Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni

"People rag on western medicine a lot for its disregard of indirect causalities and holism, for its antisceptic deconstructivism, for its blindness to things like the union of mind and body, and for its proclivity for post-facto treatment...But these criticisms notwithstanding, modern medicine is the accumulation of years and years of human effort to taxonomically observe, understand and explain an enormous set of conditions within a massively complex, underspecified system. To me, this is impressive. Also, they use cool phrases like "the radiolucent lungs" and "ligamentous laxity.""

"The whole youth-idolatry oh-god-not-another-birthday thing has to be the most sure-fire way to be unhappy about the way things are progressing in your life."

"If ordinary people can really figure out how to set the alarm at a hotel, then we are going to make OpenOffice default to vi keybindings in the next Novell Linux Desktop."

"“The world is not ours to keep. We hold it in trust for future generations.”"

"You can do a lot with diplomacy, but with diplomacy backed up by force you can get a lot more done."

"We may have different religions, different languages, different colored skin, but we all belong to one human race."

"Eradication of extreme poverty has been identified as a priority, and specific targets have been set for prescribed measures. Many said the potential benefits of globalization are understood but people have yet to feel them. It is agreed that part of the solution lies in sovereign States giving priority to the needs of their people, especially the poorest. States, however, must work with the private sector and civil society to solve the problems of globalization. A more equitable world economy has been called for, one where those who have more do more for those who have less."

"I think that my darkest moment was the Iraq war, and the fact that we could not stop it.. I worked very hard — I was working the phone, talking to leaders around the world... The U.S. did not have the support in the [[United Nations|[UN] Security Council]]. So they decided to go without the council. But I think the council was right in not sanctioning the war...Could you imagine if the U.N. had endorsed the war in Iraq, what our reputation would be like? Although at that point, President (George W.) Bush said the U.N. was headed toward irrelevance, because we had not supported the war. But now we know better."

"He is very calm—very, very calm. Never raises his voice. Well-informed, contrary to the sense outside that he is ill-informed and isolated. And decisive."

"Unless the Security Council is restored to its pre-eminent position as the sole source of legitimacy on the use of force, we are on a dangerous path to anarchy."

"We may have different religions, different languages, different colored skin, but we all belong to one human race. We all share the same basic values."

"More than ever before in human history, we share a common destiny. We can master it only if we face it together. And that, my friends, is why we have the United Nations."

"You have said that your first priority is the eradication of extreme poverty."

"I hope we do not see another Iraq-type operation for a long time — without UN approval and much broader support from the international community."

"Well, the issue of a standing UN army has been raised by many because, quite frankly, the way we operate today is like telling Ottawa that I know you need a fire station but we will build one when the fire breaks. We have no army. When the crisis breaks then we begin to put an army together. We go around to governments and begin asking for troops. The question with a standing UN army is that it raises issues of budget issues, legal issues, where do you place it, under what jurisdiction? And the big boys, big countries don't want it. The smaller countries are also nervous."

"These values: compassion; solidarity; respect for each other - already exist in all our great religions. We can begin by reaffirming and demonstrating that the problem is not the Koran, nor the Torah nor the Bible. As I have often said, the problem is never the faith. It is the faithful, and how we behave towards each other. It is these great, enduring and universal principles which are also enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We can use these values – and the frameworks and tools we have based on them - to bridge divides and make people feel more secure and confident of the future."

"The Lord had the wonderful advantage of being able to work alone."

"The report [by a UN commission on Darfur] demonstrates beyond all doubt that the last two years have been little short of hell on earth for our fellow human beings in Darfur."

"The intention was really to do something dignified, something that is honest and reflects the work that this Organization does. And it is with that spirit that the producers and the directors approached their work, and I hope you will all agree they have done that."

"We don’t need any more promises. We need to start keeping the promises we already made."

"There are a great number of peoples who need more than just words of sympathy from the international community. They need a real and sustained commitment to help end their cycles of violence, and launch them on a safe passage to prosperity."

"The international community . . . allows nearly 3 billion people—almost half of all humanity—to subsist on $2 or less a day in a world of unprecedented wealth."

"We need to create a world that is equitable, that is stable and a world where we bear in mind the needs of others, and not only what we need immediately. We are all in the same boat."

"Gender equality is critical for the development and peace of every nation."

"When women thrive, all of society benefits and succeeding generations are given a better start in life."

"Today, in Afghanistan, a girl will be born. Her mother will hold her and feed her, comfort her and care for her — just as any mother would anywhere in the world. In these most basic acts of human nature, humanity knows no divisions.But to be born a girl in today's Afghanistan is to begin life centuries away from the prosperity that one small part of humanity has achieved. It is to live under conditions that many of us in this hall would consider inhuman. I speak of a girl in Afghanistan, but I might equally well have mentioned a baby boy or girl in Sierra Leone. No one today is unaware of this divide between the world’s rich and poor. No one today can claim ignorance of the cost that this divide imposes on the poor and dispossessed who are no less deserving of human dignity, fundamental freedoms, security, food and education than any of us. The cost, however, is not borne by them alone. Ultimately, it is borne by all of us — North and South, rich and poor, men and women of all races and religions. Today's real borders are not between nations, but between powerful and powerless, free and fettered, privileged and humiliated. Today, no walls can separate |humanitarian or human rights crises in one part of the world from national security crises in another."

"Scientists tell us that the world of nature is so small and interdependent that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon rainforest can generate a violent storm on the other side of the earth. This principle is known as the "Butterfly Effect." Today, we realize, perhaps more than ever, that the world of human activity also has its own "Butterfly Effect" — for better or for worse."

"We have entered the third millennium through a gate of fire. If today, after the horror of 11 September, we see better, and we see further — we will realize that humanity is indivisible. New threats make no distinction between races, nations or regions. A new insecurity has entered every mind, regardless of wealth or status. A deeper awareness of the bonds that bind us all — in pain as in prosperity — has gripped young and old."

"The 20th century was perhaps the deadliest in human history, devastated by innumerable conflicts, untold suffering, and unimaginable crimes.Time after time, a group or a nation inflicted extreme violence on another, often driven by irrational hatred and suspicion, or unbounded arrogance and thirst for power and resources. In response to these cataclysms, the leaders of the world came together at mid-century to unite the nations as never before. A forum was created — the United Nations — where all nations could join forces to affirm the dignity and worth of every person, and to secure peace and development for all peoples. Here States could unite to strengthen the rule of law, recognize and address the needs of the poor, restrain man’s brutality and greed, conserve the resources and beauty of nature, sustain the equal rights of men and women, and provide for the safety of future generations."

"In the 21st Century I believe the mission of the United Nations will be defined by a new, more profound, awareness of the sanctity and dignity of every human life, regardless of race or religion. This will require us to look beyond the framework of States, and beneath the surface of nations or communities. We must focus, as never before, on improving the conditions of the individual men and women who give the state or nation its richness and character."

"Over the past five years, I have often recalled that the United Nations' Charter begins with the words: "We the peoples." What is not always recognized is that "we the peoples" are made up of individuals whose claims to the most fundamental rights have too often been sacrificed in the supposed interests of the state or the nation."

"A genocide begins with the killing of one man — not for what he has done, but because of who he is. A campaign of 'ethnic cleansing' begins with one neighbour turning on another. Poverty begins when even one child is denied his or her fundamental right to education. What begins with the failure to uphold the dignity of one life, all too often ends with a calamity for entire nations. In this new century, we must start from the understanding that peace belongs not only to states or peoples, but to each and every member of those communities. The sovereignty of States must no longer be used as a shield for gross violations of human rights. Peace must be made real and tangible in the daily existence of every individual in need. Peace must be sought, above all, because it is the condition for every member of the human family to live a life of dignity and security."

"The rights of the individual are of no less importance to immigrants and minorities in Europe and the Americas than to women in Afghanistan or children in Africa. They are as fundamental to the poor as to the rich; they are as necessary to the security of the developed world as to that of the developing world. From this vision of the role of the United Nations in the next century flow three key priorities for the future: eradicating poverty, preventing conflict, and promoting democracy. Only in a world that is rid of poverty can all men and women make the most of their abilities. Only where individual rights are respected can differences be channelled politically and resolved peacefully. Only in a democratic environment, based on respect for diversity and dialogue, can individual self-expression and self-government be secured, and freedom of association be upheld."

"I humbly accept the Centennial Nobel Peace Prize. Forty years ago today, the Prize for 1961 was awarded for the first time to a Secretary-General of the United Nations — posthumously, because Dag Hammarskjöld had already given his life for peace in Central Africa. And on the same day, the Prize for 1960 was awarded for the first time to an African — Albert Luthuli, one of the earliest leaders of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. For me, as a young African beginning his career in the United Nations a few months later, those two men set a standard that I have sought to follow throughout my working life."

"In a world filled with weapons of war and all too often words of war, the Nobel Committee has become a vital agent for peace. Sadly, a prize for peace is a rarity in this world. Most nations have monuments or memorials to war, bronze salutations to heroic battles, archways of triumph. But peace has no parade, no pantheon of victory. What it does have is the Nobel Prize — a statement of hope and courage with unique resonance and authority. Only by understanding and addressing the needs of individuals for peace, for dignity, and for security can we at the United Nations hope to live up to the honour conferred today, and fulfil the vision of our founders. This is the broad mission of peace that United Nations staff members carry out every day in every part of the world."

"The idea that there is one people in possession of the truth, one answer to the world’s ills, or one solution to humanity’s needs, has done untold harm throughout history — especially in the last century. Today, however, even amidst continuing ethnic conflict around the world, there is a growing understanding that human diversity is both the reality that makes dialogue necessary, and the very basis for that dialogue. We understand, as never before, that each of us is fully worthy of the respect and dignity essential to our common humanity. We recognize that we are the products of many cultures, traditions and memories; that mutual respect allows us to study and learn from other cultures; and that we gain strength by combining the foreign with the familiar."

"In every great faith and tradition one can find the values of tolerance and mutual understanding. The Qur’a, for example, tells us that "We created you from a single pair of male and female and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know each other." Confucius urged his followers: "when the good way prevails in the state, speak boldly and act boldly. When the state has lost the way, act boldly and speak softly." In the Jewish tradition, the injunction to "love thy neighbour as thyself," is considered to be the very essence of the Torah. This thought is reflected in the Christian Gospel, which also teaches us to love our enemies and pray for those who wish to persecute us. Hindus are taught that "truth is one, the sages give it various names." And in the Buddhist tradition, individuals are urged to act with compassion in every facet of life. Each of us has the right to take pride in our particular faith or heritage. But the notion that what is ours is necessarily in conflict with what is theirs is both false and dangerous. It has resulted in endless enmity and conflict, leading men to commit the greatest of crimes in the name of a higher power. It need not be so. People of different religions and cultures live side by side in almost every part of the world, and most of us have overlapping identities which unite us with very different groups. We can love what we are, without hating what — and who — we are not. We can thrive in our own tradition, even as we learn from others, and come to respect their teachings."

"The lesson of the past century has been that where the dignity of the individual has been trampled or threatened — where citizens have not enjoyed the basic right to choose their government, or the right to change it regularly — conflict has too often followed, with innocent civilians paying the price, in lives cut short and communities destroyed. The obstacles to democracy have little to do with culture or religion, and much more to do with the desire of those in power to maintain their position at any cost. This is neither a new phenomenon nor one confined to any particular part of the world. People of all cultures value their freedom of choice, and feel the need to have a say in decisions affecting their lives."

"The United Nations, whose membership comprises almost all the States in the world, is founded on the principle of the equal worth of every human being. It is the nearest thing we have to a representative institution that can address the interests of all states, and all peoples. Through this universal, indispensable instrument of human progress, States can serve the interests of their citizens by recognizing common interests and pursuing them in unity."

"This era of global challenges leaves no choice but cooperation at the global level. When States undermine the rule of law and violate the rights of their individual citizens, they become a menace not only to their own people, but also to their neighbours, and indeed the world. What we need today is better governance — legitimate, democratic governance that allows each individual to flourish, and each State to thrive."

"Beneath the surface of states and nations, ideas and language, lies the fate of individual human beings in need. Answering their needs will be the mission of the United Nations in the century to come."

"In today’s world, the security of every one of us is linked to that of everyone else."

"No nation can make itself secure by seeking supremacy over all others. We all share responsibility for each other’s security, and only by working to make each other secure can we hope to achieve lasting security for ourselves. — And, I would add that this responsibility is not simply a matter of States being ready to come to each other’s aid when attacked — important though that is. It also includes our shared responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity — a responsibility solemnly accepted by all nations at last year’s UN world summit. That means that respect for national sovereignty can no longer be used as a shield by Governments intent on massacring their own people, or as an excuse for the rest of us to do nothing when heinous crimes are committed."

"When I look at the murder, rape and starvation to which the people of Darfur are being subjected, I fear that we have not got far beyond “lip service”. The lesson here is that high-sounding doctrines like the “responsibility to protect” will remain pure rhetoric unless and until those with the power to intervene effectively — by exerting political, economic or, in the last resort, military muscle — are prepared to take the lead."

"I believe we have a responsibility not only to our contemporaries but also to future generations — a responsibility to preserve resources that belong to them as well as to us, and without which none of us can survive. That means we must do much more, and urgently, to prevent or slow down climate change. Everyday that we do nothing, or too little, imposes higher costs on our children and our children’s children. Of course, it reminds me of an African proverb — the earth is not ours but something we hold in trust for future generations. I hope my generation will be worthy of that trust."

"We are not only all responsible for each other’s security. We are also, in some measure, responsible for each other’s welfare. Global solidarity is both necessary and possible. — It is necessary because without a measure of solidarity no society can be truly stable, and no one’s prosperity truly secure. That applies to national societies — as all the great industrial democracies learned in the twentieth century — but, it also applies to the increasingly integrated global market economy that we live in today. It is not realistic to think that some people can go on deriving great benefits from globalization while billions of their fellow human beings are left in abject poverty, or even thrown into it. We have to give our fellow citizens, not only within each nation but in the global community, at least a chance to share in our prosperity."

"Both security and development ultimately depend on respect for human rights and the rule of law. — Although increasingly interdependent, our world continues to be divided — not only by economic differences, but also by religion and culture. That is not in itself a problem. Throughout history, human life has been enriched by diversity, and different communities have learnt from each other. But, if our different communities are to live together in peace we must stress also what unites us: our common humanity, and our shared belief that human dignity and rights should be protected by law."

"Human rights and the rule of law are vital to global security and prosperity. As Truman said, “We must, once and for all, prove by our acts conclusively that Right Has Might”. That’s why this country has historically been in the vanguard of the global human rights movement. But that lead can only be maintained if America remains true to its principles, including in the struggle against terrorism. When it appears to abandon its own ideals and objectives, its friends abroad are naturally troubled and confused. — And States need to play by the rules towards each other, as well as towards their own citizens. That can sometimes be inconvenient, but ultimately what matters is not inconvenience. It is doing the right thing. No State can make its own actions legitimate in the eyes of others. When power, especially military force, is used, the world will consider it legitimate only when convinced that it is being used for the right purpose — for broadly shared aims –- in accordance with broadly accepted norms. — No community anywhere suffers from too much rule of law; many do suffer from too little — and the international community is among them. This we must change."

"The US has given the world an example of a democracy in which everyone, including the most powerful, is subject to legal restraint. Its current moment of world supremacy gives it a priceless opportunity to entrench the same principles at the global level."

