🖍️Charles Livingston - Collected Quotes

"Cautions about combining groups: apples and oranges. In computing an average, be careful about combining groups in which the average for each group is of more interest than the overall average. […] Avoid combining distinct quantities in a single average." (Charles Livingston & Paul Voakes, "Working with Numbers and Statistics: A handbook for journalists", 2005)

"Central tendency is the formal expression for the notion of where data is centered, best understood by most readers as 'average'. There is no one way of measuring where data are centered, and different measures provide different insights." (Charles Livingston & Paul Voakes, "Working with Numbers and Statistics: A handbook for journalists", 2005)

"Concluding that the population is becoming more centralized by observing behavior at the extremes is called the 'Regression to the Mean' Fallacy. […] When looking for a change in a population, do not look only at the extremes; there you will always find a motion to the mean. Look at the entire population." (Charles Livingston & Paul Voakes, "Working with Numbers and Statistics: A handbook for journalists", 2005)

"Data often arrive in raw form, as long lists of numbers. In this case your job is to summarize the data in a way that captures its essence and conveys its meaning. This can be done numerically, with measures such as the average and standard deviation, or graphically. At other times you find data already in summarized form; in this case you must understand what the summary is telling, and what it is not telling, and then interpret the information for your readers or viewers." (Charles Livingston & Paul Voakes, "Working with Numbers and Statistics: A handbook for journalists", 2005)

"If a hypothesis test points to rejection of the alternative hypothesis, it might not indicate that the null hypothesis is correct or that the alternative hypothesis is false." (Charles Livingston & Paul Voakes, "Working with Numbers and Statistics: A handbook for journalists", 2005)

"Limit a sentence to no more than three numerical values. If you've got more important quantities to report, break those up into other sentences. More importantly, however, make sure that each number is an important piece of information. Which are the important numbers that truly advance the story?" (Charles Livingston & Paul Voakes, "Working with Numbers and Statistics: A handbook for journalists", 2005)

"Numbers are often useful in stories because they record a recent change in some amount, or because they are being compared with other numbers. Percentages, ratios and proportions are often better than raw numbers in establishing a context." (Charles Livingston & Paul Voakes, "Working with Numbers and Statistics: A handbook for journalists", 2005)

"Probability is sometimes called the language of statistics. […] The probability of an event occurring might be described as the likelihood of it happening. […] In a formal sense the word "probability" is used only when an event or experiment is repeatable and the long term likelihood of a certain outcome can be determined." (Charles Livingston & Paul Voakes, "Working with Numbers and Statistics: A handbook for journalists", 2005)

"Roughly stated, the standard deviation gives the average of the differences between the numbers on the list and the mean of that list. If data are very spread out, the standard deviation will be large. If the data are concentrated near the mean, the standard deviation will be small." (Charles Livingston & Paul Voakes, "Working with Numbers and Statistics: A handbook for journalists", 2005)

"The basic idea of going from an estimate to an inference is simple. Drawing the conclusion with confidence, and measuring the level of confidence, is where the hard work of professional statistics comes in." (Charles Livingston & Paul Voakes, "Working with Numbers and Statistics: A handbook for journalists", 2005)

"The central limit theorem […] states that regardless of the shape of the curve of the original population, if you repeatedly randomly sample a large segment of your group of interest and take the average result, the set of averages will follow a normal curve." (Charles Livingston & Paul Voakes, "Working with Numbers and Statistics: A handbook for journalists", 2005)

"The dual meaning of the word significant brings into focus the distinction between drawing a mathematical inference and practical inference from statistical results." (Charles Livingston & Paul Voakes, "Working with Numbers and Statistics: A handbook for journalists", 2005)

"The percentage is one of the best (mathematical) friends a journalist can have, because it quickly puts numbers into context. And it's a context that the vast majority of readers and viewers can comprehend immediately." (Charles Livingston & Paul Voakes, "Working with Numbers and Statistics: A handbook for journalists", 2005)

