scientists-from-the-united-states

"Those of us who have witnessed the marvellous development of the great motion picture industry, who have perhaps played in our childhood with the strangely named toys, which produced the crude effects of movement of a few printed figures on a short strip of paper, have lived through the most astonishing drama of all that the moving picture world has produced. Its own development to one of the principal industries of the world is a great romance. It is a romance told by thousands of films all over the civilized world; every film is a short chapter in the great story."

"It is assumed in this work that cognitive processes are carried out in two distinct ‘levels’ with qualitatively different mechanisms. Each level encodes a fairly complete set of knowledge for its processing, and the coverage of the two sets of knowledge encoded by the two levels overlaps substantially."

"One point I considered was how much I make from each sale. Even though I drastically cut the list price, I actually make more per book than I did when the book was sold through the publisher. I did a lot of research into which self-publishing house to use to find one where the royalty model fit my sales model."

"I always knew that it was possible to buy back rights. When I decided to request the rights back, I did a lot of online reading to be sure I understood the ins and outs."

"It thus seems necessary that we come up with more nuanced and more detailed characterizations of the two systems (the two types of processes) in order to avoid painting the picture in too broad strokes."

"The first thing to do is to self-educate. Second, consider hiring a lawyer. I did, but things went so smoothly that I didn’t need one. Third, ask for your rights back. I had expected [McGraw-Hill] to ask for many thousands for the rights based on my calculations of their profits for the next five years."

"When The Mechanical Design Process was first introduced in 1992, I insisted that it be priced at less than $50. I felt this was a fair price for a university text on the topic. McGraw-Hill, the publisher, agreed and released it at $49. Over the years, McGraw-Hill steadily raised the price over my protests."

"Toward developing a more fine-grained and more comprehensive framework, I will adopt the more generic but less loaded terms of implicit and explicit processes (Reber, 1989, Sun, 2002) and present a more nuanced view of these processes, centered on a computational “cognitive architecture”."

"With my book, most sales are through university book stores with some coming through online sales. I found a self-publisher who would give me the most for these outlets (Ingram Spark). I do not expect any sales through brick and mortar book stores."

"The distinction between “intuitive” and “reflective” thinking has been, arguably, one of the most important distinctions in cognitive science. There are currently many dual-process theories (two-system views) out there."

"Imprecise language and buzzwords govern the computing ecosystem. I coined the term HTC in the mid-nineties in order to differentiate it from traditional High Performance Computing, known to many as supercomputers."

"There are two Nobel Prize discoveries whose computation system was powered by HTCondor––the Higgs Boson in 2012 and then recently detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO collaboration. So I am always joking, I’m looking for the triple crown. But I can’t say that they’re more important or challenging than other works of science powered by HTCondor."

"What I’m doing today is anchored in my PhD work in the late 1970s. I always joke that I’ve been working on the same problem for over 40 years and it’s still not done! My thesis was on load balancing and distributed systems."

"We now share HTC capabilities across more than 125 institutions. And that brought with it many complications, not only in terms of volume of users, but also in diversity of science domains, types of institutions and politics. I always listed sociology as the top obstacle to high throughput computing and we have our fair share in the Open Science Grid."

"But the personal angle is that we always saw what we are doing as expanding from the desktop to the world. And that’s how we went from the campus to nation-wide and beyond."

"I was always fascinated by the simple problem that you have a quest for work sitting and waiting in one place and a resource capable and willing to serve it is idling in another place. How do you bring them together? It turns out it’s an unsolvable problem so I can work for 40 more years."

"No other theory of natural language processing can better explain or reproduce the results within our territory. You don't need a complex theory of learning, neural nets, or cognitive models to explain how to chat within the limits of A.L.I.C.E.'s 25,000 categories. Our stimulus-response model is as good a theory as any other for these cases, and certainly the simplest."

"Like many of our colleagues at the time we espoused a "minimalist" design philosophy based on cheap sensors and simple stimulus-response algorithms, rather than complex and costly processing."

"These thoughts remained dormant through the first half of the 1990s, when I struggled to establish myself as a robotics and computer vision professor at NYU and Lehigh Universities. In a very real sense A.L.I.C.E. was born from the frustration of those experiences, and the realization that much of my own job as a professor was "robotic" responses to frequently asked questions."

"I was working at a startup in New York City called Vision Applications, Inc. We were entirely funded by a Department of Defense contract to produce a miniature active vision system. My specialty at the time was computer vision and robotics."

"Our thoughts were far away from natural language processing. We were, however, deeply concerned with issues of cost and robot design."

