University Of California Berkeley Alumni

"Earlier this year, we saw the 2 millionth subscription to the Spinlet service, and our website sees 1,300 unique visitors a day on average. In order of volume, Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya are where most of our users are based, though we are seeing a gradual increase in UK and US subscriptions as well."

"AI could be the very tool that allows us to leapfrog and monetise our cultural assets to the next level. Ignoring this shift will be a mistake."

"Music, art, film, fashion, and all creative mediums are unified by a common theme: their ability to powerfully communicate, and engage people through narrative."

"Gain as much knowledge as you can – know your rights, know the policies, and know who you can go to for help to ensure they are properly implemented."

"I think that it’s very helpful that I was 30 when I started my PhD. I took time to do other things between high school and college, and college and my masters, and masters and my PhD. So it meant that when my initial committee said no, I thought, "Well, you’re not the boss of me. I’m here for my own intellectual path, and I’m going to figure out how to do what I want to do." I don’t think I would have had the confidence to do that at age 21—speaking just about myself at 21."

"The first thing I tell students is that geography is the field that has the most intellectual freedom of any part of the academy. To me the beautiful part about geography is that you have no excuse for ever being bored. Every week, when you go into colloquium, you’re hearing about something totally different and outside of the normal academic arena that you’re used to, and I love that about geography."

"… techno utopia is this idea that the machine-learning tools, the algorithms, the things that help Google, like, have cars that drive themselves, that these tools are somehow making things objective and fair when, in fact, we really have no idea what's happening to most algorithms under the hood."

"... Eventually, I became a tenure-track professor at , which had a combined math department with . And then I made a big change. I quit my job and went to work as a quant for , a leading hedge fund. In leaving academia for finance, I carried mathematics from abstract theory into practice. The operations we performed on numbers translated into trillions of dollars sloshing from one account to another. At first I was excited and amazed by working in this new laboratory, the global economy. But in the autumn of 2008, after I'd been there for a bit more than a year, it came crashing down The crash made it all too clear that mathematics, once my refuge, was not only deeply entangled in the also fueling many of them. The housing crisis, the collapse of major financial institutions, the rise of unemployment—all had been aided and abetted by mathematicians wielding magic formulas."

"... She is an academic mathematician turned Wall Street quant turned data scientist who has been involved in and recently started an algorithmic auditing company. She is one of the strongest voices speaking out for limiting the ways we allow algorithms to influence our lives and against the notion that an algorithm, because it is implemented by an unemotional machine, cannot perpetrate bias or injustice."

"… In her new book, “The Shame Machine,” the writer and data scientist Cathy O’Neil, writing with Stephen Baker, examines how shame has been both commodified and weaponized by a society that is increasingly estranged from real life. Who stands to profit from our ubiquitous shame-driven culture wars? she wonders. And is there anything to be gained from them? … … O’Neil suggests that we enter treacherous waters when we start -ing people online; it is a fantasy to believe that it does anything other than enrich ."

"The tech giants are paying millions of dollars to the operators of clickbait pages, bankrolling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world. Shame is a potent mechanism to turn a systemic injustice against the targets of the injustice. Someone might say, “This is your fault” (for poor people or people with addictions), or “This is beyond you” (for algorithms), and that label of unworthiness often is sufficient to get the people targeted with that shame to stop asking questions."

"For shame machines, there is nothing more profitable than a painful and intractable scourge shrouded in mystery. False promises sell, and since they don’t work, the market stays strong. Failure, in fact, is central to the dieting business model, fueling earnings for giants like and . They profit from a never-ending stream of shame-addled, self-loathing repeat customers. Weight Watchers’ former chief financial officer, Richard Samber, told ' that 84 percent of the customers failed in their diets and cycled back to the company. “That’s where your business comes from,” he said."

"“As resources committed to benefits decline,” Tainter wrote in 1988, “resources committed to control must increase.”"

"In talking about sustainability I like to use a metaphor of sport, of a game. When you are in a sustainability exercise it is possible to lose. You can be unsustainable. But the converse doesn't hold. There is no point at which you can say that you have won. Sustainability consists of staying in the game; that is, continuing with the ability to solve problems. It is like a dance where you must be constantly in motion. There is no point where you can rest and say "Aha! We are sustainable!" It is something that always requires adjustment."

"Тhey [Romans] were forced to debase the currency. Debasing the currency for them was the same as borrowing is for us. It basically shifts the cost of solving your problems on to the future. Now, you can do that if the future doesn’t have any problems of its own. And we know that never happens, right? So the future has to deal with its own problems plus the cost of the past problems that you’ve deferred the cost of."