🧿Glenn Greenwald - Collected Quotes

"A population, a country that venerates physical safety above all other values will ultimately give up its liberty and sanction any power seized by authority in exchange for the promise, no matter how illusory, of total security. However, absolute safety is itself chimeric, pursued by never obtained. The pursuit degrades those who engage in it as well as any nation that comes to be defined by it."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"A prime justification for surveillance - that it’s for the benefit of the population - relies on projecting a view of the world that divides citizens into categories of good people and bad people. In that view, the authorities use their surveillance powers only against bad people, those who are “doing something wrong,” and only they have anything to fear from the invasion of their privacy."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"Converting the Internet into a system of surveillance thus guts it of its core potential. Worse, it turns the Internet into a tool of repression, threatening to produce the most extreme and oppressive weapon of state intrusion human history has ever seen."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"Democracy requires accountability and consent of the governed, which is only possible if citizens know what is being done in their name."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"For many kids, the Internet is a means of self-actualization. It allows them to explore who they are and who they want to be, but that works only if we’re able to be private and anonymous, to make mistakes without them following us."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"Technology has now enabled a type of ubiquitous surveillance that had previously been the province of only the most imaginative science fiction writers." (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"The ability to eavesdrop on people’s communications vests immense power in those who do it. And unless such power is held in check by rigorous oversight and accountability, it is almost certain to be abused."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"The principle which protects personal writings and all other personal productions, not against theft and physical appropriation, but against publication in any form, is in reality not the principle of private property, but that of an inviolate personality."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"To permit surveillance to take root on the Internet would mean subjecting virtually all forms of human interaction, planning, and even thought itself to comprehensive state examination."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"We all instinctively understand that the private realm is where we can act, think, speak, write, experiment, and choose how to be, away from the judgmental eyes of others. Privacy is a core condition of being a free person."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"We shouldn't have to be faithful loyalists of the powerful to feel safe from state surveillance. Nor should the price of immunity be refraining from controversial or provocative dissent. We shouldn't want a society where the message is conveyed that you will be left alone only if you mimic the accommodating behavior and conventional wisdom of an establishment columnist."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"What made the Internet so appealing was precisely that it afforded the ability to speak and act anonymously, which is so vital to individual exploration."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

OOP: Generalization (Definitions)

"The activity of identifying commonality among concepts and defining a superclass (general concept) and subclass (specialized concept) relationships. It is a way to construct taxonomic classifications among concepts which are then illustrated in class hierarchies." (Craig Larman, "Applying UML and Patterns: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and the Unified Process", 1997)

"The activity of identifying commonality among concepts and defining a superclass (general concept) and subclass (specialized concept) relationships. It is a way to construct taxonomic classifications among concepts, which are then illustrated in class hierarchies. Conceptual subclasses conform to conceptual superclasses in terms of intension and extension." (Craig Larman, "Applying UML and Patterns", 2004)

"The process of forming a more comprehensive or less restrictive class (a superclass) from one or more entities (or classes, in Unified Modeling Language [UML])." (Sharon Allen & Evan Terry, "Beginning Relational Data Modeling 2nd Ed.", 2005)

"In extended ER model (EER model), generalization is a structure in which one object generally describes more specialized objects." (S. Sumathi & S. Esakkirajan, "Fundamentals of Relational Database Management Systems", 2007)

"A special type of abstraction relationship that specifies that several types of entities with certain common attributes can be generalized (or abstractly defined) with a higher-level entity type, a supertype entity; an 'is-a' type relationship. For example, employee is a generalization of engineer, manager, and administrative assistant, based on the common attribute job-title. A tool often used to make view integration possible." (Toby J Teorey, ", Database Modeling and Design" 4th Ed., 2010)

"In a specialization hierarchy, the grouping together of common attributes into a supertype entity. See specialization hierarchy." (Carlos Coronel et al, "Database Systems: Design, Implementation, and Management 9th Ed", 2011)

"The process of evaluating multiple relationships between entities in a set into fewer relationships. Usually necessary after other generalization activities have taken place, which carry the relationships of the specialized entities into the generalized entities. For example, two 1:M relationships between two entities, each having a different parent, can be generalized into a M:N relationship." (DAMA International, "The DAMA Dictionary of Data Management", 2011)

"The process of recognizing commonalities, and combining similar types of entities or objects into a less specialized type based on common attributes and behaviors, creating a supertype for two or more specialized subtypes. Contrast with specialization." (DAMA International, "The DAMA Dictionary of Data Management", 2011)

"The abstraction, reduction, and simplification of features and feature classes for deriving a simpler model of reality or decreasing stored." (GRC Data Intelligence)

OOP: Method (Definitions)

"A function that performs an action by using a component object model (COM) object, as in SQL-DMO, OLE DB, and ADO." (Microsoft Corporation, "SQL Server 7.0 System Administration Training Kit", 1999)

"A programmatic operation such as a procedure or function defined on an object type or class." (Bill Pribyl & Steven Feuerstein, "Learning Oracle PL/SQL", 2001)

"A callable set of execution instructions. Methods specify a contract; that is, they have a name, a number of parameters, and a return type. Clients that need to call a method must satisfy the contract when calling the method. Several kinds of methods are possible, such as instance and static." (Damien Watkins et al, "Programming in the .NET Environment", 2002)

"A procedure associated with a Java class or interface." (Peter Gulutzan & Trudy Pelzer, "SQL Performance Tuning", 2002)

