Scientists From The United States

"A small, bespectacled man who became an American citizen after the war but never lost his French accent or Gallic jauntiness, Dr. Mayer (pronounced my-YAIR), was a perfect blend of European intellectual and American pragmatist: a charming, talkative, often stubborn educator who pushed the frontiers of knowledge in the laboratory and fought hunger and malnutrition wherever they flourished."

"In becoming a vegetarian, you will eat a greater percentage of your calories from cereal grains, dried beans and peas, potatoes and pasta—the very foods most dieters avoid with zeal. And you will lose weight."

"[Vegetarianism] has three things going for it all at once—economics, health and compassion."

"How many talks have you sat through where the researcher qua [as] person just didn't show up: no anecdotes, no personal details, no emotion or enthusiasm, no humor (intentional, that is), no real contact with the audience – in other words, no performance. [...] They may satisfy the second two requirements mentioned above – accuracy and nonadvocacy – but they fail in the first and, in some ways, the most important."

"Scientists are not known for the graces of courtesy and tact when commenting on the work of others."

"If speaking to nonscientific audiences is something that interests you or will likely be asked of you, keep in mind three overriding requirements: first, you must be a human being, an interesting one if at all possible; second, you must be accurate in what you say, that is, tell the truth (about what is known and what isn't; about issues, debates, controversies); and third, if your subject is scientific knowledge, you must remain a scientist and not slip into the role of advocate or activist."

"Scientific advances can wreak havoc with social values. What appears to be advanced thinking at times turns out to be retrograde attempts at dehumanization. Advances in technology can be used to commoditize human beings. Genetic fetal testing, for example, can be used to screen against the "unfit"."

"Since the 1980's, we have been concerned about acceptable risk, but I believe that we have now entered the era of acceptable uncertainty."

"Humility is fundamental in science. I recall during an update meeting with my PhD committee at Duke saying that I thought I would be ready to defend my dissertation in May. The unflappable engineering professor, Aarne Vesilind, said he agreed, but year was I talking about?"

"You often hear that the language of science is mathematics. I don't completely agree with the article. I don't think it is a definite article. Mathematics is "a" language of science. But, it is only "a" language of science. The language of science is English. The language of science is Spanish."

"I believe synthetic biology forces society into the chaos of ethics. And, I believe that every connotation of "chaos" applies to the ethics of synthetic biology. Researchers must decide if a particular endeavor is ethical because, of course, mistakes can result due to the unpredictability of these very complex systems. I also believe that the original Greek and the Genesis, Chapter 1, understanding of formlessness applies, since scientists are trying to move to the simplest creatures possible, so-called "chassis bacteria", onto which they can add desirable traits at their choosing. Finally, I believe that the mathematical connotation of chaos applies, since even the most simple living creature is a dynamical system that is highly sensitive to initial conditions. I sometimes wonder about the extent to which those most intimately involved and those strongly advocating synthetic biology think about this."

"Moral relativism is an easy and sloppy way to deal with personhood."

"The image discoveries which then ’emerge’ resemble the way perceptual discoveries can follow the active exploration and manipulation of physical objects."

"Surrogate percept, allowing people to detect some pattern or property in a remembered scene that they did not encode explicitly when they saw the scene initially."

"Finke et al. (1992) proposed a cognitive model of creative thinking called geneplore, a name that emphasizes the importance of generative and exploratory phases of the creative process. In the generative phase, one uses processes such as retrieval, analogical transfer, or mental transformation to construct representations of ideas that may take various forms such as visual patterns, verbal combinations, or mental models. These initial ideas, referred to as preinventive forms, ideally have properties such as novelty, meaningfulness, and emergent qualities. Exploratory processes can then be used to develop the initially generated ideas for specific purposes."

"Restricting the ways in which creative cognition are interpreted encourages creative exploration and discovery and further reduces the likelihood that a person will fall back on conventional lines of thought."

"Perceptual interpretive processes are applied to mental images in much the same way that they are applied to actual physical objects. In this sense, imagined objects can be "interpreted" much like physical objects."

"New heuristic (1) is used to prefer revision to premises that support relatively weak generalized beliefs."

"In recent years, researchers have made considerable progress on the of inductive learning tasks, but for theoretical results to have impact on practice, they must deal with the average case. In this paper we present an average-case analysis of a simple algorithm that induces one-level decision trees for concepts defined by a single relevant attribute. Given knowledge about the number of training instances, the number of irrelevant attributes, the amount of class and attribute noise, and the class and attribute distributions, we derive the expected classification accuracy over the entire instance space. We then examine the predictions of this analysis for different settings of these domain parameters, comparing them to experimental results to check our reasoning."

"Science is a seamless web: each idea spins out to a new research task, and each research finding suggests a repair or an elaboration of the network of theory. Most of the links connecting the nodes are short, each attaching to its predecessors. Weaving our way through the web, we stop from time to time to rest and survey the view — and to write a paper or a book."

"In the scientist’s house are many mansions... Outsiders often regard science as a sober enterprise, but we who are inside see it as the most romantic of all callings. Both views are right. The romance adheres to the processes of scientific discovery, the sobriety to the responsibility for verification..."

"BACON.4 does not have heuristics for considering trigonometric functions of variables directly . Thus, in the run described here we simply told the system to examine the sines. In the following chapter we will see how BACON can actually arrive at the sine term on its own in a rather subtle manner."

