Educators From The United States

"I am not the woman president of Harvard. I am the president of Harvard."

"I believe that affirmative action has changed the shape of and the landscape of higher education in a way that we need to continue. The past is with us. We can't pretend that it's not, even as we misrepresent it or try to erase it."

"MIT's Cynthia Breazeal is developing "social robots" that could help care for patient's emotional wellbeing. In the future Breazeal noted that social robots could help a number of different demographics including the veteran community, supporting education for children, and aging care."

"Can robots help teachers improve classroom learning?... Consider the work of Cynthia Breazeal... who leads the Personal Robots group. The group is conducting randomized control trials of the use of an AI-powered, teddy bear-sized and -looking robot named Tega in Boston-area schools... to improve the language and literacy skills of 5- and 6-year-olds. Researchers are tracking gains in the youngsters’ vocabulary and oral language development to determine how the use of human teachers and artificially intelligent robots together in classrooms compares with instruction without robots. “We’re starting to see some exciting and significant learning gains,” Breazeal said. “I am very encouraged.” But she conceded that a longer, bigger study is the next step... “We see a social-emotional benefit across age groups,” she said... If students started feeling much more comfortable interacting with robots... they might jeopardize their willingness and ability to have meaningful conversations or relationships with other people... Breazeal recognizes those downsides. “We need to be thinking more deeply around ethics,” she said, “particularly with AI with children.”"

"Cynthia Breazeal has been promoted to full professor and named associate director of the Media Lab, joining the two other associate directors: Hiroshi Ishii and Andrew Lippman. Both appointments are effective July 1... Breazeal will work with lab faculty and researchers to develop new strategic research initiatives... Most recently, Breazeal has led an MIT collaboration between the Media Lab, MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, and MIT Open Learning to develop aieducation.mit.edu, an online learning site for grades K-12, which shares a variety of online activities for students to learn about artificial intelligence, with a focus on how to design and use AI responsibly. While assuming these new responsibilities, Breazeal will continue to head the lab’s Personal Robots research group, which focuses on developing personal social robots and their potential for meaningful impact on everyday life — from educational aids for children, to pediatric use in hospitals, to at-home assistants for the elderly. Breazeal is globally recognized as a pioneer in human-robot interaction. Her book, “Designing Sociable Robots” (MIT Press, 2002), is considered pivotal in launching the field. In 2019 she was named an AAAI fellow. Previously, she received numerous awards..."

"There is one view that we can allow these AI [tools] to deal with data and analytics and we let people deal with the caring, and the empathy, and the emotional aspects of care, which I think is absolutely critical... What if technology is capable of high touch engagement? What if AI was also social and emotionally intelligent? For me when I talk about emotional engagement, it’s not just about great user experience with technology... It is about deeper human engagement to enable transformative change in people’s lives... We have the world of design and we have the world of AI and right now those two aren’t built top of each other... But these have to come together. So we, through a lot of psychology, understand how people are thinking about experiencing new technology."

"There's going to be a time when everybody will just take the personal robot for granted."

"We’re starting to see some exciting and significant learning gains... I am very encouraged... We see a social-emotional benefit across age groups... We need to be thinking more deeply around ethics ... particularly with AI with children."

"Like many of us, Cynthia Breazeal’s fascination with robots started with Star Wars. And as an associate professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT Media Lab, she has made bringing robots to life her career. Her latest venture? Founder and chief scientist of Jibo, which has been dubbed the world's first family robot. The company is in the final stages of bringing Jibo to a limited developers’ market later this year; a full commercial rollout is expected by summer 2016. Jibo is based on principles of socio-emotive artificial intelligence and engaging human-computer interaction, which Breazeal has been working on since building her first robot."

