Mellon Quotes

Gandalf never had this kind of problem. He had exactly this problem, actually, standing in front of the hidden Dwarf door to Moria. Remember when . . . I sighed. Sometimes my inner monologue annoys even me. “Edro, edro,” I muttered. “Open.” I rubbed at the bridge of my nose and ventured, “Mellon.” Nothing happened. The wards stayed. I guessed the Corpsetaker had never read Tolkien. Tasteless bitch.

Storytellers have as profound a purpose as any who are charged to guide and transform human lives. I knew it as an ancient discipline and vocation to which everyone is called.

With a suddenness that startled them all the wizard sprang to his feet. He was laughing! "I have it!" he cried. "Of course, of course! Absurdly simple, like most riddles when you see the answer." Picking up his staff he stood before the rock and said in a clear voice: Mellon! The star shone out briefly and faded again. Then silently a great doorway was outlined, though not a crack or joint had been visible before. Slowly it divided in the middle and swung outwards inch by inch, until both doors lay back against the wall.

She stepped back and frowned at me. "Open it." "Me?" I felt sure she was picking on me because I was the only enslaved god she had. "I'm not Hermes! I'm not even Valdez!" "Try." As if that were a simple request! I attempted to get my fingertips under the edge and prise it open. I spread my arms and yelled the standard magic words: MELLON! SHAZAM! SESAME STREET! None of these worked. At last I tried my infallible ace in the hole. I sang 'Love Is an Open Door' from the Frozen soundtrack. Even this failed. "Impossible!" I cried. "This door has no taste in music!

Steve mellon had told him that love was for poor suckers, and Richard had written on his steamed-up shaving mirror that morning, 'I must be penniless.

George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon provides one of the simplest definitions of curiosity: the feeling of deprivation that comes from an information gap between what we know and what we want to know. Separately,

Now, how do you think this door works ... ?” Brynne took one look at it and kicked it open. “Wait ... that’s it?” said Aru. “I thought there’d be more to it! Like in Lord of the Rings, where there’s a riddle door with the message ‘speak friend and enter.’ Except I can’t remember what friend is in Elvish.” Brynne rolled her eyes, but her smile was warm. She stepped through first. Aiden held open the door for Aru. As she walked past him, he said, “It’s mellon, by the way.” “Nerd.

Let me tell you a secret: every time self-doubt crawls in to your skull, grab that mother by the throat and kick the ever-loving shit out of it. Trust me. You only succeed in this business when you know, absolutely know in your heart you will succeed. It’s like the guy says, if you think you’ll win or you think you’ll lose, you’re right." ~ Ross "Melon-Head" Mellon, to Ellie Bourke

«El recurso más precioso de un ordenador no está en su procesador, en su memoria, en su disco duro ni en la red, sino en la atención humana», concluye un grupo de investigación de la Universidad de Carnegie Mellon.

We stepped outside rather hurriedly and down the street to anonymous sanctuary among the buildings of San Francisco. "Promise me till your dying day, you'll believe that a Mellon was a Confederate general. It's the truth. That God-damn book lies! There was a Confederate general in my family!" "I promise," I said and it was a promise that was kept.

Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flourishing sign of God's specifically American favor, made manifest in the uncountable millions of Carnegie and Mellon and Henry Ford and Catholina Lambert. But amid this fabled plenty the whiff of damnation had cleared of dollars and cents the parched ground around Clarence Wilmot.

Who taught us to bow our heads while waiting for trains? to touch lumber without regret and sing privately or not at all? To invest the season with forgiveness and coax from it a hopeful omen? Lord knows the hope would heal this little fear. But who taught us to fear?

Lee Mellon told me that he was born in Meridian, Mississippi, and grew up in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina, 'Near Asheville,' he said. 'That's Thomas Wolfe country.' 'Yeah,' I said. Lee Mellon didn't have any Southern accent. 'You don't have much of a Southern accent,' I said. 'That's right, Jesse. I read a lot of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Kant when I was a kid,' Lee Mellon said. I guess in some strange way that was supposed to get rid of a Southern accent. Lee Mellon thought so, anyway. I couldn't argue because I had never tried a Southern accent against the German philosophers.

America's industrial success produced a roll call of financial magnificence: Rockefellers, Morgans, Astors, Mellons, Fricks, Carnegies, Goulds, du Ponts, Belmonts, Harrimans, Huntingtons, Vanderbilts, and many more based in dynastic wealth of essentially inexhaustible proportions. John D. Rockefeller made $1 billion a year, measured in today's money, and paid no income tax. No one did, for income tax did not yet exist in America. Congress tried to introduce an income tax of 2 percent on earnings of $4,000 in 1894, but the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. Income tax wouldn't become a regular part of American Life until 1914. People would never be this rich again. Spending all this wealth became for many a more or less full-time occupation. A kind of desperate, vulgar edge became attached to almost everything they did. At one New York dinner party, guests found the table heaped with sand and at each place a little gold spade; upon a signal, they were invited to dig in and search for diamonds and other costly glitter buried within. At another party - possibly the most preposterous ever staged - several dozen horses with padded hooves were led into the ballroom of Sherry's, a vast and esteemed eating establishment, and tethered around the tables so that the guests, dressed as cowboys and cowgirls, could enjoy the novel and sublimely pointless pleasure of dining in a New York ballroom on horseback.

