publish or perish

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Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie

Albert Einstein, anesthesia awareness, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Black Lives Matter, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citation needed, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, hype cycle, Kenneth Rogoff, l'esprit de l'escalier, Large Hadron Collider, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, mouse model, New Journalism, ocean acidification, p-value, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine

  ‘400,000 studies’: Steven Kelly, ‘The Continuing Evolution of Publishing in the Biological Sciences’, Biology Open 7, no. 8 (15 Aug. 2018): bio037325; https://doi.org/10.1242/bio.037325; ‘2.4 million papers’: Andrew Plume & Daphne van Weijen, ‘Publish or Perish? The Rise of the Fractional Author…’, Research Trends, Sept. 2014; https://www.researchtrends.com/issue-38-september-2014/publish-or-perish-the-rise-of-the-fractional-author/. According to a report from the US National Science Foundation, in 2016 China became the largest single-country producer of scientific papers, just above the US. Jeff Tollefson, ‘China Declared World’s Largest Producer of Scientific Articles’, Nature 553, no. 7689 (18 Jan. 2018): p. 390; https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-00927-4 7.  

, LSE Impact of Social Sciences, 18 Jan. 2018; https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2018/01/16/why-has-no-other-european-country-adopted-the-research-excellence-framework/ 12.  For an (inconclusive) attempt to track down the origins of the phrase ‘publish or perish’, see Eugene Garfield, ‘What is the Primordial Reference for the Phrase “Publish or Perish”?’, Scientist 10, no. 2 (10 June 1996): p. 11. 13.  Albert N. Link et al., ‘A Time Allocation Study of University Faculty’, Economics of Education Review 27, no. 4 (Aug. 2008): pp. 363–74; https://doi.org/10.1016/j. econedurev.2007.04.002 14.  

But they also found that researchers who published more papers per year had slightly fewer retractions overall – a finding they interpreted as going against the idea that the publish-or-perish culture causes more research misconduct. Retractions are quite rare and quite extreme, though: retraction involves removing a paper from the literature and is often due to major infractions like fraud. In my view, therefore, the 2015 paper can’t be used as a defence of publish-or-perish, since it didn’t measure anything about the quality of the articles. The authors also found that researchers who publish more regularly tend to publish more corrections.


pages: 465 words: 109,653

Free Ride by Robert Levine

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Anne Wojcicki, book scanning, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, commoditize, company town, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Firefox, future of journalism, Googley, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Justin.tv, Kevin Kelly, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, offshore financial centre, pets.com, publish or perish, race to the bottom, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

HOW TECHNOLOGY COULD TURN THE PAGE ON PUBLISHING 1. Rory Maher, “Here’s Why Amazon Will Win the eBook War,” BusinessInsider.com, January 13, 2010. Amazon’s share of the e-book market has fallen since then. 2. In addition to interviews, I got details of the Seattle meeting from Ken Auletta, “Publish or Perish,” The New Yorker, April 26, 2010. 3. Jay Yarow, “9 Charts That Show Why Amazon Investors Have Nothing to Worry About,” BusinessInsider.com, February 17, 2010. This article quoted a Credit Suisse report that said Amazon had 22 percent of the overall book market and 19 percent of the print book market in 2009. 4.

“Announcement: Macmillan E-books,” Amazon.com Kindle Community, from the Amazon Kindle team. Amazon’s announcement dripped condescension toward publishers, saying, “Customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book.” 5. Auletta, “Publish or Perish.” 6. No one at Random House asked for any special consideration as I wrote this book. I interviewed Richard Sarnoff, since he was a key figure in negotiating the Google Books settlement, but I arranged the interview through the Random House publicity department, just as any other journalist would. 7.

Competition and Commerce in Digital Books: The Proposed Google Book Settlement Hearing Before the House Judiciary Committee, 111th Cong., 1st sess. (September 10, 2009) (Marybeth Peters testimony.) 18. Authors Guild, Assn. of American Publishers v. Google, No. 05-CV-8136 (S.D.N.Y. filed March 22, 2011). 19. Ibid. 20. Auletta, “Publish or Perish.” 21. The practice of selling less expensive paperbacks after a title had been sold in hardcover dates from 1935, when the London-based Penguin Books acquired rights to reprint ten books from their original publishers. Pocket Books brought Penguin’s model to the United States in 1939. John Feather, A History of British Publishing (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 177. 22.


pages: 289 words: 22,394

Virus of the Mind by Richard Brodie

Abraham Maslow, cognitive dissonance, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Gödel, Escher, Bach, joint-stock company, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy

