This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The Chinese government keeps installing video cameras in its most troubling cities. Not only do such cameras remind passersby about the panopticon they inhabit, they also supply the secret police with useful clues[...]. Such revolution in video surveillance did not happen without some involvement from Western partners. Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, funded in part by the Chinese government, have managed to build surveillance software that can automatically annotate and comment on what it sees, generating text files that can later be searched by humans, obviating the need to watch hours of video footage in search of one particular frame. (To make that possible, the researchers had to recruit twenty graduates of local art colleges in China to annotate and classify a library of more than two million images.) Such automation systems help surveillance to achieve the much needed scale, for as long as the content produced by surveillance cameras can be indexed and searched, one can continue installing new surveillance cameras. [...] The face-recognition industry is so lucrative that even giants like Google can’t resist getting into the game, feeling the growing pressure from saller players like Face.com, a popular tool that allows users to find and automatically annotate unique faces that apepar throughout their photo collections. In 2009 Face.com launched a Facebook application that first asks users to identify a Facebook friend of theirs ina photo and then proceeds to search the social networking site for other pictures in which that friend appears. By early 2010, the company boasted of scanning 9 billion pictures and identifying 52 million individuals. This is the kind of productivity that would make the KGB envious.
Effort | Empathy | Feelings | Focus | Important | Knowing | Need | Observation | Opposition | People | Problems | Reading | Search | Security | Space | Technology | Understanding | Waiting | Work |
It's political and economic factors, rather than the ease of forming associations, that primarily set the tone and vector in which social networks contribute to democratization; one would be naive to believe that such factors would always favor democracy.
Belief | Force | Neglect | Popularity | Power | Space | Technology | Will | World |
And I don't like people who eat powdered doughnuts. I don't car how careful you are, they're just plain messy. I can't believe they taste good enough to justify getting that sugar all over everything, especially me.
Power |
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
Just think of all those women on the Titanic who said, "No, thank you" to dessert that night. And for what?!
Control | Family | Power | Television |
Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.
The master key to life is Unity. All the ills of life are due to inharmony, inharmony is due to a sense of separation and lack of unity. But when we have once more made our unity with All-Good we become bondservants no more to the Law, but rather the Law becomes our servant while we pass into the glorious freedom of the sons of God.
Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
Capacity | Individual | Machines | Power | Talking |
Everything I do is a creation of my hands whether it is made in wood, plaster, or clay.
Patience is the ballast of the soul, that will keep it from rolling and tumbling in the greatest storms: and he, that will venture out without this to make him sail even and steady will certainly make shipwreck, and drown himself; first, in the cares and sorrows of this world; and, then, in perdition.
The culture around here is much less cutthroat than it is in, say, Silicon Valley, or even within the non-profit culture in D.C.
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You're not out of it until the computer says you're out of it.
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
I was going to have inner peace if I had to break a few heads to do it.
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
My mind works . . . two boobs never get me a job.
This is the situation in Qatar: … We only have two days of water reserve, we import 90 percent of our food, and we only cultivate less than one percent of our land.
Power |
Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
Let us... quietly accept our times, with the firm conviction that just as much good can be done today as at any time in the past, provided only that we have the will and the way to do it.
Exploit | Genius | Pleasure | Public | Temptation | Work | Talent | Temptation |
Since technology, like gas, will fill any conceptual space provided, Leo Marx, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describes it as a “hazardous concept” that may “stifle and obfuscate analytic thinking”. He notes, “Because of its peculiar susceptibility to reification, to being endowed with the magical power of an autonomous entity, technology is a major contributant to that gathering sense… of political impotence. The popularity of the belief that technology is the primary force shaping the postmodern world is a measure of our.. neglect of moral and political standards, in making decisive choices about the direction of society.”
Cost | Day | Knowledge | Men | Opposition | Organization | Public | Will |
There is the type of man who has great contempt for "imÂmediacy," who tries to cultivate his interiority, base his pride on something deeper and inner, create a distance between himself and the average man. Kierkegaard calls this type of man the "introvert." He is a little more concerned with what it means to be a person, with individuality and uniqueness. He enjoys solitude and withÂdraws periodically to reflect, perhaps to nurse ideas about his secret self, what it might be. This, after all is said and done, is the only real problem of life, the only worthwhile preoccupation of man: What is one's true talent, his secret gift, his authentic vocation? In what way is one truly unique, and how can he express this uniqueÂness, give it form, dedicate it to something beyond himself? How can the person take his private inner being, the great mystery that he feels at the heart of himself, his emotions, his yearnings and use them to live more distinctively, to enrich both himself and manÂkind with the peculiar quality of his talent? In adolescence, most of us throb with this dilemma, expressing it either with words and thoughts or with simple numb pain and longing. But usually life suck us up into standardized activities. The social hero-system into which we are born marks out paths for our heroism, paths to which we conform, to which we shape ourselves so that we can please others, become what they expect us to be. And instead of working our inner secret we gradually cover it over and forget it, while we become purely external men, playing successfully the standardized hero-game into which we happen to fall by accident, by family connection, by reflex patriotism, or by the simple need to eat and the urge to procreate.
Character | Creativity | Death | Defense | Defiance | Dread | Failure | Insanity | Life | Life | Looks | Means | Men | Misfortune | Nature | Parents | People | Price | Reality | Sense | Style | Tragedy | Will | Wonder | World | Misfortune | Failure |