What are the biggest mistakes that new project managers make?

Question: Getting started in the role of project manager is not always easy.  Are there some common mistakes that you see newer project managers making that can be avoided (e.g. trying to take on too much themselves, or allowing problems to linger too long before addressing them)?
Comment: This is a legacy question that has historical significance, but no longer fits the site's guidelines or community standards for on-topic questions that encourage canonical answers.
Answer: In my opinion a big problem is that you try to solve the problems yourself and not manage the project. Your job as a project manager is to lead the people who do the actual work (of course this depends on the size of the project, in small projects you will have a technical role too).
Another one is that you underestimate soft factors (and therefore soft skills). You can have as many technical tools as you like - in the end project management is people business!
Comment: Managers should manage the project and the people working at the project. They should focus the people working on a project in the right direction and coach and guide them into reaching the best results possible with as little resources spent.
Comment: Can someone give me an example? Their job is to manage the project. If they don't do, the who do?
Answer: One big mistake new (and experienced) project managers make is not managing risks. Just sitting down to think about them, brainstorm them, and log them is a huge improvement over doing nothing.
Comment: +1 Drawing up a Risk Assessment sheet with Risks, Impact, Likelihood and mitigation strategy would cover this, as long as it is consulted periodically throughout the project.
Comment: @JBRWilkinson Unless you're doing waterfall, it's definitely more than just a high-level sheet of likely risks to the project. You should evaluate for *every major task* the degree to which there's a potential for it to be more work than expected.
Comment: Fell into this trap. KEEP A RAID LOG!
Answer: While many new project managers understand the project goal, many fail to understand personal objectives of those on his/her team.  Some people call this understanding personalities; others call it managing politics.
Within a team, team members may have different personal objectives including:

Shipping a product
Learning a new technology
Have a reasonable work schedule so they can spend time with family

The new project manager's challenge is to meet the project objectives while making sure members are engaged, motivated, and putting their best effort.  The only way to do this is to make sure the team's personal objectives are being met.
Answer: One mistake made (that is not entirely the fault of the project manager) is being promoted into a project management role without having the right skills. This happens frequently in IT (some companies even tout it as a "career path") where someone who spent the last 20 years developing software becomes a project manager.
And he might have no idea about what it takes to manage a team, a schedule, or to deal with external parties (stakeholders, project sponsor, customers).
While tutoring and the right tools can help, fundamentally, project management is an entirely different discipline. You wouldn't let a doctor start operating without years of study and training, so why let a project manager do it without even assessing basic skills?
As a project manager, you need to understand your own weaknesses and overcome them. If you're put in this position, read, read, read. And then read some more. And consult heavily with your peers to avoid making costly mistakes.
Comment: +1 because you pointed exactly what my company has done on more than one occasion.
Answer: Reinventing The Wheel
Most problems have previously been solved before by other people in your organization.  Consulting with a senior PM helps bring perspective and teaches old solutions to your "new" problems. One of my senior PM's has been managing projects my entire life.  He knows a thing or two.  Someone like this is invaluable helping new PM's avoid reinventing the wheel, as well as spinning them.
If you are new, you need help.  Find someone you can meet with to spend 10 minutes every few days discussing the most critical problems you are facing.  Usually, as a new PM you won't have a very long leash anyway...so there will be someone checking in with you.  In the case that your organization is trying you by fire, the smartest thing you can do is get advice from someone with more experience.  If you think that you will be bother that person too much, find a couple of people and spread the love.
Answer: One of the most common mistakes is not recognising that tools are just that and as such you need to pick the correct tool for the project you are working on. Not to be blindly led by the methodology that you have just learned/is flavour of the month.
I know I did that quite a bit when I started out, thinking a new tool was the silver bullet I was looking for and not recognising that I just needed to pick the correct tool for the job at hand, and that is truly only something that comes with experience (at least in my case).
Answer: I made a video about this called "ten mistakes team leaders make" but it applies here as well.

Not recognizing the needs of the team from the current leader. For example if the team is required to be self organizing, but do not have the skills to solve their own problems.
Fear of delegation. (micro management)
Fear of engagement. Fearing confronting people and talking about the real issues iwth upper management, or your team members.
Placating. Telling others what they want to hear ("yes, we can make that deadline" even when you can't)
Being Irrelevant. Being away in meetings, playing clown, or not being involved.
Being Super Reasonable. Assuming that what is in your head is fully in the heads of others. That everyone understands exactly what you mean, even if you wrote it in three sentences in an email.
Blaming. Even in your head. Telling the story for the other side without actually talking to them (an example of fearing engagement)
Ignoring Influence Forces. Not knowing what makes people behave the way they do, and what you could change to affect behavior is a big piece of the puzzle.
Fear of Assertiveness. I see that a lot in scandinavia for example.
Perpetuating non commitment. For example leaving a meeting without everyone knowing what they are going to do and by when. Not using a commitment driven language (we could vs. I will, for example)
Comment: http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/59302/160519
Answer: Make sure that you nail down the scope of the Project at the very beginning. Get confirmation from the key stakeholders that their view of the scope is in line with yours. Get early sign off to your Project Management Plan and draft your stakeholder plan (including a RACI) as a first priority. Thereafter stakeholder management (and hence engagement) should be straightforward.
Answer: As many have answered the question from their point of view I am not going to repeat them but add one more that I thing is prevalent widely in IT. Micro management. I know the PM is new or it may be his/her first project, and they try to constantly ping the team for status, being opinionated on every task the team members complete and over motivating the employees. They too need their space and time to think.
Answer: I consider I entered the management side too early on my career and without the proper training before hand.
Looking back this is what I believed I failed at:

Not creating more leaders. As a newly made PM I thought the PM chair was for me and only for me, later on I understood I needed more people next  to me to make the right calls, as well as training more people to have the right conversations and continuously improve a project.
Not building a team, and prefer office co-workers I understand sometimes it is close to impossible due to people working remote or other personal matters, yet building a team should be one of the main priorities of the PM, everyone and business itself gets huge benefits from a highly motivated and cohesive team.
Hiring with hard skills over soft skills Soft skills can maintain a team together when a challengue surpasses the hard skills. Commonly known as "Divas" with a high set of hard skills can easily destroy your project and break a team in no time.
Failing to provide constant goals and motivation for a team We all need motivation, we all need goals - for me - the PM should always be reminding the team of where they are going,  creating and reaching milestones, asking for input and adjust according to personal motivations within the team. Don´t leave it on a crappy PPT at the start of the year that no one will remember by Q2.
Not delegating tasks A basic one, yet one that is easily overlooked. It is hard to let things go sometimes, yet a PM needs to delegate accordingly to balance out the work and trust the team members.
Micro-managing Another basic one but that is find way too often. A PM needs to be able to open communication and create activities to gain trust within and from the team, this does not mean checking everything and deciding how everything should be done.
Treat every team the same Many PMs come with straight out of the book ideas or plans that will not necessarily work with the team at hand. Seasoned PMs understand that every team is different, and that what worked for team A, doesn´t necessarily work for team B. A PM needs to adjust and be open enough to experiment and make whatever it takes to make the team work and grow together. Same applies to each team member, what improved the work of team member A will not necesarrily do the cut for team member B.
Answer: Not using task management software!  It is very important for those involved on a project to have a 'home base' to refer to.  Emails work to an extent, but can quickly pile up into a chaotic mess of info with important elements slipping through the cracks.  Having an organized task entered into a task management program can efficiently display all important info, revisions, attachments, etc.
Comment: As much as I'd agree with having a place where the work is organized I definitely wouldn't insist on software. Kanban board or task board is often more effective tool.
Answer: The biggest mistake I found was to assume certain parameters about a project instead of using a DDD approach or writting down every aspect of a project for the client / entity to check if it's correct. Most of the projects comes a time when you realise certain things that were ommited had a purpose / certain needs that you hadn't think of before, ruining timelines and changing the value of the project.
Answer: I think one of the biggest problems is not having a disciplined approach to risk management.  It is not a well publicized area of PM, but it can have a big impact on project success.  even a very simple risk management plan which just takes a few hours may avoid all sorts of problems down the road.
This is even more true for new project managers than experienced ones, as they are not at all familiar yet with everything that can go wrong.
Answer: Not using task management software at all is undoubtedly a big problem. However the usage of a tool that doesn't fully correspond to the needs of the company might turn out to be even a bigger problem. Project managers have to be very careful when it comes to choosing software. Bare in mind the size of your team, your budget and the features that your business needs in the first place.
Answer: Managers, especially new ones, are often unprepared for the job because they are so used to being an individual contributor and not responsible for other people. The hardest skills in business (and life) are working with other people because everyone has different motivators and a different view of how work should be done. As a manager, your job is to engage your team, make sure everyone knows what their responsibilities are and ensure that everyone is meeting their deadlines. Executives will blame you if something goes wrong, even if it's your team's fault. If you don't perform as a manager it's not just costly to you, but to your company as well. Your direct reports will leave and you will be charged with replacing them, which takes time and will frustrate you. Here are the top mistakes I see managers making most frequently: - See more at:http://www.transtutors.com/homework-help/management/managing-information-technology/information-system/project-management-software/

Not Learning From Past Mistakes
Not Enough Planning
Too Much Planning
Trying To Do It Alone
Not Enough Resources
Allowing the Scope to Creep
Not Enough Risk Management
Answer: Communication is a KEY factor in successfully managing a project.  Failing to communicate on a regular basis is big mistake.  To help organize communications, devise a Communication Plan that includes different schedules and formats depending on the target audience.
Know your audience and communicate effectively to that audience.  This means that the same message needs to be adapted appropriately to the target audience... bullet points for C-levels, detailed specs for the technical team, etc.
Answer: Mistakes that I see often:

not keeping a running list of Risks and not being able to manage those risks effectively
always saying yes and never controlling change which leads to scope creep
not creating small clear milestones (this is why Agile and SCRUM use sprints, to force these milestones to be created!)
no proper monitoring of a project; no idea if 100% or 50% or 0% of a milestone is completed, no idea who has knowledge of which area of a project, no idea what stakeholders are expecting
no closing of a project; there are some tasks that have to be done at the close of a project and they're usually just not kept track of at all. Handing things off to another team means you have to document things for them.
not using time buffers to allow people to work on some necessary tasks for a limited time (think bug fixing for software with a minimum of 2 days and a potential maximum of 30 days in the schedule).
not building holidays/training into schedules, hard to work on a project when you expect 100% of resources to be available!

