Academics From The United States

"Much of the uncertainty in individual decision making comes from not knowing what we really want to achieve through the decision, and from our tendency to exaggerate both potential losses and potential gains. People buy lottery tickets and play the slot machines at casinos, despite the fact that the casino owners and the lottery managers aren’t in business to give away money.…Hopeful gamblers (and the writers of lottery advertising) are fond of pointing out that, after all, someone does win. That’s exaggeration of potential gain, because it doesn’t mean that you have a realistic chance of winning. On the other side of the coin, exaggerated fear of harmful effects keeps some parents from immunizing their children against disease, leads them to throw away their electric blankets, and makes them demand that schools root out harmless asbestos in the walls, which would usually have been better left alone. We are terrified of trivial risks, and spend billions in futile efforts to control them. That’s exaggeration in the other direction. Both expectations of gain and fears of loss are far too often overblown, to the detriment of balanced decision making."

"It is a fallacy of human perception to see patterns that aren’t there, and to see order where there is none."

"It turns out that you can’t do better than a chance in ten of multiplying your bankroll by a factor of ten, even with the very best strategy. That’s a general rule for fair (or almost fair) games: the probability of achieving your objective before going broke is exactly the inverse of the amount by which you want to increase your fortune."

"It is said that nature abhors a vacuum (a saying that has always struck this author as unusually dumb—since the vast majority of the natural universe is in fact a splendid vacuum, nature must in fact love a vacuum), but any perceived voids in the law books do tend to get filled in due course."

"There may be people who know more than you, and can therefore do a better job of predicting the odds. If you can find one to help you out, do so. But steer clear of phoney prophets, like astrologers, palmists, and readers of crystal balls. (We may have lost some readers on that sentence. Polls continue to show that an appalling and disturbing fraction of Americans still believe in that baloney.)"

"The laws of probability are mighty powerful, and they never sleep. If this were more widely understood there’d be a lot less crowing about good luck, and a lot less guilt about bad luck. And we’d have a more civilized world. Some things really do happen by chance, and there is little we can do to change that."

"So the road to a decision involves five steps, each simple enough: list of the actions you can take (a decision is just a choice among possible actions, including the action of taking no action at all); list the reasonably conceivable consequences of each of the various actions, as best you can guess them; assess, as best you can, the chance (or odds, or probability) that any particular consequence will follow from any particular action (this is an issue we need to get into—the one most people gloss over); find a way to express your objectives, how much you wish for (or dread) the various possible consequences; and finally put it all together in such a way that it can lead to a rational decision."

"Terry Gross: One of Trump's justifications for canceling government contracts is that he accused Harvard as being a breeding ground - I'm quoting here - "breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination." How do you interpret that?" Noah Feldman: "Well, first thing I would say is that it's wrong. You know, it's always hard to understand exactly what is meant when you're being maligned, but, you know, you know the feeling. You know the idea that even a dog knows the difference between being tripped over and being kicked? Well, that's someone kicking us. One piece of relevant background here is that Harvard was one of the parties in the Supreme Court case - the SFFA case - in which the Supreme Court, for the first time in nearly 50 years, overturned the idea that racial diversity was a permissible rationale to use in college admissions. And the Trump administration, in all of its rhetoric, has been referring, subsequently, to the perfectly lawful use of diversity as it existed from 1978 and really before then, until just, you know, a year or so ago as, quote-unquote, "discrimination." I think that's the rhetorical move there. And Harvard is no more a breeding ground for that point of view than all of the other universities in the country, essentially all, which used exactly the same admissions procedures. It's just that it's easier for Trump to make headlines by attacking Harvard over that." Terry Gross: "That's probably part of the reason why many other universities are worried right now." Noah Feldman: "There are a lot of reasons for universities to be concerned. If Trump can go after the oldest university in the United States, one of the most significant in terms of its endowment and its academic legacy and its prestige, then he can really go after any similar university. And so all universities, I think, have very, very good reason to be concerned because going after a university is one of the things in the playbook of someone who's trying to erode democratic values and who wants to be at least dictatorial, if not a dictator. Universities are a place for the preservation of free expression, free ideas and free beliefs. They've always been that. And so in any country where someone is trying to break that norm of freedom, the universities are a very important target, and that's been true historically.""