"Governments must be accountable for their actions in the international arena, as well as in the domestic one. — Today, the actions of one State can often have a decisive effect on the lives of people in other States. So does it not owe some account to those other States and their citizens, as well as to its own? I believe it does. — As things stand, accountability between States is highly skewed. Poor and weak countries are easily held to account, because they need foreign assistance. But large and powerful States, whose actions have the greatest impact on others, can be constrained only by their own people, working through their domestic institutions. — That gives the people and institutions of such powerful States a special responsibility to take account of global views and interests, as well as national ones. And today they need to take into account also the views of what, in UN jargon, we call “non-State actors”. I mean commercial corporations, charities and pressure groups, labor unions, philanthropic foundations, universities and think tanks — all the myriad forms in which people come together voluntarily to think about, or try to change, the world. — None of these should be allowed to substitute itself for the State, or for the democratic process by which citizens choose their Governments and decide policy. But, they all have the capacity to influence political processes, on the international as well as the national level. States that try to ignore this are hiding their heads in the sand."

"It is only through multilateral institutions that States can hold each other to account. And that makes it very important to organize those institutions in a fair and democratic way, giving the poor and the weak some influence over the actions of the rich and the strong."

"I have continued to press for Security Council reform. But, reform involves two separate issues. One is that new members should be added, on a permanent or long-term basis, to give greater representation to parts of the world which have limited voice today. The other, perhaps even more important, is that all Council members, and especially the major powers who are permanent members, must accept the special responsibility that comes with their privilege. The Security Council is not just another stage on which to act out national interests. It is the management committee, if you will, of our fledgling collective security system."

"My friends, our challenge today is not to save Western civilization — or Eastern, for that matter. All civilization is at stake, and we can save it only if all peoples join together in the task. You Americans did so much, in the last century, to build an effective multilateral system, with the United Nations at its heart. Do you need it less today, and does it need you less, than 60 years ago? Surely not. More than ever today, Americans, like the rest of humanity, need a functioning global system through which the world’s peoples can face global challenges together. And in order to function more effectively, the system still cries out for far-sighted American leadership, in the Truman tradition. I hope and pray that the American leaders of today, and tomorrow, will provide it."

"Thank you, Senator [Hagel] for that wonderful introduction. It is a great honour to be introduced by such a distinguished legislator."

"And thanks to you, Mr Devine, and all your staff, and to the wonderful UNA chapter of Kansas City, for all you have done to make this occasion possible."

"What a pleasure, and a privilege, to be here in Missouri. It is almost a homecoming for me. Nearly half a century ago I was a student about 400 miles north of here, in Minnesota."

"I arrived there straight from Africa - and I can tell you, Minnesota soon taught me the value of a thick overcoat, a warm scarf and even ear-muffs!"

"“If one is going to err, one should err on the side of liberty and freedom.”"

"When you leave one home for another, there are always lessons to be learnt'. And I had more to learn when I moved on from Minnesota to the United Nations - the indispensable common house of the entire human family, which has been my main home for the last 44 years."

"Today I want to talk particularly about five lessons I have learnt in the last 10 years, during which I have had the difficult but exhilarating role of Secretary General."

"I think it is especially fitting that I do that here in the house that honours the legacy of Harry S Truman. If FDR [Franklin D Roosevelt] was the architect of the United Nations, President Truman was the master-builder, and the faithful champion of the Organisation in its first years, when it had to face quite different problems from the ones FDR had expected."

"Truman's name will for ever be associated with the memory of far-sighted American leadership in a great global endeavour. And you will see that every one of my five lessons brings me to the conclusion that such leadership is no less sorely needed now than it was 60 years ago."

"We not only have confidence in him, we support him fully. He is in a very difficult job under very difficult circumstances, but we continue to have hope that he is doing his best. We only want his senior management to exhibit the transparency and accountability that he has proscribed for the organization."

"We in Europe hold Kofi Annan in high esteem and recognise his unstinting efforts in the cause of peace and democracy."

"We are not suggesting or pushing for the resignation of the secretary-general. We have worked well with him in the past and look forward to working with him for some time in the future."

"It is with sadness that I learnt of the passing of Mr Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary-general. May his soul rest in peace."

"Both Bush as well as Tony Blair are undermining an idea [the United Nations]. Is this because the secretary general of the United Nations [Ghanaian Kofi Annan] is now a black man? They never did that when secretary generals were white."

"Have the climate models been successful in predicting anything? They, of course, predict substantial global warming. This is not surprising given the expressed belief of some of the model builders in the global warming hypothesis and the many parameters in the model that need to be introduced. However, the models also predict unambiguously that the atmosphere is warming faster than the surface of the earth; but all the available observational data unambiguously shows the opposite! Truth in science is always determined from observational facts. One finds the truth by making a hypothesis and comparing observations with the hypothesis. It is absolutely essential that one should be neutral and not fall in love with the hypothesis. If the facts are contrary to any predictions, then the hypothesis is wrong no matter how appealing. "Truth by Assertion" is not science."

"The pioneer spirit is still vigorous within this nation. Science offers a largely unexplored hinterland for the pioneer who has the tools for his task. The rewards of such exploration both for the Nation and the individual are great. Scientific progress is one essential key to our security as a nation, to our better health, to more jobs, to higher standard of living, and to our cultural progress."

"As long as scientists are free to pursue the truth wherever it may lead, there will be a flow of new scientific knowledge to those who can apply it to practical problems."

"This has not been a scientist's war; it has been a war in which all have had a part. The scientists, burying their old professional competition in the demand of a common cause, have shared greatly and learned much. It has been exhilarating to work in effective partnership. Now, for many, this appears to be approaching an end. What are the scientists to do next?"

"There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers — conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial."

"Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month's efforts could be produced on call. Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential."

"The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships."

"Two centuries ago Leibnitz invented a calculating machine which embodied most of the essential features of recent keyboard devices, but it could not then come into use. The economics of the situation were against it: the labor involved in constructing it, before the days of mass production, exceeded the labor to be saved by its use, since all it could accomplish could be duplicated by sufficient use of pencil and paper. Moreover, it would have been subject to frequent breakdown, so that it could not have been depended upon; for at that time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous."

"Babbage, even with remarkably generous support for his time, could not produce his great arithmetical machine. His idea was sound enough, but construction and maintenance costs were then too heavy. Had a Pharaoh been given detailed and explicit designs of an automobile, and had he understood them completely, it would have taxed the resources of his kingdom to have fashioned the thousands of parts for a single car, and that car would have broken down on the first trip to Giza."

"Machines with interchangeable parts can now be constructed with great economy of effort. In spite of much complexity, they perform reliably. Witness the humble typewriter, or the movie camera, or the automobile."

"A spider web of metal, sealed in a thin glass container, a wire heated to brilliant glow, in short, the thermionic tube of radio sets, is made by the hundred million, tossed about in packages, plugged into sockets — and it works! Its gossamer parts, the precise location and alignment involved in its construction, would have occupied a master craftsman of the guild for months; now it is built for thirty cents. The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it."

"A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted."

"The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3 millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice."

"The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also to be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled by a few."

"To make the record, we now push a pencil or tap a typewriter. Then comes the process of digestion and correction, followed by an intricate process of typesetting, printing, and distribution. To consider the first stage of the procedure, will the author of the future cease writing by hand or typewriter and talk directly to the record?"

"Much needs to occur, however, between the collection of data and observations, the extraction of parallel material from the existing record, and the final insertion of new material into the general body of the common record. For mature thought there is no mechanical substitute. But creative thought and essentially repetitive thought are very different things. For the latter there are, and may be, powerful mechanical aids."

"Adding a column of figures is a repetitive thought process, and it was long ago properly relegated to the machine. True, the machine is sometimes controlled by the keyboard, and thought of a sort enters in reading the figures and poking the corresponding keys, but even this is avoidable."

"The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more. Moreover, they will be far more versatile than present commercial machines, so that they may readily be adapted for a wide variety of operations. They will be controlled by a control card or film, they will select their own data and manipulate it in accordance with the instructions thus inserted, they will perform complex arithmetical computations at exceedingly high speeds, and they will record results in such form as to be readily available for distribution or for later further manipulation."

"There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things."

"Every time one combines and records facts in accordance with established logical processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the selection of the data and the process to be employed, and the manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter to be relegated to the machines."

"The needs of business, and the extensive market obviously waiting, assured the advent of mass-produced arithmetical machines just as soon as production methods were sufficiently advanced. With machines for advanced analysis no such situation existed; for there was and is no extensive market; the users of advanced methods of manipulating data are a very small part of the population."

"If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability. The abacus, with its beads strung on parallel wires, led the Arabs to positional numeration and the concept of zero many centuries before the rest of the world; and it was a useful tool — so useful that it still exists."

"It is a far cry from the abacus to the modern keyboard accounting machine. It will be an equal step to the arithmetical machine of the future. But even this new machine will not take the scientist where he needs to go. Relief must be secured from laborious detailed manipulation of higher mathematics as well, if the users of it are to free their brains for something more than repetitive detailed transformations in accordance with established rules."

"A mathematician is not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot. He is not even a man who can readily perform the transformation of equations by the use of calculus. He is primarily an individual who is skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane, and especially he is a man of intuitive judgment in the choice of the manipulative processes he employs."

"Whenever logical processes of thought are employed — that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove — there is an opportunity for the machine. Formal logic used to be a keen instrument in the hands of the teacher in his trying of students' souls. It is readily possible to construct a machine which will manipulate premises in accordance with formal logic, simply by the clever use of relay circuits. Put a set of premises into such a device and turn the crank, and it will readily pass out conclusion after conclusion, all in accordance with logical law, and with no more slips than would be expected of a keyboard adding machine."

"There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene."

"There is another form of selection best illustrated by the automatic telephone exchange. You dial a number and the machine selects and connects just one of a million possible stations. It does not run over them all. It pays attention only to a class given by a first digit, and so on; and thus proceeds rapidly and almost unerringly to the selected station."

"To be able to key one sheet of a million before an operator in a second or two, with the possibility of then adding notes thereto, is suggestive in many ways. It might even be of use in libraries, but that is another story. At any rate, there are now some interesting combinations possible. One might, for example, speak to a microphone, in the manner described in connection with the speech-controlled typewriter, and thus make his selections. It would certainly beat the usual file clerk."

"Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path. The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature."

"Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, memex will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory. It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk."

"Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely."

"Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct entry."

"There is, of course, provision for consultation of the record by the usual scheme of indexing. If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions."

"A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the index. Any given book of his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item in position while he calls up another."

"All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing."

"Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by its patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior."

"The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only at the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected."

"Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race. It might be striking to outline the instrumentalities of the future more spectacularly, rather than to stick closely to the methods and elements now known and undergoing rapid development, as has been done here. Technical difficulties of all sorts have been ignored, certainly, but also ignored are means as yet unknown which may come any day to accelerate technical progress as violently as did the advent of the thermionic tube."

"All our steps in creating or absorbing material of the record proceed through one of the senses — the tactile when we touch keys, the oral when we speak or listen, the visual when we read. Is it not possible that some day the path may be established more directly?"

"The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand?"

"In the outside world, all forms of intelligence, whether of sound or sight, have been reduced to the form of varying currents in an electric circuit in order that they may be transmitted. Inside the human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs. Must we always transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one electrical phenomenon to another? It is a suggestive thought, but it hardly warrants prediction without losing touch with reality and immediateness."

"Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his record more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursion may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important."

"The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and are teaching him to live healthily therein. They have enabled him to throw masses of people against another with cruel weapons. They may yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good. Yet, in the application of science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to lose hope as to the outcome."

"Science can be effective in the national welfare only as a member of a team, whether the conditions be peace or war. But without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world."

"The responsibility for the creation of new scientific knowledge — and for most of its application — rests on that small body of men and women who understand the fundamental laws of nature and are skilled in the techniques of scientific research. We shall have rapid or slow advance on any scientific frontier depending on the number of highly qualified and trained scientists exploring it."

"On the wisdom with which we bring science to bear in the war against disease, in the creation of new industries, and in the strengthening of our Armed Forces depends in large measure our future as a nation."

"Advances in science when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for ages past. Advances in science will also bring higher standards of living, will lead to the prevention or cure of diseases, will promote conservation of our limited national resources, and will assure means of defense against aggression. But to achieve these objectives — to secure a high level of employment, to maintain a position of world leadership — the flow of new scientific knowledge must be both continuous and substantial."

"Science, by itself, provides no panacea for individual, social, and economic ills. It can be effective in the national welfare only as a member of a team, whether the conditions be peace or war. But without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world."

"The publicly and privately supported colleges, universities, and research institutes are the centers of basic research. They are the wellsprings of knowledge and understanding. As long as they are vigorous and healthy and their scientists are free to pursue the truth wherever it may lead, there will be a flow of new scientific knowledge to those who can apply it to practical problems in Government, in industry, or elsewhere."

"Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown. Freedom of inquiry must be preserved under any plan for Government support of science..."

"We puzzle as to whether the universe is bounded or extends forever; whether, indeed, it may only be one universe among many. We speculate as to whether our universe began in a vast explosion, whether it pulsates between utter compression and wide diffusion, whether it is self-renewing and thus unchanged forever. And we are humble. But science teaches more than this. It continually reminds us that we are still ignorant and there is much to learn. Time and space are interconnected in strange ways; there is no absolute simultaneity. Within the atom occur phenomena concerning which visualization is futile, to which common sense, the guidance from our everyday experience, has no application, which yield to studies by equations that have no meaning except that they work. Mass and energy transform one into another, Gravitation, the solid rock on which Newton built, may be merely a property of the geometry of the cosmos. Life, as its details unfold before us, becomes ever more intricate, emphasizing more and more our wonder that its marvelous functioning could have been produced by chance and time. The human mind, merely in its chemical and physical aspects, takes on new inspiring attributes. And what is the conclusion? He who follows science blindly, and who follows it alone, comes to a barrier beyond which he cannot see. He who would tell us with the authority of scholarship a complete story of why we exist, of our mission here, has a duty to speak convincingly in a world where men increasingly think for themselves. Exhortation needs to be revised, not to weaken its power, but to increase it, for men who are no longer in the third century. As this occurs, and on the essential and central core of faith, science will of necessity be silent. But its silence will be the silence of humility, not the silence of disdain. A belief may be larger than a fact. A faith that is overdefined is the very faith most likely to prove inadequate to the great moments of life."

"It is Earlier Than We Think."

"Science has a simple faith, which transcends utility. Nearly all men of science, all men of learning for that matter, and men of simple ways too, have it in some form and in some degree. It is the faith that it is the privilege of man to learn to understand, and that this is his mission. If we abandon that mission under stress we shall abandon it forever, for stress will not cease. Knowledge for the sake of understanding, not merely to prevail, that is the essence of our being. None can define its limits, or set its ultimate boundaries."

"That the threat is now intense is not a reason to abandon our quest for knowledge. It is a reason to hold it more tightly, in spite of the need for action to preserve our freedom, in spite of the distractions of living in turmoil, that it may not be lost or brushed aside by the demands of the hour. We would not neglect our duty to our country and our fellows to strive mightily to preserve our ways and our lives. There is an added duty, not inconsistent, not less. It is the duty to so live that there may be a reason for living, beyond the mere mechanisms of life. It is the duty to carry on, under stress, the search for understanding."

"Bush is responsible for the whole architecture of government support for science. Today, everyone thinks these terrific innovations came from the minds of bright kids, but they don't realize that these kids needed an environment to be in. It came from Bush. He said, "Give these people money, let them play, and they'll come up with something.""

"Vannevar Bush is a great name for playing six degrees of separation. Turn back the clock on any aspect of information technology — from the birth of Silicon Valley and the marriage of science and the military to the advent of the World Wide Web — and you find his footprints. As historian Michael Sherry says, "To understand the world of Bill Gates and Bill Clinton, start with understanding Vannevar Bush.""

"I am concerned that many young people in the Hemisphere seem to envision the United States as a nation intoxicated by power, addicted to warfare, controlled by a military-industrial complex, and determined to preserve the status quo, that we are against rapid economic and social growth."

"Industry is not a collection of machines and tools and buildings. It is a social entity that has the responsibility of realizing the happiness of those who work in it."