Most of these mistakes stem from the fact that there has been no formal education in project management techniques and tools and possibly no interest in learning those.
Answer: The biggest problem I have encountered is that organisations send people on PRINCE2 training and then expect them to be able to manage projects. The mistake the newbie (PRINCE2 trained) project manager makes is trying to go it alone in the forlorn belief that PRINCE2 is all they need.
Comment: The second sentence answers the OP, but I think that if it is to be useful to the new PM, it needs to be expanded a bit (particularly for the non-British audience, who aren't acquainted with PRINCE2)


How were women to serve the church according to the Apostolic Fathers?

Question: Did the Apostolic Church Fathers write about the capacity in which women were to serve in the early church, or expand the capacity in which they served the church? In other words, what were they responsible for as far as the Apostolic Church Fathers were concerned? As the church grew did their responsibilities grow as well?
Comment: You might find [this article](http://newlife.id.au/church-history/women-church-smyrna-alke/) of relevence.
Comment: The story of Paul and Thelca comes to mind
Comment: Pope calls for commission to study female deacons http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=28298
Comment: @KenGraham that headline is exactly why I ask this question. I can't seem to get the question worded correctly.
Comment: @bruised reed- Exactly what I was looking for! Fantastic historical perspective
Answer: The woman Grapte referred to in I.2.IV of the Shepherd of Hermas is understood to have been a deaconess.  The duties of deaconesses, however, are not understood to be equivalent to those of deacons, but involved, rather, ministering to widows and orphans, and perhaps helping to prepare and baptize women.  The above passage is an example:

You will write therefore two books, and you will send the one to
  Clemens and the other to Grapte. And Clemens will send his to foreign
  countries, for permission has been granted to him to do so. And Grapte
  will admonish the widows and the orphans.

The Apostolic Constitutions, which may have been published long after the Apostolic Fathers, but is thought by many to represent the teachings of both them and the Apostles, provides additional details about the roles of deaconesses:

For let the bishop preside over you as one honoured with the authority
  of God, which he is to exercise over the clergy, and by which he is to
  govern all the people. But let the deacon minister to him, as Christ
  does to His Father; and let him serve him unblameably in all things,
  as Christ does nothing of Himself, but does always those things that
  please His Father. Let also the deaconess be honoured by you in the
  place of the Holy Ghost, and not do or say anything without the deacon
In the next place, let the presbyters one by one, not all together,
  exhort the people, and the bishop in the last place, as being the
  commander. Let the porters stand at the entries of the men, and
  observe them. Let the deaconesses also stand at those of the women,
  like shipmen. For the same description and pattern was both in the
  tabernacle of the testimony and in the temple of God
Ordain also a deaconess who is faithful and holy, for the
  ministrations towards women. For sometimes he cannot send a deacon,
  who is a man, to the women, on account of unbelievers. Thou shalt
  therefore send a woman, a deaconess, on account of the imaginations of
  the bad. For we stand in need of a woman, a deaconess, for many
  necessities; and first in the baptism of women, the deacon shall
  anoint only their forehead with the holy oil, and after him the
  deaconess shall anoint them

There also appears to be a prohibition against women baptizing:

Now, as to women's baptizing, we let you know that there is no small
  peril to those that undertake it. Therefore we do not advise you to
  it; for it is dangerous, or rather wicked and impious. For if the "man
  be the head of the woman," and he be originally ordained for the
  priesthood, it is not just to abrogate the order of the creation, and
  leave the principal to come to the extreme part of the body. For the
  woman is the body of the man, taken from his side, and subject to him,
  from whom she was separated for the procreation of children. For says
  He, "He shall rule over thee"


Is there a guide for systematic way of writing test scenarios?

Question: Are there best practices in coming up with effective test scenarios? Are there documented test scenarios that can be reused across different systems?
Comment: You may use this set of [instructions](http://isemail.info/_system/is_email/test/?all) for thorough email address testing.
Answer: Katrina,
It is possible to include some important approaches and goals for software testing that tend to be beneficial in creating effective test case scenarios in a wide variety of testing situations.  They include:

Don't repeat yourself  (e.g., keep scenarios "DRY"); don't repeat combinations of test inputs more than you need to because you would find out more with the limited time you have if you tested as many different combinations of test inputs as you can in the limited time you have available.
Maximize variation (the flip-side of the "DRY" principle).  Changing things as much as possible between each test case is an excellent way to trigger as many defects as possible in as few tests a possible.
Cover as much as possible in a manageable number of tests (because you'll never have time to test everything).
Use basic concepts like Equivalence Class Partitioning and Boundary Value analysis to focus your tests on where the defects are most likely to be.
Have an easy and maintainable approach to ensure that you're testing for all of the requirements that key stakeholders have told you that they want tested - but go far beyond that "minimum" list to "earn your keep" as a value-adding software tester.
Systematically and intelligently prioritize what combinations of inputs get tested vs. what combinations will not get tested using methods such as pairwise testing and/or combinatorial testing that are designed to maximize the amount of coverage you can achieve with the limited time you have available to test.  (Test design tools, as mentioned below, can often be a big help here).
With a tip of the hat to Laura for her good comment (below)... Be sure to include tests based on ideas gathered from reviewing bug reports.  Even if bugs have been found and fixed, bugs tend to "cluster" and places in the code that have broken before are more likely than other code to misbehave in the future.

A complete list of "best practices" is not possible to cram into a stackexchange answer though.
Accordingly, if you're serious about advancing your understanding from here about how to write effective test scenarios, I'd suggest:

Reading books about effective strategies for software test design.  There are relatively few around, but I would highly recommend these 3:

A Practitioner's Guide to Software Test Design by Lee Copeland
Essential Software Test Design  by Torbjörn Ryber and
The superb recently released book by Elisabeth Hendrickson called "Explore It!"

Try out software test design tools like our company's Hexawise tool and others listed on sites like pairwisetesting.com and pairwise.org.  Learn their benefits and limitations.  While they can be a big help to quickly generate powerful sets of test scripts when they are used correctly, in order to be used to their full potential, they rely on the critical thinking skills of thoughtful testers who understand the fundamentals of solid software test design principles.

On a related note, you might find the sqa.stackexchange question about "Systematic Approaches to Selection of Test Data" to be of interest.
Thanks and good luck.
Comment: This is a lot to cover for someone who is just getting started in testing, but it is a good list.
Answer: There are different approaches possible:

if you have system requirements document, you may write one or more test cases to each requirement
another approach is based on system / user manual, you read this document and then write test scenarios trying to cover described functionalities
in Agile / Scrum teams you may use acceptance criteria definition for the user story / epic and write your test cases based on this document
Answer: For the login process, have a look at this mindmap from Darren Mcmillan
Answer: What we do at my company is this: We sit down and model the flow through the application. Every point where the user makes a decision causes a branching path, and every path ends with an expected outcome. That way we're sure we understand everything the software is meant to do (And often, the developers hadn't thought about the user doing things out of sequence or some such action, so they forgot to account for it). Then it's easy to write test cases: just follow each path (we use an automated tool that generates manual test scripts from models).
Comment: Can I please know what is the tool you use to generate manual test scripts from models?
Comment: Sorry, I can't recall the name of it. It started with a T I think? I no longer work at that company and I'm terrible with names.


Extreme examples of protein translation/use coupling/decoupling?

Question: What are known extreme examples of protein translation/effect coupling/decoupling? For example, examples of proteins that are immediately used at the time the have been translated and vice versa, cases of proteins that are translated but then only used much later in time in/outside the cell?
Comment: @bobthejoe, it is not similar. The OP is asking about cases where a protein is functional just after translation or, conversely, long after it.
Comment: Is this similar? http://biology.stackexchange.com/q/2240/389
Answer: Proteins that are membrane localized or secreted would take time to become active or even become poised for activity. Membrane receptors may remain inactive until triggered by the appropriate ligand. Nonetheless proteins won't remain (inactive or active) for a very long time as constant turnover happens in the cell.
One example, similar to what MarchHo mentioned in their answer (pre-proteins) is that of fibrinogen. Fibrinogen gets converted to fibrin when there is an injury and haemostasis reaction cascade is initiated. Fibrinogen has a biological half life (in its latency) of ~100 hours [ref].
Comment: @MarchHo There are several. This is essentially a principle based answer. More the number of steps to final destination, more will be the latent period.
Comment: A specific example would be great.
Answer: Chymotrypsinogen is a proteolytic protein that is translated and stored in the pancreas in an inactive form. They are only activated when they are secreted from the pancreas.
Other zymogens such as apoptotic caspases have similar lengths of time between translation and use.
Answer: One example that may interest you Rory M are the so-called toxin - antitoxin pairs in bacteria. Interestingly enough, many bacterial species need a way to protect themselves from their own toxins. Thus, for a particular toxin, a corresponding antitoxin is synthesized (most often both are proteins, but the antitoxin may be RNA as well, three types of toxin - antitoxin systems are known; check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxin-antitoxin_system). The antitoxin remains bound to the toxin until the latter is secreted into its designated location. If the antitoxin decouples prematurely, cellular death may occur. I'm not too sure how long the two are "stored" within the cell; I imagine this could vary greatly between species.


Do angels make requests of G-d?

Question: Do angels make any requests of G-d besides praising and thanking Him?
Answer: Yes Angels make requests of Hashem Zohar Chelek 1, 23,1 see also Pirkei Drabbi Eliezer 13, and  Yalkut Shimoni Bereishis 3,1. But they ussually get punished for questioning G-d's decisions by requesting their own way.

