duke-university-faculty

"Rain, rain, rain . . . my mother put her head through the window to let the neighbour know that I was nine, and they flattered me with the consolation that my birthday had brought showers of blessing. The morning laden with cloud soon passed into noon, and the noon neutral and silent into the sodden grimness of an evening that waded through water. That evening I kept an eye on the crevices of our wasted roof where the colour of the shingles had turned to mourning black, and waited for the weather to rehearse my wishes. But the evening settled on the slush of the roads that dissolved in parts into pools of clay, and I wept for the watery waste of my ninth important day. Yet I was wrong, my mother protested: it was irreverent to disapprove the will of the Lord or reject the consolation that my birthday had brought showers of blessing. It was my ninth celebration of the gift of life, my ninth celebration of the consistent lack of an occasion for celebration..."

"The West Indian's education was imported in much the same way that flour and butter are imported from Canada. Since the cultural negotiation was strictly between England and the natives, and England had acquired, somehow, the divine right to organise the native's reading, it is to be expected that England's export of literature would be English. Deliberately and exclusively English. And the further back in time England went for these treasures, the safer was the English commodity. So the examinations, which would determine that Trinidadian's future in the Civil Service, imposed Shakespeare and Wordsworth, and Jane Austen and George Eliot and the whole tabernacle of dead names, now come alive at the world's greatest summit of literary expression."

"The architecture of our future is not only unfinished; the scaffolding has hardly gone up."

"One feels not so much alone when, from a distant witness, supporting evidence comes to buttress one's own testimony. And the voice I now bid you hear is sounding in Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin."

"the most powerful and far-ranging of the West Indian school, George Lamming"

"in 1953, George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin appeared and everything was transformed. Here breathing to me from every pore of line and page, was the Barbados I have lived. The words, the rhythms, the cadences, the scenes, the people, their predicament. They all came back. They all were possible. And all the more beautiful for having been published and praised by London, mother of metropolises."

"George Lamming is one of the most important writers in the African diaspora, and one whose work has touched illuminatingly on significant aspects of colonialism, postcolonialism, and other matters vitally important to our comprehension of the worlds in which we live."

"has been the cornerstone for research advancement, scientific innovation, , and economic prosperity ... The ’s Leadership Computing Facilities have a long history of enabling researchers to accelerate and deliver practical breakthroughs for some of the most computationally challenging problems. These research and development advances happen across many disciplines such as , , , astrophysics, biology, and engineering to name a few. In addition, supercomputing has proven to be an effective ally to our society by helping us address critical and pressing challenges, such as climate change, , and . For instance, supercomputers help researchers develop personalized medical treatments as well as better predict and manage the effects of natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes through the use of advanced s. ... These discoveries help shape our understanding of the universe, bolster US economic competitiveness, and contribute to a better future. ..."

"... refers to s that can perform 1 billion, billion full precision calculations per second. ... the set that goal a decade ago, not only to achieve exascale computing but to achieve it with extreme . And both our laboratories are very proud to have delivered on that vision with these two systems that are dedicated to . We are already seeing how exascale computing is driving innovation and breakthroughs in many scientific domains, including medicine, from all the way to clinical care. And this is a crucial milestone for science and technology because, now, we can tackle challenges that previously we could not. We can tackle them faster. We can analyze large scales of data with extreme efficiency. We can do simulations of very s."

"Unquestionably, the s approach the diagnostic task with a level of intelligence, flexibility, and common sense that is difficult to duplicate with a computer. Thus far, research findings have demonstrated only that computers are the best savants when it comes to executing mathematically rigorous steps toward the solution of narrowly defined problems. Nonetheless, the radiologist's approach is not devoid of limitations. There are well-documented errors and variations in the human interpretation of ... Some study findings even indicate that the same errors are being made now, as they were in earlier decades ..."

"ecosystems have stimulated decades of and hold promise of mineral and genetic resources that also serve societal needs. Some endemic taxa thrive only in vent environments, and vent-associated organisms are adapted to a variety of natural disturbances, from tidal variations to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. In this paper, physicochemical and biological impacts of a range of human activities at vents are considered. , albeit at a local scale, based on our current understanding of ecological responses to disturbance. Natural recovery from a single mining event depends on immigration and larval recruitment and colonization; understanding processes and dynamics influencing life-history stages may be a key to effective minimization and mitigation of mining impacts. Cumulative impacts on of several mining projects in a single region, without proper management, include possible species extinctions and shifts in community structure and function."

"in the late 1970s led to the discovery of at s. More recently, sulphide deposits containing . In addition to metal-rich ores, hydrothermal vents host ecosystems based on . Although there has been considerable effort to study the biology and ecology of vent systems in the decades since these systems were first discovered, there has been limited attention paid to conservation issues. Three priority recommendations for conservation science at hydrothermal vent settings are identified here: (i) determine the natural conservation units for key species with differing life histories; (ii) identify a set of first principles for the design of preservation reference areas and conservation areas; (iii) develop and test methods for effective mitigation and restoration to enhance the recovery of biodiversity in sulphide systems that may be subject to open-cut mining."

