Educators From The United States

"When I graduated in 1958, K-State was a good university. By most measures, Kansas State was a good university through the 1960s's, the 1970's, and into the 1980's. Then came Jon Wefald, or, as I have said at numerous K-State pep rallies, "And now, the man who has led us from the valley of despair and defeat to unprecedented pride and victory... Jon 'Moses' Wefald." This book is about the Wefald years at K-State, when a very good university aimed high and became an excellent university. During the Wefald years, Kansans have pointed with pride to the greatest turnaround in the history of Division I football, and K-State becoming a football power among the nation's elite. They know that between 1986 and 2000, student enrollment also reversed a serious decline and increased from 14,000 to 22,000. Alumni and visitors to campus see a new library and a new art museum. And there is much more attributable to Jon Wefald's term as president."

"The whole field of Deductive Logic, even when thought of merely in the terms of common language, has acquired, for the student of , a symmetry and a completeness and a simplicity which it is, apparently, far from possessing in the minds of its usual exponents. The natural repugnance which the ordinary logician felt, at first, to seeing processes of deductive reasoning made the subject of a great development by a purely mechanical process, has in great part passed away; it would have been hard for it to survive the eloquent persuasiveness of 's Symbolic Logic. It seems, therefore, to be time for the simplified ways of looking at things which prevail in Symbolic Logic to begin to sink into the elementary expositions of the subject."

"In assessing the "Wefald Years," one is reluctant to single out accomplishments because in truth, there were many, large and small. (Don't ever tell Jon Wefald something can't be done!) In sum, they illustrate what can be accomplished by creativity, team planning, and- most of all- leadership at the top. K-State has a long and grand history, written by good and respected presidents: Denison, Anderson, Fairchild, Will, Nichols, Waters, Jardine, Eisenhower, McCain, and Acker. Now, we add the Wefald years and the contributions of a man who, during difficult times, literally grabbed a university by the scruff of its academic and athletic neck and gave it a good shake. They are years of progress and striving for excellence in all areas of the university. They are the renaissance years."

"What gives significance and value to truths is that they permit of interesting predictions."

"Morgan's views concerning animal and human interdependence place her among a select group of strong conservationists, of whom the most renowned is probably Rachel Carson ..."

"... The two problems which face every organism are those of maintaining its own life and continuing its race. Its youth is devoted entirely to satisfying its individual needs for food and safety; its adult life is devoted to the race, but the necessities of the individual are still satisfied though they may be secured in an entirely different way. The immature life of is aquatic, and to it all adjustments concerned with food or safety are exclusively confined. The mature or adult life is aerial. It is solely devoted to reproduction. There is no provision for food or for other means of lengthening its life. It gives an opportunity for studying ways of getting a living which have been completely isolated from ways of reproducing."

"... Although she carried on most of her research in the northeastern United States, she spent the summer of 1926 working in at the Tropical Laboratory in Kartabo. Although limnology was her special subject—on which wrote a useful book, Field Book of Ponds and Streams (1930)—Morgan was also interested in many other facets of zoology, particularly hibernating animals. Her Field Book of Animals in Winter (1939) reflected this interest. In 1949 the ' made it into an educational film. She was also interested in conservation and ecology.."

"Different waters hold their own special communities; the dainty glen stream shelters companies of in its swift riffles; pond shallows and meadow brooks are the homes of lurking s; and wayside puddles are populous with s and s. In all these places living things must contend with winter cold and summer drought, with storms and flood waters. In winter the pond populations drop to the bottom, frogs and turtles dig under mud and broken plants, s hide under banks to come out with every warm spell, and fresh water sponges are packed in tough covered capsules. In summer when its own pool dries up the flies to some other pond but many burrow into the mud bottom and endure the drought as best they can."

"Among the s and the water weeds of the shallows, lurk es, s, mud minnows, and young . All of these forage upon snails, crustaceans, and insect larvæ, especially the tempting mayfly nymphs which they find there. s float with their heads just out of water; of all frogs these belong most thoroughly in the pond. Equally at home in it are the painted turtles, and the spotted turtles often found with them … In May and June stumps and floating logs usually carry a load of one kind or the other. They forage in the shallows taking a heavy toll of tadpoles, snails, dragonflies—a miscellaneous bill-of-fare which they always eat under water. Snapping turtles frequent these waters also, catching anything within reach of the lightning-quick thrusts of their heads—fishes, tadpoles, frogs, or crayfishes, as well as the smaller game of insects and worms."

"es posses much more beauty and interest than their reputation credits them with. Most of them are marked with concealing colors and patterns, browns, greens, and blacks, picturing upon them the broken shadows and water-soaked leaves of their natural background and hiding them in it. They are sensitive to the slightest vibration of the water, to shadows passing over them, and to small changes in the water around them. Their whole set up is one of exquisite efficiency for their mode of living. … The external features most essential to a leech are the strong muscular suckers at each end of its body and the sucking mouth which which may or may not be armed with jaws … Leeches are segmented worms like bristleworms and common earthworms and belong to the Phylum '."