"Terry Gross: "The attacks on Harvard started with the task force commissioned by Trump to address antisemitism on campus. And, you know, this has led to cancellation of billions of dollars in grants and contracts to Harvard. But didn't Harvard reach a settlement with Trump over antisemitism?" Noah Feldman: "No. Let me tell the story a little bit differently. I think, really, what we're facing now started with the testimony in Congress of Harvard's president and a couple of other university presidents in which they were pushed very hard on a series of hypothetical questions about how the campus manages free speech in the context of protests. That put a target on Harvard's back, and the Trump administration has been pushing very, very hard since they came into office to exploit the perception - in my view, the incorrect perception - that Harvard is some sort of hotbed of bias, antisemitism and Islamophobia in order to bring about a fundamental attack on higher education with the stated goal - this is their stated goal - of making the university align itself with the administration's beliefs and priorities, which is a clear violation of the First Amendment. What's more, Harvard hasn't reached any settlement of any kind with the Trump administration. There was a lawsuit brought by a small number of students alleging that Harvard had not sufficiently protected the environment against antisemitism. And that was settled by the university before the Trump administration even came into office.""

"Terry Gross: "So what do you think Trump's attacks on Harvard are really about?" Noah Feldman: "Donald Trump usually has a kind of short-term self-interest objective and then a broader-term aggrandizement objective. In the short term, his self-interest is to make a headline, to make a populist headline that says, Donald Trump is going after those liberals at Harvard University, which might please some of his supporters and, probably more important to Donald Trump, is intended to shed fear or to cast fear on everyone in higher education and, more broadly, everyone who doesn't agree with his policies. You know, it's part of the idea that every day we should wake up and listen to the radio or look at the newspaper and discover that the Trump administration has gone after some opponent in some way that makes it really hard to stand up to Donald Trump. So I think that's the short-term objective. The longer-term objective, though, is part of Trump's overall assault on our democratic values and institutions. And you can see that the institutions that he likes to go after are places like universities, institutions like the press and the courts, which are institutions that are all devoted to independent judgment and independent thinking. We need independent universities. We need an independent press. And, of course, we need independent courts. And Trump doesn't like independence because independent institutions can say no to him. And the more he can weaken the independence of those institutions, the more he can make his agenda the dominant agenda. And ultimately, this is about Trump trying to impose his view of the world on everybody else.""

"Harvard Law Prof. Noah Feldman's testimony during Wednesday's impeachment hearing took a turn for the mystical Wednesday afternoon, when he seemed to claim that impeaching President Trump was necessary so that lawmakers would be able to answer to Alexander Hamilton and James Madison when they bump into them in the afterlife. Feldman was fielding questions from attorney Norm Eisen, who questioned witnesses at the behest of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., when he claimed that Trump's actions were exactly what the framers of the Constitution forewarned. Immediately prior to the morbid warning, Feldman claimed he had been an "impeachment skeptic" when Robert Mueller's Russia report came out. But he said that changed after President Trump's July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that resulted in the impeachment inquiry due to suspicion that the president sought help in investigating political rivals."

"It's very unusual for the framers' predictions to come true that precisely, and when they do we have to ask ourselves. Some day, we will no longer be alive, and we will go wherever it is we go, the good place or the other place, and we may meet there Madison and Hamilton. And they will ask us, 'When the president of the United States acted to corrupt the structure of the republic, what did you do?' And our answer to that question must be that we followed the guidance of the framers, and it must be that if the evidence supports that conclusion, that the House of Representatives moves to impeach him."

"Terry Gross: "Are you playing any official or unofficial role on Harvard's legal strategy or decision-making?" Noah Feldman: "No. The university follows a good policy of creating a wall between its lawyers who represent it and its law faculty who have lots of ideas about how it should be represented. So my primary role is as a constitutional scholar, analyzing the issues, writing about them, speaking about them. And that's the right job for me in this moment.""

"A year ago, Harvard's commencement, our graduation, was really, in a significant way, disrupted by students protesting, including some faculty protesting, marching out of the graduation, speakers denouncing the president and the corporation of Harvard, which is what we call our board of directors. This year, commencement was pretty much the polar opposite. There was literally a standing ovation for our president, Alan Garber, when all he had done was come up to the podium. And speaker after speaker hinted at the importance of supporting the university. So what's happened is that Donald Trump's assault on the university has led to a deep unification of the campus. And that's an important transformation from a year ago. I would say it's a fundamental transformation."