Consider Herbert A. Simon, a right sharp scientific thinker, who did his thinking most frequently at Carnegie Mellon, by which I mean this chap was smart as shit. Check out some of his smart-thinks: “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. Slogan-worthy.

One of the most bizarre and intriguing findings is that people with brain damage may be particularly good investors. Why? Because damage to certain parts of the brain can impair the emotional responses that cause the rest of us to do foolish things. A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and the University of Iowa conducted an experiment that compared the investment decisions made by fifteen patients with damage to the areas of the brain that control emotions (but with intact logic and cognitive functions) to the investment decisions made by a control group. The brain-damaged investors finished the game with 13 percent more money than the control group, largely, the authors believe, because they do not experience fear and anxiety. The impaired investors took more risks when there were high potential payoffs and got less emotional when they made losses.7 This

Someone once told me women want to be understood, while men want to be accepted.

the societal contract that dictates that we must first learn, then earn, then retire and expire is already being broken.

The sane universities never went near this stuff, but Carnegie Mellon gave us explicit license to break the mold.

I don’t care if your first name’s “Carnegie” and your last name’s “Mellon,” you’d probably be waitlisted now.

One speaker, Herbert Simon, was a Carnegie Mellon professor of computer science and psychology who later won a Nobel for his work in economics. In his presentation, he warned that the growth of information could become a burden. Why? “Information consumes the attention of its recipients,” he explained, and “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”1

Two decades later, when I got my PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon, I thought that made me infinitely qualified to do anything, so I dashed off my letters of application to Walt Disney Imagineering. And they sent me the nicest go-to-hell letter I'd ever received.

The giant stuffed animals all found homes quickly. A few days later, I learned that one of the animals had been taken by a Carnegie Mellon who, like me, has cancer. After the lecture, she walked up and selected the giant elephant. I love the symbolism of that. She got the elephant in the room.

According to a study at Carnegie Mellon University, the average American encounters 1,462 privacy policies a year, each with an average length of 2,518 words. If one were to read each and every one of those policies, it would take seventy-six full workdays, at eight hours a day, from our lives.

The truck looked just like a Civil War truck if they'd had trucks back in those times. But the truck ran, even though it didn't have a gas tank. There was an empty fifty-gallon gasoline drum on the bed of the truck with a smaller gasoline can on top of it, and there was a syphon leading from that can to the fuel line. It worked like this. Lee Mellon drove and I stayed on the back of the truck and made sure everything went all right with the syphon, that it didn't get knocked out of kilter by the motion of the truck. We looked kind of funny going down the highway. I'd never had the heart to ask Lee Mellon what happened to the gas tank. I figured it was best not to know.

It is one of the many ironies of this period that, at a time when the intelligentsia were excoriating Mellon for tax-evasion, and contrasting the smooth-running Soviet planned economy with the breakdown in America, he was secretly exploiting the frantic necessities of the Soviet leaders to form the basis of one of America's most splendid public collections

Most of all, she could go out and be with friends, people who made the darkness seem darker but invited her into the light.

You would think you could just stick a goddamn sword through 'em and be done with it.

A moment's reflection will convince any one that prosperity cannot come from continued plunging into debt.

A bonus or subsidy can be paid only by taking money out of the pockets of all the people in order that it shall find its way back into the pockets of some of the people.

No reprimand in the mirror Slow walk to Liberia Slow dance across the Sahara Slow unraveling of gray matter

I made a resolution never again to whine or be disagreeable. For why should anyone have any need to be unhappy when they have what I have.

You combed Third Avenue last year For some small gift that was not too dear, Like a candy cane or a worn out truss, To give to a loving friend like us You'd found gold eggs for such wealthy hicks As the Edsel Fords and the Pittsburgh Fricks The Andy Mellons, the Teddy Shonts The Coleman T. and Pierre duponts But not one gift to brighten our home So I'm giving you back your Goddamn poem.

The Kochs were unusually single-minded, but they were not alone. They were among a small, rarefied group of hugely wealthy, archconservative families that for decades poured money, often with little public disclosure, into influencing how Americans thought and voted. Their efforts began in earnest in the second half of the twentieth century. In addition to the Kochs, this group included Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir to the Mellon banking and Gulf Oil fortunes; Harry and Lynde Bradley, midwesterners enriched by defense contracts; John M. Olin, a chemical and munitions company titan; the Coors brewing family of Colorado; and the DeVos family if Michigan, founders of the Amway marketing empire. Each was different, but together they formed a new generation of philanthropist, bent on using billions if dollars from their private foundations to alter the direction of American politics.

The more we can reach out to our partners, the more separate and independent we can be. Although this flies in the face of our culture’s creed of self-sufficiency, psychologist Brooke Feeney of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh found exactly that in observations of 280 couples. Those who felt that their needs were accepted by their partners were more confident about solving problems on their own and were more likely to successfully achieve their own goals.