"Not only are Puerto Ricans citizens by birth, but one would be hard-pressed to find a Puerto Rican without a sister in New York or a son in Chicago, a cousin in Orlando or a daughter in Honolulu or Oklahoma City."

"The scholars and critics all called it kitsch, everyone thought I was crazy to buy them."

"Revolutionary in my ideas, liberal in my objectives and conservative in my methods."

"The most important things in my life have been being governor of Puerto Rico and eliminating the old tradition that was established by [former Gov. Luis] Muñoz himself of being a boss. He was the boss of the government and there was no opposition in Puerto Rico. That was the thing I broke to make Puerto Rico a two-party system, a truly democratic society."

"My theory was that a city without a newspaper is a city without a soul."

"We speak Spanish but we think American. We don't want to be a colony, we don't want to be inferior. We want to be equal."

"I hope I will live to see a final meeting of the minds between Puerto Rico and statehood, but [even] if I don't live that long, I am certain it will happen."

"La razón no grita, la razón convence."

"We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code."

"Deep Democracy is our sense that the world is here to help us to become our entire selves, and that we are here to help the world to become whole."

"Clearly, one can obfuscate one's ideas with a compiler language but it's harder. To some extent one is talking about what one wants rather than how one wants to do it. The trouble with machine code, of course, is that when you look at a random section of machine code you don't know what properties of the instructions the programmer really wanted to exploit."

"Regardless of whether one is dealing with assembly language or compiler language, the number of debugged lines of source code per day is about the same!"

"Systems with unknown behavioral properties require the implementation of iterations which are intrinsic to the design process but which are normally hidden from view. Certainly when a solution to a well-understood problem is synthesized, weak designs are mentally rejected by a competent designer in a matter of moments. On larger or more complicated efforts, alternative designs must be explicitly and iteratively implemented. The designers perhaps out of vanity, often are at pains to hide the many versions which were abandoned and if absolute failure occurs, of course one hears nothing. Thus the topic of design iteration is rarely discussed. Perhaps we should not be surprised to see this phenomenon with software, for it is a rare author indeed who publicizes the amount of editing or the number of drafts he took to produce a manuscript."

"The use of the high level language made each programmer a factor of 5 to 10 more productive in a coding sense and more concerned with the semantics than the syntax of modules."

"Because one has to be an optimist to begin an ambitious project, it is not surprising that underestimation of completion time is the norm."

"The computer field is intoxicated with change. We have seen galloping growth over a period of four decades and it still does not seem to be slowing down. The field is not mature yet and already it accounts for a significant percentage of the Gross National Product."

"To our dismay, users who had been enduring several hour waits between jobs run under batch processing were suddenly restless when response times were more than a second."

"Design bugs are often subtle and occur by evolution with early assumptions being forgotten as new features or uses are added to systems."

"One is faced with a dilemma: If one places total trust in all other users, one is vulnerable to the antisocial behavior of any malicious user—consider the case of viruses. But if one tries to be totally reclusive and isolated, one is not only bored, but one's information universe will cease to grow and be enhanced by interaction with others. The result is that most of us operate in a complicated trade-off zone with various arrangements of trust and security mechanisms."

"It is important to emphasize the value of simplicity and elegance, for complexity has a way of compounding difficulties and as we have seen, creating mistakes. My definition of elegance is the achievement of a given functionality with a minimum of mechanism and a maximum of clarity."

"The value of metaphors should not be underestimated. Metaphors have the virtue of an expected behavior that is understood by all. Unnecessary communication and misunderstandings are reduced. Learning and education are quicker. In effect metaphors are a way of internalizing and abstracting concepts allowing one's thinking to be on a higher plane and low-level mistakes to be avoided."

"Quantum theory was split up into dialects. Different people describe the same experiences in remarkably different languages. This is confusing even to physicists."

"You must develop one all-important ability — being able to enlist the help of other people. You have to reach a state where others want to help you. This includes giving credit...which will come back to you a hundredfold. Your reputation stems from what people say when you’re not present."

"There is no concept in the whole field of physics which is more difficult to understand than is the concept of entropy, nor is there one which is more fundamental."

"Taxonomy is a Greek word which means an arrangement based on any kind of law or principle."

"The word ontology comes from the Greek ontos for being and logos for word. It is a relatively new term in the long history of philosophy, introduced by the 19th century German philosophers to distinguish the study of being as such from the study of various kinds of beings in the natural sciences. The traditional term for the types of beings is Aristotle's word category, which he used for classifying anything that can be said or predicated about anything."

"Soon, the enterprise of the information age will find itself immobilized if it does not have the ability to tap the information resources within and without its boundaries."

"A conceptual graph is a finite connected bipartite graph which consists of concepts and conceptual relations. Every conceptual relation has one or more arcs, each of which is linked to a concept. We define a multilevel conceptual graph to be a conceptual graph in which some of the concepts and conceptual relations arc sensitive."

"We define a semantic network as "the collection of all the relationships that concepts have to other concepts, to percepts, to procedures, and to motor mechanisms" of the knowledge"."

"To distinguish the meaningful graphs that represent real or possible situations in the external world, certain graphs are declared to be canonical."

"An analysis of the concept of mind is an important philosophical issue, but the analysis cannot be reduced to programming of physiological terms... [It remarks the importance of the question] the way people think and the way computers can simulate thinking."

"Conceptual graphs are system of logic based on the existential graphs of Charles Sanders Peirce and the semantic networks of artificial intelligence. The purpose of the system is to express meaning in a form that is logically precise, humanly readable, and computationally tractable. With their direct mapping to language, conceptual graphs can serve as an intermediate language for translating computer-oriented formalisms to and from natural languages. With their graphic representation, they can serve as a readable, but design and specification language."

"[The goal of the LOT (lattice of theories) is to create a framework] which can support an open-ended number of theories (potentially infinite) organized in a lattice together with systematic metalevel techniques for moving from one to another, for testing their adequacy for any given problem, and for mixing, matching, combining, and transforming them to whatever form is appropriate for whatever problem anyone is trying to solve."

"Conceptual graphs (CGs) (Sowa 1976; 1984) and fuzzy logic (Zadeh 1965; 1975a) are two logical formalisms that emphasize the target of natural language, each of which is focused on one of the two mentioned desired features of a logic for handling natural language. Conceptual graphs, based on semantic networks and Peirce's existential graphs, combine the visual advantage of graphical languages and the expressive power of logic."

"Sowa (1984) argued that 'Peirce logic', cited by its founder as 'the logic of the future', significantly enhances traditional predicate logic. One aspect of this improvement is, like conceptual graphs, the visual nature of Peirce logic."

"Sowa (1992) observed that various kinds of semantics networks had been developed for multiple purposes, ranging from modeling human cognitive mechanisms to optimizing computational efficiency. He commented that computational motivations had occasionally produced the same network as psychological purposes."

"In 1992, the Zachman framework was extended by Zachman and Sowa (1992). In addition to answering the final three questions, they introduce the conceptual graph to represent the ISA and replace the “model of the information system” with the more generic system model reference for row 3 or the designer perspective."

"Among the formal graphical methods are Frege's (1879) Begriffsschrift, Peirce's (1909) existential graphs, and Sowa's (1984) conceptual graphs. These three are based in first-order predicate logic."

"The assertion that a problem unstated is a problem unsolved seem to have escaped many builders... All too often, design and implementation begins before the real needs and system functions are fully known. The results are skyrocketing costs, missed scheduled, waste and duplication, disgruntled users and endless series of patches and repairs euphemistically called "systems maintenance""

"This report summarizes the activities of the M.I.T. Computer-Aided Design (CAD) Project from 1 December 1959 through 3 May 1967 in the development of a generalized 'system of software systems' for generating specialized problem-solving systems using high-level language techniques and advanced computer graphics. Known as the AED Approach (for Automated Engineering Design) the Project results are applicable not only to mechanical design, as an extension of earlier development of the APT System for numerical control, but to arbitrary scientific, engineering, management, and production systems as well."

"There is a rigorous science, just waiting to be recognized and developed, which encompasses the whole of 'the software problem,' as defined, including the hardware, software, languages, devices, logic, data, knowledge, users, users, and effectiveness, etc. for end-users, providers, enablers, commissioners, and sponsors, alike."

"The objective of the Computer-Aided Design Project is to evolve a machine systems which will permit the human designer and the computer to work together on creative design problems."

"From the computer application point of view the primary problem [of Computer-Aided Design] is not how to solve problems, but how to state them."

"It is very difficult to define what is meant by computer-aided design since the complete definition is, in fact, the sum and substance of the total project effort which has only begun. It is much easier to describe, what is not computer-aided design as we mean it."

"Computer-aided design is not automatic design, although it must include many automatic design features. By automatic design we mean design procedures which are capable of being completely specified in a form which a computer can execute without human intervention."

"Computer-aided design also is not automatic programming, although automatic programming techniques must necessarily play an important role in computer-aided design."

"Automatic design has the computer do too much and the human do too little, whereas automatic programming has the human do too much and the computer do too little. Both techniques are important, but are not representative for what we wish to mean by computer-aided design."

"(SA) combines blueprint-like graphic language with the nouns and verbs of any other language to provide a hierarchic, top-down, gradual exposition of detail in the form of an SA model. The things and happenings of a subject are expressed in a data decomposition and an activity decomposition, both of which employ the same graphic building block, the SA box, to represent a part of a whole. SA arrows, representing input, output, control, and mechanism, express the relation of each part to the whole."

"Neither Watt's steam engine nor Whitney's standardized parts really started the Industrial Revolution, although each has been awarded that claim, in the past. The real start was the awakening of scientific and technological thoughts during the Renaissance, with the idea that the lawful behavior of nature can be understood, analyzed, and manipulated to accomplish useful ends. That idea itself, alone, was not enough, however, for not until the creation and evolution of blueprints was it possible to express exactly how power and parts were to be combined for each specific task at hand."

"Mechanical drawings and blueprints are not mere pictures, but a complete and rich language. In blueprint language, scientific, mathematical, and geometric formulations, notations, mensurations, and naming do not merely describe an object or process, they actually model it. Because of broad differences in subject, purpose, roles, and the needs of the people who use them, many forms of blueprint have evolved, but all rigorously present well structured information in understandable form."

"There are certain basic, known principles about how people's minds go about the business of understanding, and communicating understanding by means of language, which have been known and used for many centuries. No matter how these principles are addressed, they always end up with hierarchic decomposition as being the heart of good storytelling. Perhaps the most relevant formulation is the familiar: "Tell 'em whatcha gonna tell'em. Tell 'em. Tell 'em whatcha told 'em." This is a pattern of communication almost as universal and well-entrenched as Newton's laws of motion."

"The natural law of good communications takes the following, quite different, form in SA:"

"We never have any understanding of any subject matter except in terms of our own mental constructs of "things" and "happenings" of that subject matter."

"I was sort of a hellraiser with a bunch of friends, most of whom were squeaking by with C's and D's while I was getting an A-average and should have been doing better. I did a lot of things on my own. I liked to make things with my hands. There was a lot of woodworking, model building, and model railroading. I collected stamps, and did various things in chemistry. I used to make things that exploded, and all that sort of thing. So I evidently got quite a good background in science. I always had a knack for that sort of thing. The hospital had a subscription to Scientific American and Science. So things came every week and I consumed them..."

"I realized after I'd been at MIT for a while that I had never even known the semantics of the word "engineering". You see, all my relatives and contacts were medical doctors or biology and chemistry professors. In fact, I'm almost the "black sheep" in the family for not being an MD or Ph.D. because everybody was doing that sort of thing. There was no contact at all with engineering. I didn't even know what the word meant..."

"With all this science and physics and so forth that I absorbed. I did have one early experience with engineering, however. When we got the Book of Knowledge, I found on one page a diagram for a short-wave radio. I thought it would be neat to try to make a shortwave radio, so I arranged with all the radio repairmen in the town that whenever they were going to junk a radio, they should set it aside and I would pick it up. I got all these old radios -- really classics now -- that I stripped. I had huge transformers and loudspeakers and huge condensers -- the whole works. Boxes full of this stuff. I didn't understand it. I didn't know a thing about it. I just liked to take things apart and learn how to solder. I discovered out of my collection of parts -- with the tuning condensers (with movable plates), the knobs, and all that stuff, that I had what seemed to be needed in this one page diagram of a shortwave receiver."

"I just looked in the phone book, and called up the Executive Officer of the Servomechanisms Laboratory (Al Sise) and said, "I'm a math graduate student and would like a summer job. If you could find an electrical engineering student, I'm sure by the end of the summer we could make you an electronic calculator that would beat the pants off that little mechanical thing that Wiener has put together. Are you interested?""

"A lot of people are not familiar with the fact that when Lincoln Lab grew out of the Project Whirlwind (which were just names to me at that point) for the purpose of looking into radar air defense -- processing radar signals with the computer and then using radio controls to defend with fighters and so forth -- Whirlwind had been originally designed as an aircraft simulator for individual airplanes."

"The first paper I ever wrote was "Gestalt Programming" and that was in 1955. The whole idea there was to replace the laborious writing out of detailed programs and all those steps by having analyzed a problem area well enough so that you had what I later came to call a "systematized solution." Then you could compose different problems of this class by just plugging together pieces of program, and they would in turn be controlled by a pushbutton language. The user would make a number of discreet selections. It's just like nowadays it's done with menus, and when you had indicated all the pieces that you wanted to put together--by these mnemonic names and words for things associated with buttons, switches, with one meaning "period," essentially, for that sentence, you see--all these things would be brought together and that would be the man/machine, manual-intervention mode of problem-solving. I took over the term from studying Gestalt psychology, meaning that everything was brought together at once, as a unit, instead of this laborious step-by-step build-up."

"The artificial intelligence people, the artificial intelligencia,... kept choosing little games to play, and little things that they could master, right? But my whole philosophy has always been give me a really tough problem that's just beyond the state-of-the-art, and give me a whole bunch of users beating on me to get it done. In other words, the real core of what being an engineer is."

"The real core of what being an engineer is. You have a scientific basis, but when you don't have the science, you put in some bugger factors, some safety factors, and so forth and you get smart enough, and you get the job done anyhow, right? Economically, and as close to on time as you can make it. And if the customer is asking for something that's outlandish, give him what you can, and educate him back to what it is."

"I introduced what I called "outside-in problem solving," which nowadays is called "top-clown." But I prefer outside-in because outside-in allows you to have many different viewpoints instead of a single top that you stupidly try to get to the bottom of, and things of that sort. came out of that."

"The APT and CAD Projects had one Air Force sponsorship, but it was actually a combination of about five or six projects, all going in parallel on both hardware and software matters, and I couldn't keep track of things, so I would take Polaroid pictures of the blackboard and then say what we had talked about into my dictating machine and my secretary would type it up."

"A general theme for what I'm trying to convey and what actually drove me and my very industrious and creative project members over all these years, is... that there is much more to it than pictures. It has to be a picture language. There has to be meaning there, and the meaning is useful. You're trying to solve problems. So it really comes down to man machine problem solving . Better means of communication and expression is what always has driven our work."

"Even though we started in the days when the equipment itself wasn't able to do very exciting visual things, we were always concentrating on this matter of communication and meaning."

"Douglas T. Ross, who began his career as a graduate student in math at MIT where he was quickly lured into computing, serving as head of the Computer Applications Group from 1952 to 1969, when he left MIT to form SofTech, Inc., which he served as president until 1975 and since then as chairman. He's made seminal contributions to several areas of computing, ranging from automatic programming of numerically controlled tools, the computer language APT, through Computer Aided Design, his Automated Engineering Design System, down to software engineering, the method of structured analysis design technique, which he puts generally under the heading of man machine collaboration. He's an old hand at historical gatherings, having reported on APT at the conference on the History of Programming Languages held in 1978, and more recently on the early development in the History of Personal Workstations in 1986."