"You can go for hundreds of meters along the and see nothing. But then you’ll get to a and it will be a garden of exotic creatures. The vents are like the . The seawater percolates down through cracks caused by earthquakes, and then it comes up through these underwater chimneys. There are lots of ores there like copper, gold, silver, and s. There’s so much life there, and it’s very different from what we’re used to seeing. Whenever scientists go down, we almost always find new creatures."

"and their were discovered in 1977. While the hot-water springs were predicted to occur at s, no one expected to find them colonized by exotic invertebrate faunas. Accustomed to a view of the deep sea as a food-limited environment, the puzzle of how lush communities could be maintained provoked biologists into a flurry of research activity. ... As field programs multiplied and more vent communities were discovered, biogeographic patterns in the distribution of faunas became apparent and ecological issues of requirements, , and began to be addressed. associated with diverse settings, from and s to . Massive bacterial blooms triggered by the release of nutrients during a volcanic eruption, rapid colonization of new vents by invertebrates, and burial of extant vent communities by lava flows demonstrate the dynamic nature of hydrothermal systems. Perhaps the most provocative consequence of the discovery of seafloor hydrothermal vents is the ."

"I looked to the women such as my mother who had had academic careers, and tried to think about how I could shape my life to look something like that, and I realized that it could be something I could make work."

"I didn’t know what my life would look like as a black postdoc or faculty member."

"Black women are a different story. But there were minority women working at the Fermilab experiments whom I was very happy to see. And at the ATLAS experiment there are a noticeable fraction of African descent. So I think things are improving because, historically, all of the icons in our field have been white men."

"Since I started working in high energy physics it certainly hasn't been lonely and there haven't been a lack of female role models."

"My own belief is that science remains the most powerful tool we have yet generated to apply leverage for our future. It is the instrument which is most useful for guiding our own destinies, for assuring the condition of man in the years to come. I have much to hope that we will not abandon that tool, leaving us to our own brute devices."

"Although the first two Timurid emperors and many of their noblemen were recent migrants to the subcontinent, the dynasty and the empire itself became indisputably Indian. The interests and futures of all concerned were in India, not in ancestral homelands in the Middle East or Central Asia. Furthermore, the Mughal empire emerged from the Indian historical experience. It was the end product of a millennium of Muslim conquest, colonization, and state-building in the Indian subcontinent."

"The continued blindness to black feminism as an autonomous intellectual and political tradition that has ... done far more than ask to be “accounted for” and included in feminist theory is what enables women’s studies to continue representing black feminist theory as merely a critique."

"Women’s studies has long constructed black feminism as a form of discipline inflicted on the field and has imagined black feminists as a set of disciplinarians who quite literally whip the field into shape with their demands for a feminism that accounts for race generally, and for black women specifically. Of course, in an account where black women’s primary labor is to remedy—and perhaps even to save—the field from itself, ... once the field has effectively reconfigured itself, black feminism is imagined as no longer necessary or vital. Nowhere has this simplistic construction unfolded more visibly than in the context of intersectionality."

"The emergence of the "post-" links both transnationalism and intersectionality to a kind of past tense. ... If the past tense of these terms is, in part, secured by "newer" work that challenges the hegemony of these terms, it is also secured through the fantasies of "political completion" that have swirled around the terms. ... The impossibility that any analytic can perform or produce "political completion" means that both intersectionality and transnationalism have been bemoaned and criticized for what they cannot ever accomplish. ... Because both analytics have been posited as correctives, both are imagined as exhaustible or finite. ... This conception of these analytics is at odds with the analytics themselves, both of which call for ongoing feminist engagements with questions of power, dominance, and subordination."

"Perhaps the last philosopher who gave any significant attention to the privacy of the individual was Jeremy Bentham; his strongly expressed view that law was an invasion of privacy that must be justified on the ground of necessary utility was somewhat, but not profoundly, modified by John Stuart Mill."

"Administration may possess scientific qualities, but does it have a sufficiently coherent body of knowledge to justify recognition as an independent discipline which may stand side by side with the major sciences? This issue constitutes in itself a technical problem in epistemology. However, the student of administration who wishes to establish his field of study as a scientific discipline or as a recognized profession will soon wish to inquire into this question. The broad answer seems to be that few epistemologists or philosophers consider administration as worthy of recognition as a separate science."