I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist, and since I had an absolute belief that I should be able to handle my own problems, I naturally bought a horse. Not just any horse, but an unrelentingly stubborn and blindingly neurotic one, a sort of equine Woody Allen, but without the entertainment value. I had imagined, of course, a My Friend Flicka scenario: my horse would see me in the distance, wiggle his ears in eager anticipation, whinny with pleasure, canter up to my side, and nuzzle my breeches for sugar or carrots. What I got instead was a wildly anxious, frequently lame, and not terribly bright creature who was terrified of snakes, people, lizards, dogs, and other horses – in short, terrified of anything that he might reasonably be expected to encounter in life – thus causing him to rear up on his hind legs and bolt madly about in completely random directions. In the clouds-and-silver-linings department, however, whenever I rode him I was generally too terrified to be depressed, and when I was manic I had no judgment anyway, so maniacal riding was well suited to the mood. Unfortunately, it was not only a crazy decision to buy a horse, it was also stupid. I may as well have saved myself the trouble of cashing my Public Health Service fellowship checks, and fed him checks directly: besides shoeing him and boarding him – with veterinary requirements that he supplement his regular diet with a kind of horsey granola that cost more than a good pear brandy – I also had to buy him special orthopedic shoes to correct, or occasionaly correct, his ongoing problems with lameness. These shoes left Guicci and Neiman-Marcus in the dust, and, after a painfully aquired but profound understanding of why people shoot horse traders, and horses, I had to acknowledge that I was a graduate student, not Dr. Dolittle; more to the point, I was neither a Mellon nor a Rockefeller. I sold my horse, as one passes along the queen of spades, and started showing up for my classes at UCLA.

In addition to the Kochs, this group included Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir to the Mellon banking and Gulf Oil fortunes; Harry and Lynde Bradley, midwesterners enriched by defense contracts; John M. Olin, a chemical and munitions company titan; the Coors brewing family of Colorado; and the DeVos family of Michigan, founders of the Amway marketing empire. Each was different, but together they formed a new generation of philanthropist, bent on using billions of dollars from their private foundations to alter the direction of American politics.

Consider this: Google grew into a multibillion-dollar sensation by helping us find the right Web page. How much more valuable will it be, in every conceivable industry, to find the right person? That information is worth fortunes, and the personal data we throw off draws countless paths straight to our door. Even if you hold back your name, it's a cinch to find you. A Carnegie Mellon University study recently showed that simply by disclosing gender, birth date, and postal zip code, 87 percent of people in the United States could be pinpointed by name.

[Dr. McFarland] once invited a well-known sculptor from the faculty of Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) to come to our nursery school. Dr. McFarland said to him, 'I don't want you to teach sculpting. All I want you to do is to love clay in front of the children.' And that's what he did. He came once a week for the whole term, sat with the four- and five-year-olds as they played, and he 'loved' his clay in front of them. The adults who have worked at the center for many years have said that not before or since have the children in that school used clay so imaginatively as when they had those visits from the sculptor who obviously delighted in his medium.

In 1818, five-year-old Thomas Alexander Mellon emigrated with his family from Northern Ireland to Pennsylvania. Inspired to seek riches by The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas studied hard and became a lawyer, and then a judge. He saved his money, bought vast stretches of downtown Pittsburgh real estate, and opened T. Mellon and Sons Bank, where he placed a life-size statue of his hero, Ben Franklin, above the door. In 1890, Thomas gave control of the bank to his son Andrew. Andrew transformed the bank into the Mellon National Bank, and as the family fortune swelled, he invested in other industries, too. Some of the investments became Gulf Oil, Alcoa, and Union Steel. Over time,

According to one recent study [...] the [climate change] denial-espousing think tanks and other advocacy groups making up what sociologist Robert Brulle calls the “climate change counter-movement” are collectively pulling in more than $ 900 million per year for their work on a variety of right-wing causes, most of it in the form of “dark money”— funds from conservative foundations that cannot be fully traced. This points to the limits of theories like cultural cognition that focus exclusively on individual psychology. The deniers are doing more than protecting their personal worldviews - they are protecting powerful political and economic interests that have gained tremendously from the way Heartland and others have clouded the climate debate. The ties between the deniers and those interests are well known and well documented. Heartland has received more than $ 1 million from ExxonMobil together with foundations linked to the Koch brothers and the late conservative funder Richard Mellon Scaife. Just how much money the think tank receives from companies, foundations, and individuals linked to the fossil fuel industry remains unclear because Heartland does not publish the names of its donors, claiming the information would distract from the “merits of our positions.” Indeed, leaked internal documents revealed that one of Heartland’s largest donors is anonymous - a shadowy individual who has given more than $ 8.6 million specifically to support the think tank’s attacks on climate science. Meanwhile, scientists who present at Heartland climate conferences are almost all so steeped in fossil fuel dollars that you can practically smell the fumes. To cite just two examples, the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels, who gave the 2011 conference keynote, once told CNN that 40 percent of his consulting company’s income comes from oil companies (Cato itself has received funding from ExxonMobil and Koch family foundations). A Greenpeace investigation into another conference speaker, astrophysicist Willie Soon, found that between 2002 and 2010, 100 percent of his new research grants had come from fossil fuel interests.

By failing to make the obvious connection between an openly misogynistic culture and the mysterious lack of women, Levy contributed to the myth of innately talented hackers being implicitly male. And, today, it’s hard to think of a profession more in thrall to brilliance bias than computer science. ‘Where are the girls that love to program?’ asked a high-school teacher who took part in a summer programme for advanced-placement computer-science teachers at Carnegie Mellon; ‘I have any number of boys who really really love computers,’ he mused. ‘Several parents have told me their sons would be on the computer programming all night if they could. I have yet to run into a girl like that.’ This may be true, but as one of his fellow teachers pointed out, failing to exhibit this behaviour doesn’t mean that his female students don’t love computer science. Recalling her own student experience, she explained how she ‘fell in love’ with programming when she took her first course in college. But she didn’t stay up all night, or even spend a majority of her time programming. ‘Staying up all night doing something is a sign of single-mindedness and possibly immaturity as well as love for the subject. The girls may show their love for computers and computer science very differently. If you are looking for this type of obsessive behavior, then you are looking for a typically young, male behavior. While some girls will exhibit it, most won’t.