דעזא ועזאל הוו מקטרגי עליה, דבזמנא דאמר שכינתא לקב"ה נעשה אדם, אמרו (תהלים קמד ג) מה אדם ותדעהו, מה את בעי למברי אדם, ותדעהו דעתיד למחטי קמך
  When the Holy One was making Man, Uzza and Azael the Angels objected that man should not be made as he is destined to sin, "What is man that you should know him." "man is compared to nothing"
שכינתא אמרת לון, בהאי דאתון מקטרגין אתון עתידים למנפל כדכתיב ויראו בני האלהים את בנות האדם כי טובות הנה,
  Hashem said to them because of your incrimination against man you yourselves will fall to earth and sin as its written: "the sons of the angels saw the daughters of man and they took them" these were the Nefilim see Nephilim after the Flood

Another example is when Korach and his congregation were undermining Moshe Rabeinu the ministering Angels appointed on the sun and the Moon suggested to avenge Moshe and they moved in protest out of their regular orbit Sanhedrin 110a:

אמר רבא מאי דכתיב (חבקוק ג, יא) שמש ירח עמד זבולה לאור חציך יהלכו מלמד שעלו שמש וירח לזבול אמרו לפניו רבש"ע אם אתה עושה דין לבן עמרם נצא ואם לאו לא נצא עד שזרק בהם חצים אמר להן בכבודי לא מחיתם בכבוד בשר ודם מחיתם והאידנא לא נפקי עד דמחו להו
  Why did the sun and moon move to Zevul (level of heaven which is further away) because they protested to Hashem "If you do not do justice for Moshe against Korach and his followers we will go out of our destined places." Hashem then threw missiles at them in punishment and said: " Every day pagan people worship you and you don't protest in my honour, and when a man gets supposed injustice you protest?"
Answer: There were many questions about angels' nature on this site - are they real individualities or just G-d's messengers.
To consolidate those views especially on your question, I would like to differentiate between two different aspects of angels - a. the nature of angels and b. our perception of angels.

The nature of angels does not allow for deviating from Hashem's will. They are not separated self-sustained entities. They ARE G-d's will. As I answered about Gabriel they are named after their mission, they have no names for themselves and no "personalities" at all.
The perception of angels in our eyes - as we all tend to personify (anthropomorphism) everything around us, we depict angels as humanlike creature assigning to them all the qualities we humans have. All the interpretations of the angels as separated, self-aware, and self-willing (?) creatures are results of our imaginations, sort of "דברה התורה כלשון בני אדם". Those are parables and not reality, similar to what Rambam writes on the personification of G-d Himself in the Writings (Yesodey Hatora 1).

Based on this differentiation, we can say that the angels really don't have any requests as they have no will of their own, but we picture them as ones that have a sort of free thinking.
Answer: Rashi on Gen 32:27, when the man/angel asks Jacob to release him, writes

כי עלה השחר FOR THE DAY BREAKETH, and I have to sing God's praise at day (Chullin 91b; Genesis Rabbah 78:1).

So the answer would be that, yes, they pray, singing God's praises, every day.
Comment: Perhaps, I should edit my question - by "praying" I meant making requests. Praises are mentioned multiple times in Tanakh (Ezekiel, for instance), so there is no question about that. But I'm wondering if they make any requests besides praising G-d.
Comment: @DanWeisberg that would be a different question -- prayer has many forms -- praise and thanks are equally prayer, along with requests. A secondary question would be whether any request is by default prayer. If a medrash has angels asking God something, does that become a form of prayer?
Comment: I know that praise and thanks are all parts of prayer, I've edited my question.
Comment: When the angels, in the story of the 10 martyrs, protest to God (implicitly asking for justification or at least mercy) are they praying? "The Midrash relates that as heaven and earth stormed with the sacrifice of these lofty souls, the angels wept and protested before G‑d against such brutality." https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2751091/jewish/The-10-Martyrs.htm
Comment: That would be an answer I guess

Do angels make requests of G-d?


Can I link two Twitter accounts to my Facebook pages?

Question: I have two Twitter accounts - two different emails. I want to have each post tweets to their own related Facebook pages I am admin of. Twitter won't let me have the second Twitter account post to its related page, which I set up as a separate business page after Twitter wouldn't let me post to a second page under my profile. Help, anyone?
Answer: Transfer the second Facebook Page to the "ownership" of a different (and, if necessary, newly-created) Facebook account.
Technically, creating this second Facebook account for a fictitious person would violate Facebook's TOS, and so you can/should create this second account as a "business account" (with a dummy and not-yet-published Page, if necessary).
After the second Facebook account will "like" your second Page, your original account can add the second account as an additional admin, and then remove itself from being an admin.
At this point, there will no longer be any connection between the second Page and your original account, and Twitter should not have any reason to complain.  (Before logging into Twitter, make sure your original account is logged out of Facebook.)
Answer: There are a few Third Party solutions out there, but so far the best one I've encountered is zapier.com.
You can set up multiple twitter accounts to post to one Facebook feed, or one twitter to multiple pages. It's pretty incredible.


Is there a small easel or book butler for an ereader?

Question: Is there something like a small easel or book butler to be used with an ereader?
I don't like the way the device feels when I hold it.  I like holding a book, and I like hardcover books where the pages lie flat nicely.
Comment: I read your question twice and honestly I can't understand what you are talking about. Can you please try to be clearer?
Comment: @Anthon - Thanks for the assistance.  By the way, I think you mean "thinking out loud."  ("Loud thinking" might be understood as a criticism -- but I didn't take it that way, I figured out what you meant.)
Comment: @aparente001 Yeah, that was it.
Comment: @Sekhemty - I've split my question up into two separate questions, and added an image to try to show what the wrapping problem looks like: https://ebooks.stackexchange.com/q/7370/9925  I hope this makes it clearer.
Answer: There are mini easels (like these from Amazon), I have seen them in all kinds of different sizes in shops catering for artists (in Germany).
Given that your ebook is rigid (all that I know are), you can easily make such a book butler by using a 20mm thick block of wood, the size of your ebook reader, and routing a slot slightly wider than your readers thickness about 2/3 deep.
If you don't have a router, you can use three 6mm pieces of wood, and from two cut off a 15mm strip and from the rest the thickness of your reader + plus a bit, then glue the 4 pieces so created on top of the full size base
<code>###   #######################
###   #######################
#############################
</code>
You put the ebook with the front to the left, and the ebook leaning like this: <code>/</code>.
Make sure the "groove" is not to deep to cover any buttons that might be at the bottom of your reader. While it might be OK to take it out when you want to switch it off, doing so for every page turn is probably not what you want.
Comment: I made an easel for my laptop (out of cardboard, using an Instructable), and I use it on a small shelf; but I'm not sure I'm going to be happy with an ereader even with an easel.  I'm so used to holding a book in my hands!
Comment: I am used to that as well. And since I like to read without glasses, I have to use a slightly larger font, which means flipping pages more often.
Comment: can you take a look at my other question, please?  https://ebooks.stackexchange.com/q/7370/9925


How to use what, that, who, where, etc. in Chinese?

Question: I recently learned how to use interrogative pronouns in chinese, such as 什么 (what), 谁 (who) ,etc. But in English we also use these words as what I think are called 'Reflexive Pronouns' or something like that. It is the what in "Do you know WHAT that chair is for" or 'Integrity is WHAT he needs. The who in "I know a few people WHO drive blue cars." How does chinese use those words?
Answer: What you are talking about are called relative pronouns. Chinese, you may have noticed, does not play by English rules. Chinese does things differently, and to my mind often more elegantly. One way is this use of 是 ...... 的 or some other 动词 .... 的 combination. Relative clauses are just bigger adjectives really, and that is often exactly how Chinese uses the information content of the relative clause, as part of a big adjectival phrase, in front of a noun.
[relative clause]
(information content of relative clause)
{noun + relative pronoun, or just relative pronoun}

That is {the dog [that} (bit me)]!
这是那只(咬我)的狗。
What is that chair /used/ for? (For what purpose is that chair used?)
那把椅子是干什么用的吗?

2a. Do you know {WHAT} that chair is /used/ for?
2b. Do you know {the thing [that} that chair is (used) for]?
你知道那把椅子是干什么用的吗?
Using 所 you get close to an English style relative pronoun,but here it is still wrapped inside a 是 ... 的 clause. In my head, I always think 'thatwhich' for 所。

Integrity is {WHAT} he needs.
3a. Integrity is {the thing [which} he needs]. (In Chinese I think they will say 'the thing which he lacks)
正直是他[所(缺少)]的。
I know {a few people [WHO} (drive blue cars)].
4a. I know {a few people, [those people} drive blue cars].
我认识几个(开蓝色汽车)的人。

Don't like writing in the comments box.
Simple answer is: No. It depends on what you want to say and how you want to say it. 回家的人 is not a relative clause, just adjective + noun. There is a thing called a Zero Relative Clause. Basically, the Relative Pronoun is omitted, but could be inserted. "This is the man (who) I met yesterday.
那时正是冬天, 黑漆漆的街上, 满满都是回家的人。
It was winter then, the dark streets (were) full of people (who were)  headed home. (The words in brackets make the sentence too wordy.)
我到家的时候, 我们一起去超市吧。
¨WHEN I get home, we will go to the store¨.
There are various ways to express 'when'. An easy way is 的时候, 的时
Chinese can put the information content of an English relative clause in front of the noun. That means, it is not a relative clause but an adjective. We can't write 'The headed home man' in English, but in Chinese it's easy. I believe this originates in the Germanic penchant for 'Verb second'.
Comment: Thank you. Just a few more questions. Do all relative clause need to follow a 是/动词? Can a relative clause just come before a 的 like 回家的人( Man who came home)? I think that is an example of a relative clause that doesn't need 是. Also, is WHEN in the statement ¨WHEN I get home, we will go to the store¨ phrased in a relative clause in Chinese?
Answer:
"That chair is for..." (那椅子是用來...)
"[What] that chair is for " (那椅子是用來做[什麼旳])