"Because comparatively few poets today write in meters, rhymes, and stanzas, my use of these has resulted in my being labeled a 'formalist.' But I find this term meaningless and even objectionable. It suggests, among other things, an interest in style rather than substance, whereas I believe that the two are mutually vital in any successful poem. I employ the traditional instruments of verse simply because I love the symmetries and surprises that they pro-duce and because meter especially allows me to render feelings and ideas more flexibly and precisely than I otherwise could. This preference is personal and aesthetic, how-ever, I have never imagined that it provided me with access to cultural or spiritual virtue. And despite allegations to the contrary about Missing Measures, I have never said that vers libre is somehow wrong and immoral or that meter is somehow right and pure. The experimental school of Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, and Williams has its own beauties and achievements. But we can prize them justly and build on them, it seems to me, only if we retain a knowledge and appreciation of the time-tested principles of standard versification. Free verse cannot be free, unless there is something for it to be free of."

"We enter life and thus inherit The kingdom of the human voice. The Word is Word because we share it. Wonder encourages our choice To sort out life’s conflicting data, To come to terms with its traumata, To shape ourselves to nothing less Than reasoned self-forgetfulness."

"It’s especially interesting when you try to balance and people when you do archival and historical research today when you try to balance digital sources and everything that that means in terms of what’s available digitally with analog, old fashioned stuff like scripts that you, mysterious scripts that may or may not elude you with what’s located in archives here in the United States and elsewhere."

"That search, that charge after these floating ephemeral objects that you try not only to capture but then assemble into some reconstructed narrative that will not only make sense but also maintain some truth to the performer or the artist you’re studying or the film and media artifact at the same time."

"Lost, dead, never made, absent and more. We’ve heard a lot of those terms coursing through the various papers during this session and also during the course of the day, the ultimate challenge in many ways for the archivists as well as the film historian scholar."

"It’s just about the work of balancing between analog archival and/or digital sources that the contemporary media historian has to undertake and that everybody here has undertaken."

"Physicians and since the days of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush have criticized the peculiar tensions of American life. The speculative pathologies which explain precisely how these tensions injured the mind and body have changed in form since the days of Rush, but the ambivalent attitudes which they express toward American life have not. Yet neither Benjamin Rush nor his successors later in the century—, , and , among others—were willing, warn as they might of the psychic perils of American life, to exchange its liberties for the placid tyranny of the Russian or Turkish empires (or, most Americans felt, their Protestantism for the formalistic reassurances of Catholicism)."

"... and Hugh Hodge, Philadelphia's leading teachers of in the 1840s and 1850s were vociferous in rejecting the suggestion that might be contagious, indeed often spread by the obstetrician himself ... The intensity of their response suggests that something more than mere intellectual difference was involved; one of the roots of their hostility to a contagionist point of view lay in the threat it implied for the physician's status, especially in relation to female patients."

"Medicine has always had its s, but until recently it was a history written by and for practitioners. Until the early nineteenth century, in fact, history and practice could hardly be distinguished. Galen and Hippocrates could be and were used to bolster arguments about the nature of fever or the logic of a particular therapeutic choice. A learned physician read Latin and , not simply to mystify the laity but to work with those master texts that still figured meaningfully in his intellectual life. By the late nineteenth century, of course, the writings of and were no longer alive in the thought and practice of even educated practitioners. History had become quite clearly history — something in the past. This is not to suggest that interest in the medicine of previous eras disappeared. It remained was to become gradually — if even today incompletely — an academic field. But the history of medicine was still populated almost entirely by scholars trained in medical schools, the great majority of whom made their living as physicians."

"Far into the nineteenth century, Washington remained a small, rather provincial city. Life was seasonal. Oppressed by heat and malaria during the summer, the capital did not awake to its foreshortened and unnaturally frenetic life until fall and the convening of Congress."

