Mechanism Quotations

Leo Hurwicz is the father of mechanism design theory and has inspired much of my work, and Roger Myerson is an old friend and collaborator and a tremendous economist.

I believe that we can 'sense' the future. We just haven't yet established the mechanism allowing it to happen.

There should be a policy to have a mechanism in place to decide when and how to import or export.

The backbone of any improvement of governance, its development as well as its protection from any form of wastage or excessiveness, is a mechanism to place laws under the microscope of revision and modernization until they resonate in tune with the methodological development and new administrative technologies.

My own ideas on the mechanism of catalytic phenomena were very different from those at one time commonly held, ideas which I no doubt owed to the influence of the illustrious teacher who had guided my first steps in chemistry nearly twenty years before - I refer, of course, to Berthelot.

A very powerful mechanism to get elected is to play on anger and pick those wedge issues.

I was actually pretty shy in school. My defense mechanism was to be the class clown. I remember getting into a lot of trouble for being disruptive, and I was brought in front of the headteacher, who said: 'What's going to happen to you; what are you going to do when you grow up?' and I said: 'Well, I'm obviously going to be a comedian.'

We are like the mechanism of a watch: each part is essential.

The constancy of the blood sugar level is maintained by a complex physiological mechanism, a homeostatic mechanism of the same order as those which maintain the body temperature, the blood pressure or the heart rate at normal levels and control many other functions.

My interest was directed, from my medical student days, to Immunology, and particularly to the mechanism of hypersensitivity. I had suffered from bronchial asthma as a child and had developed a deep curiosity in allergic phenomena.

The euro zone must strike for a better governance structure, and there is no alternative to that. Euro zone countries must either develop an exit mechanism for troubled members, or it should embrace a closer political union: an effective governance structure that is capable of enforcing rules.

I remember saying to the chairman after serving the first year, 'Why are we doing this? Why don't the Hawaiians have control?' 'Well, we have no mechanism to do it,' I was told.

The Net is not television. It is the finest direct-marketing mechanism in the history of mankind. It is direct mail with free stamps, and it allows you to create richer and deeper relationships than you've ever been able to create before.

The identification of the genes which determine biological phenomena and the study of the control they exert on these phenomena has proven to be the most successful approach to a detailed understanding of the mechanism of biological processes.

The whole market mechanism and its evolution is something that, I'm kind of of the Buffett School. You know, if I see a derivative, I run the other way.

In essence, capitalist systems are a mechanism by which economies may generate growth in knowledge - with much uncertainty in the process, owing to the incompleteness of knowledge.

Devising a mechanism is a lot like solving a puzzle - and gives you the same kind of kick.

Unfortunately, the mechanism for doing philanthropy in a structured way isn't yet in place in India. I already do a fair bit and support various causes such as education, sanitation, health. But selling costly drugs at affordable prices is philanthropy in itself.

Most companies don't have a good mechanism to give the CEO real, honest feedback.

The evolvement of proteolysis as a centrally important regulatory mechanism is a remarkable example for the development of a novel biological concept and the accompanying battles to change paradigms.

I realized that nature had invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward, as a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life. Rarely seen by the naked eye, this intersection between the animal world and the plant world is truly a magic moment.

In Ronald Reagan's chaotic childhood, the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a characteristic psychic defense mechanism of the Boy Who Disappears.

Complex astronomical instruments like the Antikythera Mechanism and the Nebra Sky Disk were made by Pagans. Our Pagan intellectual heritage includes poets and scientists and literary intellectuals of every kind, especially including those who wrote some of the most important and influential books in all of Western history.

One day I looked at something in myself that I had been avoiding because it was too painful. Yet once I did, I had an unexpected surprise. Rather than self-hatred, I was flooded with compassion for myself because I realized the pain necessary to develop that coping mechanism to begin with.

Business is a very beautiful mechanism to solve problems, but we never use it for that purpose. We only use it to make money. It satisfies our selfish interest but not our collective interest.