"As Head of the Computer Application Group at the MIT Electronic Systems Laboratory, Doug led the development of the (APT), a special purpose programming language that became the world standard for programming computer-controlled machine tools. He then turned his attention to the development of a and supporting tools. This led to the development while at MIT of the first software engineering language and supporting tools, the AED system. In 1969 Doug founded where he continued to work on software engineering standards. While at SofTech, Doug conceived of SA, a graphic notation and methodology for system description. SA has been successfully applied worldwide as SofTechs (SADT) or as the U.S. government standard ."

"In his article “CAD: A Statement of Objectives”, published in. 1960, Ross, who was thirty years old then, defined not only the term CAD, but also the principles, goals and visions of Computer Aided Design. His ideas shaped all the further CAD development in the past 50 years."

"For me, he has been an important pioneer in crucial areas throughout his career. Here are two examples:"

"The (UML) is a general-purpose visual that is used to specify, visualize, construct, and document the artifacts of a software system. It captures decisions and understanding about systems that must be constructed. It is used to understand, design, browse, configure, maintain, and control information about such systems. It is intended for use with all development methods, lifecycle stages, application domains, and media. The modeling language is intended to unify past experience about modeling techniques and to incorporate current software best practices into a standard approach. UML includes semantic concepts, notation, and guidelines. It has static, dynamic, environmental, and organizational parts. It is intended to be supported by interactive visual modeling tools that have code generators and report writers. The UML specification does not define a standard process but is intended to be useful with an iterative development process. It is intended to support most existing object-oriented development processes."

"I know that I disagree with many other UML experts, but there is no magic about UML. If you can generate code from a model, then it is programming language. And UML is not a well-designed programming language. The most important reason is that it lacks a well-defined point of view, partly by intent and partly because of the tyranny of the OMG standardization process that tries to provide everything to everybody. It doesn't have a well-defined underlying set of assumptions about memory, storage, concurrency, or almost anything else. How can you program in such a language? The fact is that UML and other modelling language are not meant to be executable. The point of models is that they are imprecise and ambiguous. This drove many theoreticians crazy so they tried to make UML "precise", but models are imprecise for a reason: we leave out things that have a small effect so we can concentrate on the things that have big or global effects. That's how it works in physics models: you model the big effect (such as the gravitation from the sun) and then you treat the smaller effects as perturbation to the basic model (such as the effects of the planets on each other). If you tried to solve the entire set of equations directly in full detail, you couldn't do anything."

"If two classes express the same information, the most descriptive name should be kept. For example, although customer might describe a person taking an airline flight, Passenger is more descriptive."

"The name of a class should reflect its intrinsic nature and not a role that it plays in an association. For example, Owner would be a poor name for a class in a car manufacturer's database. What if a list of drivers is added later? What about persons who lease cars? The proper class is Person (or possibly Customer), which assumes various different roles, such as owner, driver, and lessee."

"Constructs extraneous to the real world should be eliminated from the analysis model. They may be needed later during design, but not now. For example, CPU subroutine, process, algorithm, and interrupt are implementation constructs for most applications [and should be excluded from the analysis model]..."

"The key books about object-oriented graphical modeling languages appeared between 1988 and 1992. Leading figures included Grady Booch [Booch,OOAD]; Peter Coad [Coad, OOA], [Coad, OOD]; Ivar Jacobson (Objectory) [Jacobson, OOSE]; Jim Odell [Odell]; Jim Rumbaugh (OMT) [Rumbaugh, insights], [Rumbaugh, OMT]; Sally Shlaer and Steve Mellor [Shlaer and Mellor, data], [Shlaer and Mellor, states] ; and Rebecca Wirfs-Brock (Responsibility Driven Design) [Wirfs-Brock]."

"Dr. James Rumbaugh is one of the leading object-oriented methodologists. He is the chief developer of the Object Modeling Technique (OMT) and the lead author of the best-selling book Object-Oriented Modeling and Design. Before joining Rational Software Corporation in October 1994, he worked for more than 25 years at General Electric Research and Development Center in Schenectady, New York."

"Heinz performs the magic trick of convincing us that the familiar objects of our existence can be seen to be nothing more than tokens for the behaviors of the organism that apparently create stable forms. These stabilities persist, for that organism, as an observing system. This is not to deny an underlying reality that is the source of objects, but rather to emphasize the role of process, and the role of the organism in the production of a living map, a map that is so sensitive that map and territory are conjoined."

"Cybernetics is the study of systems and processes that interact with themselves and produce themselves from themselves."

"I've never observed wisdom to emerge from shouting."

"You can lead a theorist to data, but you can't make him think."

"Obvious results provoke opposition. The more obvious the result, the stronger the opposition."

"It is often stated that the evidence for is overwhelming. This is not quite correct: the evidence for mass discrepancies is overwhelming. These might be attributed to either dark matter or a modification of gravity."

"My gut reaction to all these questions is negative. But it appears that one set or the other must be answered in the affirmative. Either way, we are missing something fundamental about the nature of our universe."

"I came to the subject a True Believer in dark matter, but it was MOND that nailed the predictions for the LSB galaxies that I was studying (McGaugh & de Blok, 1998), not any flavor of dark matter. So what I am supposed to conclude?"

"One should not only be truthful, but as complete as possible. It does not suffice to be truthful while leaving unpleasant or unpopular facts unsaid."

"A long standing prediction (Milgrom 1983) of MOND is that rotating galaxy curves will fall on a single mass-velocity relation with slope 4: Mb \propto Vf4. This prediction is realized in multiple independent data sets. Gas rich galaxies fall where predicted by MOND with no free parameters. There are not many predictions in extragalactic astronomy that fare so well a quarter century after their publication. … a physical understanding for why galaxy formation in the context of ΛCDM should pick out the particular phenomenology predicted a priori by MOND remains wanting."

"The current cosmological paradigm, the cold dark matter model with a cosmological constant, requires that the mass-energy of the Universe be dominated by invisible components: dark matter and dark energy. An alternative to these dark components is that the law of gravity be modified on the relevant scales. A test of these ideas is provided by the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation (BTFR), an empirical relation between the observed mass of a galaxy and its rotation velocity. Here, I report a test using gas rich galaxies for which both axes of the BTFR can be measured independently of the theories being tested and without the systematic uncertainty in stellar mass that affects the same test with star dominated spirals. The data fall precisely where predicted a priori by the modified Newtonian dynamics."

"... It was (in part) Gross’s excessive enthusiasm for string theory in the mid-80s that drove me (as an impressionable grad student at Princeton) away from theoretical physics (and into astronomy). String theory may have been a beautiful idea, but it made no predictions that could be tested experimentally in the then-foreseeable future. That’s not science. A quarter century later and the theoretical physics community has yet to wake up and realize that there is new physics right under their noses – just not the new physics they’ve been expecting (GUTs, strings, membranes, etc.). Galaxy dynamics are consistent with a single, universal force law, but this unexpected behavior has largely been ignored because it doesn’t fit with particle theorists’ dreams of super symmetric dark matter particles. That we do not understand the observed behavior makes it more interesting than the “expected” (but unobserved) new physics: who ordered this?"

"The concordance model of cosmology, ΛCDM, provides a satisfactory description of the evolution of the universe and the growth of large scale structure. Despite considerable effort, this model does not at present provide a satisfactory description of small scale structure and the dynamics of bound objects like individual galaxies. In contrast, MOND provides a unique and predictively successful description of galaxy dynamics, but is mute on the subject of cosmology. … it is far from obvious that the mass spectrum of galaxy clusters or the power spectrum of galaxies can be explained in MOND, two things that ΛCDM does well. Critical outstanding issues are the development of an acceptable relativistic parent theory for MOND, and the reality of the non-baryonic dark matter of ΛCDM. Do suitable dark matter particles exist, or are they a modern aether?"

"People have been looking for this dark matter because there is a Nobel prize, for sure, waiting for whoever discovers it."

"I have experienced time and again people dismissing the data because they think MOND is wrong, so I am very consciously drawing a red line between the theory and the data."

"Why does MOND get any predictions right? It has had many a priori predictions come true. Why does this happen?"

"... I was deeply shocked when it was not my predictions or any of my immediate colleagues' predictions that came true in my data — but Milgrom's. This was completely outside my conceptual framework."

"A long time ago when I first got interested in MOND, having come from the background where I believed in dark matter, I wrote a proposal saying, "Gee, this theory had its predictions come true, ... we should look into that" and it was rejected, you know, very harshly. And I thought "OK, the community is not willing to fund this kind of thing" — this was almost twenty years ago. And so I basically did a global substitute, replaced MOND with dark matter, resubmitted, and I got my money. ... Pavel is totally correct that scientists are focused on getting grants, because that's what you need to support your students, and your postdocs, and getting the data, and all those sort of things. And I would like to believe that that was an anecdote from the distant past, but I am aware of a colleague who had this experience very recently where this person did not even mention MOND in the proposal, but the panel came back saying "MOND is no good — you must not spend money on this." ... the panel had associated ... this person's name with having at some point written a paper about MOND and projected that onto this proposal that ... did not mention MOND. And so it really is that bad."

"Whenever I come across a case that doesn't make sense in MOND, it usually doesn't make sense in either."

"... Dark matter provides the additional gravitational pull to bring model and reality broadly into alignment. Researchers now routinely take this model – Einstein plus dark matter, often called the ‘null hypothesis’ – as their starting point and then perform detailed calculations of galactic systems to test it. ... Most recently, Stacy McGaugh at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio and his team documented that the pattern of rotation in spiral galaxies seems to precisely follow the pattern of the visible matter alone, posing yet another challenge to the null hypothesis."

"Keeping a book on macroeconomics up to date is a challenging and neverending task. The field is continually evolving, as new events and research lead to doubts about old views and the emergence of new ideas, models, and tests. The result is that each edition of this book is very different from the one before. This is truer of this revision than any previous one."

"Just as vision is inseparable from our spiritual intelligence, our capacity to handle ambiguity, uncertainty, and complexity is bound up with our emotional intelligence."

"Organizational theory is based on a culture's answers to questions about the self."

"Zohar and Marshall (2001) describe three aspects of intelligence. The first intelligence is the intellectual or rational intelligence (IQ), which would be the intelligence used "to solve logical or strategic problems". The second intelligence is emotional intelligence (EQ), a "basic requirement for the effective use of IQ". The third intelligence is spiritual intelligence (SQ), which is the "necessary foundation for the effective functioning of both IQ and EQ". Spiritual intelligence can be described as conscience."

"On further reflection, I now think that in arguing his case Bell exaggerated, oversimplified the historical development of both classical electrodynamics and quantum mechanics, and as a result arrived at a definition of "understanding" that may be too rigid in that it reflects a presumption - a prejudice, if you will - as to what constitutes physical reality."

"By taking issue with Bell on this score, I am not saying that I am satisfied with my understanding of quantum mechanics. I share Feynman's belief that no one really understands quantum mechanics. But we should not exaggerate our embarrassment; it is ample as it stands. In any event, I agree with Bell that the foundations continue to merit the closest scrutiny."

"That classical theory had catastrophic implications for the constitution of matter was barely appreciated by Planck and others at the turn of the century, and played no substantial role in the development of quantum theory until Bohr's work 13 years later. The lesson that could be drawn from this, and also from the development of general relativity, is that a crisis will only become creative if it is formulated in a mathematically precise manner. This conclusion has an echo in Bell's insistence on having quantum mechanics "fully formulated in mathematical terms, with nothing left to the discretion of the theoretical physicist", but what it really calls for is a critique of the "orthodox" theory fully formulated in mathematical terms with nothing left to the discretion of the critic."

"I, for one, remain unpersuaded that a crisis of major proportions has been identified, but at the same time I am open to the possibility that such a crisis has been glimpsed, though perhaps only subliminally, by Bell and his great predecessors: Einstein, Schrodinger, de Broglie, Bohm and Wigner. This is a roster which should give us all pause. To my understanding, however, this crisis has not yet been formulated with sufficient precision to facilitate the birth of a great offspring."

"When we finally got our hands on the paper, we quickly realized that Einstein had put his finger on the essence of the problem and had delineated when it has a solution, before the invention of the modern quantum theory. Moreover, Einstein wrote with great lucidity about the subject, so that it seemed as if he were speaking directly to us, a century later. There was nothing dated or quaint about the analysis. For the first time in a long while, I found myself thinking, “Wow, this man really was a genius.”"

"It was Einstein who had introduced almost all the revolutionary ideas underlying quantum theory, and who saw first what these ideas meant. His ultimate rejection of quantum theory was akin to Dr. Frankenstein’s shunning of the monster he had originally created for the betterment of mankind. Had Einstein not done so, in all likelihood he would be seen as the father of the modern theory."

"I think I’m starting to resolve a puzzle that’s been bugging me for awhile. Pop economists (or, at least, pop micro-economists) are often making one of two arguments:1. People are rational and respond to incentives. Behavior that looks irrational is actually completely rational once you think like an economist. 2. People are irrational and they need economists, with their open minds, to show them how to be rational and efficient. Argument 1 is associated with “why do they do that?” sorts of puzzles. Why do they charge so much for candy at the movie theater, why are airline ticket prices such a mess, why are people drug addicts, etc. The usual answer is that there’s some rational reason for what seems like silly or self-destructive behavior. Argument 2 is associated with “we can do better” claims such as why we should fire 80% of public-schools teachers or Moneyball-style stories about how some clever entrepreneur has made a zillion dollars by exploiting some inefficiency in the market. The trick is knowing whether you’re gonna get 1 or 2 above. They’re complete opposites!"

"I’m not saying that arguments based on rationality are necessarily wrong in particular cases. (I can’t very well say that, given that I wrote an article on why it can be rational to vote.) I’m just trying to understand how pop-economics can so rapidly swing back and forth between opposing positions. And I think it’s coming from the comforting presence of rationality and efficiency in both formulations. It’s ok to distinguish economists from ordinary people (economists are rational and think the unthinkable, ordinary people don’t) and it’s also ok to distinguish economists from other social scientists (economists think ordinary people are rational, other social scientists believe in “culture”). You just have to be careful not to make both arguments in the same paragraph."

"The emigres often work as a Trojan horse, lobbying on your behalf. They use external opportunities to succeed prodigiously in different occupations. And they can bring their skills and funds home to assist the country in its economic takeoff."

"In Japan, organizations and people in the organization are synonymous."

"Rowing harder doesn't help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction."

"Analysis is the critical starting point of strategic thinking. Faced with problems, trends, events, or situations that appear to constitute a harmonious whole or come packaged as a whole by common sense of the day, the strategic thinker dissects them into their constituent parts. Then, having discovered the significance of these constituents, he reassembles them in a way calculated to maximize his advantage."

"In business as on the battlefield, the object of strategy is to bring about the conditions most favorable to one's own side, judging precisely the right moment to attack or withdraw and always assessing the limits of compromise correctly. Besides the habit of analysis, what marks the mind of the strategist is an intellectual elasticity or flexibility that enables him to come up with realistic responses to changing situations, not simply to discriminate with great precision among different shades of gray."

"Without competitors there would be no need for strategy, for the sole purpose of strategic planning is to enable the company to gain, as efficiently as possible, a sustainable edge over its competitors. Corporate strategy, thus, implies an attempt to alter a company's strength relative to that of its competitors in the most efficient way."

"The strategist's method is very simply to challenge the prevailing assumptions with a single question: Why? And to put the same question relentlessly to those responsibles for the current way of doing things until they are sick of it."

"In strategic thinking, one first seeks a clear understanding of the particular character of each element of a situation and then makes the fullest possible use of human brainpower to restructure the elements in the most advantageous way. Phenomena and events in the real word do not always fit a linear model. Hence the most reliable means of dissecting a situation into its constituent parts and reassembling then in the desired pattern is not a step-by-step methodology such as systems analysis. Rather, it is that ultimate nonlinear thinking tool, the human brain. True strategic thinking thus contrasts sharply with the conventional mechanical systems approach based on linear thinking. But it also contrasts with the approach that stakes everything on intuition, reaching conclusions without any real breakdown or analysis... No matter how difficult or unprecedented the problem, a breakthrough to the best possible solution can come only from a combination of rational analysis, based on the real nature of things, and imaginative reintegration of all the different items into a new pattern, using nonlinear brainpower. This is always the most effective approach to devising strategies for dealing successfully with challenges and opportunities, in the market arena as on the battlefield."

