people-from-albuquerque

"I liked the way they looked. They were easy to work with my hands. The drawings turned into these magical things."

"“I want my children to be happy. I want them to find their own purpose in life rather than fall into a life that’s already set up for them"

"I had this internal need to be a healer. My mom was ill a lot when I was a kid. When she got cancer, I became interested in the progression of the disease and how she was being treated,"

"I’m in a position where I don’t have to be labeled… I don’t have to call myself an Indian artist to sell my work, and I decided that it was more to my advantage not to label myself as a particular kind of artist, based solely on my genealogy… now I know that I can be part of something, part of that lineage, without being defined by it."

"My grandmother, my mother, and me, each one of us progressed into our own work, “I take a great deal of pride in being different from my family. Yet I know my mother would absolutely love my work. As a woman, I think she’d be very proud that I’ve chosen to do things in my own style.”"

"I don’t like to feel like I have to stay within a certain style. I like to see things progress and turn into other things. I’m all about adventure."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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..."

"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.”"

"I am much more articulate and able to express myself more eloquently through my art…It is with this voice that I attempt to communicate, reach out and touch others."

"I also got exposed to the poets that were being read at the colleges at that time. The only poetry I had remembered before that time were those horrible, long Longfellow-type things que nos hacían leer in high school [that they made us read in high school]. So I was turned off. But . . . one vato [guy] that I read was doing something that was exciting to me because he seemed to do it with a facility that I could relate to somehow . . . that was Walt Whitman. Me caiba su poesía [I dug his poetry] so I went with his trip for a long time. By then I was also starting to read T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and the Welshman Dylan Thomas. Y me fui prendiendo con esos vatos [and I got attached to those guys]. And the other vato that I really dug a lot around that same time was William Carlos Williams. I also thought he was getting away with something. And I thought all these guys were getting away with something I was being told not to do. Por eso los veía como rebels a ellos. [That's why I saw them as rebels.] How could they get away with it and I get put down for trying it."

"I remember Richard broke a wooden box to use one of the pieces as a ruler and he was trying to figure out how to best create the image of the eagle…He noticed the detailed work of the eagle on the American dollar bill and the one on the Mexican flag and he wanted something similar but nothing was coming out right. So, he created a simple black one that was still powerful in its own right. I never thought it would still be around today in its true and original form."

"I see their role as the same as ever; the artist is to give voice to the issues that are given to us in a confused manner, so that people can understand the role that they must play…I think the role of the cultural worker is to define those things we receive from those that are in power, and give it back to the community, presented it in a more clear way."

"I remember sometimes growing up I would feel ashamed of my mom or my dad if they came to pick us up at school, because they never looked like all the other mothers and fathers; they were always dirty because they had been out in the fields, drove in to pick us up at 3:00 so we could go to work…So I remember when I heard Chávez speak, when I saw him on television, I remember thinking that my mom and dad had actually contributed to the wealth of this country and I shouldn’t feel embarrassed by them or feel bad for them."

"Realizing later that it was not by choice that we remained mute but by a conscious effort on the part of those in power, I realized that my art could only be that of protest—a protest against what I felt to be a death sentence."

"Putting a low price on valuable environmental resources is a phenomenon that pervades modern society. Agricultural water is not scarce in California; it is underpriced. Flights are stacked up on runways because takeoffs and landings are underpriced. People wait for hours in traffic jams because road use is unpriced. People die premature deaths from small sulfur particles in the air because air pollution is underpriced. And the most perilous of all environmental problems, climate change, is taking place because virtually every country puts a price of zero on carbon dioxide emissions."

"When I talk to people about how to design a carbon price, I think the model is British Columbia. You raise electricity prices by $100 a year, but then the government gives back a dividend that lowers internet prices by $100 year. In real terms, you’re raising the price of carbon goods but lowering the prices of non-carbon-intensive goods."

"My own view is that there basically is no alternative to a market solution. The reason is, if you look around, who are we talking about that’s going to solve the problem: it’s you and me. There are billions of individuals, millions of firms, thousands of governments, hundreds of nations, and for them to take action, they’re going to have to have incentives. The kind of incentives we’re talking about; they’re not speeches - we can sermonize all day - but the incentives of market prices. [This requires us to] raise the prices of goods and services that are carbon intensive, and to lower the ones that are less carbon intensive."