"There are so many things that we did with Kismet at MIT, in the Personal Robots Group, that are highly relevant today. It was the first of its kind, a scientific exploration, arguably the first robot to model emotions as an important way for it to make decisions as much as it did on its interactions with humans... When I first saw Star Wars I wanted R2D2 to be my sidekick! Like any kid with a Disney fantasy, when I saw him, I wanted him to come and live in my house... Of course C3PO is the cool humanoid robot, but the magic in Star Wars was those two robots together. They played off each other in a beautiful way, almost like Laurel & Hardy."

"Hopes for social robots keep outpacing reality. Late last year, the squat, almost featureless Jibo graced the cover of Time Magazine's "best inventions" edition. Its creator, MIT robotics researcher Cynthia Breazeal, told The Associated Press at the time that "there's going to be a time when everybody will just take the personal robot for granted."... Jibo, a foot-high, vaguely conical device topped by a wide hemispherical "head," stays where you put it, typically on a countertop. But it can swivel its flat, round screen "face" to meet your gaze; tells joke and plays music; and can shimmy convincingly if you ask it to dance. It was pitched as "the world's first social robot for the home." At almost $900, though, Jibo didn't win anywhere near enough friends."

"Recently, I read a tweet by the poet Natalie Diaz, who asked, Why must writers of color always have to talk about whiteness? Why center it in our work when it's centered everywhere else?"

"In Mojave, our words for want and need are the same – because why would you want what you don’t need?"

"Maybe a wound is a way of seeing into someone. Or maybe it is an opening into the person who inflicted the wound. I don’t need the wounds to disappear, but I want to give them the possibility to flower or tu’aachk, as we might say in Mojave. I can’t deny my wounds, those I’ve gathered across my own body and mind, as well as those I have inflicted on others’ bodies and minds. I can try to imagine a condition in which the wound will bloom, meaning a place beyond the wound…"

"I am Native, so I am both—truth/fiction—and also bleeding over or overflowing each. Truth is always a placeholder for something. For how we feel, or how we want to feel, how we wished we didn’t feel. Things we wish we’d done, or hadn’t done, hadn’t enjoyed doing. The way we handle or mishandle our wounds, and try to hold them up and look through them, like mirrors, to be seen, no matter how opaque and obstructed they are. You can’t trust truth. But then, even the word trust. . . what is that a placeholder for?"

"Poetry was an unlikely place for me to land … I mean, who says: ‘I’m going to be a poet when I grow up’? I grew up on a reservation and we had a boarding school where language was taken."

"Diaz is my antidote to being uninspired. I never leave her work empty-handed."

"I had to be willing to risk myself for what I wanted. And I want desire; I want to be capable of it. I want to be deserving of it."

"Conservatives and fascist ideologies adapted the notion that Jews were alien to the national community to a cultural critique that attributed the inauthenticity of contemporary mass culture to Jewish influence. Jews, not having a fixed location, could not share in cultures rooted in the community of blood or soil and were therefore reduced to the imitation of other cultures, to artifice."

"For conservative and nationalist discourses, these marginalized Others were frequently objects of fascination and revulsion. Yet the horror provoked by Jews, homosexuals, and, in some areas, Gypsies cannot be explained simply by reference to the marginal; it was the way those at the margins of society made the bordelines of gender and nationality blur and shift that threatened to tear apart the very fabric of the patriarchal nation-state as it had been constituted. This threat was perhaps especially acute in Germany, whose identity as a unified nation was so tenuous."

"For many liberal of the 1930s fascism seemed not so much intrinsically wrong as wrong-headed, offering solutions that were at once too extreme and inadequate to address the crises of modernity."

"SCAD shows that we can educate students and prepare them for successful careers in creative fields. That was a revolutionary idea when SCAD began, but our students and alumni — who hail from over 100 countries — are proof positive that it's true. If I leave any kind of legacy, there's nothing more joyful than that."

"The thing is, a creative education—especially the elevated and professional degree programs offered at SCAD—is about intentionality. You build, you invent. There’s purpose to it."