"In practice, the managerial decision to tackle organizational and systems changes is made even more difficult by the way in which problems become visible. Usually a global systems problem first comes into view in the form of local symptoms. Rarely do such problems show up where the real underlying causes are."

"Top managers are always slow to point the finger of responsibility at headquarters or at themselves. When global faults have local symptoms, they will be slower still. When taking corrective action means a full, zero-based review of all systems, skills and structures, their speed will decrease even further. And when their commitment to acting globally is itself far from complete, any motion is unlikely."

"It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses. And we need to throw the old ones away."

"Without Ambition, No Conquests Are Made, No Lands Discovered, No Businesses Created Ambition Is the Root of All Achievement."

"Half a revolution is not better than none... It may, in fact, be worse."

"It is not enough for a leader to have a vision. A leader needs to attract followers, men and women who can commit themselves to the new ideal of customer focus. But if the mobilization process is to succeed, those followers must become leaders, too, finding their own sense of purpose in the shared challenge and spreading the call and vision of change."

"Managers model the way by first changing themselves."

"People claim that significant change requires commitment from the top. True, the top is necessary, but it's not enough. No CEO can do this alone."

"Values are our moral navigational devices."

"Don't live too long with people who refuse to change their behavior, especially if their work is important to achieving your reengineering goals."

"Unless you can subject your decision‐making to a ruthless and continuous JUDGMENT BY RESULTS, all your zigs and zags will only be random lunges in the dark, sooner or later bound to land you on the rocks."

"People must know that their ideas will be listened to and, if they have merit, acted upon. If they do, it is possible to mobilize individual creativity on a very broad scale."

"We are in the grip of the second managerial revolution, one that's very different from the first. The first was about a transfer of power. This one is about an access of freedom."

"Fast, Cheap, Good - Pick Any Two."

"From the late 1940s until the early 1960s, events seemed to prove the Keynesians correct. Then, beginning in the 1960s, several distinguished economists began to challenge Keynesian ideas. Their counterrevolutionary views, which in many ways mirrored those of the classical economists, were strengthened by events in the 1970s, when the economy’s behavior began to contradict some Keynesian ideas. But in 2008 and 2009, as the economy sank into the most serious worldwide recession since the Great Depression, Keynesian ideas were once again at the center of a heated debate about the causes of the problem and the appropriate remedies."

"You are all computer scientists. You know what FINITE AUTOMATA can do. You know what TURING MACHINES can do. For example, Finite Automata can add but not multiply. Turing Machines can compute any computable function. Turing machines are incredibly more powerful than Finite Automata. Yet the only difference between a FA and a TM is that the TM, unlike the FA, has paper and pencil. Think about it. It tells you something about the power of writing. Without writing, you are reduced to a finite automaton. With writing you have the extraordinary power of a Turing machine."

"There are so many things that we did with Kismet at MIT, in the Personal Robots Group, that are highly relevant today. It was the first of its kind, a scientific exploration, arguably the first robot to model emotions as an important way for it to make decisions as much as it did on its interactions with humans... When I first saw Star Wars I wanted R2D2 to be my sidekick! Like any kid with a Disney fantasy, when I saw him, I wanted him to come and live in my house... Of course C3PO is the cool humanoid robot, but the magic in Star Wars was those two robots together. They played off each other in a beautiful way, almost like Laurel & Hardy."

"There's going to be a time when everybody will just take the personal robot for granted."

"There is one view that we can allow these AI [tools] to deal with data and analytics and we let people deal with the caring, and the empathy, and the emotional aspects of care, which I think is absolutely critical... What if technology is capable of high touch engagement? What if AI was also social and emotionally intelligent? For me when I talk about emotional engagement, it’s not just about great user experience with technology... It is about deeper human engagement to enable transformative change in people’s lives... We have the world of design and we have the world of AI and right now those two aren’t built top of each other... But these have to come together. So we, through a lot of psychology, understand how people are thinking about experiencing new technology."

"We’re starting to see some exciting and significant learning gains... I am very encouraged... We see a social-emotional benefit across age groups... We need to be thinking more deeply around ethics ... particularly with AI with children."

"Like many of us, Cynthia Breazeal’s fascination with robots started with Star Wars. And as an associate professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT Media Lab, she has made bringing robots to life her career. Her latest venture? Founder and chief scientist of Jibo, which has been dubbed the world's first family robot. The company is in the final stages of bringing Jibo to a limited developers’ market later this year; a full commercial rollout is expected by summer 2016. Jibo is based on principles of socio-emotive artificial intelligence and engaging human-computer interaction, which Breazeal has been working on since building her first robot."

"Hopes for social robots keep outpacing reality. Late last year, the squat, almost featureless Jibo graced the cover of Time Magazine's "best inventions" edition. Its creator, MIT robotics researcher Cynthia Breazeal, told The Associated Press at the time that "there's going to be a time when everybody will just take the personal robot for granted."... Jibo, a foot-high, vaguely conical device topped by a wide hemispherical "head," stays where you put it, typically on a countertop. But it can swivel its flat, round screen "face" to meet your gaze; tells joke and plays music; and can shimmy convincingly if you ask it to dance. It was pitched as "the world's first social robot for the home." At almost $900, though, Jibo didn't win anywhere near enough friends."

"MIT's Cynthia Breazeal is developing "social robots" that could help care for patient's emotional wellbeing. In the future Breazeal noted that social robots could help a number of different demographics including the veteran community, supporting education for children, and aging care."

"Can robots help teachers improve classroom learning?... Consider the work of Cynthia Breazeal... who leads the Personal Robots group. The group is conducting randomized control trials of the use of an AI-powered, teddy bear-sized and -looking robot named Tega in Boston-area schools... to improve the language and literacy skills of 5- and 6-year-olds. Researchers are tracking gains in the youngsters’ vocabulary and oral language development to determine how the use of human teachers and artificially intelligent robots together in classrooms compares with instruction without robots. “We’re starting to see some exciting and significant learning gains,” Breazeal said. “I am very encouraged.” But she conceded that a longer, bigger study is the next step... “We see a social-emotional benefit across age groups,” she said... If students started feeling much more comfortable interacting with robots... they might jeopardize their willingness and ability to have meaningful conversations or relationships with other people... Breazeal recognizes those downsides. “We need to be thinking more deeply around ethics,” she said, “particularly with AI with children.”"

"Cynthia Breazeal has been promoted to full professor and named associate director of the Media Lab, joining the two other associate directors: Hiroshi Ishii and Andrew Lippman. Both appointments are effective July 1... Breazeal will work with lab faculty and researchers to develop new strategic research initiatives... Most recently, Breazeal has led an MIT collaboration between the Media Lab, MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, and MIT Open Learning to develop aieducation.mit.edu, an online learning site for grades K-12, which shares a variety of online activities for students to learn about artificial intelligence, with a focus on how to design and use AI responsibly. While assuming these new responsibilities, Breazeal will continue to head the lab’s Personal Robots research group, which focuses on developing personal social robots and their potential for meaningful impact on everyday life — from educational aids for children, to pediatric use in hospitals, to at-home assistants for the elderly. Breazeal is globally recognized as a pioneer in human-robot interaction. Her book, “Designing Sociable Robots” (MIT Press, 2002), is considered pivotal in launching the field. In 2019 she was named an AAAI fellow. Previously, she received numerous awards..."

"There are no child prodigies in biology. Future physicists may play with radios or electronics, forcing electrons to flow along wire paths through light bulbs or amplifiers, but there is no comparable pastime for biologists. Nature-watching is no substitute. Simply looking at frogs is no more instructive than looking at a radio: the tinkering is is the important component. Perhaps someday, when molecular biology has reached elementary and secondary schools, promising young biologists will play with molecular biology sets the way chemists and physicists play with chemistry sets and circuit boards. As it is, most young biologists do no experiments before college. Of the few who do, almost all experiment with chemistry sets, only to switch to biology in college when they learn about its experimental possibilities."

"T cell help to B cells is a fundamental aspect of adaptive immunity and the generation of immunological memory. Follicular helper CD4 T (TFH) cells are the specialized providers of B cell help. TFH cells depend on expression of the master regulator transcription factor Bcl6. Distinguishing features of TFH cells are the expression of CXCR5, PD-1, SAP (SH2D1A), IL-21, and ICOS, among other molecules, and the absence of Blimp-1 (prdm1). TFH cells are important for the formation of germinal centers. Once germinal centers are formed, TFH cells are needed to maintain them and to regulate germinal center B cell differentiation into plasma cells and memory B cells. This review covers TFH differentiation, TFH functions, and human TFH cells, discussing recent progress and areas of uncertainty or disagreement in the literature, and it debates the developmental relationship between TFH cells and other CD4 T cell subsets (Th1, Th2, Th17, iTreg)."

"Tfh cell differentiation is a multistage, multifactorial process. There is no single event that defines Tfh cell differentiation, unlike T helper 1 (Th1) cell differentiation, for instance, which can be fully induced by interleukin-12 (IL-12) exposure in vitro or in vivo. Instead, Tfh cell differentiation is a multistep, multisignal process that also accommodates a significant amount of heterogeneity."

"‘Help’ to B cells is not a single product of TFH cells and not even a single process. T cell help to B cells can be divided into seven distinct functions, ... : proliferation, survival, plasma cell differentiation, somatic hypermutation, class-switch recombination, adhesion and attraction. These seven different forms of help are all contributors to TFH cell–B cell interactions, and each process consists of multiple pathways ... Furthermore, some molecules have a role in several different forms of help."

"Although T cell help to B cells was one of the very first defined functions of T cells (Crotty, 2015), the identification of the CD4+ T cell subset responsible for T cell-dependent humoral immune responses developed much later. The term T follicular helper (Tfh) cell was coined in a series of studies on human tonsillar germinal center (GC) CD4+ T cells and CXCR5+ CD4+ T cells in blood (Crotty, 2011). Early converts rightly point to those papers as seminal for establishing the field, but it was not until Bcl6 was determined to be a lineage-defining transcription factor (TF) of Tfh cells that Tfh cells were broadly accepted among immunologists as a distinct lineage of helper CD4+ T cells and required for GCs. That trifecta of papers was published 10 years ago (Johnston et al., 2009, Nurieva et al., 2009, Yu et al., 2009), including the demonstration that the TFs Blimp1 and Bcl6 are potent reciprocal antagonists (Johnston et al., 2009) …"

"I bent over backwards to structure it and find ways to speak about it that avoided as much as possible the risk of its being seen as Buddhist, New Age, Eastern mysticism or just plain flaky."

"A good place to start is with yourself. See if you can give yourself gifts that may be true blessings, such as self-acceptance, or some time each day with no purpose. Practice feeling deserving enough to accept these gifts without obligation—to simply receive from yourself, and from the universe."

"If you know anything about Buddhism, you will know that the most important point is to be yourself and not try to become anything that you are not already. Buddhism is fundamentally about being in touch with your own deepest nature and letting it flow out of you unimpeded."

"Such is the power of mindful, selfless generosity. At the deepest level, there is no giver, no gift, and no recipient…only the universe rearranging itself."

"Breathe and let be... Give yourself permission to allow this moment to be exactly as it is, and allow yourself to be exactly as you are."

"It helps to have a focus for your attention, an anchor line to tether you to the present moment and to guide you back when the mind wanders. The breath serves this purpose exceedingly well. It can be a true ally. Bringing awareness to our breathing, we remind ourselves that we are here now, so we might as well be fully awake for whatever is already happening."

"Be a light unto yourself."

"Mindfulness practice means that we commit fully in each moment to be present; inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now."

"To let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking."

"The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing."

"Jon Kabat-Zinn describes overwhelm as the all-too-common feeling “that our lives are somehow unfolding faster than the human nervous system and psyche are able to manage well.”"

"He has made millions by commercially franchising the ancient Vipassana system that Buddha himself taught. However, Kabat-Zinn markets the technique as his recent discovery. He learned to distance his work from Hindu and Buddhist traditions, and position it entirely as secular science with himself as the discoverer. When discussing with other scholars in the field, he admits to what he calls the ‘Asian’ origins of his methods, which he describes as a combination of three components: (1) Vipassana, a Theravada form of Buddhism; (2) Zen practices; and (3) Hatha Yoga, a kind of yoga that is more physical. Though these are clearly Indian systems with spiritual origins, those terms would undermine the clinical nature of his claims."

"I really believe this is the best time to be an African start-up. This is Africa's time and we as Africans need to seize this opportunity to contribute our quotas to our respective countries."

"To improve innovation in Africa, we need to invest more in education. You cannot innovate when you do not have a good education."

"At the beginning of a business when you're just starting, you have to be very hands-on to get the business to run. But there's going to be a stick because you have to understand every aspect of your business inside and out. But there's going to be a stage where you have to step back and be more strategic..."

"Not many people know what recycling is. They don't appreciate it. So dealing with that is very important."

"It's about how you present. How do you ensure that people understand the story, understand what you're doing, and they are buying into it? So it's actually a science."

"Why is it that you go to other countries, Nigerians that are educated, do very well. It's not a fluke. It's just that we're not really utilizing our resources properly."

"Traveling to other countries has just shown me that Nigeria is a fantastic country. I think one of our issues in Nigeria is that we don't have very good marketing."

"And as we become more affluent, people become richer, they begin to consume more and also look at things that make their lives easy. They consume things that are more packaged. And when you consume things that are packaged, you also create waste because you deal with packaging."

"The most important thing I will tell a young entrepreneur is that once you've decided on an idea, and you really truly have done your research and you believe that it's a good one, please, don't give up."

"I believe that once you can just marry your idea, believe in it. You will begin to see the results."

"Why not waste? Why not recycling? I think as a woman, people might think that it's dirty, it's not something that women should do. I saw the opportunity that was there in this field and also the impact that we could have on people's lives. And that's really what drove me."

"We want to make money, wanting to make money is important because the business is sustainable. But, then, we also want to be able to have a good impact on the lives of people."

"Basically the American modernization (of nuclear weapons), and Russia’s unfortunate inability to improve their early-warning system, has resulted in a situation where everything is potentially a lot more dangerous, because an accident could much more easily occur. And this is both a social, political and technical problem."

"[Putin's] afraid of the misinformed American president doing something that gets everybody killed. He’s not worried about us getting ourselves killed, but he is worried about Russia. So what he wants to do is make it clear to anybody — to a child on a bicycle — that you cannot win. They will destroy the United States in response, no matter what your defenses can or cannot do."

"We’re talking about a wall of fire that encompasses everything around us at the temperature of the center of the sun. That will literally turn us to less than ash, if this thing gets going. I can’t emphasize how powerful these weapons are. When they detonate, they’re actually four or five times hotter than the center of the sun, which is 20 million degrees Kelvin. They’re 100 million degrees Kelvin at the center of these weapons."

"The idea of magnetic trapping is that in a magnetic field, an atom with a magnetic moment will have quantum states whose magnetic or Zeeman energy increases with increasing field and states whose energy decreases, depending on the orientation of the moment compared to the field. The increasing-energy states, or low-field-seekers, can be trapped in a magnetic field configuration having a point where the magnitude of the field is a relative minimum. [No dc field can have a relative maximum in free space (Wing, 1984), so high-field-seekers cannot be trapped.] The requirement for stable trapping, besides the kinetic energy of the atom being low enough, is that the magnetic moment move adiabatically in the field. That is, the orientation of the magnetic moment with respect to the field should not change."