"We have to be grown-ups, I think [when discussing the payment of funds today to prevent climate harm which may be decades in the future]. There are lots of things we do where the investments come way, way in the future. Educating 4-year-olds . . . that's an investment that goes way into the future as well."

"In the mid-1990s, [Nordhaus] became the first person to create an integrated assessment model, i.e. a quantitative model that describes the global interplay between the economy and the climate. His model integrates theories and empirical results from physics, chemistry and economics. Nordhaus’ model is now widely spread and is used to simulate how the economy and the climate co-evolve."

"Carbon prices must be raised to transmit the social costs of GHG emissions to the everyday decisions of billions of firms and people."

"We’re building what’s called a private cloud for them [the C.I.A.], … because they don’t want to be on the public cloud."

"That kind of divine discontent comes from observing customers and noticing that things can always be better."

"You gotta earn your keep in this world. When you invent something new, if customers come to the party, it’s disruptive to the old way."

"If you absolutely can't tolerate critics, then don't do anything new or interesting."

"We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient. If you replace ‘customer’ with ‘reader,’ that approach, that point of view, can be successful at The Post, too.."

"Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out ways for teams to communicate less with each other, not more."

"It is as if Bezos charted the company’s growth by first drawing a map of antitrust laws, and then devising routes to smoothly bypass them."

"Bezos is a serial innovator: with Amazon, he changed the way the retail industry works; and now he’s applying that same spark of creativity to media, with his ownership of the Washington Post and the founding of Amazon Studios. Still, for me it is his zeal for helping humanity return to the moon, settle Mars and reach destinations beyond that is the most thrilling."

"In my view, it is totally absurd for the taxpayers of this country to have to subsidize people like Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the wealthiest person in the world, worth over $150 billion. He should be paying all his employees a living wage, and a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage would be a step in the right direction toward making that happen."

"Jeff Bezos is filthy rich. The richest man in the world has a net worth of $170 billion. His wealth becomes all the more astonishing when you break it down. Bezos earns $2500 a second. That works out at $150,000 a minute. Every hour, he becomes a millionaire nine times over. If Jeff Bezos were a country, he would be the 54th wealthiest country in the world. His title as the world’s richest person means he’s revered as a great capitalist, entrepreneurial success story... Rather than helping to solve world hunger, the fortune of people like Bezos is the very reason millions go hungry. Extreme wealth inequality means a few live in unbelievable splendour, while millions live in dire squalor. This is a shocking state of affairs, yet our society celebrates it... A consumer-centric society is a world of extremes, where a few have too much, and too many have nothing at all. Imagine if Bezos started questioning a system of extremes that makes him so wealthy at the expense of so many. He could go down in history as the man that catalysed a transformation of society. His wealth buys him the power to exert extraordinary influence. And yet, the appalling working conditions in Amazon hint at the fact Bezos has one goal in mind, to become richer."

"Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, whose corporation Amazon paid no federal taxes last year, alone added $34.6 billion to his personal wealth since started."

"Activists have also noted that Bezos is much less philanthropic than many of his peers. Among America’s top five billionaires, he is the only one who has not signed the Giving Pledge—a program, created by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, that encourages the world’s wealthiest citizens to give away at least half their wealth."

"What J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were to the Age of Robber Barons, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett, as well as digital moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are to the contemporary age of the rule of the 1%. Then as now, the super-rich used governments to write laws and rules to allow them to accumulate unlimited wealth; then as now, creating monopolies by enclosing the commons and killing competition is the strategy for becoming the 1%."

"In January, Jeff Bezos announced that he would donate $33 million to help 1000 people go to college. This week, shortly after Amazon posted a $2 billion quarterly profit to end 2017, his company announced hundreds of layoffs at its headquarters. Meanwhile the 20 finalist cities for Amazon HQ2 are working feverishly to put together the most lavish package of taxpayer-funded subsidies. It’s great that Mr. Bezos wants to help 1,000 Dreamers – immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children – to attend college. But just imagine how many people he could help if Amazon paid taxes, wasn’t focused obsessively on replacing workers with automation, didn’t employ hundreds of thousands of temps who are paid low wages and receive no benefits, and declined to engage in reality TV-style “contests” to find out which state and local governments will succumb to desperation and give his very, very profitable company billions of dollars that might otherwise be spent on things like… education, for one."

