Mackowiak Communications Quotes

It's funny but when young people say to me "what can I study to be a force for change, should I study law or biology or business?" My answer is music, drama, journalism, communications. ~ Paul Watson

I'll buy you a blow-up doll. I'm sure my mate won't mind when I explain how hard up you are."
She didn't bother to punch him this time, just glared with promise of future retaliation. "Very funny. You wouldn't be laughing if you knew how sexually frustrated I am right now." [ ... ] "The last time was when that SilverBlade sentinel was in town for a communications meeting."
All amusement left Dorian's face. "You serious? That was months ago." A very long time to go without intimate touch. "Merce, that could get dangerous."
"I know. Do you think I don't know?" She thrust her hands through her hair. "Damn it Dorian! It's getting to the point where I'm starting to wonder if some of the wolves would be good in bed. [ ... ]
"Cat and wolf isn't a ... um ... normal combination."
"And Psy and cat is?" She made a face at him. "Yeah, yeah I know. Cat and wolf is strange." [ ... ]
"How about one of the Rats?" Dorian's eyes gleamed. ~ Nalini Singh

Humans are conversant in many media (music, dance, painting), but all of them are analog except for the written word, which is naturally expressed in digital form (i.e. it is a series of discrete symbols - every letter in every book is a member of a certain character set, every "a" is the same as every other "a," and so on). As any communications engineer can tell you, digital signals are much better to work with than analog ones because they are easily copied, transmitted, and error-checked. Unlike analog signals, they are not doomed to degradation over time and distance. That ~ Neal Stephenson

Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for titbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived. ~ Douglas Adams

I'm in the communications business. ~ Beeban Kidron

Over fifteen years of studying the American Right professionally - especially in their communications with each other, in their own memos and media since the 1950s - I have yet to find a truly novel development, a real innovation, in far-right 'thought.' ~ Rick Perlstein

Wilson was outraged but chose not to see the declaration itself as sufficient justification for war. What he did not yet know was that there was a second, very secret message appended to the telegram Bernstorff had received and that both telegrams had been intercepted and relayed to Blinker Hall's intelligence division in the Old Admiralty Building in London, which by now oversaw a second, and singularly sensitive, component of Room 40's operations - the interception of diplomatic communications, both German and, incidentally, American. ~ Erik Larson

The emergence of self-organized ecoranges generates the potential for highly adaptable responses to environmental perturbations that might affect that ecorange. Within that system, all the plants are continually communicating with each other, sending chemical communications along the mycelial network to other plants in the community. (Plants also speak using auditory signals through a complex sound-based language that is far more ancient than the human though it exists in a much subtler sound spectrum than our own.) ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner

The Chinese construction of South Asia's tallest edifice, the Lotus (a Lotus Sutra in Buddhism) Tower, both points to Beijing's Peaceful Rise and unsettles some onlookers. For the nervous India and the United States, the cleverly designed and highly sophisticated rising communications tower is more than a Buddhist symbol of Peaceful Rise. ~ Patrick Mendis

If technology and communications can adapt to people's modern lifestyles, then why can't our labor laws follow suit? Private-sector businesses continue to live under an outdated federal mandate that says the only way to compensate for overtime is through cash wages. ~ Renee Ellmers

The main reason to measure objectives is not so much to reward or punish individual communications manager for success or failure as it is to learn from the research whether a program should be continued as is, revised, or dropped in favor of another approach ~ James E. Grunig

Twitter can be incredibly valuable as an open communications mechanism, but if you close too many things down too quickly, if you think about it too short-sightedly, you could easily do a lot of damage to that ecosystem. ~ Mike McCue

People thought this was a computer IT gig, and that will flow through those nerdy departments and it won't come into fashion photography, it won't come into television, it won't come into my daily communications, it won't come into my telephone, my microphone, my light control, my microwave radio, my - I mean, just name it. ~ Juan Enriquez

I was in Christian broadcasting back in the 1970s. I was director of communications for James Robinson, and I really thought Christian broadcasting was going to be my career. There have been so many twist and turns in my life; of course I haven't been a pastor for almost 22 years, but it was a very important part of my life. ~ Mike Huckabee

Communications and commerce are global; investment is mobile; technology is almost magical; and ambition for a better life is now universal. We earn our livelihood in peaceful competition with people all across the earth. Profound and powerful forces are shaking and remaking our world, and the urgent question of our time is whether we can make change our friend and not our enemy. ~ William J. Clinton

..technological breakthroughs, such as the Internet, have made international communications not just possible but commonplace. However, for most Americans, these international conversations are viable only if the other side speaks English. In this new international era, Americans find themselves locked in a monolingual society. How strange that, instead of viewing those who speak other languages as welcome assets to our nation, some seem eager to erase linguistic diversity. ~ David Miller Sadker

After simmering years of censorship and repression, the masses finally throng the streets. The chants echoing off the walls to build to a roar from all directions, stoking the courage of the crowds as they march on the center of the capital. Activists inside each column maintain contact with each other via text messages; communications centers receive reports and broadcast them around the city; affinity groups plot the movements of the police via digital mapping. A rebel army of bloggers uploads video footage for all the world to see as the two hosts close for battle. Suddenly, at the moment of truth, the lines go dead. The insurgents look up from the blank screens of their cell phones to see the sun reflecting off the shields of the advancing riot police, who are still guided by close circuits of fully networked technology. The rebels will have to navigate by dead reckoning against a hyper-informed adversary.

All this already happened, years ago, when President Mubarak shut down the communications grid during the Egyptian uprising of 2011. A generation hence, when the same scene recurs, we can imagine the middle-class protesters - the cybourgeoisie - will simply slump forward, blind and deaf and wracked by seizures as the microchips in their cerebra run haywire, and it will be up to the homeless and destitute to guide them to safety. ~ CrimethInc.