~

"That chair is for..." (那椅子是留給...)
"[Whom] that chair is for " (那椅子是留給[誰旳])

~

'He needs integrity' (他需要诚信)
'Integrity is [what] he needs." (诚信是他[所]需要[旳])

~

"I came from Hong Kong" (我来自香港)
"Hong Kong is [where] I came from" (香港是我[所]来自[旳地方])

~

"A few people drive blue cars" (幾個人駕駛藍色汽車)
"A few people [who] drive blue cars" (幾個駕駛藍色汽車[的人])
Answer: You're mixing up question words and relative pronouns. Your Chinese examples are for question words: https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/Placement_of_question_words
Your English sentences use "what" for linking relative clauses. Chinese uses different constructions than English does:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_clause#Chinese
Are there relative pronouns in Chinese
Finally, if you want to avoid basic confusions like this in the future, I recommend having a read through something like https://www.amazon.com/English-Grammar-Students-Chinese-Learning/dp/0934034397


Assigning Story Points to issues that aren't stories

Question: In my organization, we do not assign story points to bugs. Some members of my team argue that bugs should slow our Sprint velocity, in order to create an incentive to avoid technical debt and to produce high-quality code. Others, however, argue that some bugs cannot be avoided, and should be reflected in the velocity of a Sprint and in planning meetings. In the collective experience of StackExchange, what is the best practice around assigning story point values to bugs?
Answer: Yes, you should estimate points for bug fixing work
There are a variety of reasons for bugs to be found in code, many beyond the control of the developer.
Here is a detailed write-up from Mike Cohn giving the reasons why bug fixing work should also be estimated and factored into velocity calculation.
However, there is an exception to the above rule. Do not assign points for bugs found by testers within the Sprint.
In my projects, if the developer worked on a feature and testers found problems, the developer is required to fix them as part of the original estimate. This is to encourage quality coding and avoid slapdash work. We not only do not assign points, we also encouraged the developers and testers to work together and avoid even writing bug tickets for bugs found and fixed within the Sprint. If an intractable bug could not be fixed and had to be carried to the backlog, then we wrote a bug ticket for that. It will be estimated and prioritized as part of the backlog refinement work.
Answer: Velocity has one use in Scrum, that is to give the team a means of estimating their capacity for future sprints. It is not a measure of work done, nor should it ever be used as an indicator of the performance of a team.
Imagine a situation where the team is using the velocity as a part of release planning to estimate what can be achieved by a given release date. They would do the calculation based on the stories in the backlog, which represent business value. If the team's calculated velocity includes story points allocated to bug fixing or tasks that do not represent added business value then it is like comparing apples and oranges.
It is noticable that a lot of agile tools recognise this. For example, JIRA Agile only has the story point field on stories and not on other issue types.
As an example, consider a team that decides to allocate story points to bugs they fix in sprints. That team typically manages 20 points worth of stories in a sprint and around 5 points of bug fixing. They record their velocity as 25 story points per sprint. The Product Owner asks for a release planning session as they plan to do a release in a sprints time. They look at the backlog to work out roughly how much work they are likely to complete for the release. Can they assume they will complete around 25 points off the backlog? No they can't, because chances are they will also be fixing bugs as well. So it is likely they will only complete 20 points off the backlog before the release.
It would worry me if some members of the team thought it was necessary to reflect bugs in the velocity. That might indicate that they see the velocity as a measure of the performance of the team rather than purely as a means of estimating future sprint capacity.
Comment: Sorry, but this is wrong. Capacity allocated to fixing bugs or doing anything that isn't feature work still represents capacity that could be allocated to something else. Capacity is capacity; how that capacity is spent (e.g. on Product Backlog items, fixing bugs, or anything else) is a *business decision* managed by the Product Owner. In addition, anyone who doesn't think that fixing bugs or addressing technical debt lacks business value lacks perspective; bug-ridden or broken projects lack customer value, even if the UI is super-shiny.
Comment: "That might indicate that they see the velocity as a measure of the performance of the team rather than purely as a means of estimating future sprint capacity." This is where you're going wrong. Velocity is not a measure of sprint capacity; it's an estimated range of *team capacity to do work*--any kind of work. By not adding bugs to the Product Backlog you make bugs invisible work, prevent the PO from prioritizing the *all* of the work, and treat "capacity" as a measure of product capacity (whatever you think that means) rather than team capacity. YMMV.
Comment: I second @CodeGnome - both his comments.
Comment: I think you may have misunderstood my answer. The velocity is a reflection of the capacity of the team to complete business value stories in sprints. This capacity by definition takes in to account the need to fix bugs, tackle technical debt and any other activity that allows the team to operate successfully. When the team does its forward estimating as a part of release planning it needs the ability to feedback to the Product Owner how much of the backlog will be covered while still achieving the quality levels as agreed by the team and covered in the definition of done.
Comment: I have added an example that will hopefully make it clearer.


What is the importance of pawns in the endgame?

Question: How important is it to have more pawns in the endgame phase? Does the power of the individual pawns decrease or increase as the game progresses and why?
Answer: Having more pawns than one's opponent (assuming non-pawn material is even) is extremely important in the endgame. Many games of chess boil down to endings where one side has just a single pawn more than the other, and all the action centers around the attempt to promote. In fact, one could not unreasonably define endgames, as opposed to middlegames, as those positions in which the main direct objective is to queen a pawn. (There are plenty of alternative definitions as well, none of which can be perfect.)
A one-pawn advantage is certainly not always enough to win, but the mere fact that having one extra pawn is very often a winning advantage shows just how important the pawn count is in the endgame, and in this sense I would say pawn "power" (to use your wording) does increase as the game goes on. It is a pretty reliable rule of thumb that the side with the material advantage should look to trade pieces and avoid trading pawns; conversely, the defender usually strives to trade off as many pawns as possible in order to increase the chances of a draw. Again, this is just a rule of thumb, and one of the beauties of chess is that one constantly encounters exceptions to such "rules," but this advice will generally steer you in the right direction.
Answer: It is very important to have pawns during the end game, especially if it is a King and Pawn vs. King.  This scenario would most likely allow you to promote your pawn up the board and it would remain protected given your king is closest to it.  Also remember your pawns won't be as powerful if they lack structure, for example if they are unprotected or doubled up or the enemy king is in close range to eat them up.  Also remember that the power of the pawn increases if they are the only ones on the board and the ratio of your pawns to your opponents is greater, for example:
<code>2 pawns : 1 pawn > 3 pawns : 2 Pawns.
</code>
Comment: this is true in some cases, but generally speaking, the stronger side will have better winning chances with more pawns and fewer pieces.  For example KP vs K is a draw quite frequently, but KPPPPP vs KPPPP is almost never a draw.
Comment: Good point Andrew.  Usually when I am referring to a KP vs K, it is a P on the a or h file with the KING in front of it.
Answer: The importance of pawns is that 1) they can become queens by marching down to the opponent's eighth rank and 2) the endgame is the time for them to do so. So the value of the pawns increases the more pieces are traded off, and the closer to the endgame you get to. The fewer the remaining pieces, the greater the value of an individual pawn in percentage terms.
In the middle game, other factors such as king safety are more important. It does you no good to "queen" a pawn if your opponent is using the extra "time" (moves) to checkmate your king. But in the endgame, the remaining material is small enough so that you probably won't be checkmated UNLESS someone queens a pawn.
The value having an extra pawn is that you can (theoretically) trade off pawn for pawn so that your opponent runs out of pawns before you do. The exception to the rule is if your opponent has a pawn one square away from queening, and you have four or five pawns that are all several squares away from queening. Then the advantage of having a "closer" pawn is greater than the advantage of having "more" pawns.


Can MBA student get a job role as software project manager or Scrum master? If he/she has a bachelor degree in Information Technology

Question: I am a final year IT student and further I want to study MBA. As I have a good technical background and after completing MBA, can I get job roles like a software project manager or a scrum master?
Comment: Hi Anal, welcome to PM.SE - I believe your question is already answered in [Is it possible to be a Scrum Master without any experience?](https://pm.stackexchange.com/q/16594/430) and [Interview preparation tips for junior project manager position or project manager with no experiences](https://pm.stackexchange.com/q/7895/430). Hope this helps!
Comment: Also [Career path in project management](https://pm.stackexchange.com/q/2165/430) and several items in [tag:career].
Comment: This is an opinion related question, and the only opinion that counts is the hiring manager.
Answer: It depends
First of all, you need to aquire project management and Scrum knowledge if you want to be a PM or a SM. It goes without saying that you need to put in the effort to learn and aquire the skills that can differentiate you from other candidates applying for the same jobs. A degree and an MBA aren't worth as much these days compared to some time ago.
With that said, a lot will depend on the companies you apply for. Some might hire you, some might not. Like any other job, it will be a matter of them matching their needs, and companies have differen needs depending on the company itself, the project, the domain, etc.
Here is my experience with the situation you are describing:

most companies won't hire an inexperienced PM, no matter your degree or MBA. Many projects require an experienced PM to be run, so even if you have project management knowledge, that knowledge is theoretical, not practical. They need someone who has been in the trenches and know the nature of the battle. That means they will hire an experienced PM, or a PM would be promoted from within the company, someone that knows what they are doing and have proved so already in their daily work;
many companies will hire a SM right from the street. No degree, no MBA, nada. This is because they don't really understand the importance of a SM in Scrum, they think it's someone that facilitates meetings and events and such, kind of like a secretary. It's better if you don't end up in such a company because you will end up doing some perverted Scrum implementation, so basically you won't be a SM as per the definition of a SM. Companies that do know what they are doing will look for knowledge and experience, maybe even for some certifications (I dislike certifications and personally think they are mostly useless if you simply look for a certification, but it's a reality that needs mentioned);
with an IT degree one can be hired as a developer, then prove their worth in other areas too, like Scrum knowledge and management skills. Many companies will move someone like this to a different role like a SM or PM if they see they are good at it. It will take of course longer now to become a SM or PM than getting a job directly, but it's a common occurrence.