"s are transparent microscopic animals which live in fresh or salt water. They abound in the surface waters of great lakes, and swarm through the shallows of ponds and bogs; there is scarcely any stand of soft water, whether transient puddle or rain-barrel or fountain-basin, where rotifers can not be found. They live in ponds and lakes, providing a large part of the food for small s and worms and are thus indirectly a large source of food for fishes."

"As the spawning season approaches, fishes move toward the shores of ponds and lakes or upstream in the creeks. Some of them, such as perch and sunfish, only swim in among nearby weeds or protecting stones. The journeys vary from such short ones to the famous migrations of river salmon, extending over hundreds of miles; but they all end at spawning grounds or nesting sites. During this time color differences between male and female appear or become more marked."

"... Darwin ... became the official naturalist on the five-year voyage of the "" (1831–1836) ... ... He also read the essay in which Malthus told of the human populations that became too large for the space available to them (1838). This suggested a plan. Some organism must be winnowed out by their natural surroundings; thus, others would be benefited. There would be natural selection."

"... s feed upon microorganism from the muck and water of the bottom and in turn are consumed by es, s and mankind."

"The s () of s repeat the essentials of kidney form and function, tubules closely associated with blood and body fluid, each one a guardian of the content of the blood. There are two kidneys in nearly every segment of the earthworm ..."

". The power to regrow lost parts permits to survive and even to multiply after injury. Three planarians may live and flourish because one was cut into three pieces. All ns are aquatic. A considerable number live in fresh water and a few on moist soil. Most of them are marine."

"In most cold winters there is plenty of snow, and this is the greatest aid to wintering insects."

"At Kartabo the waters of the meet those of the and soon join the great lake-like flowing north through the low lying country of British Guiana until it runs into the sea at . These rivers are hedged in by the jungle whose undergrowth has invaded the border waters in a persistent attempt to gain more territory. roots swing so far out from the banks that fish swim in and out among them. Moccamoccas, the giant s, have grown out still further. Their clublike stems standing in close rank provide on gigantic scale the kind of animal shelter furnished in more modest form by our own and s. Many slow flowing creeks feed into these larger streams but their mouths are hidden by creepers, tangles of mangrove, and prickly shrubs, and if the currents are gentle enough they are choked by lush growths of '. … Even at Kartabo Point the daily tides are insistent reminders of the ocean forty miles away.The low tide lay bare stretches of muck and ooze, silt and silty sand ... the likely dwelling place of the burrowing and crawling Mayflies ..."

"Crickets.—Crickets, like grasshoppers, vary in their winter habits. Some live over the winter in the ; others hibernate as s. Nymphs of the , Gryllus assimilis pennsylvanicus (which has a short ), hibernate beneath stones ..."

"… Wherever animals live, in fresh water, salt water, or on land, their body fluids are similar; all are salty. In marine invertebrates, whether es or s, the body fluids are practically filtered sea water."

"Feeding. The majority of ns are carnivorous. The smaller fresh-water ones feed upon s and worms that are nearly microscopic, the larger one on s, s and , often on their softened remains. Even in quiet waters they can detect juicy meat two or three feet away."

"Of the 100 or so scientists who have served on , Finkbeiner has interviewed 36. A few spoke anonymously, and others refused to talk at all. That reticence is not surprising, given that as much as three-quarters of Jason's work has consisted of classified military projects, some of them morally questionable. Like Errol Morris's film "The Fog of War," in which Robert McNamara painfully revisits Vietnam, Finkbeiner's book shows how even the smartest people with the noblest intentions can end up committing shameful acts."

"... Defense physics is generally ; it solves problems by applying other physicists' more basic work. Its result is usually not knowledge but technology. The adjective applied, when used by physicists, is not a compliment. Academic physics is pure research; its direction is determined by what academics are curious about and can get funding for. It is, of all the sciences, the most fundamental; its questions are about matter's basic nature and the forces that govern the known universe. Moreover, pure research is considered innocent, neither moral nor immoral. Applied research, whose technologies have potential for harm, comes accompanied by difficult moral decisions."

"The ’s first image looked like all hell. A month later, in late June 1990, the telescope's political shepherd, , found out what had gone wrong. He called some interested local astronomers—, Don Schneider, and particularly —and since astronomy in Princeton, New Jersey, usually involves food, he invited them to supper at a Route 206 strip-mall Chinese diner. He told them that NASA was about to announce that the telescope's perfect mirror had been ground to the perfectly wrong shape. Jim Gunn, who had designed and overseen the construction of the telescope's principal camera, had also seen the first image and had thought the problem might be fixed. But no, now Bahcall was telling him no, it was the mirror's shape, the telescope couldn't focus, the problem was irrevocable. … NASA, of course, pulled off an ingenious fix, installed by astronauts dangling improbably over the telescope up in space."

