All Quotes

"One of the reoccurring challenges I incur is that my stories don’t fit neatly into one category – there is too much social commentary for the romance genre and too much romance for general fiction. It makes marketing a challenge, as well as award nominations."

"Within the circle of friends, Kasey and Connie have the most stable relationship. My hope is to leave the reader with the sense that this couple has the tools to work through the challenges that long term relationships face."

"As have so many LGBT people, I formed a family of choice throughout the years – people who accepted and nurtured and loved me for who I am. During the writing of The Indelible Heart, I lost three of those people. There wasn’t enough time for me to recover from the grief of one loss before I was faced with another. The once solid ground beneath me was gone. And, at the same time that I was trying to get through my own grief, I was having to take Sharon back to hers. It has made this the most difficult book for me to write."

"That’s the dilemma the group of friends in The Indelible Heart had to face. And, as in our larger society, their opinions ran the gamut from indifference to merciful release to let him rot in hell. As I wrote, I found myself weighing and evaluating my own belief. As it turns out, I find myself leaning closer to Sharon’s ‘let him rot’ opinion, with a gentle nudge to force justice to take the hand of forgiveness."

"That balance has been a real struggle for me. And, balance truly is the key, I believe. It’s a fluid thing, something that changes as our lives change. There were times when I could expend time and energy on marches and rallies and petitions, and there were times when I needed to secure my personal place in the world. The truth, I’ve realized, is that it takes a community, recognizing its fluidity and maintaining its focus. It takes leaders. It takes everyone doing what they can. For me, for now, it means writing stories of palatable consciousness."

"In 1994 an amazing thing happened. The phone rings and it is Professor Sheila Widnall of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics of MIT. She said, "Do you know anyone who wants to be Chief Scientist of the Air Force? And by the way, if you are interested let me know." She had been chosen to be Secretary of the Air Force, and she was looking for her Chief Scientist. I thought about it briefly, told her yes, and stayed for three years."

"My job was to be a window on science for the Chief of Staff of the Air Force. I was the first person to be asked to be Chief Scientist who was not an Aero-Astro person, a weapons person, or from the physical sciences. There had not been any computer scientists before me."

"I did two big things. One was consciousness-raising in the Air Force about software. The one big report I wrote, at the end of my term, was a report called, It’s a Software-First World. The Air Force had not realized that. They probably still do not think that. They think it is an airframe-based world."

"The other was on software development. The military up to that point believed in, and could only imagine, a structured-programming top-down world. You set up requirements, you get a contractor to break down the requirements into blocks, another contractor breaks them down into mini-blocks, and down at the bottom there are some people writing the code. It takes years to do. When it all comes back up to the top, (a) it’s not right, and (b) it’s not what you want anymore. They just didn’t know how to contract for cyclical development. Well, I think we were able to help them figure out how to do that."

"It was a rather unsettling experience to come back to Stanford. After playing a role on a big stage, all of a sudden you come back and your colleagues ask,"

"So at the beginning of 2000, I retired. Since then I have been leading a wonderful life doing whatever I please. Now that I have a lot more time than I had before, I’m getting geekier and geekier. It feels like I’m 10 years old again, getting back involved with details of computing."

"The great thing about being retired is not that you work less hard, but that what you do is inner-directed. The world has so many things you want to know before you’re out of here that you have a lot to do."

"When I was younger, I was too busy for history and not cognizant of the importance of it. As I got older and began to see my own career unfolding, I began to realize the impact of the ideas of others on my ideas. I became more and more of a history buff."

"That convinced me to get very serious about archives, including my own. If you’re interested in discoveries and the history of ideas, and how to manufacture ideas by computer, you’ve got to treat this historical material as fundamental data. How did people think? What alternatives were being considered? Why was the movement from one idea to another preposterous at one time and then accepted"

"Our group, the Heuristic Programming Project, did path-breaking work in the large, unexplored wilderness of all the great scientific theories we could possibly have. But most of that beautiful wilderness today remains largely unexplored. Am I am happy with where we have gotten in induction research? Absolutely not, although I am proud of the few key steps we took that people will remember."

