people-from-buffalo

"The thing that stands out in my mind is the professor showing us pictures of various shapes such as triangles and squares, pointing out how easy it was for us to distinguish them, but then asserting that nobody knew how to write a computer program to do so (to date myself, this must have been the mid ’80s). I had already started programming computers, but this got me interested in the concept of modeling intelligence with computers."

"I’m made proud over and over again by the achievements of my students and postdocs. I’ve been very fortunate to work with a phenomenal group of individuals, both technically and personally. Nothing makes me happier than seeing each succeed in his or her own way, and to think that I played some small role in it."

"Reinforcement learning has been a relatively “niche” area of AI since I became interested in it my first year of graduate school. But with recent advances, I became convinced that now was the time to move to the next level and work on problems that are only possible to attack in a commercial setting."

"There’s no one right answer,said Howe. I have lots of friends who are incredibly talented from business school who have made very different choices, and they were right for them. For me, this has been absolutely the right decision"

"Learning how to position a company for further growth and regulatory change has also come with the challenge of learning how to prioritise different strategies - and more importantly deciding what areas of business do not require time, energy or resources"

"There’s a lot of focus on the path to profitability while also gaining share and driving growth in the market. So scalability becomes really paramount for success as we think about the longevity of our business model, as well as the success of the industry as a whole"

"It is also an industry that is going through huge growth. So the ability to come in and understand how you structure your organisation and create a culture for massive change and growth was one of the biggest learnings that was very applicable"

"I don’t even love the term [‘work-life balance’] because it implies that on any given day or week, that you have to have perfect balance"

"At some point, if you’re going to do anything other than consulting, you’ve got to move over"

"I always say, life is too short. If you don't trust and respect the people you're working with, there's lots of other places to work, right? That mantra has always been a prerequisite for me"

"I had a feeling that I was going to love being in an operating role. … The old adage that when you’re in consulting, you tell people what to do, but you don’t really get a chance to implement your own recommendations is true"

"What I’ve come to realize over time is it’s a long game. There are times in your life that you’re not going to have balance, and that’s okay. I’ve made some very conscious choices not to"

"There is still quite a bit of runway ahead of us. If you break that down into its different components, there's still quite a bit of momentum in the sports betting space"

"When we think about bonuses and player incentives, it’s very easy to get caught up in what the market is doing. But we look at our numbers and we know what numbers pay off. I think that has been one of the key drivers of our success and our ability to actually hit profitability perhaps sooner than some of our competitors have done"

"And then, after a certain period of time, for me, my barometer was, ‘Is this working for me, right, am I still having fun, am I still developing and learning, and how is that impacting my family life"

"So if you look at our economics of how we bring users onto the platform, they're significantly advantaged relative to the rest of the field. But I think perhaps equally, if not more important, is our product advantage"

"I think that as a leader of the largest sports betting company in America, it is my job to help consumers keep betting entertaining"

"I think one of the most pivotal things I took from my previous roles is how you position an organisation for massive growth or change. You could argue that what Ticketmaster was going through is very similar to what sports betting is going through now - it’s an industry that is being disrupted by digital technology"

"I made partner when I found out I was pregnant with my first child — and those are two points in your life that if you think you can control either of those, you’re kidding yourself"

"Cook’s theory has a special meaning to mathematical logic since Cook’s theory can be viewed as a branch of recursion theory. Freeman Dyson wrote a fantastic article in the 1980s, which recorded the story of how Gödel insisted on his “Unfashionable pursuits” in logic. In fact, when (computer science) people were talking about the unfairness of the late appointment of professorship to Gödel in the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Stephen Cook reinstated the dignity of mathematical logic."

"For many listeners and admirers, Hall's burnished tone and understated approach connote the sonic equivelant of watercolors, haiku, or gentle poetic lyrics. Known as much for the notes he doesn't play, Hall is a complete original. That delicate, sensitive style, with its exquisite note choices, introspective moods, and disciplined restraint, has been his calling card and lasting legacy as generations of ostentatious technicians have come and gone through the turn of history."

"A harmonically advanced cool-toned and subtle guitarist, Jim Hall was an inspiration to many guitarists, including some (such as Bill Frisell) who sound nothing like him."