"Even the most optimistic advocate of innovation in medicine cannot ignore ever-increasing , costs associated in some measure with that we so much admire. And, as we are equally well aware, access to clinical services is far from universal or equitable. As I write this introduction, more than forty million Americans lack and medical expenses remain a major cause of bankruptcy. Still another paradox complicates the relationship between society and medicine. Though expectations of therapeutic efficacy have never been more euphoric and patients appear to trust their own physicians, respect for the medical profession has declined ... The is trusted even less."

"Just as s and s assumed that their research illuminated the glory of God in His works, so did most nineteenth-century American physicians assume that there could be no conflict between their findings and the truths of morality. The human organism was a thing both material and divine, and offenses both physical and moral were necessarily punished with disease. Drinking, overeating, sexual excess, all carried with them inevitable retribution, not because the Lord deigned to intercede directly in human affairs, but because He had created man's body so that infringing on God's moral law meant disobeying the laws of . Moralism thus drew upon the prestige of science, while medicine was pleased that its findings supported the dictates of morality."

"In an account that both travels over explored territory and covers new ground, Charles Rosenberg provides a vivid and complex history of a key institution. Rosenberg divides The Care of Strangers into two periods: the pre-Civil War era, before the advent of modern medicine, and from the war to the 1920s, by which time the had assumed modern form. The underlying theme of the book is that hospitals are a product of the interaction of and physicians. Hospitals were dominated by reformers as long as medical science was weak. But with its rise and the subsequent power of physicians, reformers and their social welfare goals faded."

"was the classic epidemic disease of the nineteenth century, as had been of the . When cholera first appeared in the United States in 1832, and smallpox, the great epidemic diseases of the previous two centuries, were no longer truly national problems. Yellow fever had disappeared from the , and had deprived smallpox of much of it menace. Cholera, on the other hand, appeared in almost every part of the country in the course of the century. ... Before 1817, there had probably never been a cholera epidemic outside the ; during the nineteenth century, it spread through almost the entire world ..."

"Studies of human behavior in different societies have helped the social scientist understand the relations between culture and personality and have helped him shake free his hypotheses about human behavior from particular sets of cultural biases. These points are as important in studying middle age and aging as in studying child development."

"Age is an underlying dimension of social organization, for in all societies the relations between individuals and between groups are regulated by age difference. Thus far, however, little systematic attention has been paid by sociologists or social psychologists to the ways in which age groups relate to each other in modern complex societies, to age-grading, to relations between generations, of to systems of norms which govern ."

"The terminal phase of the life cycle is receiving increased attention from social scientists. While this may be caused by the student interested in the sociology of knowledge, it is nevertheless striking that in the past few years there has been a sudden multiplication of studies of perceptions of time, finitude, attitudes toward death, and other psychological and sociological aspects of death and dying (an interest which is reflected also in the professional literature of physicians, psychiatrists, nurses, and s)."

"Social scientists are interested in two broad themes or aspects of . The first is how any society functions as an age structure and how changing over time affect economic, political, and other aspects of social organization. The second is how attitudes and roles change over the life cycle of the individual or in cohorts of individuals."

"The of are rapidly changing, thereby altering the traditional relations between age groups. Some observers think ageism is increasing in the United States; others, that it is decreasing. In either case, stereotypes of old age are now changing with the rise of the young-old—that is, the age group 55 to 75, who constitute 15 percent of the population—who are relatively healthy, relatively affluent, relatively free from traditional responsibilities of work and family and who are increasingly well educated and politically active. This group will develop a variety of new needs with regard to meaningful use of time and for maximizing the opportunities for both self-enhancement and community participation. The young-old have enormous potential as agents of social change in creating an age-irrelevant society and in thus improving the relations between age groups."

"Research on (small particles of plastic <5 in size) has long focused on their largest sink: the ocean. More recently, however, researchers have expanded their focus to include freshwater and terrestrial environments. This is a welcome development, given that an estimated 80% of microplastic pollution in the ocean comes from land ... and that rivers are one of the dominant pathways for microplastics to reach the oceans ... Like other , such as s (PCBs), microplastics are now recognized as being distributed across the globe. Detailed understanding of the fate and impacts of this ubiquitous environmental contaminant will thus require a concerted effort among scientists with expertise beyond the marine sciences."

