Learning is any change in a system that produces a more or less permanent change in its capacity for adapting to its environment.

Assuming that a tax increase is necessary, it is clearly preferable to impose the additional cost on land by increasing the land tax, rather than to increase the wage tax - the two alternatives open to the City (of Pittsburgh). It is the use and occupancy of property that creates the need for the municipal services that appear as the largest item in the budget - fire and police protection, waste removal, and public works. The average increase in tax bills of city residents will be about twice as great with wage tax increase than with a land tax increase.

In the computer field, the moment of truth is a running program; all else is prophecy.

Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.

Innovation has a lot to do with your ability to recognise surprising and unusual phenomena.

Most of what we do to get people ready to act in situations of encounter consists of drilling these lists into them sufficiently deeply so that they will be evoked quickly at the time of the decision.

Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent - not with how things are but with how they might be - in short, with design.