How can you possibly reconcile the justice of God with the idea that only through Christ can you be saved? Most of the world lives and dies and never even hears of Christ. There has to be some mechanism set up for all those who have ever lived to have an opportunity to hear of Christ.

No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek

We discovered a mechanism which is like the garbage machine of the body. We need to remove damaged proteins and create new ones in their place, and we discovered the machine that does this.

The theory of mechanism design can be thought of as the 'engineering' side of economic theory.

The Federal Reserve, the Treasury, all the regulator agencies - if there's a problem of the financial mechanism in society, the only one to fix it is government. They've got a legitimate role.

Because mechanism designers do not generally know which outcomes are optimal in advance, they have to proceed more indirectly than simply prescribing outcomes by fiat; in particular, the mechanisms designed must generate the information needed as they are executed.

Market fundamentalists recognize that the role of the state in the economy is always disruptive, inefficient, and generally has negative connotations. This leads them to believe that the market mechanism can take care of all the problems.

Jesus Christ never preached there should be celibate priests. The only reason the church has this is because it's a mechanism of power and control. You can control priests who are celibate.

I think God has some mechanism that he uses to punish those that make mistakes.

Any mechanism that will ensure benefits to consumer, any mechanism that will ensure that we do not waste food grains, any mechanism that helps the poorest of the poor is a welcome step.

Self-hatred is OK. I have self-hatred, too. It's OK. What's bad is if you don't know how to get out of it, don't know how to manage it. Self-hatred is, in fact, a good thing if you can clearly see the mechanism of it, because it helps you to understand others.

Poems - crystallizations of the universal play of analogy, transparent objects which, as they reproduce the mechanism and the rotary motion of analogy, are waterspouts of new analogies.

We're beautiful devices. The devices work well; we're all experts in what we do. But when the mechanism fails, those failures can tell you a lot about how the mind works.

There is not a single indication in man's wonderful mechanism that he was created for a life of poverty. There is something larger and grander for him in the divine plan than perpetual slavery to the bread-winning problem.

My understanding is Mick Staton has refused to accept the League of Women Voters. He would not do it and I think, because he has been criticized so much, he's trying to find some other mechanism to make it look like there is a debate.

On the back side, we see pings from Blogger.com, and an enormous number are splogger pings. Google obviously has a filtering mechanism in its own perimeter. They use search and textual analysis tools, quickly and fairly accurately, I'd say. You'd likely find two or three out of 50 that are spam blogs.

One of the things that Californians have been lacking is a choice in their television provider. That is something that has been the result of a regulatory mechanism that's been in place since the 1960s. That's something that we are excited might be changing.

Only after the effective news release mechanism takes shape, can governments at various levels make rapid response to media in the occurrence of major accidents.

One argument is that it was conserved to help us lift buses off of pedestrians who just got hit. My belief is that nature conserved the stress mechanism because of its effect on gestation. Natural selection doesn't care about individuals, it just wants poundage and conservation of genes. It found a way to maximize the pounds and the genes.

Obviously, this is a significant loss to the musical legacy of our nation and the history of Beverly Hills and its role in shaping American culture. Despite repeated pleas from local residents, Beverly Hills still has no mechanism to protect its historic and cultural treasures.

Naturally the detail of the mechanism that will make this happen needs further work but it is great news for the country that both men's and women's teams are now certain to be represented at the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Look what a beautiful mechanism that is. It's obviously designed to do what it does. It must have been made that way.

When you bring telomerase RNA levels down by using a mechanism that targets the RNA for destruction, the cells which were running on very high telomerase levels are now running on a lean diet of telomerase.

My kids download 10 games. They play them all for two minutes. They throw away the eight they don't like. Then they play those last two obsessively for a month. That's alien to those of us who buy a $60 game and play it for 40 or 50 hours. The discovery mechanism is completely social, and I don't think you get that genie back in the bottle.

Mechanism is always important, because without understanding it, it's difficult to predict how animal data would translate to people.

Mr. Bach is a very crafty person. This may be a mechanism he may be using to further his cause and his campaign.