"In the end, I learned two things about the long-term effects of . One is that a child's death is disorienting. The human mind is wired to find patterns and attach meanings, to associate things that are alike, to generalize from one example to another, in short, to make sense of things. Your mind could no more consciously stop doing this than your heart could consciously stop beating. But children's deaths make no sense, have no precedents, are part of no pattern; their deaths are unnatural and wrong. So parents fight their wiring, change their perspectives, and adjust to a reality that makes little sense. The other thing I learned is that letting go of a child is impossible. ..."

"Following the launch of NASA's planet-finding in 2009, the number of possible s quickly multiplied into the thousands — enough to give astronomers their first meaningful statistics on other planetary systems, and to undermine the standard theory for good. Not only were there lots of exoplanet systems bearing no resemblance to ours, but the most commonly observed type of planet — a 'super-Earth' that falls between the sizes of our world and Neptune, which is four times bigger — does not even exist in our Solar System. Using our planetary family as a model, says astronomer of the , “has led to no success in extrapolating what's out there”."

"The fundamental necessity of space security is knowing where every satellite is and how it is behaving. ’s June 2020 doctrine calls this “space domain awareness.” Officially that awareness comes via a global network of sensors on satellites and telescopes on the ground that covers all orbits all the time and tracks everything bigger than 10 centimeters: 3,200 live satellites, as well as 24,000 nonfunctioning “zombies” and pieces of space debris that, in a collision with a satellite at 35,400 kilometers an hour, would cause a catastrophic breakup. The information is sent to Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron at the Combined Space Operations Center at in California. Data on the secret satellites are set aside, and the rest go into a public, free, online catalog called Space-Track, from which “conjunction notifications” are issued when two satellites look like they might get too close."

"Four centuries ago, Machiavelli was thinking of certain great problems of human society and writing two famous books. In so doing he reached scientific generalizations about the influence of the sentiments upon the actions of men and, through these actions, upon the fate of human societies. As a whole, these conclusions stand; but from this great and ingenious work of Machiavelli's almost no developments have followed. The science of statecraft and of the influence of the sentiments upon human behavior is little different to-day from what it was in in the 16th century."

"... More explicitly than ever before the modern principles of physical science seem to compel us to recognized absolute mechanical necessity in all things. We may not understand organic regulations, or organic evolution, or the origin of life; in fact we are still unable with the necessary clearness to represent to ourselves the structure of a cell; yet theses are at least phenomena. As phenomena they are subject to the two laws of thermodynamics. For the laws of conservation and degradation of energy have long since supplanted Leibniz's rudimentary idea of the conservation of ', as the ground of our conception of necessary causation."

"It is in proportion to our success or failure in conceiving facts simply that sciences are abstract or concrete, rational or descriptive. In these respects the contrast is great between the physical and the biological sciences. The figure of the earth, its path about the sun, and its relations to the other planets are readily conceivable in a first approximation as simple; but the forms of life seem complex, their activities manifold, and the concatenations interminable. Therefore, unlike celestial mechanics, the science of biology, which is the record of efforts accurately to describe and clearly to understand living things, is chiefly a science descriptive of concrete fact. It bears little resemblance to the more perfect science and as yet is in no danger of a relativist revolution. It has never attained, perhaps, as some have argued, it can never in any respect achieve and should not strive for the abstractness, the elegance, and the simplicity which are the mark of the classical epoch of many the physical sciences and the ideal of those who follow Newton and Willard Gibbs."

"Urban education in the nineteenth century did more to industrialize humanity than to humanize industry."

"We must welcome our guests, then, Amari. We would never judge people simply by how they looked—that would be uncivilized…Let us prepare for a celebration."

"Amari loved the rusty brown dirt of Ziavi. The path, hard-packed from thousands of bare feet that had trod on it for decades, was flanked on both sides by fat, fruit-laden mango trees, the sweet smell of which always seemed to welcome her home."

"The crowd is eventually separated, the men from the women, and shoved into a large, dark building where Amari can smell “sweat and fear…body wastes and hopelessness”"

"The spirit of the copper sun seemed to bleed for them as it glowed bright red against the deepening blue of the great water."

"I too wonder about the attraction of Santa Fe, but damn it, it has something. I have had touches of nostalgia several times. Perhaps it is the sunlight, but there is no question about the fact that there is a great pull. I am more inclined to believe that it is the stimulation of the extremes — in every direction — that we experience there which we miss when away from it."

