Technical Quotes - page 25
Computer games are embedded in the cultural framework of technological developments. In the study of technological development and creativity, focusing attention on the failure, the error, the breakdown, the malfunction means opening the black box of technology. Studies have convincingly demonstrated that the widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are "left over." However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural--and last but not least--political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products and product forms are usually not discussed. According to Langdon Winner, there is a sense in which all technical activity contains an inherent tendency toward forgetfulness.
Johannes Grenzfurthner
Google docs and spreadsheets don't work if you're on an airplane. But it's a technical problem that is going to get solved. Eventually you will be able to work on a plane as if you are connected and, then when you get reconnected to the Internet, your computer will just synchronize with the cloud.
Eric Schmidt
Woman is the future of man. That means that the world which was once formed in man's image will now be transformed to the image of woman. The more technical and mechanical, cold and metallic it becomes, the more it will need the kind of warmth that only the woman can give it. If we want to save the world, we must adapt to the woman, let ourselves be led by the woman, let ourselves be penetrated by the Ewigweiblich, the eternally feminine.
Milan Kundera
The truths modern science finds-even about human beings-are value-neutral, in no way restraining, and indeed perfectly adapted for, technical application. In short, as Hans Jonas has put it, modern science contains manipulability at its theoretical core-and this remains true even for those great scientists who are themselves motivated by the desire for truth and who have no interest in that mastery over nature to which their discoveries nonetheless contribute and for which science is largely esteemed by the rest of us and mightily supported by the modern state.
Leon Kass
We need to fund relationship language in our schools so that future parents will know how to communicate about whether they want children; to communicate with the children they have, and teach their children how to communicate with the world. Technical progress without social skills is a Tower of Babel.
Warren Farrell
We never had any use for Taylor or any of the efficiency or scientific management crowd. They never realized that human toil was the last thing in the world you had to be efficient about; the only way to be really efficient is to eliminate it entirely, and this would have been heresy to any of the Taylor, Gant, Barth, Cook efficiency crowd.
It is sad to contemplate that men of the technical ability of the names mentioned in this paragraph were so lame in their thinking and social outlook that they missed the boat so completely. Who in hell wants to be efficient with a shovel, and what sense would there be even if you succeeded? They should have had their heads opened with a shovel; it might have been more effective.
Howard Scott
Most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint -- Republican or Democratic, liberal, conservative, or moderate. The fact of the matter is that most of the problems that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems. They are very sophisticated judgments, which do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past. They deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men.
John F. Kennedy
The EU's single market is a single regulatory regime. Membership of it doesn't mean that you can sell your products into it: pretty much the whole world can do that. Membership means, rather, that you accept a common set of technical standards, and that you submit yourself to the ultimate jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.
Daniel Hannan
At Chicago, Hayek put aside his more technical economic work for the development of a social and political theory that became in time the most ambitious and complete synthesis to emerge from the ranks of the post-war Right. Among its themes - the overriding significance of the rule of law, the need for social inequality, the function of unreflective tradition, the value of a leisured class - were many cultivated by Strauss across the campus. Neither thinker, however, ever referred to the other. Did temperamental antagonism, or intellectual indifference, dictate the silence? Whatever the case, latent tensions of outlook between them were to find expression in due course. Schmitt, on the other hand, was never far from Hayek's mind – standing for the prime example of a skilled jurist whose sophistry helped to destroy the rule of law in Germany, yet a political theorist whose stark definitions of the nature of sovereignty and the logic of party, at any rate, had to be accepted.
Friedrich Hayek
The opponents of the President's plan and the special interest groups that stand to gain from continuation of the status quo will try to shift the debate away from CBO's fundamental conclusion--which is that the President's plan will guarantee universal, comprehensive health insurance coverage and save money at the same time. The real issue is not the technical question of whether the President's plan or another plan should be included in the Federal Budget. The real issue is which plan does the job of ending the Nation's health care crisis. By this standard, CBO's analysis is a convincing vote of confidence in President Clinton's plan. None of the plans advanced by the President's opponents can claim a similar seal of budget approval.
Ted Kennedy
What happened in the Haighmoor seam gave to Bamforth and myself a first glimpse of the "emergence of a new paradigm of work" (Emery, 1978) in which the best match would be sought between the requirements of the social and technical systems. Some of the principles involved were as follows:.
Eric Trist
Despite the adulation that followed him wherever he went, Menuhin's playing began to lose some of its technical brilliance in the 1950s and entered a slow decline. But Menuhin, who often appeared transfixed when he performed, readily made up for what a Times critic described as "thick-toned, raspy playing" with an increased spiritual intensity in his interpretation.
Yehudi Menuhin