Like I said, this is my experience with the situation you are asking about. Others may have a different opinion. YMMV and luck also plays a role so you might get the job you want right from the bat, no matter what I said above :). As with many other things you pursue in life you, if you have the determination and you put in the work, you can make it happen. The comments Tiago Cardoso added to your question should give you more details on what might be involved when walking this path.
Answer: You have to have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to perform adequately in those roles and then you have to be able to prove it to a hiring manager.  If you can do that, then the direct answer to your question is: yes.  However, I would suspect you do not have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to perform well in those roles and would have difficulty convincing a hiring manager of it.
Experience is a poor predictor of future performance while simultaneously is necessary to 1) practice the job to master the skills and abilities and 2) build evidence of success.
Most seller of IT services have a program to hire entry-level undergrad and graduate students and enter the workforce with a generic title, a standard entry-level salary, and assigned job tasks that have a lot of boring, grunt work along with some challenging stuff that would begin to discriminate between performers and non performers.  If you are part of the former group, the you'll likely get some leadership assignments sooner than later.  I'd advise to focus getting in with an entry-level pool and then work very hard rather than over inflating your abilities where success would be less likely.
Answer: In my opinion, your MBA degree doesn't enhance your chances of getting either role. What is important is that you are able to demonstrate the adequate skills and knowledge to perform in the role. You can apply for unpaid internships in some reputable digital agencies around, that way you will be able to set your self apart from others, your MBA degree will just be an icing on the cake. I am talking from experience, that's exactly the path I employed.


Fortigate Firewall cli query || show and get

Question: which type information can be seen by executing keywords "GET" and "SHOW" with combination other keywords at Fortigate firewall cli in general way. Can anyone differentiate the information print by using these keywords.
Comment: Did any answer help you? if so, you should accept the answer so that the question doesn't keep popping up forever, looking for an answer. Alternatively, you could provide and accept your own answer.
Answer: As far as I can remember show is used to check parameters and options as they are set in configuration, while get is used to check runtime values. Let say you have configured an interface for autonegotiation. You can see this with a show command. When the interface comes up it negotiates 100/full. You can check this with a get command
Comment: Thanks, however show commands display configured CLI by user or pre defined. and Get commands display system accepted/operations parameters/feature of that relative technologies...


When is the next point release to be available?

Question: There are several things I love about 12.04 LTS, but several bugs which make it terrible, like the LightDM issues with the XServer and whatnot. I'm really hoping on the next point release to fix these annoying problems, but I want to know... when is it expected to be released to the public?
Answer: According to the official Ubuntu wiki it will be released August 23rd 2012.
Precise release schedule
Answer: The 12.04.1 point release will be released August 23. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QuantalQuetzal/ReleaseSchedule
However, most fixes are made in new versions and those that are released to stable are generally rolled out gradually. If you have specific backport requests, or other unresolved issues, you should file a bug about it on Launchpad. see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs
Is this display manager issue you describe a flickering when logging in? And if so, are you using the radeon AMD/ATI driver? (lsmod | grep radeon)
Answer: Ubuntu releases bug fix upgrades all the time to various packages, which you can get if you follow the -updates repository for your distribution.
When there is a point release update to the CD/DVD images (which only happens for Ubuntu LTS), it simply incorporates all of the updates made thus far, which you would have installed already had you been installing updates on an existing installation.  So if you already install all available updates, you won't get anything new if you re-install from one of the point release updates.
That said, point release updates of Ubuntu LTS usually come out roughly every January and August at the moment.


How do I start my network bridge automatically upon boot?

Question: I have created a Network Bridge in Ubuntu 11.10 and have a second computer accessing the network and internet through the bridge.  The bridge comes up and is active before the log on screen but after about 30 mins of idle time for the Ubuntu computer the bridge becomes disabled.  I can no longer ping the bridge from the second computer.  I can type "sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart" and I can start using the internet through the bridge again.
I have tried modifying my power settings, telling the computer to never to go sleep or hibernate.
I think there is something simple that I am missing but my adapters config file consists of:

auto lo eth0 eth1 bridge0

iface lo inet loopback

iface eth0 inet manual

iface eth1 inet manual

iface bridge0 inet static
address x.x.x.x
netmask x.x.x.x
network x.x.x.x
broadcast x.x.x.x
gateway x.x.x.x
nameservers x.x.x.x
bridge_ports eth0 eth1
pre-up ip link set eth0 promisc on
pre-up ip link set eth1 promisc on
bridge_fd 0
bridge_hello 2
bridge_maxage 12
bridge_stp off
ip link set bridge0 promisc on

Not sure if I set something I should not of or if there is a setting that I am missing to prevent this.  I want this connection to be running when the computer boots without a user being logged in, which is currently how it is working.
Answer: You could try the following settings:
<code>auto lo

auto eth0

iface eth0 inet static

auto eth1

iface eth0 inet static

auto bridge0

iface bridge0 inet static
</code>


Is a belief that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not three persons, but one, Modalism?

Question: If I believe that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are God, but not as three persons but as one, do I believe in Modalism?
Answer: Options to consider
In the history of conceptions regarding God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit there have been names commonly assigned to some of them.  Over time, those named conceptions have developed a measure of stability and precision as shown in the Wikipedia entries dedicated to them.
A very good survey of non-Trinitarian conceptions can be found in the Wikipedia entry Nontrinitarianism.  Narrowing the field of options to those conceiving God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit as one person gives us a few options:

Monarchianism emphasizes God the Father as one, and this view has two types:

Modalistic monarchianism (or simply, Modalism), 'considers God to be one while appearing and working through the different "modes" of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.'  This is the view of Oneness Pentecostalism.
Dynamic monarchianism (aka Adoptionism) conceives that God the Father "adopted" Jesus to be God at either baptism, resurrection, or ascension, and that Jesus remained divine since then.  In this view, Jesus is not co-eternal with the Father.  Viewed another way, Adoptionism is a kind of Subordinationism where Jesus has less status than the Father.  This is the view of the now extinct Ebionites and a few minor groups throughout history.

Unitarianism differs from Modalism that Unitarians teach that Jesus is not God, but an inspired man and a great teacher.  (see GotQuestions entry).  This is the view of the Unitarian churches, whose theology is described here.

Sabellianism is similar to Modalism in its conception.  Encyclopaedia Britannica characterizes it as a "more developed and less naive form of Modalistic Monarchianism".  The different name is to identify the origin of the teaching as coming from Sabellius, a theologian and priest from the 3rd century, and as an Eastern Church heresy.  New World Encyclopedia has a good treatment on it.

Emanuel Swedenborg's view of the Trinity, expounded in Lee Woofenden's article Who is God? Who is Jesus Christ? What about that Holy Spirit?.  See also Mr. Woofenden's answer contrasting this view with modalism.

What you believe
Since you specify that 1) all three are God and 2) all three is one person, then what you believe can either be Modalistic monarchianism or Sabellianism or Swedenborg's view unless I failed to name other conceptions that can fit your search criteria.
Further study
One very good book about the historical development of the doctrine of Trinity, various ways of conceptualizing the Trinity, as well as practical consequences to other doctrines is The Trinity - A Guide for the Perplexed by an Anglican priest, Paul M. Collins, reviewed here.  Here's a relevant quote from Chapter 2 (Moments of Interpretation) in a section "A pre-Nicene ecology of language":

Monarchianism can be said to have been used to safeguard the unity of God. Dynamic or adoptionist Monarchianism, attributed to Paul of Samosata, understood that the power (dynamis) of God had descended on Jesus, inspired him and given him divine honour. Some would argue that such an understanding can be read out of the Apostles' Creed. There were other forms of Monarchianism: such as modalism, patripassianism and Sabellianism, in which the three names used in relation to the Godhead: Father, Son and Spirit represented one hypostasis or persona, which was manifest in a succession of modes. There was no understanding of any real distinction within
the divine being. These understandings of the divine led to the asking of crucial questions about how God in se was related to the revelation and redemption given. It is out of these concerns and the perceived threats of misunderstanding or heresy that the imperatives towards definition emerge.
Comment: @LeeWoofenden Thank you for your correction.  Updated answer accordingly.  Feel free to edit if it is still inaccurate.
Comment: @LeeWoofenden  welcome back!!
Comment: Just to be clear, though it is often erroneously stated that Swedenborg's theology is modalist, it most definitely is not. See my answer to this question: https://christianity.stackexchange.com/q/40799/20394
Comment: Correction: The New World Encyclopedia at the linked entry does not identify Swedenborg or the churches that follow his teachings as Sabellian. Rather, it says that Swedenborg was *accused* of Sabellianism, and that Swedenborg has been *interpreted* as being a proponent of Sabellian modalism. As the above-linked answer demonstrates, those accusations and interpretations are incorrect.
Comment: Also, Emanuel Swedenborg never founded a church. It was fifteen years after his death that the first church was founded based on his teachings.
Answer: Possibly, if you are not an extreme Monarchianist (denier of Persons in the Trinity).
Modalism is

A cluster of Trinitarian heresies of the second and third centuries claiming that there is only one person in God, but that this one person manifests himself in three different ways or modes, e.g., as creator (Father), redeemer (Son), and sanctifier (Holy Spirit). (Etym. Latin modus, way, manner, method.)