"Think migrant farmworkers have it bad? Talk to anyone who works in an Amazon fulfillment center, where every step an employee takes is tracked electronically by management; fail to account for a five-minute period and you’re punished. No textile mill ever dehumanized its workers more thoroughly. Yet when was the last time you heard a liberal criticize working conditions at Amazon? You won’t. Amazon is the future. Jeff Bezos supported Hillary for president. So did virtually all the most successful CEOs. Amazingly, liberals support them back. The distinction between successful businessman and progressive political activist gets blurrier by the day."

"We’ve now reached stratospheric inequality. Billionaires burning into space, away from a world of pandemic, climate change and starvation. 11 people are likely now dying of hunger each minute while Bezos prepares for an 11-minute personal space flight. This is human folly, not human achievement. The ultra-rich are being propped up by unfair tax systems and pitiful labor protections. US billionaires got around $1.8 trillion richer since the beginning of the pandemic and nine new billionaires were created by Big Pharma’s monopoly on the COVID-19 vaccines. Bezos pays next to no US income tax but can spend $7.5 billion on his own aerospace adventure. Bezos' fortune has almost doubled during the COVID-19 pandemic. He could afford to pay for everyone on Earth to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and still be richer than he was when the pandemic began."

"The three most prominent US newspapers haven’t run a critical investigative piece on Jeff Bezos’ company Amazon in almost two years, a FAIR survey finds. A review of 190 articles from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the Bezos-owned Washington Post over the past year paints a picture of almost uniformly uncritical–ofttimes boosterish–coverage. None of the articles were investigative exposes, 6 percent leaned negative, 54 percent were straight reporting or neutral in tone, and 40 percent were positive, mostly with a fawning or even press release–like tone."

"The executive director of the World Food Program is calling for the world’s billionaires to step up and help his organization fight hunger... David Beasley said he was supportive of capitalism but added that capitalism without a heart is a disaster. He said that the COVID-19 pandemic and the related government-mandated shutdowns to slow the spread of the virus caused over 100 million people to be on the brink of starvation worldwide... “I need an additional $6 billion this year to reach the 41 million ... that are knocking on famine’s door,” Beasley continued... He specifically mentioned Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and said that he needed just 10% of the $64 billion Bezos’s wealth grew by last year to fund the food program"

"Jeff Bezos is getting rich not because of the profits of Amazon, but because of the increase of the share price. You’ve heard that he made what, $60 billion since the beginning of the pandemic? That’s not because of the profits of Amazon... The actual profits are nothing like that. It’s maybe one billion altogether, but he made 60! From the share price."

"Beasley pointed toward Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the two richest people in the world, who could each individually help those in these situations with a small chunk of their overall change. Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has a net worth of $151 billion, according to Forbes, with his wealth increasing by more than 500% from January 2020 to March this year. Meanwhile, Amazon CEO Bezos has a net worth of $177 billion. And their net worth is still growing. The week of October 11, Musk's net wealth increased by $12.7 billion due to Tesla stock gains, according to Forbes, and in just one day, on October 15, Bezos' generated $5.6 billion from Amazon stock. When news broke that Musk may have beat Bezos for the richest person title, he tweeted at Bezos a silver second place medal emoji. Meanwhile, Beasley told CNN that millions of others are in a "heartbreaking" situation as they're "knocking on famine's door.""

"Jeff Bezos has more words for the Queen than the workers who have died in his warehouses"

"The governments are tapped out. This is why and this is when ... the billionaires need to step up now on a one-time basis, $6 billion to help 42 million people that are literally going to die if we don't reach them. It's not complicated... I'm not asking them to do this every day, every week, every year... We have a one-time crisis: a perfect storm of conflict, climate change and COVID. ...Just help me with them one time... The world's in trouble and you're telling me you can't give me .36% of your net worth increase to help the world in trouble, in times like this?... What if it was your daughter starving to death? What if it was your family starving to death? Wake up, smell the coffee, and help... My god, people are dying out there... We have a vaccine for this. It's called money, food."

"Bezos and Musk now own more wealth than the bottom 40%. Meanwhile, we're looking at more hunger in America than at any time in decades...If he was with us this morning, I would ask him the following question ... Mr. Bezos, you are worth $182 billion — that's a B. One hundred eighty-two billion dollars, you're the wealthiest person in the world. Why are you doing everything in your power to stop your workers in Bessemer, Alabama, from joining a union?... Jeff Bezos has become $77 billion richer during this horrific pandemic, while denying hundreds of thousands of workers who work at Amazon paid sick leave."