"Effects from small plastic debris and sorbed chemicals may not be additive and future research is needed to identify the nature of the risks from this combination of s. It is likely that the risk to an will vary by type and size of plastic debris, which may affect its ability to concentrate chemicals from ambient water ... and in s … Risks may also vary over space and time due to the concentration of hazardous chemicals available for ... and the length of time the debris has interacted with ambient water and sunlight. of plastic increases surface area, and may enable greater accumulation of hazardous chemicals. Such complexity begs the initiation of research programs and risk assessments that are ecologically relevant ..."

"For decades we have learned about the physical hazards associated with in the , but recently we are beginning to realize the s. Assessing hazards associated with plastic in is not simple, and requires knowledge regarding s that may be exposed, the exposure concentrations, the types of s comprising the debris, the length of time the debris was present in the aquatic environment (affecting the size, shape and fouling) and the locations and transport of the debris during that time period. Marine plastic debris is associated with a ‘cocktail of chemicals’, including chemicals added or produced during manufacturing and those present in the marine environment that accumulate onto the debris from surrounding . This raises concerns regarding: (i) the complex mixture of chemical substances associated with marine plastic debris, (ii) the environmental fate of these chemicals to and from plastics in our oceans and (iii) how this mixture affects wildlife, as hundreds of species ingest this material in nature."

"Over the last decade, it has become indisputable that small plastic debris contaminates s and wildlife globally. Of concern is that this material, which is ingested by hundreds of species across multiple trophic levels, is associated with a complex mixture of hazardous chemicals. Models, laboratory exposures, and field studies have all demonstrated that plastic debris can act as a source for hazardous chemicals to bioaccumulate in animals. This has been demonstrated with several plastic types, including , (PVC), , and , and for several different organic chemicals, including s, s, , , and . What remains less certain is the ecological importance of this transfer, i.e., the relative contribution of plastic as a source of chemicals to wildlife relative to other sources. ... Further research is warranted to better understand the mechanisms by which plastic-associated contaminants transfer to organisms and if the chemicals are biomagnified in higher trophic level animals leading to ecological consequences or even human health effects via consumption of contaminated seafood."

"Dr. Caswell’s predilection was for and astronomy. During the period of twenty-eight and a half years (from December, 1831, to May, 1860) he made, with few interruptions, a regular series of meteorological observations at the same spot on . These observations, precise as regards temperature and pressure, and including also much information on winds, clouds, moisture, rain, storms, the , &c, have been published in detail in Vol. XII of the "Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge," and fill 179 quarto pages. Dr. Caswell continued his observations in meteorology with unabated zeal to the end of 1876, covering, in all, the long period of forty-five years."

"The , no less than the severest utilitarian, rejoices in every contribution of science to the arts, but he does not admit that the whole value of science is to be measured by any present applications. He puts in a demurrer to the conclusion that those portions of it are useless of which we do not see the utility. The use may be beyond our present sphere of vision, or, if coming within our cognizance, it may not admit of comparison with any standard of measure. Unlike the precious gem, which has an exchangeable but no intrinsic value, science bears no price in the market. It transcends all ideas of comparison and exchange. Its high utility lies in the breadth and dignity and sublime grandeur which it gives to the human mind."

"There are in astronomy refinements of method, both practical and theoretical, which can be appreciated only by rare gifts and profound study. But the elementary methods are quite within the reach of ordinary minds. The , which it was difficult to discover, may be very easily understood and its results readily traced. It might require a Newton or a La Place to unveil the mechanism of the heavens, but when that is once done every beholder may watch the wonderful evolutions."

"s are the most biologically diverse and ecologically complex of terrestrial ecosystems, and are disappearing at alarming rates. It has long been suggested that rapid forest loss and degradation in the , if unabated, could ultimately precipitate a wave of species extinctions, perhaps comparable to mass extinction events in the geological history of the Earth. However, a vigorous debate has erupted following a study by Wright and Muller-Landau that challenges the notion of large-scale tropical extinctions, at least over the next century."

"Humankind has dramatically transformed much of the Earth’s surface and its natural ecosystems. This process is not new—it has been ongoing for millennia—but it has accelerated sharply over the last two centuries, and especially in the last several decades. Today, the loss and degradation of natural history can be likened to a war of attrition. Many natural ecosystems are being progressively razed, bulldozed, and felled by axes or chainsaws, until only small scraps of their original extent survive. Forests have been hit especially hard: the global area of forests have been reduced by roughly half over the past three centuries. Twenty-five nations have lost virtually all of their forest cover, and another 29 more than nine-tenths of their forest ( 2005)."