I’m just suggesting that we, as intelligent human beings, take a look at a model of evolution that centers around Dan, just as astronomers found that a model of our solar system that revolves around the sun was more useful than one that revolved around the earth. Dan’s situation in life is much like a university professor’s: publish or perish. In Dan’s case, what he’s publishing are copies of everyone’s favorite subject: himself. Does Dan care if he publishes or perishes? Only in some mystical, metaphysical sense. Dan is just a lump of carbon and a hank of amino acids. It wouldn’t be fair to say he cares about anything. We may care, having grown to love and cherish him now that we’ve given him a name, but in reality Dan’s demise would simply mean that the atoms of the universe would be arranged in a slightly different way.


pages: 708 words: 223,211

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear

air traffic controllers' union, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple Newton, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairchild Semiconductor, finite state, Future Shock, game design, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, lateral thinking, linear programming, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, Plato's cave, pre–internet, publish or perish, Ralph Nader, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, three-martini lunch, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

Unlike the conventional “publish or perish” pressure most professors are under during their careers, especially early on when they’re just starting out, Bitzer somehow managed to play the academia game without having to write much at all. Just like in high school and throughout his undergraduate years, he was able to sail through the politics and pressures of academic life through a combination of luck, magic, salesmanship, and chutzpah—he was the son of a car dealer, after all—and a mission-focus bullheadedness that made others stand back and wonder, How does he do it? “Publish or perish” would not be the Donald Bitzer Way.

The engineers and scientists put their documents in locked safes at the end of the day, and every month the safes’ combinations were changed. Not only was nothing allowed to leave the lab without permission, but the academics working in the lab could neither discuss what they were working on nor share their experimental results. In the “publish or perish” world of academia, the inability of professors to publish or even talk about what they were doing could hurt their academic career, but Wheeler Loomis had taken that into consideration, relaxing academic requirements for people who took a chance on their career by joining the lab. Funding for the lab came from Army, Navy, and Air Force grants.

Smith epitomized in the late 1960s throughout the 1990s the fearless, enthusiastic academic pioneer who cared deeply about developing compelling interactive simulations and tutorials for students in college settings. His work was often featured around the world in PLATO demos at conferences and other venues, and yet for all the recognition he achieved, UI’s publish-or-perish chemistry department did not view his work equal to research or publishing peer-reviewed articles, and it made it difficult for him to get tenure. Other departments on campus held similar biases. George Grimes, a professor of veterinary medicine who developed numerous lessons on PLATO, ran into similar problems.


pages: 347 words: 90,234

You Can't Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction--From Memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything in Between by Lee Gutkind

airport security, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Columbine, David Sedaris, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Mark Zuckerberg, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, out of africa, personalized medicine, publish or perish, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, working poor, Year of Magical Thinking

THE SHOCKING TRUTH ABOUT THE NEW YORK TIMES The Narrative Line and the Hook PLUNGING THE READER INTO THE STORY BACKGROUND MEANS WHAT IT SAYS: IN THE BACK The Story Determines the Research Information—the Facts—You Gather and Provide Framing: The Second Part of Structure (After Scenes) AS PART OF THE FRAME, THERE’S SOMETHING AT STAKE ALTERING CHRONOLOGY PARALLEL NARRATIVES DON’T MAKE PROMISES YOU CAN’T KEEP Main Point of Focus FRAME REFLECTS FOCUS STORIES (SCENES) ARE ELASTIC First Lede/Real Lead: A Creative Nonfiction Experiment Precipitated by Ernest ... CLARITY AND QUESTION MARKS THE DRAWER PHASE REMEMBER THAT WRITING IS REVISION Now That I Know Everything I Ever Wanted to Know About Creative Nonfiction, ... MFA IN THE USA PUBLISH OR PERISH DON’T WORRY, BE HAPPY—AND SMART A Final Word: Read This Book Again APPENDIX: THEN AND NOW: GREAT (AND NOT SO GREAT) MOMENTS IN CREATIVE ... BIBLIOGRAPHY PERMISSIONS INDEX Copyright Page Praise for Lee Gutkind “Gutkind is the Godfather Behind Creative Nonfiction.” —Vanity Fair “The Leading Figure in the field.”