"I don’t believe there is a general pattern recognition problem. I believe that pattern recognition, like most of human reasoning, is domain specific. Cognitive acts are surrounded by knowledge of the domain, and that includes acts of inductive behavior. So I don’t really put much hope in "general anything" for AI. In that sense I have been very much aligned with Marvin Minsky’s view of a "society of mind." I’m very much oriented toward a knowledge-based model of mind."

"I think the only way is the way human culture has gotten there. We transmit our knowledge via cultural artifacts called texts. It used to be manuscripts, then it was printed text, now it’s electronic text. We put our young people through a lot of reading to absorb the knowledge of our culture. You don’t go out and experience chemistry, you study chemistry."

"We need to have a way for computers to read books on chemistry and learn chemistry. Or read books on physics and learn physics. Or biology. Or whatever. We just don’t do that today. Our AI programs are handcrafted and knowledge engineered. We will be forever doing that unless we can find out how to build programs that read text, understand text, and learn from text."

"Reading from text in general is a hard problem, because it involves all of common sense knowledge. But reading from text in structured domans I don’t think is as hard. It is a critical problem that needs to be solved."

"There are certain major mysteries that are magnificent open questions of the greatest import. Some of the things computer scientists study are not. If you’re studying the structure of data-bases—well, sorry to say, that’s not one of the big magnificent questions."

"I’m talking about mysteries like the initiation and development of life. Equally mysterious is the emergence of intelligence. Stephen Hawking once asked, "Why does the universe even bother to exist?" You can ask the same question about intelligence. Why does intelligence even bother to exist?"

"We should keep our "eye on the prize." Actually, two related prizes. One is that when we finish our job, whether it is 100 years from now or 200 years from now, we will have invented the ultra-intelligent computer. The other is that we will have a very complete model of how the human mind works. I don’t mean the human brain, I mean the mind: the symbolic processing system."

"In my view the science that we call AI, maybe better called computational intelligence, is the manifest destiny of computer science."

"For the people who will be out there years from now, the question will be: will we have fully explicated the theory of thinking in your lifetime? It would be very interesting to see what you people of a hundred years from now know about all of this."

"Being a good listener is about creating a situation where people feel comfortable telling you things. A lot of that has to do with demeanor. The best listeners project openness, patience, and a sincere curiosity to hear the other person’s story. You need to ask the right questions, pick up on little Easter eggs hidden in the conversation, and also detect subtle, nonverbal cues about how the person is feeling or what they may be holding back. I go into detail about how to accomplish this in my book"

"But listening is a skill, and like any skill, it takes practice. Some may have more natural talent for it, like playing a sport or musical instrument, but we all can, and should, put serious effort into getting better at it. Your effectiveness and happiness depend on it. Good listeners are not only good doctors, they are good human beings."

"I believe I was quite brave and dared to do new things. I wanted us to be the best at developing and, not least, adopting new technology. I have contributed to get us to where we are on the subsea realm – including developing a complete subsea factory [at Åsgard] many years before anyone else. When you ask me to look back at my time in Equinor, that’s something I am proud of,""

"Then I got to talk to most of the people there. That was very important to me. I don't miss the all-consuming job, but I miss the people. I get quickly attached to people around me. I am still in touch with many of my former colleagues and employees,”"

"I was the only female in most of what I did at the time. I've never been afraid of it, but it's apparent that it wasn't good with so little awareness around gender balance and diversity,”"

""When I started working as a physician in South Africa, I clearly saw the consequences of inequality. The malnutrition and tuberculosis that I encountered among black patients occurred to a much lesser extent – or not at all – in the white population. Since then, my work has involved finding ways to understand and correct inequality.”"

