Answering A Question With A Question

FOREWORD BY BRENE BROWN and POSTSCRIPT FROM BRAIN PICKINGS CREATOR MARIA POPOVA Rock star, crowdfunding pioneer, and TED speaker Amanda Palmer knows all about asking. Performing as a living statue in a wedding dress, she wordlessly asked thousands of passersby for their dollars. When she became a singer, songwriter, and musician, she was not afraid to ask her audience to support her as she surfed the crowd (and slept on their couches while touring). And when she left her record label to strike out on her own, she asked her fans to support her in making an album, leading to the world's most successful music Kickstarter. Even while Amanda is both celebrated and attacked for her fearlessness in asking for help, she finds that there are important things she cannot ask for-as a musician, as a friend, and as a wife. She learns that she isn't alone in this, that so many people are afraid to ask for help, and it paralyzes their lives and relationships. In this groundbreaking book, she explores these barriers in her own life and in the lives of those around her, and discovers the emotional, philosophical, and practical aspects of THE ART OF ASKING. Part manifesto, part revelation, this is the story of an artist struggling with the new rules of exchange in the twenty-first century, both on and off the Internet. THE ART OF ASKING will inspire readers to rethink their own ideas about asking, giving, art, and love.

To get the best answer-in business, in life-you have to ask the best possible question. Innovation expert Warren Berger shows that ability is both an art and a science. It may be the most underappreciated tool at our disposal, one we learn to use well in infancy-and then abandon as we grow older. Critical to learning, innovation, success, even to happiness-yet often discouraged in our schools and workplaces-it can unlock new business opportunities and reinvent industries, spark creative insights at many levels, and provide a transformative new outlook on life. It is the ability to question-and to do so deeply, imaginatively, and “beautifully.” In this fascinating exploration of the surprising power of questioning, innovation expert Warren Berger reveals that powerhouse businesses like Google, Nike, and Netflix, as well as hot Silicon Valley startups like Pandora and Airbnb, are fueled by the ability to ask fundamental, game-changing questions. But Berger also shares human stories of people using questioning to solve everyday problems-from “How can I adapt my career in a time of constant change?” to “How can I step back from the daily rush and figure out what really makes me happy?” By showing how to approach questioning with an open, curious mind and a willingness to work through a series of “Why,” “What if,” and “How” queries, Berger offers an inspiring framework of how we can all arrive at better solutions, fresh possibilities, and greater success in business and life.

On his first day in alias, follow a spy through risky encounters. Is he under surveillance? Why did the Border Patrol surround him? What does he do with a source who almost killed someone? Every answer has repercussions for his day, his life, and the lives of many others.You see through his eyes what it means to take risks when the stakes are high and lives are on the line.You see the impact of small choices and situational awareness. You see the structure of risks, the importance of understanding necessary conditions and having fallbacks. You see how a spy takes risks. A Spy's Guide To Taking Risks is the third book in the bestselling Spy's Guide series, Following the worldwide success of A Spy's Guide To Thinking and A Spy's Guide To Strategy, A Spy's Guide to Taking Risks gives the reader a spy's view of the world. Interwoven with the story of his first day in alias, John Braddock analyzes Iran's effort to acquire a nuclear weapon, the Cuban Missile Crisis and a colleague's decisions in a checkpoint shootout.Buy A Spy's Guide To Taking Risks today!

2018 Nautilus Book Awards Silver Winner What if you could unlock a better answer to your most vexing problem—in your workplace, community, or home life—just by changing the question? Talk to creative problem-solvers and they will often tell you, the key to their success is asking a different question. Take Debbie Sterling, the social entrepreneur who created GoldieBlox. The idea came when a friend complained about too few women in engineering and Sterling wondered aloud: "why are all the great building toys made for boys?" Or consider Nobel laureate Richard Thaler, who asked: "would it change economic theory if we stopped pretending people were rational?" Or listen to Jeff Bezos whose relentless approach to problem solving has fueled Amazon’s exponential growth: “Getting the right question is key to getting the right answer.” Great questions like these have a catalytic quality—that is, they dissolve barriers to creative thinking and channel the pursuit of solutions into new, accelerated pathways. Often, the moment they are voiced, they have the paradoxical effect of being utterly surprising yet instantly obvious. For innovation and leadership guru Hal Gregersen, the power of questions has always been clear—but it took some years for the follow-on question to hit him: If so much depends on fresh questions, shouldn’t we know more about how to arrive at them? That sent him on a research quest ultimately including over two hundred interviews with creative thinkers. Questions Are the Answer delivers the insights Gregersen gained about the conditions that give rise to catalytic questions—and breakthrough insights—and how anyone can create them.

