University Of Pennsylvania Alumni

"In 1974 the Federal Trade Commission finally began to catch up with the dairy industry. Specifically, the FTC issued a "proposed complaint" against the California Milk Producers Advisory Board and Cunningham and Walsh, its advertising agency. In the complaint they charged that the dairymen's campaign to stimulate milk sales constituted false, misleading, and deceptive advertising. The dairy industry was shocked. After all, what had they done other than to proclaim that "Everybody Needs Milk?" The public has heard that line for years. This time the FTC wasn't buying the slogan. They couldn't. Too much scientific evidence had been accumulated which indicated that people didn't need milk and, in fact, that it could be harmful to your health."

""But, doctor, what will happen to my teeth and bones if I stop drinking milk?" Nothing. Nothing that wouldn't have happened anyway."

"[…] the virtues of a medicine depend less upon its intrinsic properties and powers than on the sagacity of the physician who administers it; just as the efficiency of firearms depends less upon the explosives and the missile they contain than on the judgment and accuracy of aim of the man who discharges them."

"We should be very careful to distinguish between our knowledge of phenomena and our interpretations of them."

"The more thorough the understanding needed, the further back in time one must go."

"The purpose of art is expression. Of course this short sentence raises many questions. By itself it is uninformative. One should specify what art can and cannot express. One should specify what art should and should not express. These questions cannot be answered without having some notion of the nature of man. Here it is presupposed that God created man as essentially a rational being. This implies that man’s most valuable expressions are rational and intellectual. Therefore, although man can express emotion, by screaming “Ouch,” art becomes more human and valuable in proportion to its intellectual content. This does not deny that excellent technique may express triviality, evil, and insanity. It asserts, however, that what should be expressed is rational and intelligent."

""The serious meaning of a concept," writes James, following Peirce, "lies in the concrete difference to some one which its being true will make. Strive to bring all debated conceptions to that "pragmatic" test, and you will escape vain wrangling. … If it can make no practical difference whether a given statement be true or false, then the statement has no real meaning." If the method defined in this passage be accepted, and I can not see how any one can fail to accept it even if one prove unfaithful to it afterwards, then could anything more fully illustrate the meaning of the 'meaningless' than that hypothesis of other minds in which the analogy argument culminates? Whatever may be said for the reasoning, is its conclusion at least right? Alas, I can not know. If right, my experience cannot inform me if wrong, my experience cannot disillusion me. It makes no practical difference to me whether I am right or wrong. Pragmatic conclusion: I cannot have made a meaningful hypothesis."

"A group that was somewhat connected with general systems theory is usually associated with the term, the systems approach. They were located originally at the University of Pennsylvania. They later went to Case Western Reserve University and then back to the University of Pennsylvania. Their founding philosopher was E. A. Singer, Jr. One of Singer's students was C. West Churchman, and Churchman's first student was Russell Ackoff."

"Singer was a student of William James, a lifelong associate of Peirce. Nevertheless, the connection between Singer and Peirce seems tenuous, despite the fact that we can now recognise Singer’s instrumentalism as an articulation of Peirce’s pragmatism."

"Singer's historical study focused on how we know; how we learn facts and laws and the relationship between these. He divided the major philosophies of science into three classes:"

"It is seldom given to philosophers to enter into one another's enthusiasms, but they are sometimes allowed to share a disappointment. And could anything be more generally disappointing than the attitude of a certain important group of natural philosophers toward the study of minds?"

"We may not feel as confident as once we did that the way to truth lies all open before us the moment we have brought our vague questionings to a form that "leaves the rest to experiment.""

"I have tried to show pragmatism as a moment in the swing of thought from realism to idealism, and how for it the most vital, that is to say, the moral and religious aspects of our world are things to work and fight for, to make and to mould, not just to find and come across. Its god is indeed a god of battles, and we are his soldiers on whom his victory depends. But as I view this battle, it is not to be fought out in heart throes and outpourings of sentiment. These may indeed change and better human relationships ; but it must not be forgotten that human relationships exist in a physical universe that is older than they, and promises to outlast them. Now, just the physics of things show a strong tendency to be amoral and atheistic. "You all know the picture of the last state of the universe which evolutionary science foresees."