One of the foundations of our American civilization is equality of opportunity, which presupposes the right of each man to enjoy the fruits of his labor after contributing his fair share to the Government, which protects him and his property. But that is a very different matter from confiscating a part of his wealth, not because the country requires it for the prosecution of a war or some other purpose, but because he seems to have more money than he needs.

I don't know how to fix my marriage. All I know is that I need ot tear down my own walls and face what's underneath. I cannot save my marriage but I can save myself. I can do that for me and for my children and for every relationship Ihave now and for everyone that comes in the future. I can do that so when I make the most important deision of my life, whether to stay with Craig or to leave him, I'll know that it's my strongest, healthiest self doing the deciding.

Search engine query data is not the product of a designed statistical experiment and finding a way to meaningfully analyse such data and extract useful knowledge is a new and challenging field that would benefit from collaboration. For the 2012–13 flu season, Google made significant changes to its algorithms and started to use a relatively new mathematical technique called Elasticnet, which provides a rigorous means of selecting and reducing the number of predictors required. In 2011, Google launched a similar program for tracking Dengue fever, but they are no longer publishing predictions and, in 2015, Google Flu Trends was withdrawn. They are, however, now sharing their data with academic researchers... Google Flu Trends, one of the earlier attempts at using big data for epidemic prediction, provided useful insights to researchers who came after them... The Delphi Research Group at Carnegie Mellon University won the CDC’s challenge to ‘Predict the Flu’ in both 2014–15 and 2015–16 for the most accurate forecasters. The group successfully used data from Google, Twitter, and Wikipedia for monitoring flu outbreaks.

Anyway how are you doing, crybaby? You’re fifteen now right? Crazy huh? How is school going? If you ask someone out, don’t make her kiss you right away. Also, don’t make her keep it a secret. It will make her feel bad. Are you still watching too many cartoons? What do you do in your free time? Jake does karate. I think it’s very manly. Not like someone like me needs protecting, but it’s nice to know he could, you know? My teachers say I’m good at English. My aunt thinks I should be a writer, like her of course. What do they even do? I miss you. I haven’t had a friend as good as you. Remember how scared you were I would lose your address? I showed you. Well I don’t have anything else to say. I love you. Yours, Nicole

We began the show by asking: Who did more for the world, Michael Milken or Mother Teresa? This seems like a no-brainer. Milken is the greedy junk-bond king. One year, his firm paid him $550 million. Then he went to jail for breaking securities laws. Mother Teresa is the nun who spent her lifetime helping the poor and died without a penny. Her good deeds live on even after her death; several thousand sisters now continue the charities she began. At first glance, of course Mother Teresa did more for the world. But it's not so simple. Milken's selfish pursuit of profit helped a lot of people, too. Think about it: By pioneering a new way for companies to raise money, Milken created millions of jobs. The ignorant media sneered at 'junk bonds', but Milken's innovative use of them meant exciting new ideas flourished. We now make calls on a national cellular network established by a company called McCaw Cellular, which Milken financed. And our calls are cheaper because Milken's junk bonds financed MCI. CEO Bill McGowan simply couldn't get the money anywhere else. Without Milken, MCI wouldn't have grown from 11 to 50,000 employees. CNN's 24-hour news and Ted Turner's other left-wing ventures were made possible by Milken's 'junk'. The world's biggest toy company, Mattel, the cosmetics company Revlon, and the supermarket giant Safeway were among many rescued from bankruptcy by Milken's junk bonds. He financed more than 3,000 companies, including what are now Barnes & Noble, AOL Time Warner, Comcast, Mellon Bank, Occidental Petroleum, Jeep Eagle, Calvin Klein, Hasbro, Days Inn, 7-Eleven, and Computer Associates. Millions of people have productive employment today because of Michael Milken. (Millions of jobs is hard to believe, and when 'Greed' aired, I just said he created thousands of jobs; but later I met Milken, and he was annoyed with me because he claimed he'd created millions of jobs. I asked him to document that, to name the companies and the jobs, and he did.)