"While in high school, I spent a summer working in a university research lab. The graduate student who mentored me shared this insight: physicists are people who get paid for working at their hobby. For me, that has been a joyous truth. Physicists don’t get paid much, but we sure have a lot of fun. And so, my first wish for you is that, whatever you do, you will work at something you love."

"Wineland and Haroche realized a long-standing dream of quantum physics: studying the behavior of single quantum objects. The founders of quantum mechanics believed that studying a single quantum system, like a single atom or a single photon, was beyond the realm of experimental possibility. Many believed that it did not even make sense to talk about a single atom; only the behavior of an ensemble could be meaningful. In fact, Schrödinger asserted: “…we never experiment with just one electron or atom ... In thought experiments, we sometimes assume that we do; this invariably entails ridiculous consequences…” ... The groups of Haroche and Wineland turned this idea on its head; not only did they use individual atoms and photons to elucidate some of the strangest aspects of quantum mechanics, they have even used them to make practical devices."

"I think a lot people had this idea that science advances through eureka moments and it's true to some extent. But my experience has been that it's a lot of really hard work, where finally you have figured out what's going on and you can then move on to the next stage."

"The conditions for spacetime supersymmetry of the heterotic in backgrounds with arbitrary metric, torsion, Yang-Mills and dilaton expectation values are determined using the sigma model approach. The resulting equations are explicitly solved for the torsion and dilaton fields, and the remaining equations cast in a simple form. Previously unnoticed topological obstructions to solving these equations are found. The equations are shown to agree to leading order in perturbation theory with those derived in a field theory approach, provided one considers a more general ansatz than in previous analyses by allowing for a warp factor for the metric. Exact solutions with non-zero torsion are found, indicating a new class of finite sigma models."

"Low-energy effective field theories arising from string compactifications are generically inconsistent or ill-defined at the classical level because of conifold singularities in the moduli space. It is shown, given a plausible assumption on the degenaracies of black hole states, that for type II theories this inconsistency can be cured by nonperturbative quantum effects: the singularities are resolved by the appearance of massless Ramond-Ramond black holes."

"It is shown that many of the s of type II string theory and d = 11 supergravity can have boundaries on other p-branes. The rules for when this can and cannot occur are derived from charge conservation. For example it is found that membranes in d = 11 supergravity and IIA string theory can have boundaries on s. The boundary dynamics are governed by the self-dual d = 6 string. A collection of N parallel fivebranes contains 12N(N–1) self-dual strings which become tensionless as the fivebranes approach one another."

"Much of over the last century has concerned the reductionist quest to uncover the laws of nature at ever shorter distances. In the last decade it has become increasingly clear, from a variety of investigations, that this long march into the has neglected a surprising wealth of uncharted phenomena in the deep (IR). Far from being a boring place where all is trivial and well-understood, the deep IR in four-dimensional Minkowski space has a rich structure which we are only beginning to understand. Applications range from the IR divergence problem in , 𝒩=4 Yang-Mills and color memory in in black hole information and a possible fundamental new perspective on space, time and nature."

"The uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics says that all spacetime positions are slightly uncertain. ... Nothing is immune from the uncertainty principle. ... Applying the uncertainty principle to Einstein's , we find the rug of physics pulled from under our feet."

"We have no idea what science will look in, say, twenty or thirty years. ... Every scientist has to bet. Science is not a science — it's an art and a gamble."

"Why would there be math that had no physical manifestation?"

"If you do it right, it will last forever. It’s as simple as that."

"If you can't find it, design it."

"I learned an enormous amount from Massimo about how to be a good designer. But I learned how to be a successful designer from Lella."

"Prior to one becoming a general officer, the Army's short assignments often result in people being able to mask shortcomings and get a fresh start. For someone who has bipolar disorder or is displaying hypomanic behaviors, the supervisors may only see the high-performance phase and miss the subsequent depression, or perhaps the depression is masked. Maybe a newly arrived supervisor is briefed that he has a superstar and gives that person the benefit of the doubt until departing for the next assignment, when the person goes through the depression before arriving at the next post. This pattern might continue until the person is promoted and placed in a general-officer position."

"It takes courage and strength to admit you are broken, to get help, and to walk the road to recovery. Be strong and get help for yourself, your family member, your friend, or your comrade. It's okay to admit that you're not okay. There is no real shame except to not get the help you need and become a statistic. Rather than stigma, our people who battle bipolar disorder and other mental or brain conditions should be viewed as fighting a heroic battle, much like our heroic women battling breast cancer. They are heroes, not stigmatized victims. Take it from me, the Bipolar General, who is fighting- and winning- my own forever war with mental illness."

"GPT-4 isn’t perfect, but neither are you."

"We spent a lot of time trying to understand what GPT-4 is capable of,” Brockman said. “Getting it out in the world is how we learn. We’re constantly making updates, include a bunch of improvements, so that the model is much more scalable to whatever personality or sort of mode you want it to be in. There’s policy issues like facial recognition and how to treat images of people that we need to address and work through. We need to figure out, like, where the sort of danger zones are — where the red lines are — and then clarify that over time."

"If anyone is interested in finding what they’re passionate about and not following the beaten path, it should look unique to you, it should be something that is authentic to you,"

"I think this technology is so desirable, it will be built with or without us,” he said. “But what we can do, what we can all do, is help steer it, is help decide how we want this to integrate with society, how we want to work with it, how we want this to integrate with our lives."

"I think that it’s very helpful that I was 30 when I started my PhD. I took time to do other things between high school and college, and college and my masters, and masters and my PhD. So it meant that when my initial committee said no, I thought, "Well, you’re not the boss of me. I’m here for my own intellectual path, and I’m going to figure out how to do what I want to do." I don’t think I would have had the confidence to do that at age 21—speaking just about myself at 21."

"The first thing I tell students is that geography is the field that has the most intellectual freedom of any part of the academy. To me the beautiful part about geography is that you have no excuse for ever being bored. Every week, when you go into colloquium, you’re hearing about something totally different and outside of the normal academic arena that you’re used to, and I love that about geography."

"[About affirmative action:] Don't dishonor my amazing achievement by chalking it up to favoritism. I resent it. I don't like it. I don't need it. I don't want it. That's not a political position. I'm defending my own dignity here."

"I might always be an economist at my core, but I don’t have to limit myself to graphs and equations. In fact, if I wanted to achieve the best of which I was capable, I couldn’t afford to limit myself. I’d have to read the big books and grapple with them. I needed … the best that had been written about culture and society throughout the ages."

"For my topic today I have chosen a subject connecting mathematics and aeronautical engineering. The histories of these two subjects are close. It might appear however to the layman that, back in the time of the first powered flight in 1903, aeronautical engineering had little to do with mathematics. The Wright brothers, despite the fact that they had no university education, were well read and learned their art using wind tunnels but it is unlikely that they knew that airfoil theory was connected to the Riemann conformal mapping theorem. But it was also the time of and later who developed and understood that connection and put mathematics solidly behind the new engineering. Since that time each new geernation has discovered new problems that are at the forefront of both fields. One such problem is flight near the speed of sound. This one in fact has puzzled more than one generation."

"The women who earned their Ph.D.'s in mathematics during the forties and fifties include some of the most distinguished mathematicians and mathematics educators of this century. Julia Robinson, Cathleen Morawetz, and Mary Ellen Rudin are probably the best-known women mathematicians of this generation."

"In thinking about the ethics of accountability in research (whose lives, lands, and bodies are inquired into and what do they get out of it?), the goal of “giving back” to research subjects seems to target a key symptom of a major disease in knowledge production, but not the crippling disease itself. That is the binary between researcher and researched—between knowing inquirer and who or what are considered to be the resources or grounds for knowledge production. This is a fundamental condition of our academic body politic that has only recently been pathologized, and still not by everyone. If what we want is democratic knowledge production that serves not only those who inquire and their institutions, but also those who are inquired upon (and appeals to “knowledge for the good of all” do not cut it), we must soften that boundary erected long ago between those who know versus those from whom the raw materials of knowledge production are extracted."

"A researcher who is willing to learn how to “stand with” a community of subjects is willing to be altered, to revise her stakes in the knowledge to be produced."

"Only inspired insight guided by faith in the simplicity of nature somehow revealed the interplay of the concepts of energy and entropy."

"When we sent that first message, there weren't any reporters, cameras, tape recorders or scribes to document that major even. We knew we were creating an important new technology that we expected would be of use to a segment of the population, but we had no idea how truly momentous an event it was. What I missed was that my 97-year old mother would be using the Internet today, and she is"

"We are so far from being able to move a good fraction of the population anywhere else. Even if Elon Musk and other private individuals manage to start sending humans to Mars, we may be a few hundred years away from putting any sizable population there—and we have to fix Earth right now. Eventually, if we’ve been irresponsible enough to create problems in our world, moving to a new one won’t necessarily solve the problem because we might do the same thing in the future."

"Looking from the astrobiology perspectives, life on Earth started early—just about as soon as it could. The more we learn about the origin of life, the more we realize it may be a likely outcome any time you have the right ingredients. However, if you look at the history of life on Earth, let’s say you put it on a twelve-hour clock, up until four o’clock it was just a world of microorganisms, from four to five o’clock that’s the era of plants coming onto land and animals and creatures in the sea, then after five o’clock until about ten o’clock this will be a world of only microorganisms again. So, in fact, our planet is in its late middle ages in terms of life on the surface. Then from ten o’clock until about midnight, the world will be completely desolate, devoid of life as the sun is running out of its nuclear fuel in the center and its outer atmosphere is expanding. The point is that our world has had big life for only a small slice of its existence and the portion of that which has had technology is even smaller. I think life is presumably abundant everywhere; the most common form is likely going to be microbial life. In addition, the distances are so vast that unless other civilizations have developed both a means of crossing those distances quickly and the desire to do so, plus the energy capability, I don’t know if we’ll see alien intelligence in our lifetime."

"There was a communist revolution in 1974 and we were lucky enough to be able to flee the country. I was almost 10 when my sisters and I got out – our parents had left about seven months earlier because soldiers came to our house to try and arrest my father. They shot my dad that night."

"I definitely considered different career paths. As I kid, I knew that I liked math and science, and that was fun. But I also liked art and writing, as well as architecture and photography. I was kind of a student activist too, so was contemplating something in the government. It was a hard decision, but mostly I really enjoyed science and was good at it, so that’s what I chose."

"Statistically speaking, I am certain I have suffered from discrimination through my career. I’ve seen plenty of studies showing that men are awarded more research grants than women, that men are promoted more quickly than women and that men have higher salaries than women. I don’t think that I’m outside of the norm. And if we don’t believe that women are less capable, on average, than men, then by definition, I have been discriminated against."

"Our community has lost a brilliant leader who cared deeply about making this great public research university stronger, more accessible, better connected to the community and the state and better positioned to make a difference in the world."

"Her desire to elevate Wisconsin touched all facets of the institution."

"Recognizing that the university needed to tap new sources of revenue in order to thrive, she envisioned a multifaceted, strategic plan to move us forward. She built a collegial and talented team, was always available to problem solve, react to, or guide the essential work of the university."

"Becky tirelessly fought the good fight for all that she believed in. Her pathbreaking scholarship informed actionable policies for reducing poverty and inequality, for which she fiercely advocated in her various government and nongovernmental roles."

"Her legacy will live on through her many contributions to the world."

"She made a significant impression on all who knew her."

"Former Chancellor Blank was a tireless leader whose impact on campus is undeniable."

"Uncharacteristically for biology, s were very much part of the formative studies of that were designed and executed by luminaries such as , , and . Of these, Delbrück was a physicist, and papers from the early days of phage biology (certainly those with his name attached) reveal quantitative thinking that helped build intuition regarding the dynamics that could be seen at scales far larger than those at which the actual events were unfolding. These early studies provided the foundation for subsequent diversification of the study of phage: the basic concepts of what happens subsequent to infection, experimental protocols for inferring quantitative rates from time-series data, and methods for interpreting and disentangling alternative possibilities underlying the as-yet-unseen actions taking place at micro- and nanoscale (Delbrück 1946; Lwoff 1953)."

"Quantitative reasoning alone is critical but not sufficient. If it were, then the paradigm of mathematics and physics classes would seem to be a viable path forward for a parallel pedagogical track in the . That is to say, take a set of established equations, analyze them, explore the logical consequences of the relationships, and use their solutions as a proxy for the behavior of the natural world. However, unlike the constitutive equations of physics, a mathematical set of equations that describes a living system is not necessarily a hallowed object—not yet, at least. Models of living systems should not be put on pedestals nor conflated as substitutes for measurement. Models, mechanisms, and their predictions must engage with evidence taken from living systems in an iterative fashion—with far greater frequency than in certain branches of physics."

". The word may seem an unlikely start for a book meant to explain the . Yet, over time, we have learned that nearly everyone who was infected with survived—roughly 99% (or more). Not only did the vast majority survive, but many—if not half of those infected—had such mild infections that they never knew they had the virus. They were asymptomatic."

"We have to follow the . The data doesn't follow our narrative."

"With one exception, all he cared about was the ideas: if Harrison thought you had a good idea, he would treat you like you had won the Nobel prize even if you were “just” a grad student; and if he thought your idea was rubbish he would tell you exactly that even if you *had* won the Nobel prize. The one exception was that he also, in spite of his gruff and sometimes rude demeanor, really cared for his people."

"...What I learned from him is that the thorniest problems are the most interesting ones, and also to avoid easy answers. Harrison was no fan of well-tried methods (including his own, once they became widespread) and stock explanations, sending us--meaning the students who worked with him most closely--on an unrelenting quest for something innovative."

"...On the second day of graduate studies, Harrison walks into my windowless cubicle and asks if I want to be on his payroll. I say, ”Sure” and he walks out. A few weeks go by. I get my first paycheck, and start wondering what I am supposed to do. I get up the courage to go to his two room corner office suite a floor below and ask. He answers, “If you have to ask what to do, I don’t want you working for me.” I say, “OK” and walk out."

"Eric M. Leifer,"

"The rich variety of stars live in our Galaxy mostly singly or in pairs ... Sometimes, however, hundreds or thousands of stars can be found in loose groups called s. The is a daily young open closer, and the which surrounds the famous "seven sisters" of this cluster attests to the fact that these stars must only recently have been born out of the surrounding gas and dust. The oldest stars in our Galaxy are found in tighter groups called s. Rich globular clusters may contain more than a million members."

"The revealed the to have an unexpected richness of structure. Many of the observed features have now been identified as collective effects arising from the of the ring material. These effects include , the main topics of this review chapter. Both kinds of waves were first discussed in the astronomical literature in connection with the dynamics and structure of , and our discussion contrasts the similarities and differences between the and s. After developing the theory of free and forced waves of both types, we discuss how the observed waves can be used as diagnostics to obtain crucial parameters that characterize the physical state of the rings."

"have played a prominent role in astronomical thought since the discovery by in 1845 of the spiral structure of the ... Through the work of , , , and especially Hubble, by the late 1920s, it became known, and not just speculated, that such spirals were disk-like stellar systems coequal to our own Milky Way system. From the optical study of the kinematics of stars in the solar neighborhood, (1927) and Jan Oort (1927) deduced that the flattening of the galactic disk is due to rotation, and that this rotation occurred differentially, with the stars near the galactic center taking less time to go once around the center than the material farther out."

"I think . I never would have guessed it. Even as an undergraduate, once I’d learned a little physics, I would have thought that the universe was eternal, static, and always in equilibrium. So in graduate school when I found out that the universe was expanding, I was awestruck. Then I learned if we could measure the expanding universe, the way we record the growth of a child with marks on a doorframe ... , we could determine the age of the universe and predict its ultimate fate. This was staggering! I knew this is what I wanted to do. Since that time, charting the expanding universe to determine its nature has been my passion. Though I have to add: knowing what I know now, that the , I feel like King Alfonso X of Castile who saw Ptolemy’s and reportedly said “If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking on creation thus, I should have recommended something simpler.”"