"The kids in Europe were disappointed about [Bob Rusay's departure], 'cause [they were like], 'What happened to Bob?! He was the brutal-ist!' So I kind of had my work cut out for me, you know?"

"[Lyrical possibilities within death metal are] endless, you know. The limits are just.. [nonexistent]. There's all [kinds of] new ways to talk about maming and killing and torturing."

"We do not mind writing hooks, as long as they are super heavy hooks, you know what I mean? We want the songs to be memorable, as long as there is no sacrifice in the level of heaviness. [...] And those two things should not have to be exclusive. I think you can have really catchy things that are all really heavy. I mean if we can manage to write some lyrics that are going to make you want to remember them and sing along to them each time they come around, then mission accomplished I think right?"

"I couldn’t hear the bass in a lot of the thrash [metal] I was listening to. It seemed like the bass was doing exactly what the rhythm guitar was doing, so that’s what I tried to do. I think that shaped my righthand technique, having to learn how to play the really fast stuff with three fingers. I didn’t realize a lot of these guys were cutting things in half [playing half the notes] or doing something a little different. I’ve always played fingerstyle since we got Cannibal going, just trying to keep up with the guitar players. In thrash, there’s not as much of a bass–drummer connection as there is a bass–guitar connection—at least I didn’t see it that way in the beginning. [...] When I started, I played fingerstyle with two fingers, and not very fast. I could get going to a respectable speed, but not something crazy like Jeff Berlin or Juan Alderete. But then we did a show with Cynic and Malevolent Creation. Cynic’s bass player, Tony Choy, played with three fingers, and Malevolent Creation’s bassist plucked with four. I said, “I have to be able to keep up, and I’m not going to use a pick. I have to be able to figure out how to do it with my fingers. [...] Around that same time, I was listening to Sadus a lot, which is the band that Steve DiGiorgio originally came from. I could tell the bass was played fingerstyle, and it was really fast. I managed to track down Steve’s phone number, so I called him up and asked, “Dude, how do you do that?” He explained his technique, which was going from the ring finger to the middle to the index back to the middle—there’s your four notes. I was very grateful, and we’ve been friends ever since. I tried to learn that way and got it down, but as I would start to drift off in doing muscle-memory practice, my technique would start to fall into a different technique. That was the one that I described in the book, where it ends up being a 12-note cycle. You’re basically playing a triplet pattern, but it ends up feeling like straight 16th-notes. So Steve’s tip helped get me started, but I ended up developing my own thing."

"If you really saw someone get their brains bashed in right in front of you, I think it would have a pretty dramatic impact [...] you'd react to it, no matter how many movies you've watched or how much gore metal you've listened to [...] even though we've got crazy entertainment now, our social realities are actually a bit more civilized than they were back then [...] we're not hanging people or whipping them in the street and I think that's positive improvement for any society."

"His wife’s head breaks his jaw Bruised flesh becoming raw"

"With Cannibal Corpse, it’s always a ‘song first’ kind of thing for me. Some of the side projects I’ve done have allowed me to stretch out a little bit more [in terms of style], but Cannibal is really about being a big, heavy rhythm machine, and stepping out too much might detract from that."

"[Learning music theory] can spur your creativity. I’ve found that the guys who don’t know as much theory tend to write things in 4/4 most of the time. The guys who know theory are the ones who end up experimenting more and having music that sounds a little more out there, which I like. The more you know, the more you can mess around."

"Unless you’re an experimental metal band by nature, people don’t really want that experimentation, I don’t think. They want us to try and out-do what we’ve done – I don’t think people want us to stand still and put out the same album again and again but I think what they want is something stylistically consistent and hopefully even a little better than the last album. When bands go too far away from their style it’s generally not well received in the metal community. Consistency is a big part of our genre."

"The shed we rented smelled like rat shit and it was hotter than f–k. We had an air conditioner that didn’t do shit and we’d be totally soaked by the time we were done practicing. But we were determined."

"Awake, I’m being disembowelled Rotation pulling out the guts Tortured by this tool Intestines on the spool"

"This kind of music helps people get through negative things. I mean, you're taking something negative and turning it into something positive by making it into music -- instead of actually going out and doing something violent. There's plenty of ways to turn things around, and that is what death metal did for me. [...] It got me through alot of negative things in my life -- it was always there for me."