"Looking back over the years that have lapsed since this was written, I cannot say that James's prophecy as to the future of pragmatism has been fulfilled; but that the world, at least the world in which I have lived, has lost its first sense of the absurdity of pragmatism is undoubtedly true. No one was more bitten than I with this first feeling of the absurd, unless it was some other of my kind among those who gathered of an evening in 1896 to listen to a reading of James s now famous little essay on " The Will to Believe " the essay which, so far as James was concerned, opened the campaign for pragmatism. James had written the paper that winter as a lecture to be delivered before the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities, and I cannot recall what the occasion was that brought a small number of us graduate students at Harvard together to hear it re-read but I do recall that we were very much bewildered and not a little shocked by the reading."

"I have somewhere found it recorded that as Johann Gottlieb Fichte progressed with his first reading of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," he was moved to tears. To those who have labored through the tortured pages of the great German thinker this would be no matter for surprise, were it not for the quality of the tears: not those of vexation and baffled understanding, indeed, but of enthusiasm and sheer gratitude. For Fichte had fallen into the melancholy persuasion of Spinoza. At least, certain views of this austere thinker of the seventeenth century appeared to Fichte as no less gloomy in their implication than irresistible in the logic which led to them. Irresistible were the reasons which had driven Spinoza to look upon nature as governed by inexorable Fate. In the world as a whole there was no purpose, in its parts there was no freedom."

""All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare." These words which bring to a close Spinoza's masterpiece Ethics, after the manner of Geometry, sum up the experience of a life as rare as it was difficult."

"The straightest way to the heart of old matters is an old letter."

"All the categories of life and mind are to my understanding of them teleological."

"Art is (1) a messenger of discontent, yet (2) no teacher of new ideals, but rather (3) an inspiration to each it touches, himself to turn creator of a world-more-ideal."

"Enterprise architecture is the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of a company's operation model... The key to effective enterprise architecture is to identify the processes, data, technology, and customer interfaces that take the operating model from vision to reality."

"Assessing the value of information technology (IT) has never been easy. Delayed benefits, unintended uses, business changes, and hidden support costs inhibit meaningful evaluation of individual IT investments. This was true when most investments were focused on the support of a single business process or functional area. It is even more true as business executives ponder implementations of shared technologies like data warehouses and networks, replacement of large legacy systems, and reskilling of the IT staff. Although firms introduce some systems to reduce costs and can evaluate them in terms of their success in doing so, they want many IT initiatives to support a firm's objectives. The value of these initiatives rest in their contributions to a firm's competitiveness, which is often non quantifiable and uncertain."

"The insights in the book come from a series of research projects exploring enterprise architecture in more than 200 companies where our focus was on IT government from 1995 to 2005."

"In a business world that is changing faster than ever before, the top performing firms create a stable base – they digitize their core processes and embed those processes into a foundation for execution. This stable foundation makes a company both more efficient and more agile than its competitors. With global supply chains, pressure for ever faster time to market, more complex regulation, and huge shifts in customer demographics and desires, companies cannot predict the future. But they can decide what makes them great. And then they can create a low cost, high quality core of stability and constancy in a turbulent world. With a strong digitized core great companies slide smoothly into the next opportunity while their competitors stumble."

"In 1995 we started our study of enterprise architecture – we just did not know it. At the time we thought we were studying information technology infrastructure transformations. In 1998 we thought we were studying enterprise system implementations. In 2000 it was e-business. But sometime in 2000, we recognized that each of these studies examined basically the same thing: Enterprise Architecture."

"Senior executive teams create mechanisms to govern the management and use of each of these assets both independently and together.... Governance of the key assets occurs via a large number of organizational mechanisms, for example structures, processes, procedures and audits."

"Seventy percent of all IT projects fail—and scores of books have attempted to help firms measure and manage IT systems and processes better in order to turn this figure around."