See Pohle The Divine Trinity: A Dogmatic Treatise pt. 1, ch. 2, §1, Art. 2 "The Modalism of Sabellius".
Answer: The modalist view of the Trinity in summary
Believing that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are God as one person, not three, is modalism only if Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are seen as different "modes," or roles, or ways of appearing, of God.
In general, modalism involves the idea that there is no real or permanent distinction between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but that each of them is simply a different way that God appears to human beings under different circumstances or to accomplish different tasks.
Emanuel Swedenborg's view of the Trinity
The eighteenth century scientist, philosopher, and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) offered a concept of God in which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God, in one person, but are distinct and permanent parts of God, not simply different ways that God appears to human beings, or God functioning to accomplish different tasks.
Swedenborg expresses the nature of the Trinity in one Person of God in two primary ways.
More abstractly:

The Father is the divine love
The Son is the divine wisdom
The Holy Spirit is the divine power, or action

More concretely:

The Father is the divine soul
The Son is the divine body
The Holy Spirit is the divine action

How to picture Swedenborg's view of the Trinity
The more concrete version is also the easier one to picture, since it uses the analogy of a human being, created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26–27), to illustrate the nature of the Trinity in God. Each one of us is a single human being. Yet we have different "parts," the most basic being our soul, our body, and our actions.
In the very same way, Swedenborg said, God is a single divine Person, but has three "parts" which are analogous to our soul, body, and actions. The divine soul is the divine love, the divine body is the divine wisdom, and the divine action is everything God says and does from divine love through divine wisdom.
For a fuller explanation of Swedenborg's concept of a Trinity in one person of God, please see my article:
Who is God? Who is Jesus Christ? What about that Holy Spirit?
Swedenborg does not actually apply the term "parts" to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, hence the quotation marks. Rather, he uses the Latin term essentialia, which is difficult to translate into English. It has been translated as "essentials," and more recently "essential components." The basic meaning of an "essential" of God is "something without which God is not God."
This can be illustrated by the human soul, body, and actions. These are not exactly "parts" of a human being. However, without all three of them together, a human being is not a human being. They are therefore the basic "essentials" for us to be a human being.
Swedenborg's view of the Trinity is not modalist
What they are most definitely not, however, is different ways that we appear to other people under different circumstances, or different expressions of us to accomplish different tasks, as in the modalist conception of God. Nor are they different roles we may play, as the modalist conception of God can also be expressed.
Rather, all of our appearances, tasks, and roles are the body acting from the soul in order to accomplish the soul's purposes. In other words, every one of our "modes" or "appearances" or "roles" proceeds from the soul through the body and into action.
In the very same way, in Swedenborg's conception of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, every mode, appearance, role, and action of God is the Son, or the divine wisdom, acting from the Father, or the divine love, to accomplish the purposes of God's love. These are not three persons of God, but rather three essentials that are present in all of God's appearances, words, and actions.
This, according to Swedenborg, is the meaning of Jesus' statement:

No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known. (John 1:18, New International Version)

In other words, the Father is not a "mode" or "appearance" of God, because we never see the Father at all, except through the Son. Every appearance of God is through the Son, meaning that the Son is the only "mode" of God, if that means an "appearance" of God, or God acting to accomplish particular tasks, such as redemption or sanctification. And the Holy Spirit is God speaking and acting.
For a fuller explanation of the distinction between Swedenborg's Trinity and modalism, please see my answer to this question here on Christianity StackExchange:
What's the difference, if any, between the Swedenborgian and Oneness Pentecostal doctrines of God?
Conclusion: Believing that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one person, not three persons, does not necessarily involve modalism
To return to the original question, then: No, believing that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are God, but not as three persons but as one, does not necessarily mean you believe in modalism. It could mean that. But there is at least one view, the one presented by Emanuel Swedenborg, in which the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one person, and which rejects the modalist conception of God.
Comment: +1 for excellent description of Swedenborg's view *vis-à-vis* modalism.
Comment: According to him actions are part of one's being?
Comment: @WalterS Yes. Actions are an *essential* part of our being. Without action, we are not human. Without action, we are not even alive, but are dead. Actions are the expression of our being, and an essential part of our being, just as the Holy Spirit is the expression of God's being, and is an essential part of God. This is from the Swedenborgian perspective, of course. I could add this to the question, but would prefer not to, as it would introduce a tangent not essential to the main point of the answer.


Can I charge an iPhone with another device's USB charger?

Question: I have a USB car charger from TomTom. Can I use it to charge my iPhone 4, or will that damage my phone?
Answer: Yes, it works great. The iPhone charges over USB like many other devices. The iPhone can accept more current than the USB specification, so you might have a slower charge than a charger that provides that extra wattage, but the iPhone circuitry is designed to take any normal USB charge and properly handle the charge which includes pausing it when the battery is full.
Answer: Also, just so you know, because I was curious about this myself, it is safe to charge the iPhone/iPod with the larger 10W iPad AC wall charger. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4327
Answer: You can charge an iPhone with most any device which has a USB port. USB is designed such that it starts with a small amount of electricity and the device requests more if it wants it – like to charge, for example. I have never heard of a device being damaged by USB power and I sincerely doubt it's possible without some kind of hardware fault to begin with.
In fact, the problem most people find (especially with the iPad) is that the USB port can't provide enough power. This is the cause of the "Not Charging" notification which you get on iPads. I suppose that as the iPhone develops in power (with rumours of the A5 iPad chip coming to the iPhone 5 in September) this may become the case more generally.
As far as iPhones not getting enough juice, it's generally fine. Especially with the 12V cigarette lighter socket to which you are probably referring. The one exception I have found is the USB ports on in car stereos which are designed for memory sticks only (in order to play MP3s loaded on the sticks). Those just aren't built to supply enough power, and won't charge an iPhone (in my experience).
Comment: USB doesn't "start with a small amount".  The device is expected to only draw a small amount.  It's all on the honor system.  USB bus is a voltage source so it has no control over how much the device draws, other than cutting it off completely.
Comment: @endolith Your explanation seems to contradict my understanding of the subject. A good writeup: http://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/5581
Comment: @zigg: I don't understand what the contradiction is.


Drove with radiator cap not tight all theway

Question: ....I didn't know my radiator cap was loose till I saw my car overheating...eventually it wouldn't accelerate as I pulled over n opened the hood I saw it was missin n their was radiator fluid everywhere....now it won't even start...what damage Iam I looking at?
Comment: A failed head gasket would be an educated guess, given your description. You need to have it checked out.
Comment: Related: https://mechanics.stackexchange.com/questions/41632/what-problems-can-a-loose-radiator-cap-cause
Answer: It pretty much depends on how much you drove this way.
If there is less coolant the car will heat up the remaining coolant a lot quicker, and once it reaches a hot enough temperature, most modern cars will display an error or warning, or a simple thermometer warning light will turn on and they won't let the car rev further so that the engine won't get any hotter. If this is the case you might have gotten away easily but i do not think you got that lucky.
Once the engine gets hot enough (and you keep driving) and the coolant doesn't do its job because it s just not enough of it to cool the engine down, in which case the remaining coolant simply boils. Usually in a gasoline engine it can be a minor issue as it might only mean you need to replace a few gaskets (i do not know their names, i m not a native speaker), but it can also mean that the engine has seized, meaning damage to the pistons (some might actually become scrap metal as they re so damaged that the cylinder (which can also be damaged) will have low compression, a.k.a. dead engine or on its way out. In my experience (just seing cars break down) a diesel which had the coolant boil is in big trouble. The repair cost i a lot greater than the one for a gasoline engine, but again, it depends on the wear of the engine.
Go get your car checked by a qualified mechanic and take a compression test. This is the most relevant test that tells you how much the engine has been damaged (if it has been damaged at all).
As for the radiator... seal the leaks and get a new cap and gasket.
Please keep in mind that i am no mechanic and i am talking out of personal experience (my water cooled motorcycle engine seized because of a similar problem).


Why do all the planets of the solar system orbit in roughly the same 2D plane?

