“You could be told many times, ‘You can’t do this,’ as I was. And you can either believe what people are telling you and saying to you, or you can define their challenge and go ahead and do it. And the latter was always my case.”
1/24/18, U.S. News & World Report
James E. West, professor of electrical and computer engineering, on how he dealt with racial bias throughout his career.
“One can see the rub when old-school guys are confronted with new ways of thinking.”
Anton Dahbura, director of the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute and baseball analysis consultant, on traditional baseball managers’ reluctance to embrace the role that data analytics can play in sports strategy.
“They can disregard the fact that the stakes are high and still come through with the performance that they’ve practiced all their life to achieve.”
Vikram Chib, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, on how Olympic athletes are able to overcome humans’ natural fear of injury and failure to go for the gold.
“Imagine we took 100 copies of today’s edition of The Washington Post and shredded it so that strings of words remained intact. The job then is to take those scraps and make a single edition of The Post.”
2/7/18, The Washington Post
Steven Salzberg, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Biostatistics, about the enormous task of mapping the redwood genome, which is 12 times larger than that of humans.