Katie Hafner Quotes & Sayings

The process of technological development is like building a cathedral," remarked Baran years later. "Over the course of several hundred years new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, 'I built a cathedral.'Next month another block is placed atop the previous one. Then comes along an historian who asks, 'Well, who built the cathedral?' Peter added some stones here, and Paul added a few more. If you are not careful, you can con yourself into believing that you did the most important part. But the reality is that each contribution has to follow onto previous work. Everything is tied to everything else. — Katie Hafner

Dr. Esserman, who directs the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center, is one of only a few surgeons in the United States willing to put women with D.C.I.S. on active surveillance instead of performing biopsies, lumpectomies or mastectomies. — Katie Hafner

Having a parent live with you under the best of circumstances can be a terrible stressor. — Katie Hafner

'Unexpected Legacy' reports the findings of the California Children of Divorce Study, which began in 1971, a year after the nation's first no-fault divorce law was imposed in California. Wallerstein was the principal investigator on the study. — Katie Hafner

When Rose McDermott, a professor of political science at Brown University, got divorced two years ago, she noticed that a cluster of her friends were splitting up at around the same time. — Katie Hafner

Like the protagonist of her 2006 novel, 'Love and Other Impossible Pursuits,' Ayelet Waldman is a Jewish redhead who attended Harvard Law School and is madly in love with her husband. But the obvious similarities end there. — Katie Hafner

McDermott and two colleagues - James H. Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and Nicholas A. Christakis of Harvard University - published a paper titled 'Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too.' Their study shows that divorce can spread like a virus among friends, siblings and co-workers. — Katie Hafner

It took Cianfrance 12 years to bring 'Blue Valentine' to the screen after he first conceived it. He found Gosling and Williams early on, and they hung in there with him. The film finally premiered at Sundance 2010, then screened at Cannes and the Toronto Film Festival before landing in theaters in December. — Katie Hafner

In 1981, while doing postdoctoral field work in cultural anthropology, Bonnie A. Nardi lived with villagers in Western Samoa, trying to understand the cultural reasons that people there have an average of eight children. — Katie Hafner

In 1990, Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin, two psychologists at the University of California, Riverside, embarked on a research project within a research project, seeking answers to the question, 'What makes for a long life?' — Katie Hafner

Speaking as the child of divorce, I have to say that one of the most disconcerting findings in 'The Longevity Project' focused on divorce: On average, grown children of divorced parents died almost five years earlier than children from intact families. — Katie Hafner

At its core, all engineering comes down to making tradeoffs between the perfect and the workable. — Katie Hafner

In the summer of 2009, in the wake of a crisis in her life, my mother moved from San Diego to San Francisco to live with my 16-year-old daughter and me. My mother was 77. I was 51. Despite a chorus of skepticism from friends - who knew about my upbringing - I was determined to do what I could to help my mother. — Katie Hafner

Stacey Napp understands the ugly side of divorce - which is often the side that involves money. In fact, she understands it so well that in 2008 she started a business, Balance Point Divorce Funding, which invests in divorce and probate litigation, helping clients cover costs in exchange for a share of the winnings. — Katie Hafner

It's one thing when you plug into a socket in the wall and electrons flow," said Bob Kahn. "It's another thing when you have to figure out, for every electron, which direction it takes. — Katie Hafner

Being a journalist, you write what you see. If we can't do that, what use are we? I turned years of training on myself. — Katie Hafner

Unlike most divorced parents, whose interactions are confined to the topic of the kids, people still sharing a house have to talk about clogged sinks and moth infestations. — Katie Hafner

Many anthropologists work with a concept called embodied knowledge - tacit, nonscientific knowledge - and look for ways to incorporate such information into product design. — Katie Hafner

'Blue Valentine,' Derek Cianfrance's emotional gunslinger of a film, tears into the topic of moribund marriages with an honesty that's hard to come by in Hollywood these days. — Katie Hafner

Sometimes an ethnographic inquiry will lead to new ways to use an existing technology or will generate new technologies. — Katie Hafner

Divorce, and broken marriages, are all around us, but they're not frequently depicted on screen, or if they are, they're often depicted in ways that have very little to do with reality. — Katie Hafner

The story of the Web starts in 1980, when Berners-Lee, a young consulting physicist at the CERN physics laboratory near Geneva, grew frustrated with existing methods for finding and transferring information. — Katie Hafner

Tim Berners-Lee, the 44-year-old English physicist who created the World Wide Web, is precisely the kind of hero that a relatively simple invention with profound social and economic consequences should lay claim to. He is not just creative but democratic, diplomatic, polite and generous with credit and praise. — Katie Hafner

But today I'm indifferent. And with this comes a glimmer of understanding: I can pick and choose what I absorb and what I deflect. This is how the color spectrum works: Some colors absorb light, while others deflect it, depending on where they are on the spectrum. Earlier in my life, when it came to hurtful words from my mother, I was more like an off-shade of brown, absorbing most of them. Now, with experience, wisdom, and a little more self-confidence, my spectrum is shifting. I'm making a choice to be less absorptive. And her comment... is one for which I choose to become pure white. — Katie Hafner

Berners-Lee started the World Wide Web as a set of protocols for transferring, linking and addressing documents to send over the Net. Without the global reach and open technical standards of the Internet, the Web could never have proliferated as it did. — Katie Hafner

In 2002, my husband died very suddenly. My main concern that day was how to deliver the news to our daughter, then eight. Someone put me in touch with Judith Wallerstein, an expert in child psychology who coached me through what to say. — Katie Hafner

No longer do companies study consumers' psyches only by asking people what they think about technology and how they use it. Now they conduct observational research, dispatching anthropologists to employ their ethnographic skills by interviewing, watching and videotaping consumers in their natural habitats. — Katie Hafner

Using the HTTP protocol, computer scientists around the world began making the Internet easier to navigate by inventing point-and-click browsers. One browser in particular, called Mosaic, created in 1993 at the University of Illinois, would help popularize the Web, and therefore the Net, as no software tool had yet done. — Katie Hafner

Spurred by the unlimited texting plans offered by carriers like AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company - almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier. — Katie Hafner