"In all of these cases, the error arose from accepting “loose” fits of a law to data, and the later, correct formulation provided a law that fit the data much more closely. If we wished to simulate this phenomenon with BACON, we would only have to set the error allowance generously at the outset, then set stricter limits after an initial law had been found."

"As aims to address larger, more complex tasks, the problem of focusing on the most relevant information in a potentially overwhelming quantity of data has become increasingly important."

"Given a sample of data S, a learning algorithm L, and a feature set A, feature xi , is incrementally useful to L with respect to A if the accuracy of the hypothesis that L produces using the feature set {xi} ∪ A is better than the accuracy achieved using just the feature set A."

"A cognitive architecture specifies aspects of an intelligent system that are stable over time, much as in a building’s architecture. These include the memories that store perceptions, beliefs, and knowledge, the representation of elements that are contained in these memories, the performance mechanisms that use them, and the learning processes that build on them. Such a framework typically comes with a programming language and software environment that supports the efficient construction of knowledge-based systems."

"Research on cognitive architectures varies widely in the degree to which it attempts to match psychological data. ACT-R (Anderson & Lebiere, 1998) and EPIC (Kieras & Meyer, 1997) aim for quantitative fits to reaction time and error data, whereas Prodigy (Minton et al., 1989) incorporates selected mechanisms like means-ends analysis but otherwise makes little contact with human behavior. Architectures like Soar (Laird, Newell, & Rosenbloom, 1987; Newell, 1990) and Icarus (Langley & Choi, in press; Langley & Rogers, 2005) take a middle position, drawing on many psychological ideas but also emphasizing their strength as flexible AI systems. What they hold in common is an acknowledgement of their debt to theoretical concepts from cognitive psychology and a concern with the same intellectual abilities as humans."

"Biochemistry asks how the remarkable properties of living organisms arise from the thousands of different biomolecules."

"In thermodynamic terms, formation of the solution occurs with a fa vorable free-energy change: ΔG = ΔH - TΔS, where ΔH has a small positive value and TΔS a large positive value; thus ΔG is negative."

"Water is a polar solvent. It readily dissolves most bio­ molecules, which are generally charged or polar com­ pounds (Table 2-2); compounds that dissolve easily in water are hydrophilic (Greek, "water-loving"). In contrast, nonpolar solvents such as chloroform and benzene are poor solvents for polar biomolecules but easily dis­ solve those that are hydrophobic-nonpolar molecules such as lipids and waxes."

"As a result, there is an electrostatic attraction between the oxygen atom of one water molecule and the hydrogen of another (Fig. 2-lb), called a hydrogen bond."

"The first living organisms on Earth doubtless arose in an aqueous environment, and the course of evolution has been shaped by the proper­ ties of the aqueous medium in which life began."

"The remarkable similarity of metabolic pathways and gene sequences across the phyla argues strongly that all modern organisms are derived from a common evolutionary progenitor by a series of small changes (mutations), each of which conferred a selective advantage to some organism in some ecological niche."

"Among the seminal discoveries in biology in the twentieth century were the chemical nature and the three-dimensional structure of the genetic material, deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA."

"Perhaps the most remarkable property of living cells and organisms is their ability to reproduce themselves for countless generations with nearly perfect fidelity. This continuity of inherited traits implies constancy, over millions of years, in the structure of the molecules that contain the genetic information."

"Virtually every chemical reaction in a cell occurs at a significant rate only because of the presence of enzymes."

"We can consider cellular energy conversions—like all other energy conversions—in the context of the laws of thermodynamics."

"The chemistry of living organisms is organized around carbon, which accounts for more than half the dry weight of cells."

"The current understanding that all organisms share a common evolutionary origin is based in part on this observed universality of chemical intermediates and transformations, often termed "biochemical unity.""

"The distinguishing characteristics of eukary­otes are the nucleus and a variety of membrane-enclosed organelles with specific functions."

"All living organisms fall into one of three large groups (domains) [Bacteria, Archeara, Eukarya] that define three branches of evolution from a common progenitor."

"The upper limit of cell size is probably set by the rate of diffusion of solute molecules in aqueous systems."

"Cells of all kinds share certain structural features."

"The unity and diversity of organisms become apparent even at the cellular level."

"Despite these common properties, and the fundamental unity of life they reveal, it is difficult to make generalizations about living organisms."

"Organisms possess extraordinary attributes, properties that distinguish them from other collections of matter. What are these distinguishing features of living organisms?"

"The "second order cyberneticians" claimed that knowledge is a biological phenomenon (Maturana, 1970), that each individual constructs his or her own "reality" (Foerster, 1973) and that knowledge "fits" but does not "match" the world of experience (von Glasersfeld, 1987)."

"Another group at MIT and Harvard University developed the notion of “organizational learning.” Chris Argyris and Donald Schön were the key figures in this group. Argyris was a student of Kurt Lewin, who was a participant in the Macy Foundation meetings that were chaired by Warren McCulloch."

"Another tradition in systems theory, known as system dynamics, originated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The founder of this tradition was Jay Forrester, a creative engineer who invented the magnetic core memory for computers and who built the , which is now in the Smithsonian Institution."

"A group that was somewhat connected with general systems theory is usually associated with the term, the systems approach. They were located originally at the University of Pennsylvania. They later went to Case Western Reserve University and then back to the University of Pennsylvania. Their founding philosopher was E. A. Singer, Jr. One of Singer's students was C. West Churchman, and Churchman's first student was Russell Ackoff."