The sample is what’s going to get you accepted or rejected, so the best way to begin your writing career is by writing and submitting the best work you can produce to the best programs—and waiting patiently to get where you want to go. Remember, you’re still writing, compiling material, moving in the right direction. Timing is crucial. If you enter an MFA program before you’re ready, you’ll spend your first semester or your first year trying to find a writing project. PUBLISH OR PERISH Yes, that’s the old adage, especially for academics; if you don’t publish books and critical essays, you probably won’t get tenure. And to a certain extent, the same is true for writers. If you don’t publish, your work seems unofficial. And being unpublished is depressing. Laboring alone and writing material no one seems to be paying attention to is frustrating.


pages: 428 words: 103,544

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford

Abraham Wald, access to a mobile phone, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, Automated Insights, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, Diane Coyle, disinformation, Donald Trump, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental subject, fake news, financial innovation, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kickstarter, life extension, meta-analysis, microcredit, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, publication bias, publish or perish, random walk, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, sparse data, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, When a measure becomes a target

Since the top journals weren’t very interested in publishing replication attempts, he knew that devoting his research team full-time to a replication effort might be career suicide: they simply wouldn’t be able to accumulate the publications necessary to secure their future in academia. Young researchers must either “publish or perish,” because many universities and other research bodies use publication records as an objective basis for deciding who should get promotions or research grants. This is another example of the Vietnam body count problem we met in the second chapter. Great researchers do indeed tend to publish lots of research that is widely cited by others.

If you have a result that looks publishable but fragile, the logic of science tells you to try to disprove it. Yet the logic of academic grants and promotions tells you to publish at once, and for goodness’ sake don’t prod it too hard. So not only are journals predisposed to publish surprising results, researchers facing “publish or perish” incentives are more likely to submit surprising results that may not stand up to scrutiny. * * * — The illusionist Derren Brown once produced an undoctored film of him tossing a coin into a bowl and getting heads ten times in a row. Brown later explained the trick: the stunning sequence came only at the end of nine excruciating hours of filming, when the string of ten heads finally materialized.12 There is a 1-in-1,024 chance of getting ten heads in a row if you toss a fair coin ten times.


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

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pages: 505 words: 142,118

A Man for All Markets by Edward O. Thorp

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carried interest, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Edward Thorp, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, High speed trading, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, Mason jar, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Murray Gell-Mann, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical arbitrage, stem cell, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, Works Progress Administration

We were also expected to conduct and publish our own original research in scholarly journals. When this was submitted, it was reviewed by anonymous experts, known as referees, as a precondition of acceptance. Rejections were common. Those of us who wanted to succeed in the academic hierarchy all knew the mantra “Publish or perish.” Despite all this, I also continued to work on my “arbitrary subsets” blackjack program for the IBM 704 computer, testing and correcting the computer code for one module (or “subroutine”) at a time. The 704 was one of the early mainframe electronic computers, one of a series of increasingly powerful models developed by IBM.

Initially, I transferred to UCI’s Graduate School of Management, where I enjoyed teaching courses in mathematical finance. But I found factionalism and backstabbing as bad there as it had been in the Math Department. Both had endless committee meetings, petty squabbles over benefits, people who wouldn’t pull their weight and couldn’t be dislodged, and the dictum of publish or perish. I decided it was time to leave academia. Even so, it was not an entirely easy decision. I had heard more than one person say that what they wanted most in life was to be a tenured professor at the University of California. It had been my dream, too. Over the years I hired students and former staff from UC, Irvine but only one faculty member, one without tenure, was willing to take a chance and join my operation.


pages: 172 words: 48,747

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America by Sarah Kendzior

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, clean water, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, gentrification, George Santayana, glass ceiling, income inequality, independent contractor, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, payday loans, pink-collar, post-work, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

It is less about the production of knowledge than where that knowledge will be held (or withheld) and what effect that has on the author’s career. New professors are awarded tenure based on their publication output, but not on the impact of their research on the world—perhaps because, due to paywalls, it is usually minimal. “Publish or perish” has long been an academic maxim. In the digital economy, “publish and perish” may be a more apt summation. What academics gain in professional security, they lose in public relevance, a sad fate for those who want their research appreciated and understood. Many scholars hate this situation.


pages: 209 words: 54,638

Team Geek by Brian W. Fitzpatrick, Ben Collins-Sussman

anti-pattern, barriers to entry, cognitive dissonance, Dean Kamen, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, fear of failure, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Ken Thompson, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, publish or perish, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, value engineering, web application