When I launched my AI career in 1983, I did so by waxing philosophic in my application to the Ph.D. program at Carnegie Mellon. I described AI as “the quantification of the human thinking process, the explication of human behavior,” and our “final step” to understanding ourselves. It was a succinct distillation of the romantic notions in the field at that time and one that inspired me as I pushed the bounds of AI capabilities and human knowledge. Today, thirty-five years older and hopefully a bit wiser, I see things differently. The AI programs that we’ve created have proven capable of mimicking and surpassing human brains at many tasks. As a researcher and scientist, I’m proud of these accomplishments. But if the original goal was to truly understand myself and other human beings, then these decades of “progress” got me nowhere. In effect, I got my sense of anatomy mixed up. Instead of seeking to outperform the human brain, I should have sought to understand the human heart. It’s a lesson that it took me far too long to learn. I have spent much of my adult life obsessively working to optimize my impact, to turn my brain into a finely tuned algorithm for maximizing my own influence. I bounced between countries and worked across time zones for that purpose, never realizing that something far more meaningful and far more human lay in the hearts of the family members, friends, and loved ones who surrounded me. It took a cancer diagnosis and the unselfish love of my family for me to finally connect all these dots into a clearer picture of what separates us from the machines we build. That process changed my life, and in a roundabout way has led me back to my original goal of using AI to reveal our nature as human beings. If AI ever allows us to truly understand ourselves, it will not be because these algorithms captured the mechanical essence of the human mind. It will be because they liberated us to forget about optimizations and to instead focus on what truly makes us human: loving and being loved. Reaching that point will require hard work and conscious choices by all of us. Luckily, as human beings, we possess the free will to choose our own goals that AI still lacks. We can choose to come together, working across class boundaries and national borders to write our own ending to the AI story. Let us choose to let machines be machines, and let humans be humans. Let us choose to simply use our machines, and more importantly, to love one another.

We've been here three days already, and I've yet to cook a single meal. The night we arrived, my dad ordered Chinese takeout from the old Cantonese restaurant around the corner, where they still serve the best egg foo yung, light and fluffy and swimming in rich, brown gravy. Then there had been Mineo's pizza and corned beef sandwiches from the kosher deli on Murray, all my childhood favorites. But last night I'd fallen asleep reading Arthur Schwartz's Naples at Table and had dreamed of pizza rustica, so when I awoke early on Saturday morning with a powerful craving for Italian peasant food, I decided to go shopping. Besides, I don't ever really feel at home anywhere until I've cooked a meal. The Strip is down by the Allegheny River, a five- or six-block stretch filled with produce markets, old-fashioned butcher shops, fishmongers, cheese shops, flower stalls, and a shop that sells coffee that's been roasted on the premises. It used to be, and perhaps still is, where chefs pick up their produce and order cheeses, meats, and fish. The side streets and alleys are littered with moldering vegetables, fruits, and discarded lettuce leaves, and the smell in places is vaguely unpleasant. There are lots of beautiful, old warehouse buildings, brick with lovely arched windows, some of which are now, to my surprise, being converted into trendy loft apartments. If you're a restaurateur you get here early, four or five in the morning. Around seven or eight o'clock, home cooks, tourists, and various passers-through begin to clog the Strip, aggressively vying for the precious few available parking spaces, not to mention tables at Pamela's, a retro diner that serves the best hotcakes in Pittsburgh. On weekends, street vendors crowd the sidewalks, selling beaded necklaces, used CDs, bandanas in exotic colors, cheap, plastic running shoes, and Steelers paraphernalia by the ton. It's a loud, jostling, carnivalesque experience and one of the best things about Pittsburgh. There's even a bakery called Bruno's that sells only biscotti- at least fifteen different varieties daily. Bruno used to be an accountant until he retired from Mellon Bank at the age of sixty-five to bake biscotti full-time. There's a little hand-scrawled sign in the front of window that says, GET IN HERE! You can't pass it without smiling. It's a little after eight when Chloe and I finish up at the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company where, in addition to the prosciutto, soppressata, both hot and sweet sausages, fresh ricotta, mozzarella, and imported Parmigiano Reggiano, all essential ingredients for pizza rustica, I've also picked up a couple of cans of San Marzano tomatoes, which I happily note are thirty-nine cents cheaper here than in New York.

The harmony of the human body is a prototype for personal and communal evolution.

Deliberate practice was a term coined by John Hayes of Carnegie Mellon University. In short, it describes the best way to practice is to break your main goal down into numerous sub-skills that contribute to the goal. Then, instead of rehearsing the main goal, focus on each sub-skill and bring them to the point of proficiency, one at a time.

My son Aaron, who is a professor of computer science, encountered just such a careless signal when he was on the admissions committee at Carnegie Mellon University. One Ph.D. applicant submitted a passionate letter about why he wanted to study at CMU, writing that he regarded CMU as the best computer science department in the world, that the CMU faculty was best equipped to help him pursue his research interests, and so on. But the final sentence of the letter gave the game away: I will certainly attend CMU if adCMUted. It was proof that the applicant had merely taken the application letter he had written to MIT and done a search-and-replace with “CMU” . . . and hadn’t even taken the time to reread it! Had he done so, he would have noticed that every occurrence of those three letters had been replaced.

differences

Charlene moved through the house as quietly as her abused body would allow. She hadn’t been able to stand upright in nearly two weeks thanks to the two broken ribs courtesy of her husband. But those two broken ribs had given her a new lease on life. Charlene would never forget the minute when the nurse looked up and said those magic words: you’re pregnant. Even though the nurse’s disgusted look spoke volumes, Charlene’s heart soared; then the terror set in. Charlene might not have the courage to stand against her husband for herself, but she knew she could do it to protect her unborn daughter. She didn’t know why she knew it was a girl, but she did.

