J Stanford Quotes

Tinkerers built America. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, all were tinkerers in their childhood. Everything from the airplane to the computer started in somebody's garage. Go back even further: the Industrial Revolution was a revolution of tinkerers. The great scientific thinkers of eighteenth-century England couldn't have been less interested in cotton spinning and weaving. Why would you be? It was left to a bloke on the shop floor who happened to glance at a one-thread wheel that had toppled over and noticed that both the wheel and the spindle were still turning. So James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, and there followed other artful gins and mules and frames and looms, and Britain and the world were transformed. By tinkerers rather than thinkerers. "Technological change came from tinkerers," wrote Professor J.R. McNeill of Georgetown, "people with little or no scientific education but with plenty of hands-on experience." John Ratzenberger likes to paraphrase a Stanford University study: "Engineers who are great in physics and calculus but can't think in new ways about old objects are doomed to think in old ways about new objects." That's the lesson of the spinning jenny: an old object fell over and someone looked at it in a new way.

The name UNIX began as a pun: because early versions of the operating system supported only one user—Ken Thompson—Peter Neumann, a security researcher at Stanford Research International, joked that it was an “emasculated Multics,” or “UNICS.” The spelling was eventually changed to UNIX.

The event happened at noon on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah. That moment was a pivotal episode in world history as Leland Stanford pounded a golden spike with a silver hammer and in an instant ended the isolation of California and the Great West from the eastern half of the United States.

Russ Poldrack, a neuroscientist at Stanford, found that learning information while multitasking causes the new information to go to the wrong part of the brain. If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their schoolwork goes into the striatum, a region specialized for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organized and categorized in a variety of ways, making it easier to retrieve it.

Even as it expanded into a transnational multi-billion-dollar corporation, Google managed to retain its geekily innocent “Don’t Be Evil” image. It convinced its users that everything it did was driven by a desire to help humanity. That’s the story you’ll find in just about every popular book on Google: a gee-whiz tale about two brilliant nerds from Stanford who turned a college project into an epoch-defining New Economy dynamo, a company that embodied every utopian promise of the networked society: empowerment, knowledge, democracy. For a while, it felt true. Maybe this really was the beginning of a new, highly networked world order, where the old structures—militaries, corporations, governments—were helpless before the leveling power of the Internet. As Wired’s Louis Rossetto wrote in 1995, “Everything we know will be different. Not just a change from L.B.J. to Nixon, but whether there will be a President at all.”8 Back then, anybody suggesting Google might be the herald of a new kind of dystopia, rather than a techno-utopia, would have been laughed out of the room. It was all but unthinkable.

Dr. B. J. Fogg, founder of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, wrote his graduate dissertation with a far less aggressive commitment. Even if he came home from a party at 3:00 A.M., he had to write one sentence per day. He finished in record time while classmates languished for years, overwhelmed by the enormity of the task. Understanding this

Following its publication in 1981, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks received further scrutiny from scholars in a series of reviews published in newspapers and professional journals. Stanford J. Layton, Managing Editor of the Utah Historical Quarterly, praised the book in the Salt Lake Tribune. The volume, Layton opined, projected “the heft and feel of scholarship . . . apparent on every page,” which deserved the attention of all those seeking to understand “how a racially discriminatory priesthood policy emerged during Mormonism’s formative years and solidified over time.”21 Likewise, Eli M. Oboler, head librarian at Idaho State University in Pocatello, Idaho, wrote in the Idaho State Journal and characterized the volume as

Our part is not production, but reception of our life in Christ. This entails Bible-based fact finding; explicit faith in Him and His purpose for us in Christ; and patient trust while He takes us through the necessary processing involved. No believer ever fell into maturity, even though he is complete in Christ. Spiritual growth necessitates heart-hunger for the Lord Jesus; determination, based upon assurance, to have that which is ours in Him, plus meditation and thought. We will never come into the knowledge of our spiritual possessions through a superficial understanding of the Word. How can we ever expect to have intimate fellowship with One of whom we know little?

The development of the divine life in the Christian is like the natural growth in the vegetable world. We do not need to make any special effort, only place ourselves under the conditions favorable to such growth.

The believer does not have to beg for help. He does have to thankfully appropriate that which is already his in Christ.

May the Lord teach us that the whole principle of the Christian life is that we go beyond what is right to do that which is well-pleasing to Him.

Our responsibility is to see in the Word all that is ours in Christ, and then thank and trust Him for that which we need.

Moreover, the reasons for proposing such tax cuts are often verbally transformed from those of the advocates— namely, changing economic behavior in ways that generate more output, income and resulting higher tax revenues— to a very different theory attributed to the advocates by the opponents, namely “the trickle-down theory.” No such theory has been found in even the most voluminous and learned histories of economic theories, including J.A. Schumpeter’s monumental 1,260-page History of Economic Analysis. Yet this non-existent theory[*] has become the object of denunciations from the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post to the political arena. It has been attacked by Professor Paul Krugman of Princeton and Professor Peter Corning of Stanford, among others, and similar attacks have been repeated as far away as India.[2] It is a classic example of arguing against a caricature instead of confronting the argument actually made. While

Stanford University's Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood's conclusion is stark. 'Partisans discriminate against opposing partisans, and do so to a degree that exceeds discrimination based on race,' they write. Think about that for a moment: at least under certain experimental conditions, our political identities now trump our racial identities.

Fruit ripens slowly; days of sunshine and days of storm each add their share. Blessing will succeed blessing, and storm follow storm before the fruit is full grown or comes to maturity.

Motivation comes in spurts—which is why Stanford psychologist B. J. Fogg recommends taking advantage of “motivation waves” so you can weather “motivation troughs.

[Dea07] J. Dean, “Software Engineering Advice from Building Large-Scale Distributed Systems”, Stanford CS297 class lecture, Spring 2007.

Jennifer J. Freyd, a Stanford alum and psychology professor, wrote an open letter to the administration. She condemned their self-congratulatory and defensive stance. She discussed a term I’d never heard of, institutional betrayal, which can cause victims harm that occurs above and beyond that caused by the sexual violence itself. The irony is that institutional betrayal is not only bad for those dependent upon the institution, but comes to haunt the institution itself.

Apple bought Siri from its creator, SRI (Stanford Research Institute) International, which had developed it with government funding from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) between 2003 and 2008.

recent study conducted at Stanford that evaluated the performance levels of multi-taskers. The researchers found that people who focus on one task consistently outperform those who multi-task.