While you may be afraid of someone stealing your idea or thinking you’re dumb, you should be much more scared of wasting huge swaths of your time toiling away on the wrong thing. Sadly, this problem of “clutching ideas to the chest” isn’t unique to software engineering—it’s a pervasive problem across all fields. For example, professional science is supposed to be about the free and open exchange of information. But the desperate need to “publish or perish” and to compete for grants has had exactly the opposite effect. Great thinkers don’t share ideas. They cling to them obsessively, do their research in private, hide all mistakes along the path, and then ultimately publish a paper making it sound like the whole process was effortless and obvious.


pages: 204 words: 58,565

Keeping Up With the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics by Thomas H. Davenport, Jinho Kim

behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, business intelligence, business process, call centre, computer age, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, forensic accounting, global supply chain, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, hypertext link, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, longitudinal study, margin call, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Myron Scholes, Netflix Prize, p-value, performance metric, publish or perish, quantitative hedge fund, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Shiller, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, six sigma, Skype, statistical model, supply-chain management, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport

And you’ll be an integral part of a major transformation in business and organizational life that is sweeping the world right now. Analytical Thinking Example: Scholarship Made Easy In academia, the competition for tenure-track faculty positions puts increasing pressure on scholars to publish new work frequently. The phrase “publish-or-perish” well represents, especially in prestigious and research-oriented universities, the pressure to publish work constantly to further or sustain a career in higher education. However, since preparing work for publication in a journal, especially in major journals, is not easy and takes copious amounts of time, working with other scholars is more productive and has become the prevalent path to publication.


pages: 198 words: 57,703

The World According to Physics by Jim Al-Khalili

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, butterfly effect, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, gravity well, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, information security, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, post-truth, power law, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, supercomputer in your pocket, the scientific method, time dilation

Even the most brilliant physicists have been known to downplay problems with their theories and to amplify their criticisms of a rival idea. Confirmation bias exists in science just as it does in all walks of life, and scientists are not immune to it. We strive for tenure and promotion, to compete for funding, meet project deadlines, ‘publish or perish’, and work hard to gain the respect of our peers and the approbation of our superiors. And yet, part of our training in the scientific method is to develop humility and honesty in research to enable us to act against our baser instincts. We learn not to be blinded by our desires or misled by our biases and vested interests.


pages: 836 words: 158,284

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss

23andMe, airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Buckminster Fuller, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, Dean Kamen, game design, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, index card, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, language acquisition, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, messenger bag, microbiome, microdosing, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, placebo effect, Productivity paradox, publish or perish, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

This book includes the findings of more than 100 PhDs, NASA scientists, medical doctors, Olympic athletes, professional sports trainers (from the NFL to MLB), world-record holders, Super Bowl rehabilitation specialists, and even former Eastern Bloc coaches. You’ll meet some of the most incredible specimens, including before-and-after transformations, you’ve ever seen. I don’t have a publish-or-perish academic career to preserve, and this is a good thing. As one MD from a well-known Ivy League university said to me over lunch: We’re trained for 20 years to be risk-averse. I’d like to do the experimentation, but I’d risk everything I’ve built over two decades of schooling and training by doing so.

His friends find him on his hands and knees looking for his keys under a streetlight, even though he knows he lost them somewhere else. “Why are you looking for your keys under the streetlight?” they ask. He responds confidently, “Because there’s more light over here. I can see better.” For the researcher seeking tenure, grant money, or lucrative corporate consulting contracts, the maxim “publish or perish” applies. If you need to include 100 or 1,000 test subjects and can only afford to measure a few simple things, you need to paint those measurements as tremendously important. Alas, mentally on your hands and knees is no way to spend life, nor is chafing your ass on a stationary bike. Instead of focusing on calories-out as exercise-dependent, we will look at two underexploited paths: heat and hormones.


pages: 193 words: 19,478

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext by Belinda Barnet

augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Duvall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, game design, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, John Markoff, linked data, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Project Xanadu, publish or perish, Robert Metcalfe, semantic web, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, the scientific method, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons

This emphasis on demos is not just historically specific to mid-twentiethcentury engineering discourse, either; contemporary new media has inherited it also: Demonstrations have had an important, perhaps even central, place in new media innovation. In some centers of new media, the traditional knowledge-work AUGMENTING THE INTELLECT: NLS 59 dictum of ‘publish or perish’ is replaced by ‘demo or die’. (Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort 2003, 231) Engelbart recognized this emphasis on working prototypes. In particular, he recognized how engineering paradigms work, and how they are moved or limited by demos and prototypes. It was time to take NLS out of the Petri dish and set it to work in front of the engineering community.


pages: 259 words: 76,915

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith

dark pattern, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, ocean acidification, publish or perish, Rodney Brooks

