Educators From The United States

"Wikipedia has come a long way since it started in 2001. With around 70,000 volunteers editing in over 100 languages, it is by far the world’s most popular reference site. Its future is also uncertain. One of the biggest threats it faces is the rise of smartphones as the dominant personal computing device. ... The pool of potential Wikipedia editors could dry up as the number of mobile users keeps growing; it’s simply too hard to manipulate complex code on a tiny screen."

"What has not suffered is fund-raising. The foundation, based in San Francisco, has a budget of roughly $60 million. How to fairly distribute resources has long been a topic of debate. How much should go to regional chapters and affiliates, or to groups devoted to non-English languages? How much should stay in the foundation to develop software, create mobile apps and maintain infrastructure? These tensions run through the community."

"Could the pressure from mobile, and the internal tensions, tear Wikipedia apart? A world without it seems unimaginable, but consider the fate of other online communities."

"The real challenges for Wikipedia are to resolve the governance disputes — the tensions among foundation employees, longtime editors trying to protect their prerogatives, and new volunteers trying to break in — and to design a mobile-oriented editing environment."

"The worst scenario is an end to Wikipedia, not with a bang but with a whimper: a long, slow decline in participation, accuracy and usefulness that is not quite dramatic enough to jolt the community into making meaningful reforms. No effort in history has gotten so much information at so little cost into the hands of so many — a feat made all the more remarkable by the absence of profit and owners. In an age of Internet giants, this most selfless of websites is worth saving."

"There are two things one should see on a trip West: the Grand Canyon and Dr. Reinhardt."

"She is a life member of more literary organizations than probably any other woman of California."

"You felt that she cared greatly about you as an individual. She believe in you and what you could become, and her faith in you, like her optimism, was contagious, giving you self-confidence and power so that you could not doubt yourself. She had a strange capacity for making you feel capable of anything."

"as distinguished a Unitarian as there is in the land"

"Religion and education meet in their responsibility to make possible the abundant life—the terms are intellectual and spiritual, rather than material. Humane living is assured only to those ... who have disciplined themselves to choose and who have the ardor to strive for the excellent “with heart and soul and mind.”"

"[E]ducation in a democracy, in our democracy, must use all the instruments of civilization, home, church, community, as well as school, for the adequate, suitable development of each child. This means that character and imagination, as well as heart and hand, are developed together."

"Yesterday’s woman was expected to have individual interests, caring for the brightness of the hearth fire and the comforts of the family group. Today she has inherited the community and the community’s welfare. Civics, religion and education have become her field of activity. She is homemaker and citizen."

"Horace Mann said that one former was worth a thousand reformers. And if you are going to keep justice and liberty alive, you lawyers, we teachers will try to become what we were meant to be, the formers of the character of our citizens."

"Let us not forget that the future includes more women in the ministry than we have ever known before."

"Today in a land where all women inherit civic responsibility, where professions and business are open to all comers without distinction of sex, leadership through direct influence is woman’s unchallenged heritage."

"The future of our country depends on our educational institutions. They will be kept democratic."

"Bottom trawls—large bag-shaped nets towed over the sea floor—account for more of the world's catch of fish, shrimp, squid, and other marine animals than any other fishing method. But trawling also disturbs the sea floor more than any other human activity, with increasingly devastating consequences for the world's fish population."

"Most of the oxygen we breathe is made by ocean plankton. And when animals left the seas in which life arose, they took seawater with them, in their bodies — an internal environment crucial for cellular survival. We are, in a sense, soft vessels of seawater."

"The bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) is a creature of superlatives. Growing to 1500 pounds (700 kilos), traveling on transoceanic migrations, and reputedly capable of swimming 50 miles (90 km) per hour, it is one of the largest, most wide-ranging, and fastest of animals. To anyone who has seen this saber-finned giant explode through the surface of the sea, it is among the most magnificent."

"A couple of years ago I was participating as a writing coach in a "sea-mester," sailing 1,000 miles from Hawaii to , while students from Stanford University received lectures and closely supervised instruction and conducted independent projects on high-tech oceanography. These were smart kids, and the professors were superb. Five hundred miles from land, we got into a discussion on whether the ocean is a "wilderness." The consensus: Obviously it is; there was no sign of humanity, not another boat in sight. Everyone savored the thought: wilderness! But, I reminded everyone, we haven't caught a single or seen a or a . Wilderness? I don't think so. If the were covered with water, you wouldn't see that the buffalo were gone, either. There is no ocean wilderness. The whole ocean feels our effects, through fishing, pollution, dying s, , immortal plastics, oxygen-asphyxiated s, , and ."

"When two sympatric, closely related species appear to have very similar needs, we may ask whether mechanisms exist that enable them to avoid direct competition. Implicit in this questions the presumption that two species with identical requirements cannot coexist (Gause 1934)."

"From the happy-go-lucky days of oil exploration and drilling, when a lot of easy sources were being found and easily managed, we're gotten ourselves into this sort of apocalyptic time. We're willing to destroy almost everything, risk almost anything, and go ahead with techniques for which we have no way of responding to the known problems. And that is truly an addiction in the real sense of the word, an addiction by which people destroy their own bodies to continue to have a supply of something that is killing them."