"Today we are able to make very precise measurements of the by measuring the distances and s of . The shift in a supernova’s due to the expansion of space gives its redshift (z) and the relation between redshift and distance is used to determine the expansion rate of the universe. Supernovae with greater redshifts, lying at greater distances, reveal the past expansion rate as their light was emitted at an epoch when the universe was younger. Supernovae Type Ia were the suitable candidate for these measurements as you need objects that are very luminous (thus can be observed even when they are very far) and highly uniform (so that intrinsic scatter doesn't blur the signal). Supernovae Type Ia are the most luminous of the common supernova types, peaking at 4 billion , and thus allowing us to look at extreme large distances."

"is about the gravity of empty space, the gravity of the vacuum. And the vacuum is a concept that we address in and quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is physics on microscopic scales, while Einstein's theory of general relativity ... is physics on macroscopic scales. These two theories are both great, but they don't work together. We don't have what's called a quantum theory of gravity, the way the two are united. However, dark energy actually requires you to use both of these branches of physics. So our hope is that by observing how the universe actually does physics at that interface, we will learn how to unify those."

"I hope that moms can see themselves in me and take that as permission to hold onto their own identity, dreams and passions — even after having children."

"The secret to so much success in life is to be okay with failure and have a good, healthy, positive relationship with failure."

"I want you to ask questions, make hypotheses, and test your ideas in the real world. Keep exploring anything and everything around you."

"The important thing to realise: we don’t consider climate change to be a problem — it’s a symptom. When you have physical growth in a finite planet, pressures are going to mount to stop the growth. And climate change is one of those pressures. So it’s a symptom of our efforts to keep promoting physical growth in a finite planet. You know, ironically, if we solved climate change, if we could somehow push a magic button and eliminate greenhouse gasses... but continue with our growth, we’ll just have to see bigger pressures in other sectors. Then water scarcity, or epidemics, or warfare or some other pressure will have to become even more powerful, because finally the pressures against growth have to equal the pressures in favour of growth. And only when they’re equal, growth will stop."

"If we just take the default view today, people will be going to these places with an extractive mindset that says- I have the technology, money and power, and I’ll use these resources until I’m satisfied, and I will not be concerned with other countries and future generations."

"If we don't take a radical shift toward really prioritizing labor rights, it's quite concerning imagining having a company or a government controlling the full life support system on a space station or a physical base on a planet."

"Space truly is useful for sustainable development for the benefit of all peoples."

"When I first went to MIT I thought I would be working for Bob Brown in fluid mechanic simulation, because my undergraduate thesis was on the Newtonian fluid flow simulation, and my undergraduate research advisor graduated from Washington, Seattle, working for Bruce Finlayson."

"And, I do want to thank the AVS Society again for this recognition."

"In other science fields, you can set up an experiment, or you can get samples of rocks or samples of other things to bring back to your lab and analyze them. But for astronomers, all you get is the light that comes back from galaxies or stars."

"With that light, you have to try to figure out the mass of that star or the mass of that galaxy, what the temperature is."

"We help the broad astronomy community use both the telescopes and data"

"Growing up in Chicago, I was always interested in being a scientist. I'm not entirely sure why. But my mother was always very interested in the sky. She was used to seeing a dark sky, and so she was really interested in the space program. So I just became really interested in astronomy and the stars, and I didn't necessarily want to be an astronomer. I wanted to be an astronaut and I wanted to do science."

"To look through the 16-inch telescope at Jupiter was literally life-changing for me. I just remember thinking that Jupiter actually looks like it does in the books—spot, bands, albeit in more of a gray scale."

"My job includes staring off into space. How awesome is that?!"

"Programmers are not mathematicians, no matter how much we wish and wish for it.”"

"It is only when we forget the ideas behind building something wonderful that we can actually do the building that makes things wonderful.”"

"reuse is properly a process issue, and individual organizations need to decide whether they believe in its long-term benefits."

"The problem with traditional approaches to abstraction and encapsulation is that they aim at complete information hiding. This characteristic anticipates being able to eliminate programming from parts of the software development process, those parts contained within module boundaries. As we've seen, though, the need to program is never eliminated because customization, modification, and maintenance are always required-that is, piecemeal growth."

"reuse is easiest within a project instead of between them. A manager's success depends on performance on a given project and not on performance over several projects. And preparing code for reuse requires additional work, not only by the reuse expert but also by developers. Therefore, preparing for reuse has a cost for any given project."

"Habitability is the characteristic of source code that enables programmers, coders, bug-fixers, and people coming to the code later in its life to understand its construction and intentions and to change it comfortably and confidently."

"One of the primary reasons that abstraction is overloved is that a completed program full of the right abstractions is perfectly beautiful. But there are very few completed programs, because programs are written, maintained, bugs are fixed, features are added, performance is tuned, and a whole variety of changes are made both by the original and new programming team members. Thus, the way a program looks in the end is not important because there is rarely an end, and if there is one it isn't planned."

"The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing"

"Most of this printout was analysis from the Kotok program. And I also saw some kind of a textual thing, which I don’t believe was Kotok’s thesis, but which had some of the same information as Kotok’s thesis. It was probably some kind of a technical report, or something, that was anticipatory to Kotok’s thesis [2]. Anyway, one of the things I remembered, and which I just talked with Kotok, as a matter of fact, a few days ago, was the detail that they had is Alpha Beta, and so forth, and they had these whips, and the whips were set at 4, 4, 3, 3, 2, 2, 1, 1. In other words, that was how many. It would first look at the top ply. It would look at the four best moves. The next plys, it would look at the three best. Next ply, two best, next ply, one best. Well, I just recognized immediately that that was incredibly wrong."

"You see, basically looking at only one wide, you just have no signals or noise function. In other words, you look at one move, which you think is the best, but there’s a tremendous amount of noise. Well, you look at some more moves, and if you find that one of those are better, you’ve effectively rejected some noise. Well, essentially the thing that I knew that they did, they were very weak chess players, both McCarthy and Kotok. And basically they had a very romanticized view of chess. And so I knew, however, that chess is a very, very precise game. And you really- the name of the game is take the other guy’s pieces, and you don’t just go along. In any kind of a strong game, you don’t just lose pieces, win pieces, lose pieces, win pieces. I mean, if you lose even a single pawn without compensation, then you may have drawing chances, if you’re lucky. Otherwise, the game is lost. Losing more than one pawn almost invariably results in loss of the game, period."

"I’m energized by this chance to serve the citizens of Illinois and advance the mission of learning, discovery, engagement and economic development”"

"Although I tend to focus on statistical machine learning, my research passion is actually artificial intelligence. I like to build large integrated systems, so I have also tended to spend a great deal of my time doing research on autonomous agents, interactive entertainment, some aspects of HCI, software engineering, and even programming languages."

"I think of my field as interactive artificial intelligence. My fundamental research goal is to understand how to build autonomous agents that must live and interact with large numbers of other intelligent agents, some of whom may be human. Progress towards this goal means that we can build artificial systems that work with humans to accomplish tasks more effectively; can be more robust to changes in environment, relationships, and goals; and can better co-exist with humans as long-lived partners."

"After thinking about this problem for a number of years, I've decided that the central technical issues here are: adaptive modeling, especially activity discovery (as distinct from activity recognition); and scalable interaction, including coordination and influence. Further, I have come to believe that as a practical matter, it is necessary to build development environments that support rapid development, and so I try to think seriously about authorial tools, including adaptive programming languages, domain-specific example-driven development, socially-guided machine learning, and corresponding issues in software engineering."

"All in all, I believe that there are many opportunities in this space, and it should interest anyone who cares about any of the areas I mention above. To that end, I have spent time building The Laboratory for Interactive Artificial Intelligence and the pfunk research group. Our research goal is to develop methodologies for building persistent, adaptive, collaborative, and believable agents that must live with other similar agents, including humans."

"It is also worth pointing out that I have developed a strong interest in (re)defining Computing as a separate and vivid discipline. This has most obviously manifested itself in my efforts at curricular development and reform. Possibly related to these efforts, I was the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs in the College for a number of years before becoming the Senior Associate Dean and eventually the Executive Associate Dean (where I retained my role in Academic Affairs while overseeing a lot of the operations of the College). I was lucky enough to serve as the fourth John P. Imlay, Jr. Dean of the College. After four years doing that, I became the Provost at University of Wisconsin-Madison."

"Definitely related to these efforts, I have put a great deal of energy into thinking about access at all levels, with an eye toward broadening participation in the professoriate. I don't have dozens of papers in this space, but I care about it as deeply as I do my AI research and all the rest that I do. Generally speaking, I split my time among my professor and admin selves because I think efforts around operationalizing and supporting broad access deserve as much intellectual energy and thought as any of our other academic efforts"

"It was a crashing disappointment The interesting parts weren’t rigorous, and the rigorous parts weren’t interesting."

"The skies opened,I realized that this is what I had been looking for all of my life."

"We AI researchers are concerned about the potential impact of artificially intelligent systems on humanity. In the first half of this essay, I argue that ethics is an evolved body of cultural knowledge that (among other things) encourages individual behavior that promotes the welfare of the society (which in turn promotes the welfare of its individual members). The causal paths involved suggest that trust and cooperation play key roles in this process. In the second half of the essay, I consider whether the key role of trust exposes our society to existential threats. This possibility arises because decision-making agents (humans, AIs, and others) necessarily rely on simplified models to cope with the unbounded complexity of our physical and social world. By selecting actions to maximize a utility measure, a well-formulated game theory model can be a powerful and valuable tool. However, a poorly-formulated game theory model may be uniquely harmful, in cases where the action it recommends deliberately exploits the vulnerability and violates the trust of cooperative partners. Widespread use of such models can erode the overall levels of trust in the society. Cooperation is reduced, resources are constrained, and there is less ability to meet challenges or take advantage of opportunities. Loss of trust will affect humanity’s ability to respond to existential threats such as climate change."

"The reef was super healthy and colorful, like being in a National Geographic television show,” . “As soon as I put my face in the water, this whole swarm of fish came towards me and then swerved to the right.."

"I got excited about how nature makes these complicated, distributed, mobile networks. Those multi-robot systems became a new direction of my research."

"James is the one that got me into robot swarms by introducing me to all the things that ant and termite colonies do,” Nagpal said. “I got excited about how nature makes these complicated, distributed, mobile networks. James was developing that used similar principles to move around and work together. Those multi-robot systems became a new direction of my research."

"“As far as we know, there isn’t a blueprint or an a priori distribution between who’s doing the building and who is not. We know the queen does not set the agenda,” . “These colonies start with hundreds of termites and expand their structure as they grow.”"

"“I have no idea how that works, “I mean, how do you create systems that are so adaptive?”"

"Instead of having to reason about everybody, your car only has to reason about its five neighbors, I can make the system very large, but each individual’s reasoning space remains constant. That’s a traditional notion of scalable —the amount of processing per vehicle stays constant, but we’re allowed to increase the size of the system.”"

"When you think of an ant, there is not a concentrated set of neurons there,referring to the ant’s 20-microgram brain. “Instead, there is a huge amount of awareness in the body itself. I may wonder how an ant solves a problem, but I have to realize that somehow having a physical body full of sensors makes that easier. We do not really understand how to think about that still.”"

"It’s almost like each individual fish acts like a distributed sensor. Instead of me doing all the work, somebody on the left can say, ‘Hey, I saw something.’ When the group divides the labor so that some of us look out for predators while the rest of us eat, it costs less in terms of energy and resources"

"It’s almost like each individual fish acts like a distributed sensor, Instead of me doing all the work, somebody on the left can say, ‘Hey, I saw something.’ When the group divides the labor so that some of us look out for predators while the rest of us eat, it costs less in terms of energy and resources than trying to eat and look out for predators all by yourself."

"“What’s really interesting about large insect colonies and fish schools is that they do really complicated things in a decentralized way, whereas people have a tendency to build hierarchies as soon as we have to work together, “There is a cost to that, and if we try to do that with that with robots, we replicate the whole management structure and cost of a hierarchy.”"

"The other factor is that Amazon’s robots do a mix of centralized and decentralized decision-making, The robots plan their own paths, but they also use the cloud to know more. That lets us ask: Is it better to know everything about all your neighbors all the time? Or is it better to only know about the neighbors that are closer to you?”"

"There are few others [like Amazon] with hundreds of robots moving around safely in a facility space. And the opportunity to work on algorithms in a deployed system was very exciting."

"“Maybe we could do what Amazon is doing, but do it outside, We could have swarms of robots that actually do some sort of practical task. At Amazon, that task is delivery. But given Boston’s snowstorms, I think shoveling the sidewalks would be nice."

"A machine is not a genie, it does not work by magic, it does not possess a will, and … nothing comes out which has not been put in, barring of course, an infrequent case of malfunctioning. … The “intentions” which the machine seems to manifest are the intentions of the human programmer, as specified in advance, or they are subsidiary intentions derived from these, following rules specified by the programmer. … The machine will not and cannot do any of these things until it has been instructed as to how to proceed. ... To believe otherwise is either to believe in magic or to believe that the existence of man’s will is an illusion and that man’s actions are as mechanical as the machine’s."

"Being in Silicon Valley, I see first-hand how the power of technology, innovation, ingenuity and entrepreneurship can create “magic” that can really make a big impact in people’s lives and literally change the world. I would like to encourage the Silicon Valley community to think of how they can help spread that “magic” to the developing world, to increase the cross-collaborations with entrepreneurs from the developing world so they too can leverage the power of innovation and ingenuity to improve the living conditions of all people around the world."

"Teen "addiction" to social media is a new extension of typical human engagement. Their use of social media as their primary site of sociality is most often a byproduct of cultural dynamics that have nothing to do with technology, including parental restrictions and highly scheduled lives. Teens turn to, and are obsessed with whichever environment allows them to connect to friends. most teens aren't addicted to social media; if anything, they're addicted to each other."

"In 1995, psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg coined the term internet addiction disorder. He wrote a satirical essay about “people abandoning their family obligations to sit gazing into their computer monitor as they surfed the Internet.” Intending to parody society’s obsession with pathologizing everyday behaviors, he inadvertently advanced the idea. Goldberg responded critically when academics began discussing internet addiction as a legitimate disorder: “I don’t think Internet addiction disorder exists any more than tennis addictive disorder, bingo addictive disorder, and TV addictive disorder exist. People can overdo anything. To call it a disorder is an error."

"The things that make us safest from others make us least from ourselves."

"Listening to teens talk about social media addiction reveals an interest not in features of their computers, smartphones, or even particular social media sites but in each other."

"Just because teens can and do manipulate social media to attract attention and increase visibility does not mean that they are equally experienced at doing so or that they automatically have the skills to navigate what unfolds. It simply means that teens are generally more comfortable with—and tend to be less skeptical of—social media than adults. They don’t try to analyze how things are different because of technology; they simply try to relate to a public world in which technology is a given."

"Privacy is not a static construct. It is not an inherent property of any particular information or setting. It is a process by which people seek to have control over a social situation by managing impressions, information flows, and context."

"In a world where information is easily available, strong personal networks and access to helpful people often matter more than access to the information itself."

"A central challenge in addressing the sexual victimization of children is that the public is not comfortable facing the harrowing reality that strangers are unlikely perpetrators. Most acts of sexual violence against children occur in their own homes by people that those children trust.27"

"For the teens that I interviewed, privacy isn’t necessarily something that they have; rather it is something they are actively and continuously trying to achieve in spite of structural or social barriers that make it difficult to do so. Achieving privacy requires more than simply having the levers to control information, access, or visibility. Instead, achieving privacy requires the ability to control the social situation by navigating complex contextual cues, technical affordances, and social dynamics. Achieving privacy is an ongoing process because social situations are never static."