"The authors purport to delineate sharply those essential factors which are the special attributes of "what can properly be called a utopia". (p. 3). According to their definition utopia is, first of all, fictional; secondly, it is a description or plan of a particular state or community; and, finally, its theme must be the political structure of that fictional state or community. Dr. Negley and Mr. Patrick offer an astonishing variety of "proper" utopias, all of which meet the requirements of their definition. Notable, amongst others, are Campanella's "City of the Sun" (in a new and superior translation by. William J. Gilstrap), Francis Bacon's "New Atlantis," and James Harrington's. "The Rota."..."

"It seems apparent that the circumstances of existence in modern society are in many ways more restrictive of privacy than conditions in the past; we seem haunted by specters of the organization man, Big Brother, and the omnipresent state. Yet the facts of a changing social and political structure do not themselves attest the badness of that change."

"It seems that the best method of utilizing the sciences for purposes of analysis-and this would include the science of Administration - is to conceive of them as concentrating upon the relations existing between categories rather than as describing particular categories themselves. The various sciences or fields of investigation are not distinguished because they investigate different kinds of facts or subject matter; they differ because they have developed a specialized technique for observing different aspects of the same subject matter. A rock is an adequate subject of observation for any science whatsoever. What geology does, for example, is to restrict its observations to certain aspects of the rock; economics may look at the rock from another point-of-view, chemistry from still another, and so on through the entire range of science, Geology cannot break from the rock a fragment which is of geological interest only; the sciences are distinguished according to the viewpoint taken by each in observing the rock, not by a specific difference in content in the rock."

"The coordination of information technology management presents a challenge to firms with dispersed IT practices. Decentralization may bring flexibility and fast response to changing business needs, as well as other benefits, but decentralization also makes systems integration difficult, presents a barrier to standardization, and acts as a disincentive toward achieving economies of scale. As a result, there is a need to balance the decentralization of IT management to business units with some centralized planning for technology, data, and human resources."

"Decentralization may bring flexibility and fast response to changing business needs, as well as other benefits, but decentralization also makes systems integration difficult, presents a barrier to standardization, and acts as a disincentive toward achieving economies of scale. As a result, there is a need to balance the decentralization of IT management to business units with some centralized planning for technology, data, and human resources"

"In today's volatile world, organizational design is an everyday, ongoing activity and challenge for every executive, whether managing a global enterprise or a small work team. Globalization, worldwide competition, deregulation, and ever-new technologies drive the ongoing reassessment of the organization. The executive response has been many new forms of organizational design: virtual, learning, modular, cellular, network, alliance, or spaghetti – to name a few. New organizational forms challenge old ways of organizing for efficiency and effectiveness. Yet fundamental design principles underlie any well-functioning organization. Organizations still require a formal design."

"The excess of presumption which is implied in so grandiose a project as the "organization of knowledge" will, it is hoped, be tempered by a word of explanation. It is an explanation with admission, first, of limited aim; second, of minimum anticipation of achievement. Such an apologetic implies, however, no plea of pardon for sins of omission and commission; on these let the axe hew and the quips fall where they may."

"MAN, the thinking animal, seeks the revealing light which discloses to his curious eyes the nature of things. The ages of his history in which he learned he calls enlightened; the ages of intellectual sterility are dark. It is in the daylight that man moves and has his active being; yet there is beauty in the night, when the concealing cloak of darkness shrouds the harsh and sordid realities which appear in the penetrating light of day. Why should man not prefer to live in a world of night? Why does he not go to bed with the dawn, pull the covers over his head, and shut out the stark disillusion of a world revealed nakedly in the light?"

"ANALYSIS is the recognition and description of points-of-view which can be taken in the process of thinking about a problematic situation. To discuss the analysis of action is to make at the outset some kind of distinction between analysis and action. That we normally make some such distinction is patent; we admit that "thinking doesn't make it so." Problems are not solved merely by analysis; the active implementation of analytic solutions is what is meant by control, the direction of activity by thought. Many quibbling problems might be suggested by the distinction of analysis, control, and action; but we shall proceed upon the commonsense assumption that there is a distinguishable difference between the analysis of a problem and the effort to realize a solution of that problem in activity."

"Administration is an activity which demands correct analysis and accurate orientation with relation to other sciences. To analyze and through analysis to understand and through understanding to make possible the final fruition of rational and creative action-this is the highest end which man can conceive for himself. The primary problem of rational activity is one of method, of organization. If society is to be ordered intelligently, the intelligence which is to serve as the ground of order cannot itself be without organization. Our knowledge must have some order, some method, or its application in ordering activity will be haphazard. It is often said that "man's reach exceeds his grasp"; but in regard to the knowledge contributed by research and analysis, it seems at present rather more appropriate to say that man's grasp greatly exceeds his reach. The pressing problem for most of us is not so much the acquisition of more knowledge as the more adequate employment and organization of the knowledge we already have."