"The concept of deception is layered like an onion. We can peel off one level and write programs like ELIZA that fool some of the people some of the time, and then peel off another layer and write a program like A.L.I.C.E. that (apparently) fools more of the people more of the time. The evidence suggests that we should take a serious look at the role of deception in AI."

"So if we want people to engage emotionally with robots, or avatars (or any other kind of character that is rigged up to an NLP system), we need to consider using body language as part of that system. We humans are hardwired that way."

"Videos do an excellent job of conveying the importance of body language. A great video to watch is The History Channel’s Secrets of Body Language."

"As designers of robots (or avatars) we need to consider these statistics and consider how to integrate body language into natural language communication. Therefor Geppetto Labs has built a platform to automatically generate body language and coordinate it with what a robot (or avatar) is saying."

"Body language makes up about 40% of natural language: This can be automatically generated."

"‘We don’t really believe that computers can have emotions, but we see that emotions have a certain function in human practical reasoning,’ says Mehdi Dastani, an artificial-intelligence researcher at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. By bestowing intelligent agents with similar emotions, researchers hope that robots can then emulate this human-like reasoning."

"Realizing that I didn’t belong has probably fostered my lifelong ability to not be concerned about those who attack me for being independent,” “I follow my own calling.”"

"The works have delighted, angered, provoked, and terrified those who have heard them. I do not believe that the composers and audiences of the future will have the same reactions. Ultimately, the computer is just a tool with which we extend our minds."

"“I remember thinking, ‘I’m not a white person and I’m not an Indian. What am I? Even at that young age, it somehow freed me from following cultural stereotypes. I was me, and it felt very good."

"I see no reason why computer-created music cannot move us to tears, find roots in our cultures...as much as any music composed in more traditional ways. As heretical to some as these thoughts may be, I believe them profoundly."

"I felt strongly that the work was worth something,” “I don’t worry about what people think of me.”"

"Every limitation we place on the potential of machines is a limitation we indirectly place on ourselves."

"Scientists in the Netherlands are endowing a robotic cat with a set of logical rules for emotions. They believe that by introducing emotional variables to the decision-making process, they should be able to create more-natural human and computer interactions."

"Dastani’s emotional functions have been derived from a psychological model known as the OCC model, devised in 1988 by a trio of psychologists: Andrew Ortony and Allan Collins, of Northwestern University, and Gerald Clore, of the University of Virginia. ‘Different psychologists have come up with different sets of emotions,’ says Dastani. But his group decided to use this particular model because it specified emotions in terms of objects, actions, and events.”"

"It made me appreciate what humans were capable of."

"Creativity does not originate from a vacuum."

"Basic to a free society is the belief in a golden rule. Just as you feel you have the right to your opinion, you must feel that everyone else, in turn has a right to his."

"Education is, however, an extremely interesting and complex institution provided because society has discovered that, if it is to preserve itself and advance, it must spare the time and the people necessary to provide our young people with an understanding of their heritage. But education doesn't take place within institutions. It takes place only within individuals. It is something we cannot buy. It is something that records in the registrar's office do not measure."

"We can all join that most worthwhile of all wars—the fight for tolerance, the fight for wisdom, the fight for freedom. Above all else, continue to develop your tastes—material and spiritual—so that you may learn to choose the best values from life's many alternatives."

"If any one thread runs through the UVM story, it is the continual belief that higher education should be pre-occupied with the progress of mankind."

"Biologists, or rather botanists and zoologists, studied flora and fauna in exhaustive detail, in niches, in situ, penetrating the mysteries of their local habitations, measuring them, counting them, tracking cycles, writing all this down in the equivalent of field guides, and developing the ability to predict many natural phenomena, including phenomena of change: if frost falls, the bud is harmed; if the soil is enriched, growth improves, and so on. The world of life forms was a text whose meaning the biologist interpreted. But these interpretations did not explain and were not meant to explain the biological processes according to which these species could exist in the first place, or descend, or develop, or differ. To explain these more basic issues required the theory of evolution, which, once it was available, became an indispensable instrument in the professional study of local, narrowly coordinated, in situ life forms and the niches they inhabit."

"In 1895 the writer became interested in the study of the . Breeding-cage experiments with some detail later on in this paper early convinced him that is the favorite food of this species. Even in the presence of kitchen garbage, , and , flies in confinement oviposited exclusively on horse manure. In the absence of the latter substance but in the presence of the others, he noted egg-laying on decaying fruit and on cow dung but the resultant larvæ failed to develop. He considered himself warranted in the statement that probably 95 percent of the flies found in cities come from the piles of horse manure everywhere so prevalent, especially in the vicinity of stables."