Question:
Most images you see of the solar system are 2D and all planets orbit in the same plane. In a 3D view, are really all planets orbiting in similar planes? Is there a reason for this? I'd expect that the orbits distributed all around the sun, in 3D.
Has an object made by man (a probe) ever left the Solar System?
Comment: welcome to physics.SE! Please try to ask only one question per ... question ;-) That way it's easier to determine the correct/best answer
Comment: Incidentally, this is part of why Pluto was "demoted" from planethood--it orbits with an appreciable angle with respect to the ecliptic, unlike the eight planets.
Comment: short form of @Nic's link: http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ (no need to tell google _everything_. Did I mention I hate this automatic clipboard replacement behaviour?)
Comment: The first subquestion(v4) is a duplicate of http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/26083/2451
Comment: @Qmechanic Although [that](http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/26083) was asked 4 months after this question.
Answer: Nic and Approximist's answers hit the main points, but it's worth adding an additional word on the reason the orbits lie roughly in the same plane: Conservation of angular momentum.
The Solar System began as a large cloud of stuff, many times larger than its current size. It had some very slight initial angular momentum -- that is, it was, on average, rotating about a certain axis. (Why? Maybe just randomly! All of the constituents were flying around, and if you add up those random motions, there'll generically be some nonzero angular momentum.) Because angular momentum is conserved, as the cloud collapsed the rotation rate sped up (the usual example being the figure skater who pulls in her arms as she spins, and speeds up accordingly).
Further collapse in the direction perpendicular to the plane of rotation doesn't change the angular momentum, but collapse in the other directions would change it. So the collapse turns the initial cloud, whatever its shape, into a pancake. The planets formed out of that pancake.
By the way, you can see the signs of that initial angular momentum in other things too: not only are all of the planets orbiting in roughly the same plane, but so are most of their moons, and most of the planets' rotations about their axes as well.
Comment: nice answer, Uranus rotates in a very funny direction and this suggests something significant has happened to disturb its rotation.
Comment: Uranus orbits on the same plane and in the same direction as the other planets.  It's rotation about it's axis is odd as it's practically laying on it's side and rolling along like a ball rolled on the ground, as opposed to like a spinning top.  Venus, however, is the real oddball, as it rotates about it's axis in the opposite direction of the rest of the planets (retrograde rotation), like it's completely upside down or rotating backwards.
Comment: @becko -- you're right that that wasn't clear from my explanation. The collapse to a pancake happens before the planets form. Velocities in the perpendicular direction are much smaller than velocities in the plane. The motion of the cloud is a more-or-less uniform "swirling" around the rotation axis.
Comment: Right! I have a lousy memory for which planet(s) have anomalous rotations, but I knew there were some.
Comment: Just one thing I didn't get clearly: Why the rotations of the planets about their own axes are also in similar planes?
Comment: @Pheonix - nice point about venus being upside-down:  i'd always assumed it had suffered a collision which knocked it's rotation right back round the other way, but compared to a simple rotation of 180 degrees this seems really unlikely:  ie, it's MUCH more likely to have been knocked upside-down rather than be rotating backwards.  I wonder if we can tell by looking at its magnetic field whether it is upside-down compared to the other planers.  Though, now i think of it, if you reverse the rotation of a planet you presumably flip it's magnetic north anyway.  So you probably can't tell.
Answer:
More or less yes.  The planets mostly orbit in the same plane but with small deviations compared to the size of the system.  The largest relative tilt is around 4 to 6 degrees. This 'flatness' is due to orbital mechanics, where the solar system started spherical it now has 'decayed' into a flat disc.  This disc is essentially a stable low energy configuration and therefore the system has become more and more disc like over time.
The Voyager 1 probe is 'leaving' the solarsystem as we speak but there is no real firm boundary and so it's hard to give a definitive answer.
Comment: 2) depending on the definition of the boundary, Voyager 2 and Pioneer 10 and 11, [too](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Outersolarsystem-probes-4407b.svg)
Comment: largest relative tilt is mercury 7 degrees
Answer:
The orbital planes of different planets has small inclinations to the ecliptic plane. The corresponding wikipedia diagram should give a better view than the 2D images you've seen.
Both Voyager 1 and 2 are beyond the Solar System
Comment: If you include Voyager 2, you might as well include Pioneer 10&11, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Outersolarsystem-probes-4407b.svg
Answer: We don't know, but there what I gather is the typical pattern of hypothesis, accretion disc theory, which attempts to find a model dynamic that could explain what we see, particularly in our own solar system, which is the only one we have very complete information about. In addition to seeing that our own solar system's planets all orbit in the same plane, we can also observe many disc distributions around other strong gravity wells, which we also call accretion discs.
As I understand it, the reason for most orbiting matter to end up in the same plane goes something like this:
I think the assumption is that there was a lot of dust fairly homogenously distributed over a region greater than the solar system. Conglomerations convert the dust into a random distribution of globs and gravity eventually pulls most of the globs into larger globs (protoplanets) which have growing escape velocities while enough dust remains. The globs combine until most of the mass is in one large concentration or another, typicaly one largest one, but sometimes two or more.
Just as gravity pulls most nearby dust at a similar velocity into the largest local accumultation, joining it, a system full of globs (orbiting a protostar in a random spherical cloud of orbits) would have the globs interacting with each other by gravity, resulting in unstable paths and more and more collisions. The more an orbit gets randomly changed, the more likelihood of it hitting something (proto-star or proto-planet globs) and joining it, and also cancelling some velocity in the collision. Even though inertia would still fall towards a random cloud of orbits in no particular plane, once the cloud randomly ends up with any amount of concentration of large globs in the same rough plane, that plane will have more net attraction, and more chances for collision capture, than other planes, and as that plane captures matter from orbits in other planes, the deviation will get absorbed in collisions, and the matter in that plane itself will be pulling on the other matter in that plane, resulting in more and more deviation-cancelling collisions in that plane. I.e. It would be a positive feedback loop effect. However, the stages and numbers involved though are all unknown, so even if the theory makes sense, the actual situation might not tend to work out that way, because the theoretical effect might not be anywhere near enough in practice to have the result we see. We don't know both because we don't know the details of the initial state that formed our star or others, and I think it would be a daunting task to try to model the progress of any such over so much time (and to do it many times to see trends and possibilities).
There is also an effect where energy taken from the rotational momentum of matter being pulled into a mass is released in bipolar jets, which I don't quite get the physics of, but others do, and there are spectacular observations clearly showing it.
A possibility that occurs to me, is that maybe what actually happened, either just in our case, or maybe in most or all star formation, is that two enormous dust fields with different overall velocities intersected - that intersection (it seems to me) would tend to be a plane locally, and would result in friction, velocities and concentrations focused in one plane from the start. Maybe dust clouds stay dust clouds except where two dust clouds with different velocities and sufficient density meet in the right way, and this tends to lead to an orbital plane, along with the tendencies in the accretion disc theory.
However, having said all that and looking through various articles to check it, I ran into a pretty great site full of explanations of things with an Accretion Discs section that goes into lots of detail, which I highly recommend: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Accretion_discs
Answer: The solar system was a ball of gas initially and all these gas particles wanted to clump together and compress itself to minimise gravitational potential energy. But to do this it needed to preserve some symmetries.
The ball of gas, due to some reason, had an initial rotation about some axis. This rotation had an axis of symmetry (which is time-invariant, due to angular momentum conservation), and gravity had radial symmetry. The only way to preserve both these symmetries while self compressing in a $3$ dimensional space is to form a disk.


Help solving for $x$ in the equation $x= \frac{1}{1+1/x}$

Question: The question asks if it is possible to solve for $x$, and if it is, what is $x$?
$$x= \frac{1}{1+1/x}$$
Comment: That was my first answer, but my teacher said it was wrong. Maybe it's supposed to be x = 1 divided by (1+1)/x?
Answer: Suppose that there is a real number $x$ satisfying the equation.
Multiply both sides of the equation by $1+1/x$. After some simplification, we get $x+1=1$, so $x=0$. But this is ridiculous, $1/x$ is not defined at $0$. Our supposition was wrong. There is no solution!
Remark: This kind of thing happens moderately often. When we are solving an equation, we sometimes do complicated manipulations. Some of these manipulations can produce fake (the technical term is extraneous) roots. So when you have produced what you think is a root or roots to an equation, it is very useful to substitute the numbers obtained into the equation, to see whether they "work." This also serves to detect errors of calculation.
Comment: This turned out to be the correct answer, thank you.
Answer: Well we can just multiply both sides by $1+\frac1x$ to get
$x\big(1+\frac1x\big)=1$
then
$x+1=1$
$x=0$
But $x$ can't be $0$ , since this would leave the fraction on the right side undefined.
I don't think there are any complex values of $x$ that satisfy the equation either. So no, it's not possible to solve this equation.
Comment: At no point in your answer did you assume $x$ was real, so your argument shows there are no complex solutions either.


Multiplication operators

Question: Consider a commutative Banach algebra $A$ and the Banach algebra of bounded operators $B(A)$ on $A$. Associate to each $a\in A$ the multiplication operator $T_ax =ax$ ($x\in A$). Is always the mapping $\varphi(a)=T_a$, $\varphi\colon A\to B(A)$ a continuous algebra homormorphism? What if $A$ is not commutative?
Answer: Since $\|T_a x\| \le \|a \| \|x\|$, we have $\|T_a\| \le \|a\|$, so it is continuous.
That it is a homomorphism is easy.  Even if $A$ is not commutative, since $T_{ab} x = abx = T_a T_b x$ it is a homomorphism.
Answer: Yes, it's a homomorphism: take $x,a,b\in A$. Then
$$T_{a\cdot b}(x)=(ab)x=a(bx)=T_a(bx)=T_a(T_b(x)),$$
hence $T_{a\cdot b}=T_a\circ T_b$ and $\varphi(ab)=\varphi(a)\circ \varphi(b)$. We also have $$\varphi(a+b)(x)=(a+b)\cdot x=ax+bx=\varphi(a)(x)+\varphi(b)(x),$$
and $\varphi(e)=Id$.
It's continuous, as
$$\lVert T_a-T_b\rVert_{B(A)}=\sup_{\lVert x\rVert=1}\lVert T_ax-T_bx\rVert=\sup_{\lVert x\rVert=1}\lVert ax-bx\rVert\leq \lVert a-b\rVert.$$
All has been done without the assumption that $A$ is commutative.

Multiplication operators


Difference between Project Phase and Sub Project (PMBOK)

Question: Reading the PMBOK I noticed that they almost never use the term Sub Project. Using the PMBOK terminology is a project phase the same as a sub project?
Answer: Subprojects are parts of main projects goals. Subprojects
Have deliverables to deliver by the end as final product which is part of the main project deliverables. The reason we have subproject to have better control over the main project.
Phases have specific milestones and deliverables
For specific goals. They show progress of phase.
Phases are for project management team so if the performed work is too much this means the phase life cycle would be bigger.
Answer: In pmBOK, a subproject is a smaller portion of the overall project created when a project is subdivided into more manageable components or pieces (ref: pmBOK v5, p 564).
A project phase may be a subproject if you decide to divide your project in subprojects to reduce its complexity during execution or to share it between several project managers.
Comment: Thanks. I know each phase should has its own project charter. From your explanation I understand that a sub project may be a phase. But if it is not it will use its own set of documents (input /outputs) or just a sub set from the main project?
Comment: In my view, each sub project should have its own set of documentation or project artifacts, subordinate from the project documentation.  Just the documents you need, scaled to the project or sub project you have, just in time.
Answer: All phases are sub projects but not all sub projects are phases.  Phases suggest a linear progression, sub projects that are sequenced in a finish-start relationship, generally speaking.  But other types of work that can be labeled a sub project may not fit that sequenced approach.  And I think it that difference when you would use the term phase versus sub project despite they share characteristics.
Comment: So I can execute a part of a process group as a sub project?
Comment: Other way around.  I think your sub project will consist of the process groups.  While it is very misleading in the PMBoK, the process groups are NOT phases of a project.  They are process groups.  Very very different.


Why does the pronunciation of "U" vary in English?