"Any pattern of analysis or any system of categories for the classification of knowledge is simply a suggestion for the arrangement of the data of experience. An analysis of this experience can be made in terms of certain points-of-view, categories and sciences (including Administration)."

"What can properly be called a utopia?"

"In the first place, utopia literally means "no place", and the use of the fiction of an imagined or mythical state is indeed a characteristic mark of utopian writing. This primary and necessary discrimination eliminates from utopian literature all speculation the form of which indicates that it should properly be designated political philosophy or political theory."

"Utopias are expressions of political philosophy and theory, to be sure, but they are descriptions of fictional states in which the philosophy and theory are already implemented in the institutions and procedures of the social structure."

"Philosophical literature has given scant attention to the problem of privacy as such; the framework of reference within which privacy has so recently and widely become a matter of controversy is a distinctly contemporary one. What has not been discussed, or at least made clear, is why privacy is commonly considered a right or a value to be protected by the law. There is no historical consensus, in philosophy, politics, or law, that it is such a right. Few philosophers would argue that privacy is a "natural" right or that the intrinsic nature of privacy establishes it as a legal right."

"Hayek is a puzzle. Certainly he started out as one for me, now some twenty-odd years ago."

"In his discussions of spontaneous orders, sometimes Hayek was simply trying to make the point that they exist; that is, he was trying to counter the claim that any beneficent social order needed to be constructed. This view was widespread when he first was writing; the mania for planning was then ubiquitous, so it was a point worth making. In later writings, Hayek sometimes did say, let’s trust to evolved orders rather than constructed ones, but then allowed that sometimes we needed to make piece-meal changes, and he gave no criteria for deciding."

"It seems evident from his unpublished piece that his reading of the Mill-Taylor letters gave Hayek a bit of a shock. He knew, of course, from the Autobiography that Mill had an elevated opinion of Mrs. Taylor. The letters seem to have convinced Hayek that she dominated him. Hayek would doubtless have seen this as a weakness, and he might well have lost some respect for Mill as a result. It may also have provided a convenient explanation for Hayek for why a great mind like Mill might nonetheless “desert” the liberal camp. (Hayek’s hope to lead others to the same conclusion might have helped motivate him to write the book on the correspondence between Mill and Taylor.) Given what has sometimes been said about the dominating personality of Hayek’s second wife, one wonders whether Hayek would later in his life have felt even more commonalities with Mill."

"It is probably best to start off by noting that Hayek knew a lot about Mill, probably for a time more than any other contemporary scholar. So we should not underestimate him. Next, what he had to say about Mill, what portion of Mill’s work he drew upon, was very much dictated by the sort of project he was working on. When he was making an argument about how the British liberal tradition lost its bearings, or about how Comtean positivism came to be known and gained influence across Europe, Mill was classed among the perpetrators. When he was writing about what made the British liberal tradition great, Mill could be one of the heroes. There is, I think, no inconsistency in the fact that Hayek could hold both views simultaneously."

"Some may wish to argue that Hayek was simply born with a sort of natural pessimism or cynicism, and that this generated his long standing belief in the inherent limitations that humans face when they try to intervene in social phenomena. Perhaps. But it is also possible that this view was the product of his having come of age during the final collapse of an already broken-down empire, of having experienced the multiple forms of disaster that surrounded postwar Vienna and enveloped interwar central Europe, and of having witnessed the failures of various high-minded social experiments to achieve anything like what their exponents had promised. In bearing witness to so much tragedy Hayek was again very much a part of the larger Austrian tradition. His famed ‘‘epistemic pessimism’’ may well have been another result of that larger experience."

"There are two elements of Hayek’s background that justify our considering him an Austrian economist: first, that he was raised and went to university in Vienna in the first three decades of the twentieth century, and second, that when he finally decided on economics as his field of study, he was trained within the Austrian tradition in economics."

"Critics argue that Hayek mixed a number of ethical and political philosophies in constructing his system, positions that do not necessarily cohere one with another and all of which have been independently criticized. … There are evident tensions as well between his earlier advocacy of planning a framework of law and his later enthusiasm for the gradual evolution of judge-made common law. Finally, Hayek's opinion that judges operating under the common law tradition are bound to draw "conclusions that follow from the existing body of rules and the particular facts of the case" has struck more than one observer as naive. If one is judging his work against the standard of whether he provided a finished political philosophy, Hayek clearly did not succeed."

"He linked the notion of a spontaneous order that forms when agents follow (often simple) rules with the idea of complex systems in the 1950s. This was a critical breakthrough, for it allowed him to drop the old natural science-social science dichotomy ..."

"Christians know that Christianity is simply extended training in dying early. That is what we have always been about."

"We must first experience the kingdom if we are even to know what kind of freedom and what kind of equality we should desire. Christian freedom lies in service, Christian equality is equality before God, and neither can be achieved through the coercive efforts of liberal idealists who would transform the world into their image."