"A procedure that belongs to a class and can be executed by sending a message to a class object or to instances from the class." (Stephen G Kochan, "Programming in Objective-C", 2003)

"Java code is organized into methods that are named and declared to have specific input parameters and return types. All methods are members of a class." (Marcus Green & Bill Brogden, "Java 2™ Programmer Exam Cram™ 2 (Exam CX-310-035)", 2003)

"In the UML, the specific implementation or algorithm of an operation for a class. Informally, the software procedure that can be executed in response to a message." (Craig Larman, "Applying UML and Patterns", 2004)

"Operations on an object that are exposed for use by other objects or applications." (Bob Bryla, "Oracle Database Foundations", 2004)

"A named collection of statements, with or without arguments, and a return value. A member of a class." (Michael Fitzgerald, "Learning Ruby", 2007)

"A function that is associated exclusively with an instance, either defined in a class, trait, or object definition. Methods can only be invoked using the object.method syntax." (Dean Wampler & Alex Payne, "Programming Scala", 2009)

"A program module that acts on objects created from a class in an object-oriented program." (Jan L Harrington, "SQL Clearly Explained" 3rd Ed., 2010)

"(1) A piece of code provided by an object, such as a control, that a program can call to make the object do something. (2) A routine (that may or may not return a value) provided by a class." (Rod Stephens, "Start Here! Fundamentals of Microsoft® .NET Programming", 2011)

"A function that is defined by a class and can only be invoked in the context of the class or one of its instances." (Dean Wampler, "Functional Programming for Java Developers", 2011)

"A procedure implemented by a class." (Rod Stephens, "Stephens' Visual Basic® Programming 24-Hour Trainer", 2011)

"A procedure that belongs to a class and can be executed by sending a message to a class object or to instances from the class." (Stephen G Kochan, "Programming in Objective-C, 4th Ed.", 2011)

"In the object-oriented data model, a named set of instructions to perform an action. Methods represent realworld actions. Methods are invoked through messages." (Carlos Coronel et al, "Database Systems: Design, Implementation, and Management" 9th Ed, 2011)

"In object-oriented design and programming, a function bound to a class as part of its overall behavior, executed in response to a message." (DAMA International, "The DAMA Dictionary of Data Management", 2011)

"A kind of action that an object can take if you tell it to." (Jon Orwant et al, "Programming Perl, 4th Ed.", 2012)

"In object-oriented programming, a named code block that performs a task when called." (SQL Server 2012 Glossary, "Microsoft", 2012)

"Defined and repetitive approach used to broach particular types of problems." (Gilbert Raymond & Philippe Desfray, "Modeling Enterprise Architecture with TOGAF", 2014)

"A named algorithm that defines one aspect of the behavior of a class" (Nell Dale & John Lewis, "Computer Science Illuminated, 6th Ed.", 2015)

"In object-oriented programming, a piece of code that makes an object do something." (Rod Stephens, "Beginning Software Engineering", 2015)

"The object-oriented programming term for a function or procedure." (Daniel Leuck et al, "Learning Java" 5th Ed., 2020)

🧿Stephen J Gould - Collected Quotes

"Facts do not ‘speak for themselves’; they are read in the light of theory. Creative thought, in science as much as in the arts, is the motor of changing opinion. Science is a quintessentially human activity, not a mechanized, robot-like accumulation of objective information, leading by laws of logic to inescapable interpretation." (Stephen J Gould, "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History", 1977)

"Science, since people must do it, is a socially embedded activity. It progresses by hunch, vision, and intuition. Much of its change through time does not record a closer approach to absolute truth, but the alteration of cultural contexts that influence it so strongly. Facts are not pure and unsullied bits of information; culture also influences what we see and how we see it. Theories, moreover, are not inexorable inductions from facts. The most creative theories are often imaginative visions imposed upon facts; the source of imagination is also strongly cultural." (Stephen J Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man", 1980)

"Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them." (Stephen J Gould "Evolution as Fact and Theory", 1981)

"Perhaps randomness is not merely an adequate description for complex causes that we cannot specify. Perhaps the world really works this way, and many events are uncaused in any conventional sense of the word." (Stephen J Gould, "Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes", 1983)

"The progress of science requires more than new data; it needs novel frameworks and contexts. And where do these fundamentally new views of the world arise? They are not simply discovered by pure observation; they require new modes of thought. And where can we find them, if old modes do not even include the right metaphors? The nature of true genius must lie in the elusive capacity to construct these new modes from apparent darkness. The basic chanciness and unpredictability of science must also reside in the inherent difficulty of such a task." (Stephen J Gould, "The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History", 1985)