"This book is invaluable!" Alexander Armstrong Children ask the funniest questions: Why does sweetcorn come out the same as when I ate it? Do spiders speak? Why does Daddy never win the lottery? Which is faster, a Velociraptor or a cheetah? How does the lady in the satnav know where to go? Does my goldfish know who I am? (Do you think fish have two-second memories? Find out the truth on page 94!) This book takes real children's questions gathered from primary schools across the UK and asks some of the greatest thinkers and experts of our time to give short and accessible answers. Brian Cox explores the edge of the universe, Sir David Attenborough tells us whether monkeys could ever turn into men, and Miranda Hart ponders why it's funny when someone farts. Other contributors include Bear Grylls, Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Quentin Blake, Heston Blumenthal, Kate Humble, John Lanchester, A. C. Grayling, Jeremy Paxman, Dan Snow, Jojo Moyes and Tony Robinson. Does My Goldfish Know Who I Am? is a treasury of surprising facts and insights inspired by the curiosity of children. It is the perfect family gift - because sometimes grown-ups need help with the answers too. At least 33% of the publisher's advance payments and 67% of net royalty income in respect of sales of this book is donated to the NSPCC (Registered Charity Numbers 216401 & SC037717).

TECHNICAL SALES ENGINEERS / TECHNICAL PRESALES SUPPORT: In today's digital economy, software is eating the world, and the companies with the best sales demonstrations are winning the game. Is a convincing demonstration the only thing that's standing between you and your next customer? Are you ready to make your next demo the best demo of the year? Do you feel that you can do better but don't know how? NEVER AGAIN LOSE A DEAL YOU SHOULD HAVE WON! Walk into ever demo feeling confident and prepared Include the one critical moment that must be in every demo Hit that home run and know how to set it up Master the art of answering difficult questions Leverage the power of saying NO with ease A BOOK WRITTEN SPECIFICALLY FOR YOU! Avoid late nights and long sales cycles Accelerate pipeline velocity and close more deals Learn and apply the best practices in the business Know exactly what to say and do before, during and after a demo Achieve the technical win alarming, predictable consistency This book addresses the root causes of the most common mistakes made by sales engineers. Add it to your cart NOW to permanently improve your software demos and sales results.

In a business world and society focused upon questions, there has been an underappreciation of answers in capturing our attention, imagination and critical examination. In a complex and fast-moving world, Answer Intelligence (AQ) is our ability to provide elevated answers to emotionally connect, explain and predict, and achieve results.

This book is the result of a group of researchers from different disciplines asking themselves one question: what does it take to develop a computer interface that listens, talks, and can answer questions in a domain? First, obviously, it takes specialized modules for speech recognition and synthesis, human interaction management (dialogue, input fusion, and multimodal output fusion), basic question understanding, and answer finding. While all modules are researched as independent subfields, this book describes the development of state-of-the-art modules and their integration into a single, working application capable of answering medical (encyclopedic) questions such as "How long is a person with measles contagious?" or "How can I prevent RSI?". The contributions in this book, which grew out of the IMIX project funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, document the development of this system, but also address more general issues in natural language processing, such as the development of multidimensional dialogue systems, the acquisition of taxonomic knowledge from text, answer fusion, sequence processing for domain-specific entity recognition, and syntactic parsing for question answering. Together, they offer an overview of the most important findings and lessons learned in the scope of the IMIX project, making the book of interest to both academic and commercial developers of human-machine interaction systems in Dutch or any other language. Highlights include: integrating multi-modal input fusion in dialogue management (Van Schooten and Op den Akker), state-of-the-art approaches to the extraction of term variants (Van der Plas, Tiedemann, and Fahmi; Tjong Kim Sang, Hofmann, and De Rijke), and multi-modal answer fusion (two chapters by Van Hooijdonk, Bosma, Krahmer, Maes, Theune, and Marsi). Watch the IMIX movie at www.nwo.nl/imix-film. Like IBM's Watson, the IMIX system described in the book gives naturally phrased responses to naturally posed questions. Where Watson can only generate synthetic speech, the IMIX system also recognizes speech. On the other hand, Watson is able to win a television quiz, while the IMIX system is domain-specific, answering only to medical questions. "The Netherlands has always been one of the leaders in the general field of Human Language Technology, and IMIX is no exception. It was a very ambitious program, with a remarkably successful performance leading to interesting results. The teams covered a remarkable amount of territory in the general sphere of multimodal question answering and information delivery, question answering, information extraction and component technologies." Eduard Hovy, USC, USA, Jon Oberlander, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Norbert Reithinger, DFKI, Germany