"... I haven’t wanted to write the same book over and over again, so I’ve gone back to what was really my earliest interest, which is what other animals do and why do they do it. My upcoming book, “Alfie and Me,” is also much more about the human relationship with the rest of life on Earth, why it’s the way it is for us now, and how it was in other cultures, in other times. And it’s really about what kind of relationship with the world we can have when we blur the usual boundary between us and other species. The narrative story is wrapped around a little baby that was near death that somebody found on their lawn and was brought to us, and whom we raised. She decided to stay around our property and to get a wild mate, and to raise young in a that I put up on the outside wall of my studio."

"It’s always healthy to recognize facts."

"While not a panacea, candidly recognizing the absence of any good logical arguments for God’s existence, giving up on divine allies and advocates as well as taskmasters and tormentors, and prizing a humane, reasonable, and brave outlook just might help move this world a bit closer to a heaven on earth."

"The whole weight of science is the prima facie evidence against a miracle having occurred."

"It’s become somewhat fashionable to say that religion and science are growing together and are no longer incompatible. This convergence is, in my opinion, illusory. In fact, I don’t believe that any attempt to combine these very disparate bodies of ideas can succeed intellectually."

"Confirmation of a person’s unreliable statement by another unreliable person makes the statement even less reliable."

"The universe acts on us, we adapt to it, and the notions that we develop as a result, including the mathematical ones, are in a sense taught us by the universe. Evolution has selected those of our ancestors (both human and not) whose behavior and thought were consistent with the workings of the universe."

"The connections among morality, prudence, and religion are complicated and beyond my concerns here. I would like to counter, however, the claim regularly made by religious people that atheists and agnostics are somehow less moral or law-abiding than they. There is absolutely no evidence for this, and I suspect whatever average distance there is along the nebulous dimension of morality has the opposite algebraic sign."

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

"Define God in a sufficiently nebulous way as beauty, love, mysterious complexity, or the ethereal taste of strawberry shortcake, and most atheists become theists. Still, although one can pose as Humpty Dumpty and aver, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less,” others needn’t play along."

"There is a fine line between public expressions of faith and aggressive declarations thereof, and religious tolerance is inversely proportional to the latter."

"Gullible citizens are a demagogue’s dream."

"Rigid distinctions between the deep and the shallow are generally themselves quite superficial."

"Always be smart; seldom be certain."

"I’ve argued that the set of standard questions journalists ask and readers want answers should be enlarged. Besides Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How, it should include How many? How likely? What fraction? How does the quantity compare with other quantities? What is its rate of growth, and how does that compare? What about the self-referential aspects of the story? Is there an appropriate degree of complexity in it? Are we looking at the right categories and relations? How much of the story is independent of its reporting? Are we especially vulnerable to the availability error or to anchoring effects? If statistics are presented, how were they obtained? How confident can we be of them? Were they derived from a random sample or from a collection of anecdotes? Does the correlation suggest a causal relationship, or is it merely a coincidence? And do we understand how the people and various pieces of an organization reported upon are connected? What is known about the dynamics of the whole system? Are they stable or do they seem sensitive to tiny perturbations? Are there other ways to tally any figures presented? Do such figures measure what they purport to measure? Is the precision recounted meaningful?"

"The fashion pages have always puzzled me. In my smugly ignorant view, the articles appear to be so full of fluff and nonsense as to make the astrology columns seem insightful by comparison."

"For the record, natural selection is a highly nonrandom process that acts on the genetic variation produced by random mutation and genetic drift and results in those organisms with more adaptive traits differentially surviving and reproducing."

"You would think that the obvious irreligious objection would come to almost anyone’s mind when reading a religious tome or holy book. What if you don’t believe the holy book’s presuppositions and narrative claims and simply ask for independent argument or evidence for God’s existence? What if you’re not persuaded by the argument that God exists because His assertion that He exists and discussion of His various exploits appear in this book about Him that believers say He inspired?"

"Almost any bunkum has some partial validity, and we regularly read into the confusing mess what we want to see."

"There are, of course, innumerable abuses, countless possible misinterpretations, and depressingly many biased studies, but, done right, the process works; it yields knowledge."

"Claiming that a holy book’s claims are undeniable because the book itself claims them to be is convincing only to the convinced."

"You can only predict things after they’ve happened."

"Our two most basic political ideals—liberty and equality—are, in their purest forms, incompatible. Complete liberty results in inequality, and mandatory equality leads to a loss of liberty."

"It’s time to let the secret out: mathematics is not primarily a matter of plugging numbers into formulas and performing rote computations. It is a way of thinking and questioning that may be unfamiliar to many of us, but is available to almost all of us."

"Having been involved in a couple of lawsuits as an expert probability witness and having observed that a prudent skepticism is often less prized than an indefensible certainty, I turned down preliminary requests from both sides to testify."

"There is no such thing as free lunch, and even if there were, there’d be no guarantee against indigestion."

"Correlation and causation are two quite different words, and the innumerate are more prone to mistake them than most."

"If we’re not keenly aware of the choices we’re making, we’re not likely to work for better ones."