"The growth of market-based finance and asset management is creating new sources of funding, adding welcome diversity to the financial system, particularly for emerging markets. And in some ways these flows are less risky – for example the average maturity of international securities issued by emerging markets is 10 years, reducing rollover risk and exposure to a sudden flight of capital."

"Reciprocity also helps address the old problem of asymmetric adjustment of global imbalances. Suppose a deficit country wishes to contain the supply of credit and build resilience in its financial system by raising the buffer. If a surplus country whose banks are lending to the deficit country reciprocates, its banks should be incentivised to lend less to the deficit economy, and more to their domestic economy. That should increase domestic demand in the surplus country, and hence demand for deficit country exports, reducing the overall level of imbalances."

"There are many ways in which co-operation on macro-prudential policies could be deepened further. Options which could warrant further investigation range from formalising the exchange of information, to frameworks for reciprocity for tools beyond the countercyclical capital buffer, to common stress test scenarios and risk assessment that are used across the world."

"The most obvious way to take international considerations into account is by treating risks emanating from abroad as an important input when setting domestic macroprudential policy."

"Steering Columbia University through the choppy waters of anti-Israel student protests was never going to be easy for Minouche Shafik, a member of the UK House of Lords who took over as president of the university in New York after a period of relative calm running the London School of Economics.[..] Shafik’s decision to call in the police to break up a student protest camp on the university lawn appalled many on both sides of the dispute. Protesters and their supporters among the academic community complained about police brutality and the targeting of pro-Palestinian campaigners, while Republican defenders of Israel accused Shafik of failing to act quickly enough."

"But before doing that, let me start with a story from the past. Over 3000 years ago a different kind of climate change caused by volcanic eruptions and changing weather patterns resulted in persistent droughts that caused famines and political unrest in ancient Egypt. The pharaohs of the Ptolemaic dynasty such as Cleopatra went to great lengths to adapt – transferring grain from productive regions to drought plagued areas, opening up grain stores, crossbreeding cattle to develop more heat resistant animals, and providing tax relief. These foresighted efforts managed to prolong the Egyptian empire for a half century longer but ultimately one of the greatest empires the world has ever known collapsed because of the effects of climate change. The difference between then and now is that we are the cause of today’s climate change, and we have the means to stop it by changing our economy."

"I am honoured to speak today in the country of my birth, a country that has been a cradle of human civilization for millennia, on a topic that will determine the future of human civilization and whether it lasts for more millennia. I am an economist who has worked on development and environment issues for several decades and I wanted to speak to you about the economy of the future."

"What could the economy of the future look like? We have a choice. It could be one based on familiar technologies, markets and institutions. We could continue with polluted air and water where our children suffer from respiratory diseases; where our economies are struck by frequent shocks caused by unpredictable weather events which cause catastrophic losses; where people have to move across borders as their livelihoods are destroyed by rising sea levels or persistent droughts and rising temperatures; and one where the natural world continues to diminish."

"Our values—as well as our duties under civil rights laws—compel us to condemn hate and to protect every member of our community from harassment and discrimination. Antisemitic language and actions are unacceptable and calls for violence are simply abhorrent."

"I know that many of our Jewish students, and other students as well, have found the atmosphere intolerable in recent weeks. Many have left campus, and that is a tragedy. To those students and their families, I want to say to you clearly: You are a valued part of the Columbia community. This is your campus too. We are committed to making Columbia safe for everyone, and to ensuring that you feel welcome and valued."

"Additionally, the University offered to convene a faculty committee to address academic freedom and to begin a discussion on access and financial barriers to academic programs and global centers. The University also offered to make investments in health and education in Gaza, including supporting early childhood development and support for displaced scholars. There are important ideas that emerged from this dialogue, and we plan to explore pursuing them in the future."

"I can also paint a different picture of the economy of the future. One in which we make the needed investments and created cities in which we can move, breathe, and thrive. One in which the food we eat regenerates the earth rather than depletes it. Where our economies continue to grow and especially in poor countries, living standards continue to rise, where this growth is greener, more stable and where human well-being is enhanced through co-existence with nature."

"Columbia has a long and proud tradition of protest and activism on many important issues such as the Vietnam War, civil rights, and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Today’s protesters are also fighting for an important cause, for the rights of Palestinians and against the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza. They have many supporters in our community and have a right to express their views and engage in peaceful protest."

"Over the last few months, we have been patient in tolerating unauthorized demonstrations, including the encampment. Our academic leaders spent eight days engaging over long hours in serious dialogue in good faith with protest representatives. I thank them for their tireless effort. The University offered to consider new proposals on divestment and shareholder activism, to review access to our dual degree programs and global centers, to reaffirm our commitment to free speech, and to launch educational and health programs in Gaza and the West Bank. Some other universities have achieved agreement on similar proposals. Our efforts to find a solution went into Tuesday evening, but regrettably, we were unable to come to resolution."