brown-university-alumni

"Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal."

"There are in astronomy refinements of method, both practical and theoretical, which can be appreciated only by rare gifts and profound study. But the elementary methods are quite within the reach of ordinary minds. The , which it was difficult to discover, may be very easily understood and its results readily traced. It might require a Newton or a La Place to unveil the mechanism of the heavens, but when that is once done every beholder may watch the wonderful evolutions."

"The , no less than the severest utilitarian, rejoices in every contribution of science to the arts, but he does not admit that the whole value of science is to be measured by any present applications. He puts in a demurrer to the conclusion that those portions of it are useless of which we do not see the utility. The use may be beyond our present sphere of vision, or, if coming within our cognizance, it may not admit of comparison with any standard of measure. Unlike the precious gem, which has an exchangeable but no intrinsic value, science bears no price in the market. It transcends all ideas of comparison and exchange. Its high utility lies in the breadth and dignity and sublime grandeur which it gives to the human mind."

"Dr. Caswell’s predilection was for and astronomy. During the period of twenty-eight and a half years (from December, 1831, to May, 1860) he made, with few interruptions, a regular series of meteorological observations at the same spot on . These observations, precise as regards temperature and pressure, and including also much information on winds, clouds, moisture, rain, storms, the , &c, have been published in detail in Vol. XII of the "Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge," and fill 179 quarto pages. Dr. Caswell continued his observations in meteorology with unabated zeal to the end of 1876, covering, in all, the long period of forty-five years."

"It’s easy to think of privacy and publicity as opposing concepts, and a lot of technology is built on the assumption that you have to choose to be private or public. Yet in practice, both privacy and publicity are blurred. Rather than eschewing privacy when they encounter public spaces, many teens are looking for new ways to achieve privacy within networked publics. As such, when teens develop innovative strategies to achieve privacy, they often reclaim power by doing so. Privacy doesn’t just depend on agency; being able to achieve privacy is an expression of agency"

"A central challenge in addressing the sexual victimization of children is that the public is not comfortable facing the harrowing reality that strangers are unlikely perpetrators. Most acts of sexual violence against children occur in their own homes by people that those children trust.27"

"In a world where information is easily available, strong personal networks and access to helpful people often matter more than access to the information itself."

"the introduction of social media does alter the landscape. It enables youth to create a cool space without physically transporting themselves anywhere. And because of a variety of social and cultural factors, social media has become an important public space where teens can gather and socialize broadly with peers in an informal way. Teens are looking for a place of their own to make sense of the world beyond their bedrooms"

"For the teens that I interviewed, privacy isn’t necessarily something that they have; rather it is something they are actively and continuously trying to achieve in spite of structural or social barriers that make it difficult to do so. Achieving privacy requires more than simply having the levers to control information, access, or visibility. Instead, achieving privacy requires the ability to control the social situation by navigating complex contextual cues, technical affordances, and social dynamics. Achieving privacy is an ongoing process because social situations are never static."

"More often than not, what people put up online using social media is widely accessible because most systems are designed such that sharing with broader or more public audiences is the default. Many popular systems require users to take active steps to limit the visibility of any particular piece of shared content. This is quite different from physical spaces, where people must make a concerted effort to make content visible to sizable audiences.8 In networked publics, interactions are often public by default, private through effort"

"Just because teens can and do manipulate social media to attract attention and increase visibility does not mean that they are equally experienced at doing so or that they automatically have the skills to navigate what unfolds. It simply means that teens are generally more comfortable with—and tend to be less skeptical of—social media than adults. They don’t try to analyze how things are different because of technology; they simply try to relate to a public world in which technology is a given."

"In 1995, psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg coined the term internet addiction disorder. He wrote a satirical essay about “people abandoning their family obligations to sit gazing into their computer monitor as they surfed the Internet.” Intending to parody society’s obsession with pathologizing everyday behaviors, he inadvertently advanced the idea. Goldberg responded critically when academics began discussing internet addiction as a legitimate disorder: “I don’t think Internet addiction disorder exists any more than tennis addictive disorder, bingo addictive disorder, and TV addictive disorder exist. People can overdo anything. To call it a disorder is an error."

"Teen "addiction" to social media is a new extension of typical human engagement. Their use of social media as their primary site of sociality is most often a byproduct of cultural dynamics that have nothing to do with technology, including parental restrictions and highly scheduled lives. Teens turn to, and are obsessed with whichever environment allows them to connect to friends. most teens aren't addicted to social media; if anything, they're addicted to each other."

"Privacy is not a static construct. It is not an inherent property of any particular information or setting. It is a process by which people seek to have control over a social situation by managing impressions, information flows, and context."

