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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
Ehud Barak: I believe that I already came from my childhood with the kind of feeling somehow that the fact that I'm slightly different doesn't mean that I'm worse. Or somehow -- it doesn't create -- should not kind of deter me from trying to do things. It's just a matter of fact. I cannot throw the ball through the basket so I cannot become a basketball player. But it somehow did not deter me. Somehow I came out of childhood with kind of a self-confident -- or not self-confidence in things that I cannot do, but kind of calibrated assessment of what I can do, and with a basic sense of direction of what I can do, a sense of judgment.
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
And under battle, under exercises, it's unbelievably -- the simplest operations become unbelievably tough. It's like burden on all the people. People become paralyzed. Some of them that were so kind of easy going and kind of hyper before battle become totally paralyzed. They don't hear well. They tend -- everyone tends to stay behind cover. To move a unit to assault is infinitely complicated. You know, it's -- first of all, personally you are paralyzed by the shooting. You are confident that once you raise your head over you will get a bullet at your head. It's only the eyes of your own soldiers that you know that they know that you are committed to lead them. They expect you to do something. You cannot avoid it. You cannot leave there and leave them kind of paralyzed.
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Gary Becker
Nobel Prize in Economics
Most of my teachers at Chicago were open to my working on that. Some were skeptical that an economist should be working on these problems, so they forced a sociologist to be a member of my thesis committee. But I had enough of my faculty like (Milton) Friedman and others -- Ted Schultz, who eventually won the Nobel Prize also -- and some others there, who thought I was onto something, who encouraged me. So I kept doing it. My fellow graduate students were skeptical, and I'd go out to other economists, at MIT and elsewhere, very good places, they were very skeptical if this was economics. I don't know if I would have persisted if it wasn't -- I had some support among my faculty members who I admired so much. And given my own, you might say, rebellious instincts, the combination, I think both were necessary in enabling me to persist in the face of the fact that most economists thought this wasn't really economics, and this was sociology or whatever you wanted to call it. But I thought it was economics, in the sense I was using economic tools to discuss what was obviously, I would say, "This is a major problem. We economists should be talking about this," and they would be skeptical about that.
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Gary Becker
Nobel Prize in Economics
I began to think more sporadically about family: Who marries whom, what matches you see, how many children people had -- an area I had touched on in a paper I did much earlier, but came back to that. How much they invest in their child, that is, effort and time, money, encouragement they put into the child. That directly looks at the educational issue. But then divorce was beginning to increase. Do families stay together? I had to talk about the divorce issue. Eventually I published this book that covered almost every aspect, in terms of broad issues, that the family deals with, from having children, from marrying before having children, to investing in your children, to divorcing, to care of elderly parents. All these issues I tried to bring together within a common framework. And it was the hardest thing I ever did, I mean mentally. It took enormous concentration. For a number of years I'd wake up at night, start working on it. I was very tired when the book was over. It took a year or two before I could really get much intellectual zest back to work on things. It took a lot out of me doing that book, and I felt it was an imperfect book. Family is such a huge subject that I certainly didn't feel I "solved" the family. But at the same time, I felt I had made progress in showing that one could use these tools to help illuminate some issues of the family, and was very satisfied about that, even though, again, when the book came out, the economists, the non-economists were skeptical. Even the Nobel Prize Committee, when they awarded me the Nobel Prize, they mentioned my work on discrimination very positively, my work on crime, which we haven't talked about. My work on human capital, those were all positive. But even they had to say that the family is still very controversial, this work on the family.
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Sir Timothy Berners-Lee
Father of the World Wide Web
I got a job working in a sawmill over the vacation to get money to go around Europe. And in the sawmill, there was a big dumpster, an empty dumpster, empty except for an old calculator which had these rows of buttons. I had this dream of putting together a computer terminal. So I heaved it out and took it home and removed those buttons and then relabeled them with a QWERTY keyboard and then put sort of diode matrices on the back to produce the right code, binary code for each number. So that gave me the keyboard. Then I went down to the TV store and asked the guy whether he had any TVs which he could give me for cheap which had a working monitor, but where the radio frequency tuner had broken. He rolled his eyes and said yeah, he sure did have lots like that. I could take my pick. I actually got two.
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Sir Timothy Berners-Lee
Father of the World Wide Web
In 1991, '92, every day I'd have to decide whether to write some code, or go and persuade somebody else to write some code, or write some documentation, or persuade somebody else to write some documentation, or go and give a motivating talk somewhere explaining what the whole thing is supposed to be about, or try to argue with administration for funds or resources or whatever it takes. Today, everything -- the same sort of choices exist all the time, and I have to balance my time and find more things. Some things are more motivating than others, but I find to stay sane I have to keep working with other people, and I have to keep programming. I have to keep involved with the actual design.
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