"Personally, I feel that when your narrative about the future includes the phrase “and then a miracle happens,” you’re in trouble."

"...Tainter doesn't show good judgement in his choice of information about China, nor does he display a very sound historical instinct of his own. The working historian needs at least one of those virtues."

"This... US imperium was Athenian in its ability to forge coalitions..; Roman in its reliance on... military bases across... the... world; and British in... aspiration to merge culture, commerce, and alliances into a comprehensive system... [A]... quest for ... lent it a distinctive dimension."

"Having seized... and Imperial Japan in 1945, the United States would rely for... seventy years on... thickening military power to contain... China and Russia... enjoying... unimpeded access to trade and resources of five continents... building a global dominion of... wealth and power. The current... conflict between Beijing and Washington is... the latest round in a centuries long struggle for control... Spain versus the Ottomans, Britain versus Russia... the United State versus the Third Reich and then the Soviet Union."

"Washington... faces an adversary with... the means and determination to mount a sustained challenge... Even if Beijing falters, thanks to a decline in economic growth or... surge in popular discontent, there are a dozen rising powers working to build a multipolar world beyond the grasp of any global hegemon."

"[T]he word empire is a fraught one... [E]mpire is... a form of global governance in which a dominant power exercises control over the destiny of others, either... direct... rule (colonies) or indirect influence (military, economic and cultural). Empire, bloc, commonwealth, or world order... all express... power that has persisted for... four thousand years... [E]mpires are an undeniable, unchanging fact of human history. After counting seventy... Niall Fergusson noted.., "To those who would still insist on American 'exceptionalism', the historian of empires can only retort: as exceptional as all other sixty-nine empires.""

"Nor did the French colonists have any illusions about how they were financing Indochina's development. When the government announced plans to build a railway up the Red River valley into China's Yunnan Province, a spokesman for the business community explained one of its primary goals: "It is particularly interesting, at the moment one is about to vote funds for the construction of a railway to Yunnan, to search for ways to augment the commerce between the province and our territory.... The regulation of commerce in opium and salt in Yunnan might be adjusted in such a way as to facilitate commerce and increase the tonnage carried on our railway.""

"[F]amily and school taught me that criticism was not only a right but a responsibility of citizenship."

"It has taken many years of education and much of my life to gain some insight into the geopolitical dynamics that propelled the United States to global hegemony and are... condemning it to decline."

"If I have any skill at all, it's the ability to come up with ideas that get people talking. With so many choices out there for viewers, you've got to get people talking about your show or you have no chance at all."

"“[Berkeley, Professor Hubert Dreyfus] always contended … for very philosophical and biological reasons … [AI was] never going to be able to do what a human being could do, but they could achieve mediocrity as a simulation.”"

"Certainly in the early days when I was doing a lot of shows for Fox and I was working with my friend Mike Darnell, we would sit there and try to think of crazy ideas and we would try to warm up each other. And then whenever we thought we'd have something that could be produced into a television show, we'd always say, well, can we really put that on television? And then when we would say that, we said, now we have to put it on television. Because if it was questionable about whether or not it was appropriate for viewers, then we knew we had a chance to be a success."

"I wouldn't want to do a show that looked and smelled just like another show. So you really have to force yourself to think hard about what's like what hasn't been seen, what hasn't been done. Particularly for network, because on cable there's a little, and I haven't really done much cable at all, only two or three series, but there's a luxury there where if your show fails, nobody really notices."

"“We did a whole send-out when she died, we did a tribute to Magic at the end of one of the episodes and stuff,” Fleiss recalls. “So I’ve always had Rottweilers with me on the sets. I have one now. They’re great dogs.”"

"There is no “radical relativism” plaguing modern knowledge fields, and certainly none plaguing atheists or physicalists or scientists—we are to a clear super-plurality all realists, not relativists, regarding knowledge of ourselves and the world. And secular science has provided extensive justifications for belief in the reliability of the human mind—to the extent that it actually is reliable. Remember, without those installed software fixes, of formal logics and mathematics and critical thinking and the scientific method, it’s actually pretty un-reliable. So there is no reason to believe that any of this comes from God—to the contrary, that inborn human reasoning is so terrible proves it cannot come from God. … God would want to send us that software fix! So the fact that no book purported to be God’s communications contains that crucial information means no such book actually contains God’s communications."

"Roving was good for the writer; to have been a reporter undoubtedly informed Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane. To know far more than he may ever use is imperative for the writer."

"We are not only what we are today but what we were yesterday and if you burn your immediate past there is nothing left but ashes which are all very well for those heads that like nothing better than to be sprinkled with ashes. But are these ash-covered heads really the spokesmen of our conscience?"