"A great deal of the fear and anxiety that surrounds young people’s use of social media stems from misunderstanding or dashed hopes.14 More often than not, what emerges out of people’s confusion takes the form of utopian and dystopian rhetoric."

"Listening to teens talk about social media addiction reveals an interest not in features of their computers, smartphones, or even particular social media sites but in each other."

"When people become famous, they are often objectified, discussed, and ridiculed with little consideration for who they are as people. Fans and critics feel as though they have the right to comment on everything celebrities do with little regard to the costs that those in the crosshairs of attention will bear. The cost that celebrities pay for the supposed benefits of being rich and famous is ongoing scrutiny and a lack of privacy. Most people do not understand or appreciate the pressure that results from fame, even though public meltdowns—such as the night that Britney Spears shaved her head in front of numerous photographers—are highly publicized. The public’s obsession with obtaining information about the famous puts serious pressure on those people’s lives, as the paparazzi’s role in Princess Diana’s death so brutally reminds us.20 Few people have sympathy for the kinds of stress that gossip places on public figures who have high status and wealth. At a distance, famous people seem invulnerable"

"When adults jump to fear and isolationism as their solution to managing risk, they often undermine their credibility and erode teens’ trust in the information that adults offer."

"The things that make us safest from others make us least from ourselves."

"At one point I had it as my monitor stand because it was one of the biggest set of books I had, and it was just the right height. That was nice because it was always there, and I guess then I was more prone to use it as a reference because it was just right in front of me."

"I often end up rewriting. Sometimes I do that without ever finding the bug. I get to the point where I can just feel that it’s in this part here. I’m just not very comfortable about this part. It’s a mess. It really shouldn’t be that way. Rather than tweak it a little bit at a time, I’ll just throw away a couple hundred lines of code, rewrite it from scratch, and often then the bug is gone. Sometimes I feel guilty about that. Is that a failure on my part? I didn’t understand what the bug was. I didn’t find the bug. I just dropped a bomb on the house and blew up all the bugs and built a new house. In some sense, the bug eluded me. But if it becomes the right solution, maybe it’s OK. You’ve done it faster than you would have by finding it.”"

"No, I had the box set. You had to pull hard, but you could pull one of the box. Now I’m less likely to use any book for reference—I’m just likely to do a search."

"In Lisp, if you want to do aspect-oriented programming, you just do a bunch of macros and you're there. In Java, you have to get Gregor Kiczales to go out and start a new company, taking months and years and try to get that to work. Lisp still has the advantage there, it's just a question of people wanting that."

"Real cognitive science, however, is necessarily based on experimental investigation of actual humans or animals. We will leave that for other books, as we assume the reader has only a computer for experimentation.”"

"Right, so that’s the thing. Ninety-nine percent of the people who got a one in one of their interviews we didn’t hire. But the rest of them, in order for us to hire them somebody else had to be so passionate that they pounded on the table and said, “I have to hire this person because I see something in him that’s so great, and this guy who thought he was no good is wrong, and I’ve got to stand up for him and put my reputation on the line.”"

"One of the interesting things we found, when trying to predict how well somebody we’ve hired is going to perform when we evaluate them a year or two later, is one of the best indicators of success within the company was getting the worst possible score on one of your interviews. We rank people from one to four, and if you got a one on one of your interviews, that was a really good indicator of success."

"Where would someone live within the academic ecosystem if they wanted to dive into physics topics, but also computation and statistics? That was the motivation for submitting a grant to the NSF to start this institute.If you think about AI solely as it applies to fundamental physics research, we have massive challenges in our field and we’re trying to understand some of the deepest questions in nature."

"I basically told them, in no uncertain terms, that this was not the way that I thought physics research should be going. And they agreed with me, actually, about the off-the-shelf use of machine learning."

"Cosmology is another area with massive amounts of data and massive computational costs to run simulations of the universe. Without something like machine learning, we simply wouldn't be able to tackle those problems."

"AI and physics is really a two-way street: AI’s influence on how we research new physics phenomena, but also applying physics thinking to the way that AI systems operate."

"there is physics for AI, where there are concepts from physics that can help you build better AI tools, even if you aren’t directly studying physical systems. You can build machine learning architectures that have physics-style reasoning embedded and those concepts turn out to be quite powerful."

"Alternatively, exposure notification is usually conducted completely digitally on an opt-in basis. This process involves the use of smartphones to create a log of potential close contacts."

"Contact tracing is an activity that is commonly done to interrupt transmission of communicable diseases, or diseases that are passed from one person to another. It is critically important in interrupting transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19."