These squid are among the most social of cephalopods. The contrast between the baboons and the cephalopods is, I hope, vivid. In the cephalopods we find, as a result of their heritage of camouflage, an immensely rich expressive capacity—a video screen is tied directly to their brain. Cuttlefish and other cephalopods are brimming with output. Publish or perish. To some extent, this output is designed by evolution to be seen; sometimes it is camouflage, but sometimes it is meant be noticed, by rivals and the opposite sex. The screen also seems to run through much chatter and murmuring, happenstance expression. And even if cephalopods have hidden powers of color perception, a lot of their wild chromatic output is surely lost on watchers.


pages: 272 words: 78,876

Heart: A History by Sandeep Jauhar

blue-collar work, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, Easter island, Future Shock, Honoré de Balzac, John Snow's cholera map, mass immigration, medical residency, placebo effect, publish or perish, Rubik’s Cube, selection bias, stem cell, the scientific method

Gibbon and his research assistant (and wife), Mary Hopkinson, essentially devoted the rest of their professional lives to this goal. His mentors discouraged him, believing that his outsized ambition would be better spent on a less risky project. Churchill himself took a “dim” view of the proposed work. In the medical academy, then as now, huge outlays of time and money for big ideas were frowned upon. In a publish-or-perish world, you had to get your name in the top journals with regularity. Gibbon’s mentors advised him to pursue iterative problems, problems whose solutions might tweak the existing paradigm but would not try to supplant it. However, Gibbon had a stick-to-itiveness that was unusual, even for a medical scientist, and so he applied himself and forged on.


pages: 271 words: 83,944

The Sellout: A Novel by Paul Beatty

affirmative action, Apollo 13, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, cotton gin, desegregation, El Camino Real, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Lao Tzu, late fees, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, p-value, publish or perish, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skinner box, telemarketer, theory of mind, War on Poverty, white flight, yellow journalism

“Because the white people got better accessories. I mean, look. Harriet Tubman has a gas lantern, a walking stick, and a compass. Ken and Barbie have a dune buggy and speedboat! It’s really no contest.” The next day my father burned his “findings” in the fireplace. Even at the junior college level it’s publish or perish. But more than the fact he’d never get a parking space with his name on it or a reduced course load, I was a failed social experiment. A statistically insignificant son who’d shattered his hopes for both me and the black race. He made me turn in my dream book. Stopped calling my allowance “positive reinforcement” and began referring to it as “restitution.”


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Constant experimentation with users, fast iterations, citizen-centered design and the use of GitHub repositories have resulted in a 90 percent approval rating for the department’s latest app. (When was the last time any government service saw approval numbers like that?) Aside from government, we believe ExO principles will transform other siloed areas as well. Take scientific research, which, bizarrely, is still fiercely attached to the “publish or perish” mantra. “A strong publishing record is key to getting grant funding,” says Sarah Sclarsic, a biotech executive with Modern Meadow who has been researching this issue. The problem, however, is that top scientific journals favor sensational studies with positive-correlation findings. As a result, she says, scientists feel pressure to produce those sensational outcomes, regardless of whether or not the science is sound.


pages: 653 words: 218,559

Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975 by Hannah Arendt

American ideology, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, dark matter, desegregation, means of production, military-industrial complex, post-truth, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Rosa Parks, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

There aren’t that many but there are a few dozen in the United States who are genuine believers and authentically superb teachers because they are genuine believers. ARENDT: I think a problem that really needs to be worked on, and where the foundation may be of help, is that really good teachers are not thought of highly by the academic society. This business of “publish or perish” has been a catastrophe. People write things which should never have been written and which should never be printed. Nobody’s interested. But for them to keep their jobs and get the proper promotion, they’ve got to do it. It demeans the whole of intellectual life. I used to adhere to the principle that a graduate student on a certain level should be independent from me to the extent that he could also, apart from me, choose and establish his own bibliography.

