Brandon Gorrell

“It's interesting to see how Cleverbot convinces a lot of people that it is human. It doesn't try to respond logically to every query, or to correctly parse every sentence from the human. Instead it tries to mimic how an incoherent or slightly crazed human would converse—or perhaps how a pickup artist would try to dazzle a sweet young thing with banter—as its best chance of doing a passable imitation. ”

“Outsourcing is still a smaller phenomenon than many people think. Currently imports from China are measured at about 2.7 percent of US consumer spending. Furthermore, for each dollar of imports from China, about fifty-five cents was ultimately spent in the United States preparing the import in some manner. That leaves Chinese imports, measured in terms of true net impact, at about 1.3 percent of American spending. ”

“Immigration is vital to the future economic vitality of the United States. If that immigration is Latino, as indeed it often is in the United States, the longer-run effect is to build up entrepreneurship and democratic values in the other countries in this hemisphere. ”

“Southern Germany is an extremely productive region and we can expect it will become more crowded and also more productive. The top German firms are generating some impressive learning curves.”

“...studies of spelling bees show that the winning spellers are those who not only work hard, but who engage in disciplined forms of study that do not always yield immediate positive feedback.”

“Of course, educational institutions aren't ready to admit how much they share with churches. These temples of secularism don't want to admit they are about simple tasks such as motivating the slugs or acculturating people into the work habits and sociological expectations of the so-called educated class. ”

“It is rumored that Richard Eng, one of the leading tutor kings, pulls in $1.5 million a year; his face is on billboards, he drives a Lamborghini, and his license plate reads simply 'Richard.'”

“An intelligent machine might come up with a new theory of cosmology, and perhaps no human will be able to understand or articulate that theory. Maybe it will refer to non-visualizable dimensions of space or nonintuitive understandings of time. The machine will tell us that the theory makes good predictions, and if nothing else we will be able to use one genius machine to check the predictions of the theory from the other genius machine. Still, we, as humans, won't have a good grasp on what the theory means and even the best scientists will grasp only part of what the genius machine has done. It would be like trying to explain the Periodic Table of Elements to a five-year-old. Maybe it can be done, but it will hardly serve as an easily grasped, intuitive understanding of what is going on. ”

“Men, on the other hand, were on edge. Moore goes so far in the study as to say that for men, public toilets are 'nightmarish spaces.' The anxiety they reported was centered around 'watching'—being watched by other men, or being perceived to be watching other men—and that this watching was linked to the possibility of sexual violence.”

“At the beginning of the new moon, for example, one's acetylcholine rises along with the capacity to perform. Acetylcholine is traditionally associated with attention. 'The mood it evokes in us is an Energizer Bunny-like pep. That vibe can be used to initiate social interactions, do chores and routines efficiently, and strive for balance in our activities.”