""You cannot be born and raised in South Africa without seeing different forms of injustice every day. That is what sparked my interest in research and what still dominates my research today. My interest in equality issues also motivated the work I did in reproductive health and maternity care and especially my work related to gender and health.”"

"This is another example of inequality in South Africa. The private health care system accounts for about 50 per cent of annual health care spending in South Africa but serves only about 15 per cent of the population."

""We discovered that the competitive situation was not as good as it should be. In addition, there are no performance measures regarding health in South Africa, so people do not know the quality of the care they pay for. This is a major shortcoming, unlike the completely different situation in Sweden, where health results are public.”"

"Having just finished the tenth year of the project, we have investigated the extent to which we have reached our goal – and the answer is that we have done well. We have recruited over 200 African doctors, of which almost half have obtained degrees and work in academia and with research in Africa."

""Building capacity is a long-term investment though. We are at the stage where we try to ensure that everyone who has obtained a degree within the CARTA framework has a future in research and that the institutions where they work support research. So this very satisfying work continues.”"

""Good governance in our health-care system is “patchy"

""You need to see this as a 10-year project"."

""There’s some political leadership that’s needed, and then there are some technical interventions that are needed. It’s about having a plan and getting people around the table”"

""It must be possible to review it and to work out a more manageable process around procurement. And procurement is particularly important because it’s sort of what keeps things turning over. It’s also the space where vested interests can be exercised”"

""The argument from the government is that the NHI Act is simply setting in place the fund, that’s all it’s supposed to do. I understand that … and it’s a legitimate argument. The problem is that it doesn’t tell people what it means. It’s that kind of lack of stewardship, lack of communicating a vision.”"

""The way the South African health system is set up currently is that the department is responsible for stewarding the system, for making sure that the right legislation exists, the right checks and balances exist, and the right controls exist”"

""I think that at least in part, they haven’t [fulfilled that responsibility]. It’s a complex thing to do; I’m not suggesting it’s easy. But I don’t think they’ve had their eye on the right place”"

"What our report does acknowledge is that there are many good people in the health system who actually want to see improvements, who are committed to good leadership and management and governance"

""But I think we need leadership to kind of show the way and one of the first things that we felt was important was to revisit what our public values are, what are the social goals that we want to set for the health system, and can we all agree on that and move towards that? [We need] that kind of leadership and stewardship from the political and national government level.”"

""That collaboration also resulted in Professor Fonn agreeing to be appointed an honorary doctor at Sahlgrenska Academy in 2015. So we are well aware of the outstanding knowledge and commitment Professor Fonn possesses and look forward to developing our SDG3 efforts together with the rest of the academy and the University in both teaching and research”"

"Life is about connecting with people and how can we do that? These 3 abstractions connect every human being on earth love, time, and death. We long for love, we wish we had more time, and we fear death.” I think if we all lived our lives with this in mind, we would move forward in so many ways."

"started really thinking about what I wanted to do and how I could best impact other people’s lives. I concluded that telling my story about racism issues I have dealt with as well as providing support to other people experiencing MS challenges would be a great start."

"“I come from a super normal family. My parents always worked. We lived with my maternal grandparents, my sister, my dad, my mom, me, and my grandparents in Desaguadero and Baigorria, near Devoto prison. I grew up there until I was 12, I did primary school with my sister at a convent school and high school at San Rafael, which was all girls. I grew up next to my cousin Román, who's the same age as me and is the brother I never had. My dad worked on bus line 25, and my mom worked on Jonte and Bermúdez, in a shop where they sewed school uniforms, communion dresses, and that's where I learned the trade. That was my childhood, I went to the neighborhood club, played in the street with the neighbors, and spent the end-of-year holidays with a long table in the street,”"

"We're a very close-knit family, and I think you're born with that. Then comes the personality of each one, it never crossed my mind what I was going to experience, or what my life would become. But I don't regret anything, and I'd choose it all again"

"“I couldn't study. Maybe at that time it was different, and life took me in another direction. What happens is that I lived many years abroad, and it was complicated with my daughters, alone."