"We often think, naïvely, that missing data are the primary impediments to intellectual progress - just find the right facts and all problems will dissipate. But barriers are often deeper and more abstract in thought. We must have access to the right metaphor, not only to the requisite information. Revolutionary thinkers are not, primarily, gatherers of facts, but weavers of new intellectual structures." (Stephen J Gould, "The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History", 1985)

"Numbers have undoubted powers to beguile and benumb, but critics must probe behind numbers to the character of arguments and the biases that motivate them." (Stephen J Gould, "An Urchin in the Storm: Essays About Books and Ideas", 1987)

"But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective ‘scientific method’, with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology." (Stephen J Gould, "This View of Life: In the Mind of the Beholder", "Natural History", Vol. 103, No. 2, 1994)

"Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy." (Stephen J Gould, "Dinosaur in a  Haystack: Reflections in natural  history", 1995)

"Theories rarely arise as patient inferences forced by accumulated facts. Theories are mental constructs potentiated by complex external prods (including, in idealized cases, a commanding push from empirical reality)." (Stephen J Gould, "Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms", 1998) 

"The human mind delights in finding pattern - so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it." (Stephen J Gould, "The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History", 2010)

🧿Robert M Pirsig - Collected Quotes

"An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don't prove anything one way or the other." (Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, or mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention." (Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions." (Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is." (Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite." (Robert M. Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are."(Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do."(Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best 20-20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go." (Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process." (Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are not the reality they describe." (Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"Data without generalization is just gossip." (Robert M Pirsig, "Lila: An Inquiry into Morals", 1991)

🧿Abraham Kaplan - Collected Quotes

"Every discipline develops standards of professional competence to which its workers are subject. [...] Every scientific community is a society in the small, so to speak, with its own agencies of social control." (Abraham Kaplan, "The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science", 1964)

"Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding. It comes as no particular surprise to discover that a scientist formulates problems in a way which requires for their solution just those techniques in which he himself is especially skilled." (Abraham Kaplan, "The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science", 1964)

"Measurement, we have seen, always has an element of error in it. The most exact description or prediction that a scientist can make is still only approximate." (Abraham Kaplan, "The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science", 1964)

"The price of training is always a certain "trained incapacity": the more we know how to do something, the harder it is to learn to do it differently." (Abraham Kaplan, "The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science", 1964)

"[…] statistical techniques are tools of thought, and not substitutes for thought." (Abraham Kaplan, "The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science", 1964)

"We are caught up in a paradox, one which might be called the paradox of conceptualization. The proper concepts are needed to formulate a good theory, but we need a good theory to arrive at the proper concepts." (Abraham Kaplan, "The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science", 1964)

OOP: Contract (Definitions)

"A guarantee between a definer and a user. An example of a contract is the methods in an interface type. In adding the interface type to its definition, a type agrees to the contract specified by the interface type. Contracts vary from strictly enforceable, such as verifying that a function's signature conforms to a contract (syntax correctness), to assuming consistent behavior among classes implementing a common contract (semantic correctness). Semantic contracts are more difficult to specify and verify." (Damien Watkins et al, "Programming in the .NET Environment", 2002) 

[design by contract] "A paradigm stating that each software element (e.g., a method) specifies in a contract the pre-conditions it requires to run, the post-conditions it will ensure upon completion, and which invariants will remain." (Johannes Link & Peter Fröhlich, "Unit Testing in Java", 2003)

"Defines the responsibilities and postconditions that apply to the use of an operation or method. Also used to refer to the set of all conditions related to an interface." (Craig Larman, "Applying UML and Patterns", 2004)

"A service is usually described by an interface. The complete description of a service from a consumer’s point of view (signature and semantics) is called a 'well-defined interface' or contract." (Nicolai M Josuttis, "SOA in Practice", 2007)

"The complete description of a service interface between one consumer and one provider. It includes the technical interface (signature), the semantics, and nonfunctional aspects such as service-level agreements." (Nicolai M Josuttis, "SOA in Practice", 2007)

"A statement by the developer of a component about what the component does; users of the component rely on this statement to design systems using the component." (W Roy Schulte & K Chandy, "Event Processing: Designing IT Systems for Agile Companies", 2009)

"The protocol and requirements that exist between a module (e.g., class, trait, object, or even function or method) and clients of the module. More specifically, see Design by Contract." (Dean Wampler & Alex Payne, "Programming Scala", 2009)

[data contract:] "In WCF, a data contract is one that permits the definition of messages with multiple parameters." (Bruce Bukovics, "Pro WF: Windows Workflow in .NET 4", 2010)