""Hacksaw Decapitation," ' (1999) as quoted by Jon Wiederhorn of"

"We saw that a lot of bands in Florida seemed to have more of a darker, anti-religion thing going on, so we decided to do the gore thing with the art and lyrics."

"The part is all on the C# string [E tuned down a minor 3rd], so it’s really easy to keep it going. Things get a little trickier when you start skipping strings. I didn’t think it was necessary for the part to make it harder than it needed to be, so I kept it all on the C# string so I could pedal along nicely. I kept it at a tempo where I can comfortably play 16th-notes, which is 172 beats per minute. It’s still fast, but once I start getting past 180 BPM, it gets tough."

"Alex has always been 100 percent tech, using his finger trying to get all five going. He was driven as a musician. I've never met anyone as driven as Alex when it comes to trying to learn an instrument. That's for real, man. He was always trying to outdo guys he thought were amazing. He pushed himself. On Tomb, Alex became more vocal, as far as being a songwriter and being involved in the recording process. He really got on Scott Burn's nerves. He wanted the bass turned up. Scott walked out of the room a couple of times. Alex was pushing Scott to the limit as far as how loud the bass should go. That went on into the next album, The Bleeding, too."

"People who don’t know this music think it’s just a bunch of noise and it’s really easy to play. That’s totally untrue. You may not like it, but death metal is really complex. You have to have a really fine-tuned ear to appreciate it and a lot of the guys in these bands are incredible musicians."

"I really look up to Alex when I’m mixing an album. I just love the way his bass sounds."

"It got to the point where it entered global politics. That's something I never imagined, and I never heard [Senator] actually say these words, but he said this about us: "[Cannibal Corpse] is deplorable. They have a song about having sex with a severed head." I wish I could have heard him say that shit. I'd love that sound bite."

"Even though we record to Pro Tools with a click track, I think we’ve learned how to use it in a way where everything still sounds organic. I feel like we managed to capture an old school death metal vibe. It doesn’t sound like one of those modern metal productions where everything is overly precise."

"Most Western music is people singing from the heart — singing to a girlfriend, so a lot of people are freaked out by our songs [...] But our lyrics are just stories. They’re just written to be as gross and disgusting as we could make them. At night we’d get a case of beer and watch gory horror movies. [...] We just play extreme music so we figured we needed extreme lyrics."

"Any time you're talking about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and of the ability to manufacture them, and you add to that unstable or aggressive states, and North Korea and Iran meet both of those definitions, then you've got a terrible problem on your hands. And so I can't think of any two bigger problems right now that the world is facing than those two."

"Some people are saying, 'Well, we're so competitive with China, we should end the economic relationship'. Well, the consequence of that would be 750,000 American families wouldn't be able to put dinner on the table."

"We certainly cannot trust the Chinese. Our responsibility is to make Taiwan a tough nut to crack."

"We ought not to exaggerate their [ China ] strengths or underestimate the strengths of the United States. What we need is self confidence that the United States is a strong country."

"My message to young people all over the world, and in the U.S., and Canada and China is engage with each other. If this is going to be the most important bilateral relationship in the world, and it is, if we are the two strongest powers, we’ve got to find a way to live together in peace. it would be insanity to think that we would allow this relationship to descend into conflict or war. We’re not going to do that. And so our people have to work together, study together, do business together. Learn Mandarin if you’re Canadian or Brit or German or American. If you’re Chinese, you study in the United States. Our door is open to Chinese students. We want Chinese students to walk through the door of our universities. I was a university professor, taught many, well over a hundred Chinese students in 12 years, and they’re great students."

"We have competing interests here, and balancing those interests is the reality in the U.S.-China relationship. We're going to compete. We have to compete responsibly and keep the peace between our countries. But we also have to engage."

"Well, I wish we lived in a world where I could sit down in front of Chinese CCTV and say what I wanted to and not have that edited or distorted by the state-controlled press. I mean, the reality is when you deal with the state-controlled press here, they often will completely fail to report any kind of constructive criticism, and they’ll only report when you say something positive. That’s not true of Chinese diplomats in the United States. They can write op-eds in the Washington Post, which nobody edits. And that’s part of the problem we face here."