She

Once in public office, Mellon helped define the 1920s as an era during which business succeeded in rolling back many of the Progressive Era’s reforms. In 1921, capital gains taxes were cut, and the stock market boomed. After repeated efforts during his dozen-year tenure at Treasury, in 1926 Mellon finally succeeded in getting a bill passed that “cut the tax rates on the richest Americans more deeply than any other tax law in history,” according to Martin. Mellon promised greater growth and prosperity. When instead the stock market crashed in 1929 after a frenzy of speculation, his legacy was tarnished. Not only did his economic theories look self-serving and irresponsible, but it surfaced that Mellon himself had been secretly providing tax credits and subsidies to some of the country’s biggest businesses, including many in which the Mellon family had major investments.

Thus, when the banker John Pierpont Morgan left a fortune of $68 million in 1914, the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie is supposed to have remarked pityingly that he had by no means been “a rich man.”203 Carnegie’s own fortune and those of industrialists like John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and Andrew W. Mellon were over half a billion dollars. The rapidity of the concentration of wealth may be gauged from the fact that the largest American private fortunes grew from about $25 million in 1860 to $100 million twenty years later and $1 billion two decades after that. By 1900 the richest man in the United States had assets worth twelve times more than those of the richest European (who was a member of the English aristocracy); not even the Rothschilds (finance), the Krupps (steel, machinery, weapons), or the Beits (British/South African gold and diamond capital) were in the same league.

in 1885, Mellon fretted that “the normal condition of man is hard work, self-denial, acquisition and accumulation; as soon as his descendants are freed from the necessity of exertion they begin to degenerate sooner or later in body and mind.

Jobs had tried to hire Rashid, then a computer science professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, but Rashid turned him down. He was reluctant to join the hurly-burly life of a corporation. His Mach research had been almost wholly funded by government grants; an agency of the Pentagon, his principal backer, saw Mach as crucial to unleashing the vast power of multiprocessor computers, inherently cheap machines that would someday replace pricey supercomputers as the backbone of the nation’s military and intelligence-gathering networks. Besides, Rashid was an academic purist. He seemed sincerely devoted to pursuing knowledge about software for its own sake. This was rare, even among academics, because software was such a remunerative field that the brightest researchers found themselves inexorably pulled into commerce: The money was too good. After

Once in public office, Mellon helped define the 1920s as an era during which business succeeded in rolling back many of the Progressive Era’s reforms. In 1921, capital gains taxes were cut, and the stock market boomed. After repeated efforts during his dozen-year tenure at Treasury, in 1926 Mellon finally succeeded in getting a bill passed that “cut the tax rates on the richest Americans more deeply than any other tax law in history,

When Congress instituted the federal income tax, Mellon was one of the wealthiest men in America, with interests in dozens of monopolistic conglomerates then called “trusts.” His Union Trust bank reportedly financed almost half the investments in Pittsburgh. In his view, the economic inequality that such arrangements produced was not only inevitable; it was the just reward for excellence and virtue.

Andrew Mellon himself would have been pleased with the succession of hefty tax cuts that Reagan pushed through Congress. He slashed corporate and individual tax rates, particularly helping the wealthy.

One was the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group aimed at waging conservative fights in every state legislature in the country. From 1973 until 1983, the Scaife and Mellon family trusts donated half a million dollars to ALEC, constituting most of its budget. “ALEC is well on its way to fulfilling the dream of those who started the organization,” a Weyrich aide wrote to Scaife’s top adviser in 1976, “thanks wholly to your confidence and the tremendous generosity of the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts.

The basic difference between Animals and Plants is that Animals are cordless, while Plants have to be plugged in.

My guess about Love is this: Love is a whisper that you don’t hear but feel. It can be a look in the eye or a tone in the voice or a certain way of a smile that says Yeah, you and me both, we’re in this thing together and isn’t it some ride?

Does Life care about fairness? Not one hoot. Does Life compensate? Never by design. Does Life keep score? How could it? There’s no scoreboard.

Right after hollering ‘Fire!’ the best way to clear a crowded room is to yell “Anybody wanna hear my philosophy on life?

Mellon was right,” he said. “Raising tax rates does not raise revenues. In fact, just the opposite happens. The rich just find a way to legally shelter their money and avoid the higher taxes. And who could blame them. But every time we’ve lowered tax rates, revenues rose. Harding. Coolidge. Hoover. Kennedy. Reagan. Bush. They all got that.

The Gausebeck-Levchin test became the first commercial application of a Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart—or CAPTCHA. Today, CAPTCHA tests are common on the internet—to be online is to be subjected to a search for a specific image—a fire hydrant or bicycle or boat—from a lineup. But at the time, PayPal was the first company to force users to prove their humanity in this fashion. Gausebeck and Levchin didn’t invent the CAPTCHA—Carnegie Mellon researchers devised something similar in 1999—but the PayPal version was the first to scale, and among the first to solve the centuries-old challenge of separating human from machine.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all the time. – Rumi

We now use our phones so habitually that I don’t think we consider doing a task and checking our phones at the same time as multitasking, any more than we think scratching your butt during a work call is multitasking. But it is. Simply having your phone switched on and receiving texts every ten minutes while you try to work is itself a form of switching – and these costs start to kick in for you too. One study at the Carnegie Mellon University’s Human Computer Interaction Lab took 136 students and got them to sit a test. Some of them had to have their phones switched off, and others had their phones on and received intermittent text messages. The students who received messages performed, on average, 20 percent worse.