"When people become famous, they are often objectified, discussed, and ridiculed with little consideration for who they are as people. Fans and critics feel as though they have the right to comment on everything celebrities do with little regard to the costs that those in the crosshairs of attention will bear. The cost that celebrities pay for the supposed benefits of being rich and famous is ongoing scrutiny and a lack of privacy. Most people do not understand or appreciate the pressure that results from fame, even though public meltdowns—such as the night that Britney Spears shaved her head in front of numerous photographers—are highly publicized. The public’s obsession with obtaining information about the famous puts serious pressure on those people’s lives, as the paparazzi’s role in Princess Diana’s death so brutally reminds us.20 Few people have sympathy for the kinds of stress that gossip places on public figures who have high status and wealth. At a distance, famous people seem invulnerable"

"A great deal of the fear and anxiety that surrounds young people’s use of social media stems from misunderstanding or dashed hopes.14 More often than not, what emerges out of people’s confusion takes the form of utopian and dystopian rhetoric."

"More often than not, what people put up online using social media is widely accessible because most systems are designed such that sharing with broader or more public audiences is the default. Many popular systems require users to take active steps to limit the visibility of any particular piece of shared content. This is quite different from physical spaces, where people must make a concerted effort to make content visible to sizable audiences.8 In networked publics, interactions are often public by default, private through effort"

"When adults jump to fear and isolationism as their solution to managing risk, they often undermine their credibility and erode teens’ trust in the information that adults offer."

"the introduction of social media does alter the landscape. It enables youth to create a cool space without physically transporting themselves anywhere. And because of a variety of social and cultural factors, social media has become an important public space where teens can gather and socialize broadly with peers in an informal way. Teens are looking for a place of their own to make sense of the world beyond their bedrooms"

"It’s easy to think of privacy and publicity as opposing concepts, and a lot of technology is built on the assumption that you have to choose to be private or public. Yet in practice, both privacy and publicity are blurred. Rather than eschewing privacy when they encounter public spaces, many teens are looking for new ways to achieve privacy within networked publics. As such, when teens develop innovative strategies to achieve privacy, they often reclaim power by doing so. Privacy doesn’t just depend on agency; being able to achieve privacy is an expression of agency"

"Maybe any entity significantly smarter than a human being would be crippled by existential despair."

"Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, is a powerful illumination of how we really behave toward animals."

"Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy"

"While there may be similarities here and there, my child doesn’t sense, act, or learn the way a machine does."

"The machine like the djinnee, which can learn and can make decisions on the basis of its learning, will in no way be obliged to make such decisions as we should have made, or will be acceptable to us.” —Norbert Wiener, mathematician and philosopher"

"Where my beasts of their own wrong without my will and knowledge break into another’s close, I shall be punished, for I am the trespasser with my beasts.” —Anonymous case during the reign of Henry VII"

"It may seem preposterous today to hold a robot morally accountable for its actions, but there are already glimpses of this in how we talk about robot-caused harm—in ways that risk assigning them more agency than appropriate."

"I sometimes think that, in the desperate straits of humanity today, we would be grateful to have nonhuman friends, even if they are only the friends we build ourselves." —Isaac Asimov, Robot Visions"

"The military wasn’t equipped to deal with people’s demand for information about their beloved pups."

"The changes which have taken place during the in the activities and position of women are the object of an interest which is widespread. These changes have been so striking that the period during which they occurred is frequently called the "woman's century." Nor is the movement a completed one; there is every reason to believe that equally marked changes will take place in the . The time has passed when women were on the whole content to drift with the current of life and accept without question or demur the lot which tradition, custom, and public opinion might dictate. The little band of leaders who did pioneer work in the last century in claiming and making new opportunities for women did brave service: in no respect did they do better service than in showing the value of ideals as a positive social force. The record of their lives will always be a source of courage to increasing numbers of women who will be eager to take an active part in controlling and directing the stream of women's activities."

"... except in some of the s where the opportunities for research are limited and the salaries notably low, women are not considered eligible for chairs in the sciences ... Until women are more generally given an equal chance with men in academic recognition and remuneration, it is futile to attempt to determine, in terms of s or even of scientific reputation or eminence, how much "they are able to do for the advancement of science.""

"Miss Talbot divides her book into three parts. Part I describes the changes in women's activities—industrial, educational, civic, philanthropic, domestic, and social—during the last hundred years. Part II compares the educational machinery of about fifty years ago with that of today, citing as exampels the past and the present curricula of the Boston and Chicago public schools, of , and of the , in order to show how far education has adapted itself to these changes. Part III deals with the present collegiate education of women, pointing out its characteristics, limitations, and possible modifications in the light of modern social, economic, and psychological knowledge."

"Being a woman is hard ... The expectations are that we’ll be gorgeous, completely organized, great mothers, great wives, and great professionals ... The pressures are huge. I was always expected to bring the cookies to meetings because I’m a woman. Like, men can’t find cookies? That’s why I say: Let’s be nicer to ourselves. Diversity is very important ... When you bring in new folks who ask new questions, you change the field and the basic sciences. Women want to do great research. But we’re asking, ‘Why do we have this rule? That artificial hierarchy?’ We can be more collaborative. And I’ll tell you this ... When men suggest we speak with deeper voices if we want to get our message across, here is what I say: Gravity does not care how deep your voice is."

"is that is assumed to be absolutely stable. A seed of strange matter in a will convert the star into a . The speed at which this conversion occurs is calculated. The calculation takes into account the rate at which the and s equilibrate via s and the diffusion of strange quarks towards the conversion front. The speed is found as a function of the temperature of the star and the minimum strangeness necessary for strange matter stability. The conversion can be detected as an energy release of ∼58 MeV with different luminosities for different stages of a neutron star's evolution and as a “super-glitch” on s' frequencies."

"Scientists are very curious ... We might be curious about something that looks completely irrelevant, and it turns out to be a really amazing thing. Or it could be irrelevant. We don't know. If we knew, we wouldn't be looking at it."

"I was really interested in the basic workings of nature: Why ? What is the unified theory of everything? But I realized how many easier questions we have in astrophysics: that you could actually take a lifetime and go answer them. Graduate school at MIT showed me the way to astrophysics — how it can be an amazing route to many questions, including how the universe looks, how it functions, and even particle physics questions. I didn’t plan to study s; but every step it was, “OK, it looks promising.”"

"The Of Extreme Multi-Messenger Astrophysics (POEMMA) was designed as a Astrophysics probe-class mission to identify the sources of ) and observe s from extremely energetic transient sources. POEMMA consists of two identical spacecraft flying in a loose formation at 525 km altitude oriented to view a common atmospheric volume and to provide full-sky coverage for both types of messengers. Each spacecraft hosts a wide with a hybrid focal plane optimized to observe both the UV fluorescence signal from extensive air showers (EASs) and the optical signals from EASs."

"The 1940s and 1950s were marked by intense debates over the origin of drug resistance in microbes. ... Antibiotic resistance became a key issue among those disputing physiological (usually termed ‘’) vs. genetic ( and ) explanations of variation in . Postwar developments connected with the gave this debate a new political valence. Proponents of the weighed in with support for the genetic theory. However, certain features of drug resistance seemed inexplicable by mutation and selection, particularly the phenomenon of ‘multiple resistance’—the emergence of resistance in a single strain against several unrelated antibiotics. In the late 1950s, and his collaborators solved this puzzle by determining that resistance could be conferred by rather than . These could carry resistance to many antibiotics and seemed able to promote their own dissemination in bacterial populations. In the end, the vindication of the genetic view of drug resistance was accompanied by a recasting of the ‘gene’ to include extrachromosomal hereditary units carried on viruses and s."

"Laboratory instructions and recipes are sometimes edited into books with a wide circulation. Even in the late twentieth century, publications of this nature remained influential. For example, s from a 1980 summer course on at provided the basis for a bestselling laboratory manual by , and . Not only did the Molecular Cloning: A Laboratory Manual become a standard reference for s (commonly called the ‘bible’), but also its recipes and clear instructions made gene cloning and technologies accessible to non-specialists. Consequently, this laboratory manual contributed to the rapid spread of genetic-engineering techniques throughout the , as well as in industry. As is often the case with how-to books, however, finding a way to update methods in this rapidly changing field posed a challenge, and various molecular-biology reference books had different ways of dealing with knowledge obsolescence. This paper explores the origins of this manual, its publication history, its reception and its rivals – as well as the more recent migration of such laboratory manuals to the Internet."

"There are many reasons to revisit the history of research on (TMV), beginning with the fact that it was the first virus to be identified and so marks the start of the field of . However, not every original example of a new biological category becomes a well-studied object in its own right ... As virology took off in the early twentieth century, TMV did become one of the best-studied viruses and remained at the forefront of the field. It was used to elucidate basic knowledge about the nature of viruses and served as a in as well as agriculture, where it had emerged. The fact that the first recognized virus came from plants—although es were rapidly identified—meant that virology was, from the outset, highly comparative ... Literature on the origins of often privileges and the contributions of the ... Yet early work with TMV inspired Max Delbrück and other early molecular biologists to take up the study of bacteriophages. Moreover, TMV itself became a prominent model system for understanding the molecular nature of heredity and the relationship between proteins and nucleic acids ... Notably, some of the main scientists involved in elucidating the double-helical structure of DNA were also studying TMV, which became a tool for cracking the ."

"By 1950 the nature of the virus was no longer a mystery. Viruses were known to be s, genetic units, parasites that depend on their hosts for and . But a funny thing happened on the road to this knowledge. The viruses that most shaped this emerging portrait were not the most dangerous s, but those examples, however innocuous to humans, that made good laboratory subjects. Researchers constructed general knowledge about viruses based on a few that, by reason of historical precedence or biological robustness, were intensively studied as representatives of the rest."

"Like ’’’’, is part of the biologist's . The best-known model systems—standardized organisms such as the and the —are investigated by an entire community of biologists. Model systems become prototypes within which key biological questions are defined and resolved, useful precisely because they have already been so well studied. was a model system in these respects, studied and discussed by a large contingent of s, s, and other agricultural and medical researchers ..."

"s used s to reveal the sequence of chemical reactions in . s followed the assimilation and turnover of key s and tagged molecules such as to track the movement and activity of s. s labeled s with radioisotopes to follow the replication and expression of s. Physicians utilized radioisotopes such as and to diagnose and detect s. Ecologists profited as well, using to trace through the living and nonliving parts of aquatic and terrestrial landscapes, giving concrete meaning to the notion of an ecosystem."

"put to work in , having induced in an inbred mouse strain (Strong A) that was particularly susceptible to the implantation of tumors ... He and K. G. Scott found that these leukemic mice concentrated more radiophosphorus in their s and s than did healthy mice after both groups received tracer doses. ... This finding stoked hopes that radioisotopes would be selectively absorbed and localized in cancer patients, where they could serve to irradiate tumors."

"In Life Atomic, Angela Creager weaves an engaging tale of the history of s. Much of her material came from government documents from the Manhattan Project that were declassified during the . ... Creager introduces the concepts and vocabulary of radioisotopes at a level that any reader can appreciate."

"... one of the virtues of Creager's admirable book is that the attentive, even if scientifically uninformed, reader will learn a great deal, not only about these subjects but more generally about the character of during the last two-thirds of the twentieth-century. By tracking the history of from the applied realm of through its acceptance as —a widely and conventionally accepted laboratory tool—Creager traces more general trends in the development of , genetics, and . ... The power of Creager's method lies in how it underlines the dynamic set of relationships between ideas and experimental practice, between the laboratory and its sources of support."

"Integrity is essential. It's the inner voice, the source of self-control, the basis for the trust that is imperative in today's military. It's doing the right thing when nobody's looking."

"If women don't belong in engineering, then engineering, as a profession, is irrelevant to the needs of our society. If engineering doesn't make welcome space for them, then engineering will become marginalized as other fields expand their turf to seek out and make a place for women."

"It's not easy being a pioneer. It's not easy having to prove every day that you belong. It's not easy being invisible or having your ideas credited to someone else."

"Aircraft trailing vortices have little waves that are generated and then break up....If another aircraft intercepts that trailing vortex, someone can be killed, because it’s a swirling flow....People now know that if you land airplanes three minutes apart, that’s going to be safer."

"Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate."

"and their were discovered in 1977. While the hot-water springs were predicted to occur at s, no one expected to find them colonized by exotic invertebrate faunas. Accustomed to a view of the deep sea as a food-limited environment, the puzzle of how lush communities could be maintained provoked biologists into a flurry of research activity. ... As field programs multiplied and more vent communities were discovered, biogeographic patterns in the distribution of faunas became apparent and ecological issues of requirements, , and began to be addressed. associated with diverse settings, from and s to . Massive bacterial blooms triggered by the release of nutrients during a volcanic eruption, rapid colonization of new vents by invertebrates, and burial of extant vent communities by lava flows demonstrate the dynamic nature of hydrothermal systems. Perhaps the most provocative consequence of the discovery of seafloor hydrothermal vents is the ."

"You can go for hundreds of meters along the and see nothing. But then you’ll get to a and it will be a garden of exotic creatures. The vents are like the . The seawater percolates down through cracks caused by earthquakes, and then it comes up through these underwater chimneys. There are lots of ores there like copper, gold, silver, and s. There’s so much life there, and it’s very different from what we’re used to seeing. Whenever scientists go down, we almost always find new creatures."

"in the late 1970s led to the discovery of at s. More recently, sulphide deposits containing . In addition to metal-rich ores, hydrothermal vents host ecosystems based on . Although there has been considerable effort to study the biology and ecology of vent systems in the decades since these systems were first discovered, there has been limited attention paid to conservation issues. Three priority recommendations for conservation science at hydrothermal vent settings are identified here: (i) determine the natural conservation units for key species with differing life histories; (ii) identify a set of first principles for the design of preservation reference areas and conservation areas; (iii) develop and test methods for effective mitigation and restoration to enhance the recovery of biodiversity in sulphide systems that may be subject to open-cut mining."

"ecosystems have stimulated decades of and hold promise of mineral and genetic resources that also serve societal needs. Some endemic taxa thrive only in vent environments, and vent-associated organisms are adapted to a variety of natural disturbances, from tidal variations to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. In this paper, physicochemical and biological impacts of a range of human activities at vents are considered. , albeit at a local scale, based on our current understanding of ecological responses to disturbance. Natural recovery from a single mining event depends on immigration and larval recruitment and colonization; understanding processes and dynamics influencing life-history stages may be a key to effective minimization and mitigation of mining impacts. Cumulative impacts on of several mining projects in a single region, without proper management, include possible species extinctions and shifts in community structure and function."

"The house and its surroundings are intimately connected with the home, each modifies the other. Hawthorne's , Poe's , there reports of investigations of housing committees, , all tell us the same story. The dwellers in a house put their stamp upon it, even when they have left it empty it reflects something of their characters and habits from its walls and floors, from the very air which has surrounded them. Still more the house modifies the home and the people who dwell in it. Disease and death come more frequently to the damp, unventilated house than to the sunlit one. The inconvenient house, making irksome the necessary work, influences the dispositions of all under its roof. The quiet dignified house with a beautiful outlook brings soothing and inspiration."

"A convenient kitchen is one in which the necessary work can be done with the least possible effort. To plan such a kitchen requires at least two things. First, there must be a clear idea of all the routine jobs to be done in the kitchen in the order that they are most likely to come. , cooking, serving, clearing away and are the jobs that follow each other most often in the majority of kitchens. Second, after the plan of work is clearly in mind, comes the choosing and placing of the needed equipment. The relation of the kitchen to the rest of the house, especially the dining portion, also plays an important part in convenience."

"A two-year study made by Gray (3) of one family's food during the indicated that even intelligent persons living on a very low income are likely to have a deficient diet. The of the three women in this family, two of whom were college students, furnished per person per day 2372 Calories, 41 grams , 0.59 gram , 0.79 gram , and 0.000754 gram iron. ... 3. Gray, Greta. One family's food during the depression. Jour. Home Econ. 27:24-25. 1935."