“Conformity is ‘doubly hard’ to beat—it can obviously happen when people imitate one another, but it can also set in even when folks are trying to be distinct.”
3/4/15, DISCOVERY
Joshua Epstein, a mathematical scientist and a member of the Whiting School’s Institute for Computational Medicine, who developed a new model to measure conformity that allows for people wanting to be a bit different.

“We need to study the blueprints, the scaffolding, the construction and the mistakes—not just the final building.”
5/28/15, Adweek
Avi Rubin, director of the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, on how the Smithsonian Institution should select modern tech devices to collect for posterity.

“What nags me is that all of nature is self-assembled.”
1/27/14, Cosmos Magazine
David Gracias, the Russell Croft Faculty Scholar and a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, explaining that engineers now are looking to complex natural processes—such as a tadpole turning its gills into lungs in a single day—as models for efforts to speed up the manufacturing of microscopic 3-D devices.

“Are they noticing it? Are they changing their behavior? Are they getting sick?”
11/21/14, CBS News
While mining social media content to track air pollution in China, computer scientist Mark Dredze uses the same data to understand how Chinese citizens perceive pollution.