While the federal government is required by law to document publicly its wiretapping of phone lines, it is not required to do so with Internet communications. ~ Rebecca MacKinnon

I have said, and I believe, that potentially we have in this country a free enterprise system of radio and television which is superior to any other. But to achieve its promise, it must be both free and enterprising. There is no suggestion here that networks or individual stations should operate as philanthropies. But I can find nothing in the Bill of Rights or in the Communications Act which says that they must increase their net profits each year, lest the Republic collapse. ~ Edward R. Murrow

This isn't bickering. This is classic mother-daughter communications. I've been reading up on it. ~ Christina Baker Kline

Even anthropologists, who diligently train themselves to be nonjudgmental observers of cultural differences, have trouble when it comes to recognizing and allowing for cultural differences in emotions. Because our emotions come into our consciousness unbidden and often surprise us with their intensity, we often assume that they are not influenced by cultural cues or social scripts. But with careful study, anthropologists have learned that emotions are not like muscle reflexes; rather, they are communications with deep and sometimes obscure meanings. Cultures differ not only in their response to specific events... but also in more global ways. ~ Ethan Watters

Like isolated apartment dwellers running the TV for company, we sense a deeper isolation beneath the babble of voices, the poverty of our communications. ~ Mark Slouka

The hero of the following account, Homo immunologicus, who must give his life, with all its dangers and surfeits, a symbolic framework, is the human being that struggles with itself in concern for its form. We will characterize it more closely as the ethical human being, or rather Homo repetitious, Homo artista, the human in training. None of the circulating theories of behaviour or action is capable of grasping the practising human - on the contrary: we will understand why previous theories had to make it vanish systematically, regardless of whether they divided the field of observation into work and interaction, processes and communications, or active and contemplative life. With a concept of practice based on a broad anthropological foundation, we finally have the right instrument to overcome the gap, supposedly unbridgeable by methodological means, between biological and cultural phenomena of immunity - that is, between natural processes on the one hand and actions on the other. ~ Peter Sloterdijk

We have developed communications systems to permit man on earth to talk with man on the moon. Yet mother often cannot talk with daughter, father to son, black to white, labour with management or democracy with communism ~ Hadley Read

Developing individualized operation and communication plans that are rooted in the authority and authenticity of the people, the story and the product allow for better creativity, production and engagement. ~ Create Wealth Communities

The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards. ~ Edward Snowden

It's a useful rule in Anglo-American communications that the English should double, and the Americans halve, the number of words they would normally employ. ~ Phyllis Bentley

The only communications truly without influence are those that one learns to ignore or never hears at all; this is why Jacques Ellul argued that it is only the disconnected - rural dwellers or the urban poor - who are truly immune to propaganda, while intellectuals, who read everything, insist on having opinions, and think themselves immune to propaganda are, in fact, easy to manipulate. ~ Tim Wu

Focusing on skills, communications, and community allows the project to be more effective and more agile than focusing on processes and plans. ~ Alistair Cockburn

There are ten thousand opportunities on the horizon. The pie keeps growing and, in a rapidly evolving marketplace, white spaces and blue oceans will continue to surround us. ~ Steve Woodruff

We are effectively living in a world of communications and information abundance. ~ Peter Diamandis

To a considerable extent we are faced by a technology arms race with terrorists. The communications revolution has made it easier for terrorist groups to reach out to vulnerable individuals with their violent extremist ideology and propaganda. It has also facilitated fundraising, recruitment and training. ~ Pauline Neville-Jones

[T]he Federal Communications Commission should reestablish two principles that formerly served this country well: the public service requirement and the fairness doctrine. Every television and radio station should once again be required to devote a meaningful percentage of its programming to public service broadcasting. The public, after all, owns the airwaves through which signals are broadcast, and the rights-of-way in which cables are strung. And every television and radio station should once again have to follow the fairness doctrine: those with opposing views should have the right to respond to viewpoints expressed on the station. ~ Bernie Sanders

In just 20 years terrorism, communications, the jet plane and the increase of wealth and knowledge have forced, to varying degrees, world leaders into a haunted and secret peerage whose links with the people they guide are meticulously cleansed and staged. ~ Hugh Sidey

Don't assume your partner knows about everything you expect in a relationship. Let them know. A relationship should be based on communication, not on assumptions. ~ Turcois Ominek

I've been in navigation systems, robotics, restaurants, communications systems, touch screens, and now I'm back in games. I like to say I have five-year A.D.D. ~ Nolan Bushnell

A good chunk of my life had been spent sorting out the scrambled communications, festering hostilities, and frozen affections that characterized families in turmoil. (257) ~ Jonathan Kellerman

The most basic mobile phone is in fact a communications devices that shames all of science fiction, all the wrist radios and handheld communicators. Captain Kirk had to tune his fucking communicator and it couldn't text or take a photo that he could stick a nice Polaroid filter on. Science fiction didn't see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn't see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make things amazing happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards. ~ Warren Ellis

We were smothered in advice. We were told the food to take, otherwise we would starve; what lines of communications to leave open; secret methods of getting our stuff out. And the hardest thing in the world to explain was that all we wanted to do was to report what Russian people were like, and what they wore, and how they acted, what the farmers talked about, and what they were doing about rebuilding the destroyed parts of their country. This was the hardest thing in the world to explain. We found that thousands of people were suffering from acute Moscowitis - a state which permits the belief of any absurdity and the shoving away of any facts. Eventually, of course, we found that the Russians are suffering from Washingtonitis, the same disease. We discovered that just as we are growing horns and tails on the Russians, so the Russians are growing horns and tails on us. ~ John Steinbeck

We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background. ~ M.H. Abrams