"These two terms are commonly confused. Contact tracing is a very specific method for public health intervention that requires in-depth investigation of potential exposure, risk for severe disease, and risk for transmission of the virus to others."

"The rate at which your knowledge will ripen into wisdom depends in considerable part upon your distinguishing what is important and what is relatively unimportant. Some people seem never to know any difference between the s and the s."

"There was no priestly hierarchy either for Greece as a whole or for single cantons; not even among priests of the same in different cantons was there organized coöperation. Some popular or oracle might win more than local prestige and secure the protection and support of various neighboring states, but there the drift toward centralization and organization found its limit. At no time did there exist an organized authority which could formulate standards of faith or dictate the usages of religious etiquette. Ritual, seeking that which in matter and manner was believed to be well pleasing to the , followed the traditions of the individual shrines, and there were no better theologians than the poets."

"Viewing history in the large, we cannot fail to see that the world we live in is essentially a . All its fundamental forms and moulds for law and government, art, architecture, and literature, thought and faith., were created beside the Mediterranean; all its political and religious struggles, all its wars, were the fighting over of old Mediterranean questions; and as a system of types and forms, it never can be really understood and known except as it be reduced to Mediterranean terms, and studied in the perspective of a Roman, Greek, or Syrian horizon."

"No single personality, excepting the carpenter's son of Nazareth, has done so much to make the world of civilisation we live in what it is as Alexander of Macedon. He leveled the terrace upon which built. Whatever lay within the range of his conquests contributed its part to form that Mediterranean civilisation which, under Rome's administration, became the basis of European life."

"We believe in Creation. We praise the Lord for that faith. But let us avoid either posing creation and evolution as intrinsically antithetical alternatives, the acceptance of one demanding the rejection of the other, or presenting creation as a scientific mechanism alternative to evolution, as though good science must ultimately lead to the verification of fiat creation and a falsification of evolution."

"If it is assumed, without due Scriptural support, that the purpose of revelation is to give mankind a source-book of information on all phases of physical, mental, spiritual, sociological, artistic, and scientific life — a source-book which must have meaning for the people to whom it was addressed and to all the generations coming after them in spite of the changes which are continuously occurring — then we have the greatest difficulty in maintaining the doctrine of an inerrant Scripture. If, on this stand, we adopt the position of “arbitrary inerrancy,” we essentially jeopardize the whole truth of Christianity by attempting to balance the great wealth and weight of God’s revelation in Christ upon our ability to show that the words of Scripture can be judged inerrant even when we examine them on the basis of criteria they were not written to satisfy. How much of liberalism and rejection of Biblical revelation has been precipitated as a blind reaction against such a stand!"

"The human senses are tools of science in studying the natural world. If you can see it, hear it, feel, taste, or smell it, then science can’t work with it. This isn’t meant superficially, for scientists have developed a great variety of instruments that extend the capabilities of science far beyond the unaided senses. But even with the most subtle of instruments, the link between instrument and scientist is in the form of a meter needle whose location is seen, a photographic record or computer tape that can be read, or an audible signal that can be heard."

"Evolution is a scientific question on the biological level; it would be unfortunate indeed if a scientific question were permitted to become the crucial point for Christian faith."

"Science is the art of understanding nature."

"The "Stars and Stripes" now float over a vast continent, extending from the Atlantic to the Great Ocean, and from the Gulf to the Frozen Seas of the North. The Great Republic may now be considered as embracing four nearly equal quarters, of about nine hundred thousand square miles each:—the first being the original territory east of the Mississippi River; the second, the Louisiana Purchase; the third, Texas and the Mexican Provinces; and the fourth covering Oregon and Alaska."

"Those who are deeply religious may look at evolution not as a challenge, but as a true demonstration of the power of the Creator's ingenuity. The vastness and implications of evolution cannot simplify the sense of admiration for a creator who was able to set such a mechanism in motion. Perhaps the Great Architect of the Universe didn't bother to write every single DNA base and acid in the human genome, but that doesn't detract from his incredible intelligence."

"American labor was strongest when the threat of communism was greatest. The apogee of America's welfare state, with all its limitations, was coterminous with the height of the Cold War. The dismantling of the welfare state and the labor movement, meanwhile, marched in tandem with communism's collapse."

"We need to look as a society at the system that says to succeed you need a college education, but you have to sell your future to get it."

"A lot of people are stuck for their entire lives in jobs that do not agree with their souls because of college debt."

"I never saw it as a book that’s about giving up things."

"Things that should happen because of justice and environmental sustainability, but will also benefit the FIRE people in the FIRE movement."