"Guilt is real, it is serious, but when it becomes also a fashion, there is corruption."

"It takes a true writer to show us what has been missing in our lives. No one can give the writer an assignment that his own impulse has not bespoken but more than his security should inform him. "The pen," said Kafka to Janouch, "is not an instrument but an organ of the writer's.""

"Writing should be dangerous: as dangerous as Socrates. There should be no refuge for the writer either in the Ivory Tower or the Social Church."

"Every period takes stock of the one preceding it and the past that was good enough for the fathers never seems good enough for the children no matter how idyllic it may seem to the great-grandchildren."

"There is no such thing as a writer untouched by his time. Even the most inner experience is a response to some outside."

"The great authors to come up since the Second World War have mostly been dead a long time. Kafka, Melville, Hawthorne, Henry James should be with us always but their resurgence in the forties presaged more than recognition of their stature. It signified also a genteel retreat from a period too complicated to confront easily. The writings of the detached past became a kind of smokescreen to conceal the present dilemma, and the ruins. But a ruin can be as good a point of departure as any. There is usually new life in the ruins as anyone who ever saw a population react from a bombing can testify. But the picker-uppers are not trying to salvage tender mementos only. They usually are looking for bricks and firewood."

"Literary epochs come and go but this wave seems to have frozen in the cold war."

"Low-energy effective field theories arising from string compactifications are generically inconsistent or ill-defined at the classical level because of conifold singularities in the moduli space. It is shown, given a plausible assumption on the degenaracies of black hole states, that for type II theories this inconsistency can be cured by nonperturbative quantum effects: the singularities are resolved by the appearance of massless Ramond-Ramond black holes."

"Why would there be math that had no physical manifestation?"

"We have no idea what science will look in, say, twenty or thirty years. ... Every scientist has to bet. Science is not a science — it's an art and a gamble."

"The uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics says that all spacetime positions are slightly uncertain. ... Nothing is immune from the uncertainty principle. ... Applying the uncertainty principle to Einstein's , we find the rug of physics pulled from under our feet."

"Much of over the last century has concerned the reductionist quest to uncover the laws of nature at ever shorter distances. In the last decade it has become increasingly clear, from a variety of investigations, that this long march into the has neglected a surprising wealth of uncharted phenomena in the deep (IR). Far from being a boring place where all is trivial and well-understood, the deep IR in four-dimensional Minkowski space has a rich structure which we are only beginning to understand. Applications range from the IR divergence problem in , 𝒩=4 Yang-Mills and color memory in in black hole information and a possible fundamental new perspective on space, time and nature."

"It is shown that many of the s of type II string theory and d = 11 supergravity can have boundaries on other p-branes. The rules for when this can and cannot occur are derived from charge conservation. For example it is found that membranes in d = 11 supergravity and IIA string theory can have boundaries on s. The boundary dynamics are governed by the self-dual d = 6 string. A collection of N parallel fivebranes contains 12N(N–1) self-dual strings which become tensionless as the fivebranes approach one another."

"The conditions for spacetime supersymmetry of the heterotic in backgrounds with arbitrary metric, torsion, Yang-Mills and dilaton expectation values are determined using the sigma model approach. The resulting equations are explicitly solved for the torsion and dilaton fields, and the remaining equations cast in a simple form. Previously unnoticed topological obstructions to solving these equations are found. The equations are shown to agree to leading order in perturbation theory with those derived in a field theory approach, provided one considers a more general ansatz than in previous analyses by allowing for a warp factor for the metric. Exact solutions with non-zero torsion are found, indicating a new class of finite sigma models."

"The creationist “scientific” arguments for a young Earth are absurd, I and other authors have dealt with them at length elsewhere, and they do not merit further attention here."

"Our current understanding of the chronology of the universe, Galaxy, and Solar System represents the fulfillment of a quest that required more than two centuries of endeavor and surely is one of the most notable and spectacular achievements of modern science."

"These calculations result in ages for the Earth of 4.52 to 4.56 Ga. Probably the best value is 4.54 Ga, found by (Fouad) Tera using the congruency point of the four oldest conformable lead ores. Its value, which is known to within 1% or better, is consistent with the ages of meteorites, the ages of the oldest lunar samples, and the ages of the oldest Earth rocks."

"There is incontrovertible evidence from lead-isotopic data that meteorites are approximately 4.55 ± 0.02 Ga. We can presume, as the evidence indicates, that the solid bodies of the Solar System formed nearly simultaneously, and conclude that the Pb-Pb age of meteorites also represents the age of Earth."