No firm will ever reach that extreme [of staffing only customers], but the trajectory that leads in that direction is the right one, and any step taken to shift the balance toward relying on the relationships with customers will prove to be an advantage.

Pronovost remains, in a way, an odd bird in medical research. […] He’s focussed on work that is not normally considered a significant contribution in academic medicine. […] Yet his work [implementing checklists] has already saved more lives than that of any laboratory scientist in the past decade.

[I]nstead of developing a drug to treat an abnormality, an abnormality was postulated to fit a drug. […] It was entirely possible that drugs that affected neurotransmitter levels could relieve symptoms even if neurotransmitters had nothing to do with the illness in the first place (and even possible that they relieved symptoms through some other mode of action entirely). As Carlat puts it, “By this same logic one could argue that the cause of all pain conditions is a deficiency of opiates, since narcotic pain medications activate opiate receptors in the brain.

Let’s say we were able to create a robot that targets only combatants and that leaves no collateral damage—an armed robot with a perfectly accurate targeting system. […] Such a robot would be so fearsome, inhumane, and devastating that it threatens an implicit value of a fair fight, even in war.

How to get food, ritual display, territorial dominance—all these things are part of parking, and we’ve assigned it to the most primitive part of the brain that makes snap fight-or-flight decisions. Our mental capacities just bottom out when we talk about parking.

In order to visualize mainstream media’s influence, you have to zoom much further in to the network in order to catch a glimpse of their accounts, reinforcing the idea that people on Twitter prefer to get their news from real people, as opposed to social media accounts run by anonymous employees.

While all major mainstream media outlets have a strong presence on Twitter, some with millions of followers, when it comes to how information spreads through Twitter – when it’s coming from personal, individual accounts, it is likely to reach a larger audience. […] Over all, in both Egypt and Tunisia, 70% of the accounts tweeting news belonged to individuals, versus 30% belonging to organizations, despite the fact that organizations tweet more often and have more followers.