"The following catalogue is intended to include all the now known to inhabit the that are not included in 's edition of 's Invertebrata of Massachusetts, published in 1870. In the "New England Region" I include, on the north, the coasts of Nova Scotia and , and their outlying banks; while on the south, I include the entire region, about 100 to 120 miles wide, between the shore and the , off the southern coast of New England, and embracing all depths down to 600 s. ... I have also included the free-swimming and floating forms, ordinarily inhabiting the same region, which may be considered as meeting and including the innermost edge of the Gulf Stream in summer, but most of these surface forms are usually to be found, in summer, far inside the actual limits of the Gulf Stream. The and the northern parts of the I have considered as extra-limital, for my present purposes. Those localities are inhabited by an extremely , including many species of mollusca that have not yet been found farther south. Among these are several species of ' and allied genera."

"On the first trip of the from , which was made July 16 to 19, four successful hauls were made with a large trawl, in 1,346 to 1,735 s, on the 17th and 18th of July, two each day, besides the soundings and temperature determinations, including series of temperatures at various distances from the surface. On this trip about one hundred and five species of s were obtained, not including the and other minute forms. There were among them fourteen species of ; two of s; twenty-two of s; thirty-eight of ; fifteen of ; one of ; ten of ; one of ; two of s."

"The early literature of has, from very remote times, contained allusions to huge species of s, often accompanied by more or less fabulous and usually exaggerated descriptions of the creatures ... In a few instances figures were attempted which were largely indebted to the imagination of their authors for their more striking peculiarities. In recent times, many more accurate observers have confirmed the existence of such monsters, and several fragments have found their way into European museums. To and to , however, belongs the credit of first describing and figuring, in a scientific manner, a number of fragments sufficient to give some idea of the real character and affinities of these colossal species."

"Among these pioneer zoologists the name of Verrill stands out prominently because of the amount and accuracy of his contributions to our knowledge of s. More than a thousand species, including , were discovered and described by him, and their relationships to previously known forms were diagnosed with almost unerring accuracy and with a facility that amounted almost to genius. He was much more than systematic zoologist, however; he was a real naturalist in that he was always interested in the of the animals which he studied as well as the morphological characters which distinguished the species new to science. His work on the natural history of he marine invertebrates of southern New England was the first extensive ecological study of its kind in America, and his Vineyard Sound report (published in 1871) was the standard reference book for all students of the seashore life of the region for more than thirty years."

"was a resident of , and was greatly interested in the so-called of that city. The Institute had founded a museum that contained large collections in natural history brought home through the years by the famous Salem ships. Putnam induced his fellow students, , , , and to work at these collections, Morse on the shells, Packard on the , Hyatt on the s and on geology, and Putnam on the vertebrates and ethnology. Whether they went to Salem to live a year or so earlier or later, makes little difference, but, when gave the Institute $140,000 and the well known was founded in 1867, all of them but Verrill (who had gone to , were placed in definite charge of these subjects in the Museum."

"For many centuries humanity has endured the annoyance of mosquitoes without making any intelligent effort to prevent it except in the use of smudges, preparations applied to the skin, and in removal from localities of abundance. And it is only within comparatively recent years that widespread community work against mosquitoes has been undertaken, this having resulted almost directly from the discoveries concerning the carriage of disease by these insects. As obvious a procedure as it might seem to be, the abolition of mosquito-breeding places is a comparatively new idea. The treatment of breeding places with oil to destroy the larval forms is, however, by no means recent. As early as 1812 the writer of a work published in London entitled "Omniana or Horæ Otiosiores" suggested that by pouring oil upon water the number of mosquitoes may be diminished. It is stated that in the middle of the nineteenth century was used in France in this way, while in the French quarter in oil was placed in water tanks before the , the idea having possibly come France to New Orleans or vice versa."

"As is well known, the mosquito-pest is by no means confined to the tropics or even to temperate regions. The stories which the from and other Alaskan localities tell of the abundance and ferocity of Alaskan mosquitoes, are hardly to be matched by any mosquito story which I have heard, historical or otherwise. Many of my friends in the and the who have formed members of summer parties for survey work in Alaska, have come back to this country with a much stronger idea of the importance of the practical study of insects than they had when they started, their acquaintance with mosquitoes having become so intimate and their knowledge of their ferocity having reached such a pitch that the first question which they ask on returning is: "If I have to go up there next summer, what under the sun can I do to keep from being bled to death by mosquitoes?" They state that they never experienced or even imagined anything in the mosquito line quite equal to those found in Alaska. Mr. W. C. Henderson, of Philadelphia, says, concerning Alaskan mosquitoes, "They existed in countless millions, driving us to the verge of suicide or insanity.""