"Students from everywhere come to this beautiful part of our country that we've lived in and know and love, and when they do, they find they love it too. I think part of it is that they find such a warm reception here in Savannah and at SCAD, and they find that anything is possible. It's the ultimate American dream to think that you can create whatever you want for yourself and your career."

"All around us, dreamers were dreaming up new ideas: Star Wars, The Clash, Apple. I was nearing thirty ... and wondered if I could do more."

"The G-string, which was often sequined and rhinestoned, was a cultural marker of glamorous erotic entertainment. Non-professionals wore them for costumes or naughty private play, but generally not as underwear until Frederick's of Hollywood began to make a more wearable version of them available as underwear through their catalogs and stores."

"Through the history of the modern academic and culture, as we have noted, the definition of "magic" in relation to science and religion has been a major problem. At the root of the problem is the loaded, evaluative of "magic" as false, deceptive, discredited, or morally tainted, contrasted with both science (a correct, enlightened understanding of natural law and causation) and religion (a correct, enlightened understanding of the divine and spirituality). Thus, "magic" is relegated to the "they" side of a "we/they" . This is simultaneously unfair to the materials and practices studied under the heading of "magic," and self-serving for the materials (mainly those we identify as "our own") that are exempted from that label. It perpetuates a complacent ."

"The world of the was a wonderfully diverse and pluralistic world, and nowhere is that diversity and pluralism seen more clearly than in the text of ritual power that were produced and used by the people who inhabited that world."

"The vast majority of India’s poor rely on daily for sustenance. With the current lockdown and its likely extension, millions of daily labourers and their families can no longer earn the money they need to survive. In this unprecedented situation, the Indian state must respond swiftly to prevent widespread acute hunger. [...] The health and economic threats posed by the pandemic are unprecedented: India must capitalise upon its preparedness to address food insecurity and prioritise food distribution to protect the health and welfare of its most vulnerable citizens."

"The decline of Buddhism in India was not a singular event, with a singular cause; it was a centuries-long process that unfolded in a patchwork. The seeds of Buddhism’s decline began in the mid-first millennium ce, when the sangha began withdrawing into their monasteries and divorcing them-selves from day-to-day interactions with the laity. Into this spiritual void stepped Hindu and Jain sects, who revamped their ritual practices and religious architecture to more closely resemble traditional Buddhist practices. In the South and West of India, Hindu and Jain sects increasingly earned the support of the political and economic elite. In the Western Ghats, the last major Buddhist temples were constructed at Ellora in the seventh and eighth centuries CE. Across South India, the sangha aban-doned Buddhist sites, many of which were later reoccupied by Hindus and Jains. While some small Buddhist centers still persisted in South and West India in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, for the most part, both monastic and lay Buddhism had been eclipsed and replaced by Hinduism and Jainism by the end of the first millennium CE."

"There is an invaluable treasure trove of useful historical data that has only just begun to be used to inform our actions. The lessons of 1918 (Spanish flu), if well heeded, might help us to avoid repeating the same history today (COVID-19)."

"The making of a picture involves two processes: a taking in of the impression and giving out of it by the visible expression. (....) The degree of beauty in a picture depends upon the feeling for beauty in the artist and his power to express it."

"The use of color in my paintings is of paramount importance to me. Through color I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness in my painting rather than on man's inhumanity to man.(...) My goal was not to offend the beauty in nature, but rather to share with others those aspects of it that have given me so much joy."

"Color is life, or a world without color appears to us as dead. Colors are the children of light, and light is their mother. Light (...) reveals to us the spirit and living soul of the world, through colors. The colors of the rainbow and the Northern Lights soothe and elevate the soul. The rainbow is accounted as a symbol of peace."

"Art is inevitably the expression of external conditions, modified though they be by the genius and personality of the artist."

"In my opinion Black art is a misnomer. There are black artists and they, like all others, draw from they experiences to produce artistic expressions. If this expression is non representational, it is difficult or not impossible to tell whether the artist is white or non white. There can be no doubt however of the impact traditional African art has had on the world of modern art."