He did not think that art should, or could, be sold overnight. He believed in waiting for advantageous moments; he arranged them far in advance, so he was not surprised when they came. In his grand financial strategy, he calculated in terms of his total life span. The final tally would not be in, he figured, until he had made his last sale and died. His strategy proved sound. It was not until 1937, after he put over his last great deal with Mellon, that Duveen liquidated his £1,200,000 debt to his London bank. When he had made his very last sale, he was out of debt, and had £3,000,000 in the bank, an inventory worth £2,000,000, and his self-confidence intact.

The difficulty of self-imposed discipline in the sharing of private thoughts, feelings, and other personal information has been amply demonstrated in social research and summarized in an important 2015 review by Carnegie Mellon professors Alessandro Acquisti, Laura Brandimarte, and George Loewenstein

American Express (AXP) Apple (AAPL) Bank of America (BAC) Bank of New York Mellon (BK) Charter Communications (CHTR) The Coca-Cola Company (KO) Delta Air Lines (DAL) Goldman Sachs (GS) JPMorgan Chase (JPM) Moody's (MCO) Southwest Airlines (LUV) United Continental Holdings (UAL) U.S. Bancorp (USB) USG Corporation (USG) Wells Fargo (WFC)

This was the largest transaction ever consummated in the world of art. Duveen had easily outdone the Soviets. There were twenty-one items in the Soviet deal, forty-two in Duveen’s. Mellon paid the Soviets seven million dollars; he paid Duveen twenty-one million.

Since Duveen was able to assemble a large part of the Mellon Collection – and a large part of so many others besides – in one lifetime, it can be argued that he was the greatest collector in history.

In passing the 1893 resolution, the suffragists might as well have announced that if they, as white women of the middle classes and bourgeoisie, were given the power of the vote, they would rapidly subdue the three main elements of the U.S. working class: Black people, immigrants and the uneducated native white workers. It was these three groups of people whose labor was exploited and whose lives were sacrificed by the Morgans, Rockefellers, Mellons, Vanderbilts—by the new class of monopoly capitalists who were ruthlessly establishing their industrial empires. They controlled the immigrant workers in the North as well as the former slaves and poor white laborers who were operating the new railroad, mining and steel industries in the South.

One group who seemed to have taken Mellon’s advice on liquidation to heart was the Russians.

Mellon found himself accused of corruption, of granting illegal tax refunds to companies in which he had an interest,

The emotionally crippled Mellon, long divorced from his wife

Are you still thinking about Downing?

In his paper, Dr Davis referred to the infamous 1980 Cash-Landrum UFO case, covered earlier in this book, where the Landrum family reported a massive diamond-shaped UFO hovering over their car in the road near Dayton, Texas. As well as the trio reporting terrible burns from what experts declared was ionising radiation, one of the weirdest claims in the Cash-Landrum sighting was that they said they saw 23 helicopters, including massive CH-47 Chinooks, closely following the object. The US military denied any of its choppers were in the air nearby that night, and 23 of them in one place does sound implausible. Dr Davis’s paper gave an explanation – that the helicopters were ‘mimicry techniques employed for the manipulation of human consciousness to induce the various manifestations of “absurd” interactions or scenery associated with the UFO encounter. This in combination with the mimicry of man-made aircrafts’ (helicopters) aggregate features were prominent in the Cash-Landrum UFO case’. There is no explanation for how Dr Davis reached this conclusion. No known science describes the capacity to manipulate human consciousness to induce hallucinations as described. Modern science would say it was science fiction. However, an answer may lie in extraordinary PowerPoint slides we know now were prepared for a briefing of senior officials at the US Department of Defence, detailed online by The Mind Sublime. The individual behind that site told me he found the intriguing PowerPoint slides in early August 2018 while he was trawling through former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence Christopher Mellon’s personal website.4 (This was shortly after The New York Times had revealed the existence of the previously secret Pentagon UAP investigation program.) The Mind Sublime researcher screenshotted his discovery to prove the slides came from Mellon’s website, and, importantly, because the document was stated to be a PowerPoint for a briefing of the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Defence. Perhaps it was these slides that prompted Senator Harry Reid to ask the Department of Defence for Special Access Program protection for the investigation – because what the slides said was momentous. If the unredacted slides accurately reflect the Defence Department’s knowledge of the UAP phenomenon, they are explosive. They reveal how the Pentagon’s UAP investigation unit advised the Defence Department not only that the mysterious craft were a ‘game changer’ but that the US military was powerless against them.5 One of the slides, headed ‘AATIP Preliminary Assessments’, shows that Elizondo’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program privately advised the Defence Department that ‘Preliminary evidence indicates that the United States is incapable of defending itself towards some of those technologies . . . The nature of these technologies and the fact that the United States has no countermeasures is considered Highly Sensitive’.6 The document, prepared for the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Defence, pushed for further investigation ‘in order to determine the full scope of the threat and their capabilities to be either exploited or defeated’.

Inspired by Sharpe’s work, Fouse in 1969 recommended that Mellon launch a passive fund that would try to replicate only one of the big stock market indices, like the S&P 500 of America’s biggest companies. It got nixed by Mellon’s management. In the spring of 1970, he then proposed a fund that would systematically invest according to a dividend-based model devised by John Burr Williams—who had nearly two decades earlier inspired Markowitz’s work—but that too was summarily squashed. “Goddammit Fouse, you’re trying to turn my business into a science,” his boss told him.14

Reflections on Careers in Quantitative Finance Carnegie Mellon’s Steve Shreve is out with an interesting post on careers in quantitative finance, with his commentary on the changing landscape in quantitative research and the implications for financial education.