Many Nobel Prizes are awaiting good research to understand and explain the many mysteries of our bodies, such as the basic mechanism of memory or imagination.

Sept. 11 proved that there needs to be a mechanism in place to allow the economy to rebound more quickly and to protect American jobs in the unfortunate event of another terrorist attack.

Given that HA is responsible for so much pathology in the lung, if we could identify the mechanism for how that happens and then block it, perhaps it would be useful for antiviral development. With the identification of the polymerase genes contributing to disease, that represents another set of genes that might also be a good target for prophylactic and therapeutic interventions.

Four justices of the Florida State Supreme Court have distorted the judicial process into nothing more than a mechanism for providing Mr. Gore with the victory he was unable to win November 7. This ruling not only contradicts, but assaults, the most basic principles of jurisprudence,

If budget planning requires gathering information from people who may not always have the incentive to disclose that information, then the principles of mechanism design can definitely be of use in such planning.

Global trade, settlements and reserve assets are heavily reliant on a single currency. The fund should give priority to establishing a surveillance and check-balance mechanism of the major reserve currency countries.

I don't think (Pearl) had bad intentions whatsoever. I can't tell you what he was thinking, but I know Coach Pearl is excited about what's going on with Tennessee basketball, which he should be. I just don't think it's a good idea to have the student athletes in the crowd because it breaks down the entire mechanism for protecting the players.

I don't think it's a sad commentary on society. We're just inundated with tragedies. I guess it's a defense mechanism to compartmentalize these things and set them aside.

I don't think we want to have a magic system. We know there are a lot of illegal people here. This reform has to have a mechanism to know that these people are good people and people who want to be here.

I do not want us to be starry-eyed about our normal way of doing legislative business. We should not suggest that the alternative to what is being proposed is some splendid mechanism of detailed scrutiny.

But these processes have been distorted by the prime minister. So in the end, we have an elected politician who can remain above the law with no mechanism to deal with it -- no accountability, no responsibility. That to me is not democracy.

China has made a reform to its exchange rate mechanism that was an important step. We still want to see greater currency flexibility in the region.

What is an Endangered Species Act without any enforcement mechanism to ensure that their habitat is protected? It is nothing, ... This is not a modernization of the act. This is a euthanization.

We think that it's unwise to put into the constitution a mechanism that enshrines for all time a particular way of measuring the budget.

We've found another part of the story - the mechanism in the brain that builds up sleep pressure is working at a different rate in adolescents than in pre-pubescent children.

I agree it's a definitive risk and I can attest to the intellectual prowess. With respect to protecting IP, that's a hard problem. We've had people come here, learn things, and take that back with them. One thing that says, very simplistically, is that you need to patent your ideas and enforce the patents that are part of your industry or company. Beyond that, one mechanism would be to look for partnering firms in China, as opposed to just putting up barriers. In some ways you look at the barriers as almost trade policies back early in the twentieth century. Perhaps we need to think of something a bit different there.

Humor is my mechanism for dealing with the hard reality of the world.

Having a firm grip on the money that leaves your business is an important aspect of financial discipline. This solution is an effective mechanism that controls costs, gives you greater visibility and allows you to increase your business' bottom line.

History is often best told from the ground, out of a car window or in someone's kitchen, not through some huge production mechanism or grand framing device.

Going forward, we plan to develop a countrywide mechanism with the Indian department of science and technology for spatial data creation, collection and dissemination that can be used for multiple applications such as disaster management.

... there is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms.

His reach within both the party mechanism and the policy structures of the government is so deep that I believe that it is possible to find somebody who would provide the technical and intellectual support that Libby did, even if he doesn't have the same personal relationship that he had with Libby. That's very hard to duplicate.

He sees an explicit medium-term inflation target as an anchor for financial markets and a mechanism for Fed accountability.

What Ma should do now is not get involved. He should take the chance to establish a nomination mechanism and allow the primaries to decide the final candidate.