"Every time Botany and Zoology fuse, Botany ends up screwed to the wall.""

"[Here] we have the problem of Latin America. It is the problem of a bad start – religiously, politically, economically, and socially. We may add further that the Spanish Inquisition had the effect of developing a hard, ruthless character, and that this was reflected in Spain‘s treatment of her colonies. The Inquisition sanctified cruelty in the service of the Church."

"…There’s a way in which I hope the nine chapters are like spheres of intensity that are placed in a relationship that is not the consequence of plot or the linearity of chronology, but is instead a kind of constellation, that there are charged relationships between them that is like a key change, or a mood, or an echo, or a motif. That may sound pretentious, but I think there’s a place for pretentiousness in art."

"I really do think of prose as writing sentences. I never think to myself “I’m writing a novel”. Not until I’m very deep into a project do I even think “I’m writing a book”. The kind of sentence I’m attracted to is a kind of navigating device where the sentence itself is moving me through the world and is the tool by which I am able to feel out a territory or a set of concerns."

"During the past three decades, plant anatomists have established a number of lines of phylogenetic specializations in the structures of the stele."

"The whole point of art, for me, is to give us tools to explore feelings or situations or dilemmas that defeat our other ways of making meaning. When a situation is so vertiginous, so ethically complex, so emotionally fraught, that I feel like I’m staring into an abyss—that’s when I feel moved to make art, when I feel I need the peculiar tools of fiction to figure out what I think. I mean, to inhabit my bewilderment. I think art is the realm in which we can give full rein to the ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt that we often feel we have to suppress in other kinds of expression—in our political speech, say. I think an ability to dwell in ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt is a central virtue of humanness. I think it’s crucial to any thinking that might adequately capture the complexity of reality."

"…for me the great human virtue is promiscuity, the fact that we love mixture, that we are excited by collisions between cultures, languages, traditions. This is why I’m so disgusted by the rejection of this virtue by nationalists of various stripes—and also why I’m resistant to “stay in your lane” condemnations of “cultural appropriation.” Of course, encounters with the other are fraught with peril and—like any ethically meaningful human endeavor—inherently “problematic.” Of course, we need to be mindful and reverent as we attempt to reach across borders of various kinds. But any attempt to build walls—between bodies, between cultural traditions, between languages and aesthetics—is abhorrent to me."

"Harry's first publication (in 1951) was a short paper in the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club entitled "Interesting weeds in New York City." It was during some of his collecting in the wilderness which is the Bronx that he was accosted by several policemen in a squad car, who demanded what he was doing with his odd vasculum over his shoulder. He explained he was a botanist and he was collecting plants. "You know all these weeds?", asked one the men. Upon being assured that he did, he was asked to join them in the car which drove some distance until they came to an open lot on which there was a flourishing crop. "What is it?" "Marihuana," was the reply. Whereupon one of the officers exploded, "Damn those kids, they told us they were tomatoes.""

"He was a leader within the emergency room field. ... Unless our government steps up & gets us the protective equipment we need, he will be the first of many of my colleagues."

"There are side effects to hydroxychloroquine. It causes psychiatric symptoms, cardiac problems and a host of other bad side effects. [...] There may be a role for it for some people, but to tell Americans ‘you don’t have anything to lose,’ that’s not true. People certainly have something to lose by taking it indiscriminately."

"Try to keep in mind one of the fundamental aspects of science: letting the evidence form belief rather than belief select evidence."

"Knowing how to combat your own confirmation bias helps remove that huge handicap that we all share—the tendency for our beliefs to drift toward what we want to be true."

"New breakthrough technologies can make it easier, but we've already got, right now, everything we need to accomplish the task of transforming our energy economy away from fossil fuels. Except the willingness."

"As humans, we reflexively reject arguments that contradict what we would like to be true."