Question: The letter U is pronounced differently in different words such as Umbrella and Utensils,
as well as when it is Used inside of words such as stUdent and stUdy. Can I please have a grammatical explanation?
Comment: Yes, it's not grammar. It's English spelling. **Don't** think of a "letter being pronounced" one way or another. Letters in English are not pronounced -- that is, there is no regular way people pronounce words that contain them. Especially vowels. English spelling has 5 vowel letters, while the English language has around 14 vowels. That's about like writing Japanese with only 17 kana; it would get very very difficult to figure out what is meant.
Comment: Grammar is immaterial.
Comment: Try "gh" like rough; "o" like women and "ti" like nation. Therefore, "[ghoti](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti)" is pronounced "fish".
Comment: Reminds me of: "Dearest Creature in Creation, study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse." Goes on for several pages, too.
Comment: [Dearest Creature](http://www.mipmip.org/tidbits/pronunciation.shtml) is pretty amazing (thanks, @teylyn).
Comment: Uniformed vs uninformed. Daughter vs laughter. Height vs weight.
Answer: It isn't so much a grammatical issue, as an historical one.
To make a very long story short, between the 1300s and 1700s, English underwent a change in pronunciation called the Great Vowel Shift. It was messy, and inconsistent. There are a few theories about why this happened, but there isn't any grand consensus.
Unfortunately for you and every other English language student, the standardization of spelling happened right in the middle, between the 1500s and 1600s. So, many of the spellings were created to reflect older pronunciations, which are no longer used today.
In other cases, the different pronunciations of the letter reflect the language of origin. English is a basically a mishmash of Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, and Latin, with bits of Dutch and Old Norse and others thrown in for fun, based on a long history of conquerors taking over the British Isles.
As it happens, none of the examples you've given in your question are of actual English origin: umbrella is Latin via Italian, and use, utensil, study and student are Latin via French. Other words like up and under are from Old English, while ugly comes from Old Norse. Here, you can already see some patterns, that the words of Latin origin tend to have one sound (use, utensil, student), while the words of Old English / Germanic origin tend to another (up, under, ugly), but even that isn't consistent (study, umbrella). Roughly speaking, these correspond to IPA /u/ and /ʌ/ respectively.
Other examples: great big clusters of vowels tend to point towards a French origin, like oeuvre and bouquet. Clusters of mostly silent consonants tend to point towards very old words of a Germanic origin (brought, knight), where one or more consonants have been elided over centuries of usage.
tl;dr: There are no hard and fast rules for determining the pronunciation of English words directly from spelling. In fact, even native English speakers will occasionally trip over the pronunciation of a particular word, particularly when it is seen written many times before hearing it spoken (from personal experience).
There have been attempts to resolve this issue, which can be fascinating to read about, but as of yet, none have stuck.
In cases of doubt, Wiktionary does a wonderful job of showing pronunciations in IPA format for British and American English, and there is usually at least one audio sample to listen to.
Comment: Why did it happen? In any language with more than five or six vowels, vowel shifts are happening all the time. For example, French *meuble* comes from Latin *mobile*, and *nouvelle* comes from Latin *novellus*, both definitely different vowels. The Great Vowel Shift was an extremely large vowel shift, and nobody knows if there was a reason for this or if it was just chance.
Comment: Oh sure, vowel shifts happen all the time, but if I understand correctly the Great Vowel Shift in English was bigger and more sudden than usual, and that's why it gets a Grand Capitalized Name (there could also be some anglo-centrism involved though).
Answer: As a commenter notes, the issue is that English has more vowel sounds than it does letters for vowels. A similar issue was noted by an anonymous scholar of the twelfth century trying to devise an alphabet for Icelandic (which also has many vowel sounds). The scholar discusses in a relevant part why he decided to add some new vowel letters to the five from the Latin alphabet:

Now it may well happen that some one will speak up in this way: 'I can
  read the Danish language perfectly well, even though it be written
  with the proper Latin letters. I can make out what it says, even when
  some of the letters in what I read can not be pronounced correctly ...
  To that I say: it is not the virtue of the letters that enables you to
  read and to make out the meaning where the letters are unclear. That is
  rather YOUR virtue, and it is not to be expected that I also, or any
  one else like me, if such there be, shall be able to read well and to
  make out which path to take where more than one course is possible
  because it is written one way, but not clearly, and we then have to
  guess, as you claim you can do so well.

Haugen (1950) "First Grammatical Treatise"
English readers effectively become good at "guessing" how to pronounce a word, since we don't have enough vowels to write with.
Answer: The letter "u" (by itself, not in a digraph like "au" or "ou") is actually one of the more reliably-pronounced vowel letters. There are a substantial number of exceptions to the rules for U, but they're easy to enumerate compared to the rules for pronouncing a letter like E or O.
The general rule is that it's regular for U to be pronounced "short" in "closed" syllables, and "long" in "open" syllables. This is somewhat based on historical sound changes.
These concepts are not too complicated, but I'll explain them here since they are also useful for understanding other parts of English spelling.
Long u
The "long" pronunciation of U is usually the same as its name, /juː/ ("yoo"). Fairly regularly, /uː/ ("oo") is used instead in certain contexts:

U is "oo" for nearly all speakers after one of the following consonants: /r/ /ʃ/ ("sh") /dʒ/ ("j") /tʃ/ ("ch"), or a consonant cluster ending in /l/
U is "oo" for nearly all American, and a substantial number of British English speakers in most words when it falls in a stressed syllable after one of the following consonants: /l/ /s/ /z/
U is "oo" for most American speakers, but "yoo" for most British speakers when it falls in a stressed syllable after one of the following consonants: /t/ /d/ /n/

In an unstressed syllable, "long u" can be pronounced several ways due to vowel reduction: /juː/, /jʊ/ or /jə/ (or after one of the special consonants mentioned above, /uː/, /ʊ/ or /ə/).
When "long u" comes before an /r/, it becomes an r-colored vowel, as in "sure". This may rhyme with "tour", or for some speakers, it may rhyme with "shore", and for yet other speakers (mainly Americans) it may rhyme with "sir" (the source of the Airplane! "don't call me Shirley" joke).
Short u
The "short" pronunciation of U is /ʌ/. In a small number of words /ʊ/ is used instead (for more information on that, see "Why are "put" and "but" different in their pronunciation?" and "Do "hull" and "full" rhyme?— rules for "short U" sounds before L"). In unstressed syllables, "short" U is almost always reduced to /ə/.
When "short u" comes before r and then another consonant, it is pronounced as in "fur". When "short u" comes before double "rr" followed by another vowel letter, it is usually pronounced as in "hurry", but in words with the adjective suffix -y it is pronounced as in "fur" (an example: "furry"). This is just like how "carry" and "starry" are pronounced differently. Many American speakers merge the vowels in "hurry" and "furry".
Open and closed syllables
In English spelling, there is a concept of "open" and "closed" syllables. A syllable is closed if it ends in a consonant (for example, "run" or "duck"). It is also usually closed when it comes before more than one consonant letter (either a double consonant as in "butter", or before a consonant cluster like "st" in "mustard").
On the other hand, a syllable is open when it ends in a vowel letter followed by another vowel letter (for example "glue" or "fluid"), or when it comes before a single consonant followed by another vowel letter (such as "silent e"); for example "rude" or "stupid").
Certain consonant clusters don't usually close the preceding syllable (at least, not when they occur in non-compound words). These are: pl cl gl pr tr cr br and usually dr gr (example words with long u: duplicate nucleus bugle supreme nutrient lucrative rubric).
Open and closed syllables and U
As I said, U is fairly reliably pronounced short in closed syllables, and long in open syllables. The main exceptions are:
Irregularly long U:

words ending in "uth": ruth and truth (and derived words)

Irregularly short U:

stŭdy, pŭnish, sŭburb, bŭnion, dŭcat
(for many speakers) pumice
(for some speakers) cumin
ugly snugly smugly (compare bugle)
pŭblish, pŭblic, kind of (there are no words with long u before bl)

Extremely irregular pronunciation of u:

busy = "bizzy", bury = "berry"
Comment: My *cumin* starts like my *cute*, so with a /kju/. That other way sounds weird. Also, you should recognize that *tune* and *stupid* have that same /ju/ phoneme in some speakers, and perhaps who those are.
Comment: @tchrist: "cumin" can be pronounced various ways, including "coomin". "cummin" does seem to be less common than I thought though according to the following [Phrontistery poll](http://phrontistery.info/wordpolls.html): only 6.4%. Maybe I'll drop it from the list as unimportant. I did differentiate between different consonant groups for yod-dropping.
Answer: The main form of English is speech, not writing. We speak much more than we write, and occasionally we want to write something down that someone said or we imagine saying.
So the letter u is not pronounced at all. Sounds are written down using the letter u. As other answers explain multiple different sounds are written with the same letter.
Answer: The long u  sounds   "oo" as in toot, and "yu" as in you)
After the Russian, I'll refer to these as the hard long u, and a softened long u.
As sumelic indicated, u takes the the "oo" sound after /r/ /ʃ/ ("sh") /dʒ/ ("j") /tʃ/ ("ch"), or a consonant cluster ending in /l/, /l/ /s/ /z/
These sounds have some peculiar properties relative to the sound [i] "ee" which is the initial component of the [j] 'y'
[r] is produced either in the back of the throat or with a flip of the tongue, and it is difficult to produce a front 'ee' sound with the tongue in those positions, with a subsequent closure to 'oo'
[l] is a similar front liquid that makes tricky rapid shifting of anterior tongue shape.
It is not impossible to make (e.g. the Chinese name Liu]  but not an English thing
all of the sibilants engage a firm tongue somewhere in the front-back axis, and the shift to the soft tongue anterior [i] or [j] is lost in the noise.
the sound [w] also involves a rapid back front shift to [y]
for the voiced and unvoiced labial, dental, or gutteral, it is facile to soften the vowel or not, hence there are word pairs and situations such as
boot   butte  beaut  [byoot]
coot   cute [kyoot]
       duty [dyootee]    however dude [dood]!!!!
FUBAR  futile [fyootail]
who    hue  [hyoo]
mood   mewed [myood]
noodle nude, nuclear   with n or ny
poodle puke [pyook]
toon   tune [tyoon]
we are left with the sound of the initial open syllable for words beginning with [u]
in the original languages, e.g. latin, and others, e.g. Spanish, French, German, the [u] is pronounced UNsoftened, just [oo]
So why in English is it yoosually softened in the initial position in words like yooniversity, yootile, younique,
We pronounce Youtrecht, when the native say OOtrecht.
This initial position has orthographic implications, since it avoids a hard glottal stop, and the semivowel [j] causes the indefinite article to change from "an" to "a"
What was the origin of the 'softening' of the initial "u"?