[design by contract] "An approach to class and module design invented by Bertrand Meyer for the Eiffel language. For each entry point, valid inputs are specified in a programmatic way, so they can be validated during testing. These specifications are called preconditions. Similarly, assuming the preconditions are specified, specifications on the guaranteed results are called postconditions and are also specified in an executable way. Invariants can also be specified that should be true on entry and on exit." (Dean Wampler & Alex Payne, "Programming Scala", 2009)

🧿Marshall McLuhan - Collected Quotes

"When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized." (Marshall McLuhan, "The Gutenberg Galaxy", 1962)

"Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)

"Environments are invisible. Their ground-rules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)

"It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)

"The 'message' of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)

"The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)

"The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)

"Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally." (Marshall McLuhan, American Scholar Vol. 35, 1965)

"Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition."(Marshall McLuhan, "Counterblast", 1969)

"The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb." (Marshall McLuhan, "Counterblast", 1969)

"All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors." (Marshall McLuhan, "Culture Is Our Business", 1970)

"Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly." (Marshall McLuhan, "Take Today: The Executive as Dropout", 1972)

ransportation of data from point to point." (Marshall McLuhan & Eric McLuhan, "Laws of Media: The New Science", 1988)

"Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation." (Marshall McLuhan & Eric McLuhan, "Laws of Media: The New Science", 1988)

"One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews" , 2003)

"Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation." (Marshall McLuhan, "The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan", 2011) 

"As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art." (Marshall McLuhan)

"By simply moving information and brushing information against information, any medium whatever creates vast wealth." (Marshall McLuhan)

"Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always precede causes in the actual developmental order." (Marshall McLuhan)

"When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result." (Marshall McLuhan)

OOP: Polymorphism (Definitions)

"Literally, from the Greek for many forms, and refers to the ability of different objects to respond differently to the same commands." (Greg Perry, "Sams Teach Yourself Beginning Programming in 24 Hours" 2nd Ed., 2001)

"The ability to treat many sub-types as if they were of the same base type." (Jesse Liberty, "Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours" 3rd Ed., 2001)

"The capability of objects from different classes to accept the same message." (Stephen G Kochan, "Programming in Objective-C", 2003)

"The concept that two or more classes of objects can respond to the same message in different ways, using polymorphic operations. Also, the ability to define polymorphic operations." (Craig Larman, "Applying UML and Patterns", 2004)

"In object-oriented design, the principle that the same definition can be used with different types of data (specifically, different class implementations), resulting in more general and abstract implementations." (David C Hay, "Data Model Patterns: A Metadata Map", 2010)

"The redefinition of the body of a superclass method inherited by a subclass. The polymorphic method retains the same signature." (Jan L Harrington, "SQL Clearly Explained" 3rd Ed., 2010)

"The ability of a piece of code to work with more than one type." (Mark C Lewis, "Introduction to the Art of Programming Using Scala", 2012)

"The notion that you can tell an object to do something generic, and the object will interpret the command in different ways depending on its type." (Jon Orwant et al, "Programming Perl, 4th Ed.", 2012)

"The ability of a language to determine at runtime which of several possible methods will be executed for a given invocation" (Nell Dale & John Lewis, "Computer Science Illuminated" 6th Ed., 2015)

"The ability to treat a child object as if it were actually from a parent class. For example, it lets you treat a Student object as if it were a Person object because a Student is a type of Person." (Rod Stephens, "Beginning Software Engineering", 2015)

"Two objects can receive the same input and have different outputs." (Adam Gordon, "Official (ISC)2 Guide to the CISSP CBK" 4th Ed., 2015)

"The ability of an object variable to reference objects of different classes at different times during the execution of a program" (Nell Dale et al, "Object-Oriented Data Structures Using Java" 4th Ed., 2016)

"One of the fundamental principles of an object-oriented language. Polymorphism states that a type that extends another type is a “kind of” the parent type and can be used interchangeably with the original type by augmenting or refining its capabilities." (Daniel Leuck et al, "Learning Java" 5th Ed., 2020)

🧿Albert Einstein - Collected Quotes

“As soon as science has emerged from its initial stages, theoretical advances are no longer achieved merely by a process of arrangement. Guided by empirical data, the investigator rather develops a system of thought which, in general, is built up logically from a small number of fundamental assumptions, the so-called axioms. We call such a system of thought a theory. The theory finds the justification for its existence in the fact that it correlates a large number of single observations, and it is just here that the 'truth' of the theory lies. “ (Albert Einstein: “Relativity: The Special and General Theory”, 1916)

“No fairer destiny could be allotted to any physical theory, than that it should of itself point out the way to the introduction of a more comprehensive theory, in which it lives on as a limiting case.” (Albert Einstein: “Relativity, The Special and General Theory”, 1916)

“It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.” (Albert Einstein, [lecture] 1933)

"Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone."  (Albert Einstein & Leopold Infeld, ”The Evolution of Physics”, 1938) 

"A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises is, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability." (Albert Einstein, "Autobiographical Notes", 1949)

“The mere formulation of a problem is often far more essential than its solution. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.” (Albert Einstein)

"To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science." (Albert Einstein)

“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” (Albert Einstein)

OOP: Abstraction (Definitions)

"A view of a problem that extracts the essential information relevant to a particular purpose and ignores the remainder of the information." (IEEE, 1983)

"[A] simplified description, or specification, of a system that emphasizes some of the system's details or properties while suppressing others. A good abstraction is one that emphasizes details that are significant to the reader or user and suppress details that are, at least for the moment, immaterial or diversionary." (M Shaw, Abstraction Techniques in Modern Programming Languages", IEEE Software Vol. 1 (4), 1984)

"[abstraction:] (1) A view of an object that focuses on the information relevant to a particular purpose and ignores the remainder of the information.(2) The process of formulating a view as in (1)."(IEEE," IEEE Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology", 1990)  

"[data abstraction:] (1) The process of extracting the essential characteristics of data by defining data types and their associated functional characteristics and disregardng representation details. (2) The result of the process in (1)." (IEEE," IEEE Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology", 1990) 

"Abstraction is a process whereby we identify the important aspects of a phenomenon and ignore its details." (Ghezzi et al, Fundamentals of Software Engineering, 1991)

"Abstraction is generally defined as 'the process of formulating generalised concepts by extracting common qualities from specific examples.'" (Blair et al, "Object-Oriented Languages, Systems and Applications", 1991)

"An abstraction denotes the essential characteristics of an object that distinguish it from all other kinds of object and thus provide crisply defined conceptual boundaries, relative to the perspective of the viewer." (Grady Booch, Object-Oriented Design With Applications, 1991)

"The act of concentrating the essential or general qualities of similar things. Also, the resulting essential characteristics of a thing." (Craig Larman, "Applying UML and Patterns: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and the Unified Process", 1997)

"Abstraction is the purposeful suppression, or hiding, of some details of a process or artifact, in order to bring out more clearly other aspects, details, or structure." (Timothy Budd, "An Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming" 3rd Ed., 2002)

"Abstraction can have several meanings depending on the context. In software, it often means combining a set of small operations or data items and giving them a name. For example, control abstraction takes a group of operations, combines them into a procedure, and gives the procedure a name. As another example, a class in object-oriented programming is an abstraction of both data and control. More generally, an abstraction is a representation that captures the essential character of an entity, but hides the specific details. Often we will talk about a named abstraction without concern for the actual details, which may not be determined." (Beverly A Sanders, "Patterns for Parallel Programming", 2004)

"Abstraction, as a process, denotes the extracting of the essential details about an item, or a group of items, while ignoring the inessential details. Abstraction, as an entity, denotes a model, a view, or some other focused representation for an actual item." (Edward V Berard, "Abstraction, Encapsulation, and Information Hiding", cca. 2006)

"The idea of minimizing the complexity of something by hiding the details and just providing the relevant information. It’s about providing a high-level specification rather than going into lots of detail about how something works. In the cloud, for instance, in an IaaS delivery model, the infrastructure is abstracted from the user." (Marcia Kaufman et al, "Big Data For Dummies", 2013)

"Minimizing the complexity of something by hiding the details and just providing the relevant information. It’s about providing a high-level specification rather than going into a lot of detail about how something works. In the cloud, for instance, in an IaaS delivery model, the infrastructure is abstracted from the user." (Judith S Hurwitz, "Cognitive Computing and Big Data Analytics", 2015)

"A model of a complex system that includes only the details essential to the viewer" (Nell Dale & John Lewis, "Computer Science Illuminated, 6th Ed.", 2015)

"The capability to suppress unnecessary details so the important, inherent properties can be examined and reviewed." (Adam Gordon, "Official (ISC)2 Guide to the CISSP CBK" 4th Ed., 2015)

"A model of a system that includes only the details essential to the perspective of the viewer of the system" (Nell Dale et al, "Object-Oriented Data Structures Using Java" 4th Ed., 2016)

"Way of expressing an idea in a specific context while at the same time suppressing details irrelevant in that context." (Karl Beecher, "Computational Thinking - A beginner's guide to problem-solving and programming", 2017)

"The act of representing essential features while hiding the details to reduce complexity." (O Sami Saydjari, "Engineering Trustworthy Systems: Get Cybersecurity Design Right the First Time", 2018)

"The deliberate reduction in dependency between a component and other components it works with is a way to make the component generally more useful." (Judith Hurwitz et al, "Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies" 2nd Ed., 2009)