"suffers from the drawback that it cannot with certainty distinguish between resemblances due to genetic affinity, on the other hand, and those which are the results of convergence or parallelism, on the other, and it possesses no trustworthy criterion, by which it can test the taxonomic significance of structural characters."

"The day has gone forever gone by when any one mind, however profound and comprehensive, can take all knowledge for its province. Increase of knowledge, like advance of civilization, necessarily brings with it a division of labor, and each of the great branches of science becomes more and more minutely divided and subdivided for the purposes of investigation. Such subdivision greatly enhances the efficiency of the individual worker, enabling him to concentrate his attention upon some problem of more or less limited scope, and, so far, it is advantageous. On the other hand, like most human devices, it has its drawbacks, and what is gained in one direction is apt to be lost in another. One great and growing evil is the subdiviision of knowledge which accompanies specialization of research."

"Only two or three years ago an expedition from the discovered a place in Wyoming where the lie directly upon those of the , thus fully confirming the inference as to the relative age of the two s which had long ago been drawn from the comparative study of their fossil mammals. The palæontological method of determining the geological date of the stratified rocks is thus an indispensable means of correlating the scattered exposures of the strata in widely separated regions and in different continents, it may be with thousands of miles of intervening ocean. The general principle employed is that close similarity of fossils in the rocks of the regions compared points to an approximately contemporaneous date of formation of those rocks. The principal must not, however, be applied in an offhand or uncritical manner, or it will lead to serious error."

"In the , alters forest–climate interactions in diverse ways. On a local scale (less than 1 ), elevated desiccation and wind disturbance near fragment margins lead to sharply increased tree mortality, thus altering dynamics, composition, dynamics and . Fragmented forests are also highly vulnerable to edge–related fires, especially in regions with periodic droughts or strong dry seasons. At landscape to regional scales (10–1000 km), habitat fragmentation may have complex effects on forest–climate interactions, with important consequences for atmospheric circulation, water cycling and precipitation. Positive feedbacks among , regional climate change and fire could pose a serious threat for some tropical forests, but the details of such interactions are poorly understood."

"Among Scott's outstanding contributions to the study of evolution were two memoirs, both published in 1891, the first on ' and the second on ' and '. Besides the descriptive parts of these papers, the first included a list of what Scott considered the most important questions regarding evolution and the second attempted to answer these questions from the paleontological point of view."

"Each year—as a result of , automobiles, , , and tropical —humankind spews some 8 billion tons of , , and other carbon-based pollutants into the atmosphere. The net effect, as we all know, has been an alarming rise in air pollutants—particularly carbon dioxide, which has increased by more than a third, from 280 to 380 parts per million (ppm), since the onset of the industrial era. Equally distressing is that these emissions are accelerating, because countries like the United States have failed to rein their burgeoning emissions and because rapidly developing countries like China, India, and Brazil are increasingly adopting the energy-consumptive lifestyles of industrial nations. From 1800 to 1960, for example, the average annual increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations was just 0.2 ppm, but this jumped to 1.4 ppm from 1960 to 2000 and has since risen to 2.3 ppm."

"Passing by the mountain village of —a quaint, artsy town known for its Saturday tourist markets—the changed abruptly to open . Stately rainforest trees were replaced by s, s and s, with a ground layer of punctuated by large, oddly shaped . s and s, their flowers shaped like bottle-brushes, grew in dense clumps along a few meandering creeks."

"Only two species of s of world-wide distribution are at present known which commonly attack the in numbers sufficient to cause serious injury directly due to their feeding operations. These are are the "potato aphid" (' ) and the "green peach aphid" or "spinach aphid" (' ). A third species, apparently also of world-wide distribution, is often present on the potato, frequenting especially the underside of the lower leaves. This is the "buckthorn aphid" (' Patch); which may, under certain conditions, sometimes cause infestations of a serious nature. All three of these species have been proved to be capable of spreading certain s under experimental conditions; and there can be no logical doubt that they function in the same way in the field. Wherever potatoes are grown for seed purposes these three species of aphids may need to be reckoned with."