WSC COMPLETE GUIDE 2026

These flashcards cover vocabulary and key concepts from the WSC 2026 'Are We There Yet?' curriculum, including project management, art history, socioeconomic indicators, and futurology.

Tao te Ching

The foundational book of Taoism, written by Laozi, which includes the quote: 'The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.'

Brad A. Myers

A researcher who published a paper in 1985 on percent-done progress indicators, showing they increased viewer interest even if they were inaccurate.

Hamonogram

A task-scheduling chart developed by Karol Adamiecki in 1896, which served as the precursor to the Gantt chart.

Mitchell Model

The author of a 1979 thesis on monitoring system behavior in complex computations, providing the first instance of a graphical progress bar.

Indeterminate Progress Bar

A bar or circle indicating an ongoing task without showing the percentage of completion, used when the task duration is unknown.

Splash Screen

An initial temporary graphic that appears when launching an app or website to reduce perceived wait time.

Skeleton Screen

A low-fidelity, animated version of a page layout that appears while content is loading to create the illusion of a faster application.

Placebo Buttons

Controls like elevator 'close door' buttons or crosswalk buttons that appear functional but often have no actual effect, giving users an illusion of control.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

An economic indicator representing the total output and healthy of a country's economy, calculated using the formula: $C + I + G + (X - M)$.

Gini Coefficient

A measure of income inequality typically between $0$ and $1$, where $0$ is perfect equality and $1$ means one person owns everything.

Multidimensional Poverty Index

A summary indicator that uses health, education, and standard of living to determine the intensity of poverty, with a household considered poor if its deprivation score exceeds $33\% \,$.

Big Mac Index

An informal economic index used to compare the purchasing power of different countries based on the price of a McDonald's burger.

Second Law of Thermodynamics

A physical law suggesting that closed systems grow more disordered over time as entropy increases.

Surely the World is Growing Better

A 1909 artwork by Will Crawford using stippling and crosshatching to satirize the idea that technological advancement in warfare constitutes 'progress.'

Zeigarnik Effect

The psychological tendency to remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed ones because they create mental tension.

Eisenhower Method

A to-do list prioritization technique that divides tasks into four categories: Urgent and Important, Important but not Urgent, Urgent but not Important, and Not Urgent/Not Important.

Ivy Lee Method

A productivity method where an individual writes six important tasks at the end of the day and ranks them by importance to be completed one-by-one the next day.

Umberto Eco

An Italian philosopher and novelist who distinguished between 'practical lists' (finite and functional) and 'poetic lists' (suggesting infinity and excess).

Caretaker Government

A non-partisan interim government in a parliamentary system that maintains law and order during an election period without making major political changes.

Lame Duck

A political leader whose term is about to end, leading to a decrease in their power and influence as attention shifts to a successor.

Doomsday Clock

A symbolic clock created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 to measure how close humanity is to global catastrophe.

Samuel Hartlib

A 17th-century figure who believed that shared scientific knowledge and teamwork could create a perfect, heaven-like society on Earth.

The Millerites

A religious group led by William Miller that experienced 'The Great Disappointment' after his predictions for Christ's return in 1843 and 1844 failed.

The Y2K Bug

A predicted computer crash at the turn of the millennium caused by representing four-digit years with only the last two digits.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1498)

A famous woodcut by Albrecht Dürer depicting the biblical figures of death, famine, war, and plague unleashed on Earth.

The Last Judgment (1536–1541)

A massive fresco by Michelangelo on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, famous for its numerous nude figures and depiction of divine justice.

The Course of Empire: Destruction

A 1836 landscape painting by Thomas Cole showing a once-glorious city in flames, serving as a cautionary allegory for imperial collapse.

Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor

A 1924 Otto Dix print showing soldiers in gas masks advancing through a cloud of toxic gas, highlighting the horrors of WWI.

Apocalypse '42

A ceramic sculpture by Viktor Schreckengost featuring figures of Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito riding a horse of war.

Quartet for the End of Time

A musical piece composed by Olivier Messiaen while he was a prisoner of war in a German camp during WWII.

Geoengineering

Startups developing technologies to cool the planet by reflecting sunlight, such as spraying aerosols into the stratosphere.

Sfumato

An artistic technique used by Leonardo da Vinci in the Mona Lisa to create a soft blend of tones without deep outlines.

The Scream (1893)

An Edvard Munch painting capturing an 'infinite scream through nature' inspired by a sunset in Kristiania.

Critical Path Method (CPM)

A project management technique that identifies the longest sequence of tasks and dependencies to determine the earliest possible completion date.

The Iron Triangle

A project management concept stating that scope, time, and cost are interdependent: changing one affects the others.

Kanban

A visual system for managing work developed at Toyota, using boards and cards to show the status of processes and identify bottlenecks.

Stakhanovite Movement

A 1930s Soviet propaganda campaign named after Aleksei Stakhanov that rewarded workers for exceeding production quotas.

Agile Manifesto

A 2001 document emphasizing individuals, interactions, and working software over rigid processes and comprehensive documentation.

Chaos Engineering

The practice of intentionally causing failures in a software system to test its resilience and ability to withstand real-world disruptions.

Six Sigma

A business management methodology popularized at General Electric that uses the steps Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control (DMAIC) to eliminate defects.

Hofstadter’s Law

The recursive principle that tasks always take longer than expected, even when taking the law into account.

Brooks’ Law

A principle of software development stating that adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

Doorway Effect

A phenomenon where the brain 'resets' short-term memory when passing through a threshold, causing temporary amnesia regarding one's original intent.

The Backrooms

A viral urban legend and horror concept involving an endless maze of empty, yellow-tinted rooms that people 'no-clip' into from reality.

Vibe Coding

A modern approach using AI chatbots to write code based on conversational prompts rather than manual programming.

Mechanical Turk

An 18th-century chess-playing hoax consisting of a mechanical man that was actually operated by a hidden chess master.

Wizard of Oz testing

A prototyping technique where a system's responses are manually simulated by invisible human 'wizards' while the user believes they are interacting with fully functional tech.

Gantry and High-Speed Rail

Examples of 'megaprojects' that frequently suffer from significant delays and cost overruns due to technical and management issues.

Antespace

A term coined by Helmut Puff to describe liminal spaces like antechambers where mobility and immobility converge.

Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan

Recognized as the oldest hotel in the world, this Japanese business has been in operation for over 1,300 years.