OOP: Visibility (Definitions)

[COM Visibility:] "Indicates whether a .NET type or member is accessible from COM. Anything public in .NET is visible to COM unless it’s marked with the ComVisibleAttribute custom attribute with its argument set to false, or its containing assembly is marked with the attribute with its argument set to false." (Adam Nathan, ".NET and COM: The Complete Interoperability Guide", 2002)

"The level of access granted to other classes or variables. Indicates whether something can be 'seen' from a location in a program." (Marcus Green & Bill Brogden, "Java 2™ Programmer Exam Cram™ 2 (Exam CX-310-035)", 2003)

"The ability to see or have reference to an object." (Craig Larman, "Applying UML and Patterns", 2004)

"Ability to enforce fine-grained access to and operations on data at the record, attribute, and attribute-value levels based on user entitlements and data usage and access policies." (Alex Berson & Lawrence Dubov, "Master Data Management and Data Governance", 2010)

"An attribute of operation in object-oriented design that tells whether the operation can be 'seen' by any program, or whether it is 'private' - only accessible within the model involved." (David C Hay, "Data Model Patterns: A Metadata Map", 2010)

"The scope in which a declared type or type member is visible to other types and members." (Dean Wampler, "Functional Programming for Java Developers", 2011)

OOP: Encapsulation (Definitions)

"It is a simple, yet reasonable effective, system-building tool. It allows suppliers to present cleanly specified interfaces around the services they provide. A consumer has full visibility to the procedures offered by an object, and no visibility to its data. From a consumer's point of view, and object is a seamless capsule that offers a number of services, with no visibility as to how these services are implemented [...] technical term for this is encapsulation." (Brad J Cox, "Object Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach", 1986)

A software development technique that consists of isolating a system function or a set of data and operations on those data within a module and providing precise specifications for the module. (IEEE," IEEE Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology", 1990)

"The concept of encapsulation as used in an object-oriented context is not essentially different from its dictionary definition. It still refers to building a capsule, in the case a conceptual barrier, around some collection of things." (Rebecca Wirfs-Brock et al, "Designing Object-Oriented Software", 1990]

"Encapsulation or equivalently information hiding refers to the practice of including within an object everything it needs, and furthermore doing this in such a way that no other object need ever be aware of this internal structure." (Ian Graham, "Object-Oriented Methods", 1991]

"Data hiding is sometimes called encapsulation because the data and its code are put together in a package or 'capsule.'" (David N Smith, "Concepts of Object-Oriented Programming", 1991)

"Encapsulation is used as a generic term for techniques which realize data abstraction. Encapsulation therefore implies the provision of mechanisms to support both modularity and information hiding. There is therefore a one to one correspondence in this case between the technique of encapsulation and the principle of data abstraction." (Gordon Blair et al, "Object-Oriented Languages, Systems and Applications", 1991)

"Encapsulation (also information hiding) consists of separating the external aspects of an object which are accessible to other objects, from the internal implementation details of the object, which are hidden from other objects." (James Rumbaugh et al, "Object-Oriented Modeling and Design", 1991)

"[...] encapsulation - also known as information hiding - prevents clients from seeing its inside view, were the behavior of the abstraction is implemented." (Grady Booch, "Object-Oriented Design With Applications", 1991)

"We say that the changeable, hidden information becomes the secret of the module; also, according to a widely used jargon, we say that such information is encapsulated within the implementation." (Carlo Ghezzi et al, "Fundamentals of Software Engineering", 1991]

"As a process, encapsulation means the act of enclosing one or more items within a (physical or logical) container. Encapsulation, as an entity, refers to a package or an enclosure that holds (contains, encloses) one or more items. It is extremely important to note that nothing is said about 'the walls of the enclosure'. Specifically, they may be 'transparent', 'translucent', or even 'opaque'." Compare with information hiding, which implies invisibility." (Bill Pribyl & Steven Feuerstein, "Learning Oracle PL/SQL", 2001)

"Encasing information and behavior within an object so that its structure and implementation are hidden to other objects that interact with it." (Marcus Green & Bill Brogden, "Java 2 Programmer Exam Cram 2 (Exam CX-310-035)", 2003)

"A mechanism used to hide the data, internal structure, and implementation details of some element, such as an object or subsystem. All interaction with an object is through a public interface of operations." (Craig Larman, "Applying UML and Patterns", 2004)

"An object-oriented technique that may hide, or abstract, the inner workings of an object and expose only the relevant characteristics and operations on the object to other objects." (Bob Bryla, "Oracle Database Foundations", 2004)