And busyness has become a cultural symbol of status. Even though people say they're complaining, they're secretly bragging.

Carnegie Mellon University: “We’re at the beginning of a ten-year period where we’re going to transition from computers that can’t understand language to a point where computers can understand quite a bit about language.

As George Loewenstein, an economist at Carnegie Mellon, points out, “There is little evidence beyond fallible introspection supporting the standard assumption of complete volitional control of behavior.

According to a study by Carnegie Mellon University, commercial software typically has twenty to thirty bugs for every thousand lines of code—fifty million lines of code means 1 million to 1.5 million potential errors to be exploited. This is the basis for all malware attacks that take advantage of these computer bugs to get the code to do something it was not originally intended to do. As computer code grows more elaborate, software bugs flourish and security suffers, with increasing consequences for society at large.

Ancora oggi a Bagheria si fanno dei gelati squisiti, piccoli fiori di cioccolata ripieni di pasta gelata molle e profumata, al gelsomino, alla menta, alla fragola, al cocco. Per non parlare del più tradizionale “gelo di mellone” che non è un gelato come sembra ma una gelatina di cocomero dal colore corallino disseminata di semi di cioccolato. E che dire del “gelato di campagna” che è una specie di torrone di zucchero dai colori delicati, il cui gusto al pistacchio si mescola a quello della mandorla e della vaniglia?L'ultima volta che ho mangiato i dolci di Bagheria ero in visita a villa Valguarnera in visita a zia Saretta che poi è morta lasciando la villa e tutte le ricchezze ai gesuiti, con grande dispiacere degli eredi di sangue. I quali hanno infatti subito impugnato il testamento. I gesuiti, molto saggiamente, hanno pensato che una villa così monumentale è difficile da mantenere, avrebbe procurato più grane che altro, più spese che comodità e se ne sono lavate le mani. Nel frattempo, i ladri sono entrati e hanno portato via tutto, perfino le statue del giardino.

Mellon is thirteen," Raisa said. "I hope you have experience babysitting, Micah, because you're going to need it. Assuming the Demonai don't assassinate you first. Married at thirteen, widowed at fourteen. Poor Mellony.

But the actual arguments advocated by Secretary Mellon had nothing to do with a “trickle-down theory.” Mellon pointed out that, under the high income tax rates at the end of the Woodrow Wilson administration in 1921, vast sums of money had been put into tax shelters such as tax-exempt municipal bonds, instead of being invested in the private economy, where this money would create more output, incomes and jobs.[8

In addition to the Kochs, this group included Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir to the Mellon banking and Gulf Oil fortunes; Harry and Lynde Bradley, midwesterners enriched by defense contracts; John M. Olin, a chemical and munitions company titan; the Coors brewing family of Colorado; and the DeVos family of Michigan, founders of the Amway marketing empire. Each was different, but together they formed a new generation of philanthropist, bent on using billions of dollars from their private foundations to alter the direction of American politics. —

Andrew Mellon himself would have been pleased with the succession of hefty tax cuts that Reagan pushed through Congress. He slashed corporate and individual tax rates, particularly helping the wealthy. Between 1981 and 1986, the top income tax rate was cut from 70 percent to 28 percent. Meanwhile, taxes on the bottom four-fifths of earners rose. Economic inequality, which had flatlined, began to climb. The

Levy introduced them to Mike Fowler’s widow and four sons, Mellon’s wife, and Ash’s parents. All of them seemed drained, and Holman thought Fowler’s wife was probably sedated. Everyone treated him politely and with respect, but Holman still felt conspicuous and out of place. He caught the others staring at him several times and—each time—he flushed, certain they were thinking, That’s Holman’s father, the criminal. He felt more embarrassed for Richie than for himself. He had managed to shame his son even in death. Levy

I

bore

One of the more fascinating developments of this attempt by atheists to hijack the practices of Christianity, without adopting its beliefs, is the realization on the part of atheist parents that they have shortchanged their children. Their kids are psychologically dialed on empty, and their parents know it. Thus it is the parents of college-bound guys and gals who are pushing for atheist services and secular chaplains in many colleges and universities. Rutgers, American, and Carnegie Mellon were among the first to establish such programs. The fact that 12 percent of Americans who say they don’t believe in God admit to praying—6 percent of self-identified atheists pray—is yet another indication that atheism fails to satisfy.17 Pete Sill, a former Catholic turned atheist, believes the number of atheists who pray is higher than 6 percent. “I think prayer is important because it takes your mind away from the horrible aspects of everyday life,” he says.18

Don’t sell yourself short,

They had met through the Cancer Center. Vivian had used her connection with Laura, who was on the center’s board of directors, to get him access to candidates to carry the phones on the planes. He needed men who were terminally ill and had financial worries. Vivian had told Laura that a fellow Carnegie Mellon alumnus wanted to set up a fund to help cancer patients with their expenses.

Guess what? ★ Without grand programs, Harding and Coolidge presided over one of the most economically prosperous times in America’s history. ★ Under Treasury secretary Andrew Mellon, the top income tax rate fell from 73 percent to 40 percent and later to 25 percent, but the greatest proportional reductions occurred in the lower income brackets, where people saw most of their income tax burden eliminated altogether.