We reproduced the observations from humans in animals in order to identify the mechanism for the hyperbaric oxygen effect. We found that hyperbaric oxygen mobilizes stem/progenitor cells because it increases synthesis of a molecule called nitric oxide in the bone marrow. This synthesis is thought to trigger enzymes that mediate stem/progenitor cell release.

My Ph.D. thesis concerned the metabolic mechanism by which the end product of nitrogen metabolism in the earthworm is switched from ammonia to urea during starvation. I remember spending my nights collecting over 5,000 worms from the University campus green.

Look at anyone's bookcase at home, no matter how modest, and you're going to find a book that contains wisdom or ideas or a language that's at least a thousand years old. And the idea that humans have created a mechanism to time travel, to hurl ideas into the future, it sort of bookends. Books are a time machine.

Some groups, maybe religious groups, object to some programming that's on television and don't want to see it, but furthermore don't want to pay for it. I think the reality is that if you want to allow the development of new programming ideas and give start-up channels a chance to get out there and see if they're going to be successful, you need some mechanism to help get them going.

That could point to some mechanism of climate change we don't understand, a failing in these models, or just a result of natural climate variability.

Such an agreement and strategic dialogue mechanism will solidify the Sino-EU comprehensive strategic partnership and lead to substantial projects and results,

Our news release mechanism has improved a lot since the SARS crisis and the outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza. We will try to do better in the future.

I see it as a big threat. If someone has an issue, there's already a mechanism in place. I could foresee based on our society, kids wanting to transfer all over the place to successful programs.

Last week we identified the major areas where foam came off the tank. We are starting to make some sense of the data ... what the mechanism for the foam loss was.

Kyle's, for instance, would've happened in a swimming pool. The way that thing got pinned and turned had nothing to do with the turf whatsoever, ... What we're examining very closely, quite frankly, are the shoes. The players all want, just like the padding, as little a shoe, as light a shoe, as fast a shoe as they can get. But the shoe also is a very strong support mechanism for the foot.

Just as central bank officials have been saying, what really counts is reform of the foreign exchange formation mechanism rather than the level of the exchange rate. This move is a vital part of that reform.

OPEC has shown itself to be market-savvy by recognizing that waiting for the price band mechanism to kick-in could cause a slump well below $22 a barrel,

'Johnny' was a coping mechanism who could take those things which could have ordinarily destroyed me, by tweaking my past and throwing it back out there, getting laughs from things that would have otherwise upset me.

It is ironic that the Internet, an industry I participated in and contributed to the development of, is now potentially being blackballed as a mechanism of the delivery of the very product I'm now producing.

It is an ingenious mechanism that the virus uses by having this big burst of expansion and the cells respond,

Repression has been a vague and controversial construct for over a century, in part because it has been unclear how such a mechanism could be implemented in the brain.

RNA interference has proven to be a quite reliable mechanism for turning genes off in a whole variety of different plants and animals.

Our results indicate that ice melts in one place and freezes in another. It is a mechanism by which nutrients can be input to the lake.

I think it's really wrong to try to pick out one potential root cause and say that's the underlying problem or that's the smoking gun. Foam is very complicated. The failure mechanism is likely some combination of things and it's really wrong to try to pick out one and then try to focus all your efforts on that. That will actually set you 8up for more problems in the future.

It gives the city a mechanism to more quickly and more effectively stop businesses that are masquerading as legitimate businesses,

We need a partnership with the Government of Canada and we need long-term planning. The proposed sector tables are a practical, realistic mechanism for making this happen.

Triple reuptake inhibitors will be the next blockbusters in major depression. With their new mechanism of action, they're going to offer a clinical difference in efficacy or in tolerability.

Unfortunately, there is no mechanism to eliminate existing capacity.

(We'll) ensure that we do put in place a mechanism for monitoring gas and home heating fuel prices in the months ahead,

We are in fact moving rapidly toward having a national ID, something which bothers me greatly. We've always been a nation in which the mechanism for providing identification, primarily through driver's licenses, has been a function of the state governments.