"Restricting the visibility of members of a type so they are not visible to clients of the type when they shouldn’t be. This is a way of exposing only the abstraction supported by the type, while hiding implementation details, which prevents unwanted access to them from clients and keeps the abstraction exposed by the type consistent and minimal." (Dean Wampler & Alex Payne, "Programming Scala", 2009)

"In object-oriented design, the principle that it should be possible to refer to an object with behavior and not know anything about how that behavior is implemented." (David C Hay, "Data Model Patterns: A Metadata Map", 2010)

"Detail hiding. A class hides its internal details so the rest of the program doesn't need to understand how they work, just how to use them." (Rod Stephens, "Stephens' Visual Basic® Programming 24-Hour Trainer", 2011)

"(1) A language mechanism for restricting access to some of an object’s components. (2) A language construct that facilitates the bundling of data with methods (or other functions) operating on that data." (Craig S Mullins, "Database Administration: The Complete Guide to DBA Practices and Procedures", 2012)

"The veil of abstraction separating the interface from the implementation (whether enforced or not), which mandates that all access to an object’s state be through methods alone." (Jon Orwant et al, "Programming Perl" 4th Ed., 2012)

"A language feature that enforces information hiding; bundling data and actions so that the logical properties of data and actions are separated from the implementation details" (Nell Dale & John Lewis, "Computer Science Illuminated" 6th Ed., 2015)

"The bundling of data with the procedures that operate on that data, such that data may only be changed by those procedures - a technique for reducing program complexity." (O Sami Saydjari, "Engineering Trustworthy Systems", 2018)

"The object-oriented programming technique of limiting the exposure of variables and methods to simplify the API of a class or package. Using the private and protected keywords, a programmer can limit the exposure of internal ('black box') parts of a class. Encapsulation reduces bugs and promotes reusability and modularity of classes. This technique is also known as data hiding." (Daniel Leuck et al, "Learning Java" 5th Ed., 2020)

OOP: Inheritance (Definitions)

"Creating a new type that can extend the characteristics of an existing type." (Jesse Liberty, "Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours" 3rd Ed., 2001)

"The ability of one data object to gain characteristics from another object." (Greg Perry, "Sams Teach Yourself Beginning Programming in 24 Hours" 2nd Ed., 2001)

"The process of passing methods and instance variables from a class, starting with the root object down to subclasses." (Stephen G Kochan, "Programming in Objective-C", 2003)

"A feature of object-oriented programming languages by which classes may be specialized from more general superclasses. Attributes and method definitions from superclasses are automatically acquired by the subclass." (Craig Larman, "Applying UML and Patterns", 2004)

"Acquiring the properties of the parent, or base object, in a new object." (Bob Bryla, "Oracle Database Foundations", 2004)

"The ability of a class to inherit features from another class via the < operator. See multiple inheritance, single inheritance." (Michael Fitzgerald, "Learning Ruby", 2007)

"A strong relationship between one class or trait and another class or trait. The inheriting (derived) class or trait incorporates the members of the parent class or trait, as if they were defined within the derivative. The derivative may override inherited members (in most cases). Instances of a derivative are substitutable for instances of the parent." (Dean Wampler & Alex Payne, "Programming Scala", 2009)

"A general to specific relationship between classes in an object-oriented environment." (Jan L Harrington, "SQL Clearly Explained 3rd Ed. ", 2010)

"A strong coupling between one class or interface and another. The inheriting (derived) class or interface incorporates the members of the parent class or interface, as if they were defined within the derivative. Hence, inheritance is a form of reuse. The derivative may override inherited members (unless declared final). For a properly defined derived type, instances of it are substitutable for instances of the parent, satisfying the Liskov Substitution Principle." (Dean Wampler, "Functional Programming for Java Developers", 2011)

"The process of passing methods and instance variables from a class, starting with the root object, down to subclasses." (Stephen G Kochan, "Programming in Objective-C" 4th Ed., 2011)

"What you get from your ancestors, genetically or otherwise. If you happen to be a class, your ancestors are called base classes and your descendants are called derived classes. See single inheritance and multiple inheritance." (Jon Orwant et al, "Programming Perl" 4th Ed., 2012)

"Building a class from the basic functionality of an existing class and then adding new functions." (Matt Telles, "Beginning Programming", 2014)

"A mechanism by which one class acquires the properties - data fields and methods - of another class" (Nell Dale & John Lewis, "Computer Science Illuminated" 6th Ed., 2015)

"An important feature of object-oriented programming that involves defining a new object by changing or refining the behavior of an existing object. Through inheritance, an object implicitly contains all of the non-private variables and methods of its superclass. Java supports single inheritance of classes and multiple inheritance of interfaces." (Daniel Leuck et al, "Learning Java" 5th Ed., 2020)