"(ERP) software packages have become popular means for both large and medium-sized organizations to overcome the limitations of fragmented and incompatible legacy systems. ERP systems are designed as integrated sets of software modules linked to a common database, handling basic corporate functions such as finance, human resources, materials management, sales, and distribution. Most ERP packages also provide multiple language and currency capabilities, enabling integration of global operations. The popularity of ERP is documented in a study that showed that nearly 19 percent of organizations across all industry sectors have installed ERP software, with the manufacturing sector leading the trend. The study also showed that ERP's popularity continues to rise, with 34 percent of the surveyed organizations investigating, piloting, or implementing ERP packages. Davenport characterized ERP as "the most important development in the corporate use of information technology in the 1990s""

"This paper reports on a comparative case study of 13 industrial firms that implemented an (ERP) system. It compares firms based on their dialectic leaming process. All firms had to overcome knowledge barriers of two types: those associated with the configuration of the ERP package, and those associated with the assimilation of new work processes. We found that both strong core teams and carefully managed consulting relationships addressed configuration knowledge barriers. User training that included both technical and business processes, along with a phased implementation approach, helped firms to overcome assimilation knowledge barriers. However, all firms in this study experienced ongoing concerns with assimilation knowledge barriers, and we observed two different approaches to address them. In a piecemeal approach, firms concentrated on the technology first and deferred consideration of process changes. In a concerted approach, both the technology and process changes were undertaken together. Although most respondents clearly stated a preference for either piecemeal or concerted change, all firms engaged in practices that reflected a combination of these approaches."

"Many companies are not driving significant business value from the digitized platforms they build as part of their enterprise architecture initiatives. Our 2011 survey of 146 senior IT leaders found that the companies that benefit from their platforms' efforts are consistently relying on four architecture-related practices that encourage organizational learning about the value of enterprise architecture: 1) making IT costs transparent, 2) debating architectural exceptions, 3) performing post-implementation reviews, and 4) making IT investments with enterprise architecture in mind."

"Organizations that operate under an IT monarchy place key business unit and technical decisions in the hands of the CIO. Under the duopoly method, decision-making for IT budgets, applications and technologies is shared among the CIO and business unit leaders."

"IT architecture is often assumed to follow business strategy, to align IT with the business's strategic objectives. Increasingly, though, many business strategies depend on specific underlying IT capabilities. To develop a synergy between business strategy and IT architecture, firms must develop organizational competencies in IT architecture. My research has identified four IT architectural stages, each with its own requisite competencies. The "application silo architecture stage" consists of IT architectures of individual applications. The "standardized technology architecture stage" has an enterprise-wide IT architecture that provides efficiencies through technology standardization. The "rationalized data architecture stage" extends the enterprise-wide IT standards to data and processes. And the "modular architecture stage" builds onto enterprise-wide global standards with loosely coupled IT components to preserve the global standards while enabling local differences. Each stage demands different organizational competencies to implement the architecture and prepare the firm to move to the next stage."

"To date, most research on information technology (IT) outsourcing concludes that firms decide to outsource IT services because they believe that outside vendors possess production cost advantages. Yet it is not clear whether vendors can provide production"

"Our technological revolution is quickly making degrees irrelevant for many of even the top jobs. Bill Gates didn’t graduate from college. Tumblr founder David Karp dropped out of high school. So did blip.tv founder Mike Hudack. Dropping out of the standard school curriculum is not a dead end if it leads you toward a trade where you can earn a living and be proud of your achievements."

"There’s a serious danger that the college education bubble may burst. As more and more people get college degrees, which inevitably have to become easier to get in order to increase the amount of graduates beyond its realistic levels, the market will eventually figure out that the degree doesn’t mean what it used to. It will become less useful as a heuristic for intelligence and achievement. And college graduates will find themselves with an asset—a degree—whose value is dropping while their debt remains high."

"The untransacted destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent — to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean — to animate the many hundred millions of its people, and to cheer them upward — to set the principle of self-government at work — to agitate these herculean masses — to establish a new order in human affairs — to set free the enslaved — to regenerate superannuated nations — to change darkness into light — to stir up the sleep of a hundred centuries — to teach old nations a new civilization — to confirm the destiny of the human race — to carry the career of mankind to its culminating point — to cause stagnant people to be re-born — to perfect science — to emblazon history with the conquest of peace — to shed a new and resplendent glory upon mankind — to unite the world in one social family — to dissolve the spell of tyranny and exalt charity — to absolve the curse that weighs down humanity, and to shed blessings round the world! Divine task! immortal mission! Let us tread fast and joyfully the open trail before us! Let every American heart open wide for patriotism to glow undimmed, and confide with religious faith in the sublime and prodigious destiny of his well-loved country."

"Death’s but one more to-morrow."

"I must have told my story ill if to every physician who hears me its illustrations have not the invigorating force of moral tonics."

"Where did this filthy thing come from?"

"The first thing to be done by a biographer in estimating character is to examine the stubs of his victim's cheque-books."

"When youth was lord of my unchallenged fate, And time seemed but the vassal of my will, I entertained certain guests of state— The great of older days."

"Up anchor! Up anchor! Set sail and away! The ventures of dreamland Are thine for a day."

"Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city."

"What I lacked was even the idea of a twentieth-century tradition of radical or revolutionary poetics as a stream into which a young poet could dip her glass. Among elders, William Carlos Williams wrote from the landscape of ordinary urban, contemporary America, of ordinary poor and working people, and in a diction of everyday speech, plainspoken yet astonishingly musical and flexible. But I don't recall being taken out of my skin by any Williams poem, though later I would work with his phrasing and ways of breaking a line as a means of shedding formal metrics."

"fear of embarrassment, fear of sticking your neck out, fear of looking foolish, fear of writing in a way that nobody else is writing (I'm not talking about trying to be extraordinary or avant-garde)... there are people who stick through for twenty years.... I'll give you an example: William Carlos Williams. In his autobiography he says (I'll have to paraphrase this, he said it with a New Jersey accent), "Well, it looks like this guy T. S. Eliot has hit it real big with The Waste Land, it looks like that is the direction for literature." His next line is: "Now I know I will have to wait twenty years to be heard." So he did, he just kept doing what he thought was right, became a powerful influence, stuck to his ideas of the American language. But lots and lots of other people said, "Well, that looks like the way to go," and trotted off, cutting their roots as they went."

"In the 1920s, he was calling for a book that was worthy of the Americas. He was thinking of a big American novel. He was not confining it to the United States. Williams was thinking of the Americas; he wanted a book that was speaking from the large ground of these two continents."

"When I was reading William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain...I thought, wow, this is it. This is the way to write about America. This is right. This is history, the mythic history. So I'm sure there was going to be a volume two. So I ran to the library and turned this one in, looking for volume two. There isn't a volume two; that's it! That was when I thought, oh. I've got to write volume two. If he didn't do it, then I've got to do it. So that's China Men. They bind the country together with steel, the bands of steel that are the railroads. That's the same kind of missing feeling; after I finished the first two books, I thought, oh! there's more language in me, this other kind of language, this very slangy, American, present-day language. And the other thing that was missing was that, well, I wanted to read some books about the time that the Beatniks went away-those are our forefathers, our immediate forefathers."

"When I read Virginia Woolf's Orlando or William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain, I can feel like I'm dying, or I'm stuck, both in life and in work. I read those books, and then I start flowing again. I'm happy that I can do that for other people."

"My early identity and love poems were influenced by the imagism of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams."

"In one of his poems William Carlos Williams writes that "destruction and creation are simultaneous." Picasso said a very similar thing. For Williams, that's a way of mythologizing the avant-garde, the cutting edge: you have to destroy."

"Writing is also a profession, and, at its best, an honourable one. It has been made honourable by those who have already been members of it. Whether you like it or not, every time you set pen to paper you’re staring at the same blank space that confronted Milton, Melville, Emily Bronte, Dostoevsky and George Eliot, George Orwell and William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams, not to mention the latest hero, Gabriel Garcia Marquez."