ARENDT: The one who really loses is the person who has a passionate interest in matters of the mind, who is an excellent reader, who can establish contact with his students and make them understand that his subject is important, but who will not write. Or, if he is forced to write, will not write well. And, by doing something which he is forced to do because of “publish or perish,” he will become a lesser person. I’ve seen it happen in the places where I have taught. One might give medals or awards. I know the Danforth Foundation does this. It may not help much but you could do something to raise the prestige, not of the so-called charismatic teacher who is usually a disaster, but of teachers who are truly dedicated.


pages: 346 words: 92,984

The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health by David B. Agus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, autism spectrum disorder, butterfly effect, clean water, cognitive dissonance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Marc Benioff, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, microcredit, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, nocebo, parabiotic, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, publish or perish, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Salesforce, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

One of the researchers, John Ioannidis of Stanford, had already delved into this world more than ten years ago when he published “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” which became one of the most cited papers in PLOS Medicine.20 His latest investigations culminated in his 2013 paper showing that, for the most part, pretty much everything we eat both causes and prevents cancer. And when it comes to things like milk, eggs, bread, and butter, you can find just as many studies that support their health benefits as their cancer-causing risks. Scientists can have difficulty getting their papers accepted into prestigious journals. In a world of “publish or perish,” this has created a market for bottom-feeding journals with impressive-sounding names but absolutely no standards. The number of published medical studies has skyrocketed accordingly, with a 300 percent increase over the last twenty-five years.21 And the so-called open-access model, which allows anyone to access certain journals freely online without paying a fee, has given rise to a slew of online publishers, many of which are unscrupulous and exist only to make money off the authors who pay to have their papers published.


pages: 307 words: 94,069

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Atul Gawande, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate social responsibility, en.wikipedia.org, fundamental attribution error, impulse control, Jeff Hawkins, Libby Zion, longitudinal study, medical residency, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Piper Alpha, placebo effect, publish or perish, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs

Its role is to showcase the latest thinking in the field of operations. Professors compete strenuously to get their articles published in journals like MSOM, because in order to get promoted within their university departments, they need a solid track record of publication. (You’ve probably heard the expression “Publish or perish.”) Getting articles published is a long process. First, you do a lot of research—often several years’ worth. Then you write an article describing the research and submit it to a journal. The journal editor farms out your article to “peer reviewers”—other professors who agree to critique your piece (anonymously).


pages: 322 words: 89,523

Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community by Karen T. Litfin

active transport: walking or cycling, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, collaborative consumption, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, congestion pricing, corporate social responsibility, degrowth, glass ceiling, global village, hydraulic fracturing, intentional community, megacity, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, publish or perish, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the built environment, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, urban planning, Zipcar

In the end, as much as I cherished the prospect of raising Maya in such a wholesome environment, I was deterred by yet another of the classic issues associated with group living: location. I was daunted by the commute. For me, the ecological and social benefits of community life were not worth long hours on the freeway. So I bought a house near the university and, bowing before the academic dictum “publish or perish,” I put my nose to the grindstone. As I’ve said, it was the perfect job, but something was missing, something big. I cared about my subject, thought about it constantly, saw it as vital – and yet I was not living as if it were true. My lectures, painstakingly researched, all pointed to one extremely inconvenient truth: our everyday actions are unraveling our home planet’s life-support systems.


A Second Chance by Jodi Taylor

Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, financial independence, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, out of africa, publish or perish, trade route

Afterwards, the Chancellor asked me if I would publish. ‘The ending of the war. The Trojan Horses. You should publish.’ I shook my head. I’d left it a little late to start publishing now. I could imagine the reaction to my paper. I’d rocked enough boats in my time. Leave the world its stories. I shook my head. ‘Publish or perish,’ she reminded me. For a member of St Mary’s there are many more imaginative ways to perish than simply failing to publish regularly. I thanked her and declined. She regarded me over the rim of her glass. ‘Could I interest you in joining us at Thirsk?’ I paused, my own glass halfway to my lips.


pages: 313 words: 101,403

My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance by Emanuel Derman

Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Claude Shannon: information theory, Dennis Ritchie, Donald Knuth, Emanuel Derman, financial engineering, fixed income, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, hiring and firing, implied volatility, interest rate derivative, Jeff Bezos, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, law of one price, linked data, Long Term Capital Management, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, pre–internet, proprietary trading, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stochastic volatility, technology bubble, the new new thing, transaction costs, volatility smile, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

By May 1974, at the close of my first academic year, I was heading for trouble. In three months I would have to start my next job search, and I had not published a paper; worse, I was not even involved in anything that could conceivably lead to a publication. I developed a visceral understanding of the meaning of "publish or perish," and made darkly foreboding comments to my friends and acquaintances about where I was headed. Life wasn't all bad, though. Three good things did happen that year, all extracurricular. I spent many evening hours in my Philadelphia bedroom learning to juggle three tennis balls. I started running more seriously than I had before, tagging on to a cadre of dedicated graduatestudent long distance runners who trained every day at noon on the university's famous Tartan track, site of the Penn Relays.


pages: 400 words: 94,847

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielsen

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dark matter, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Higgs boson, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, means of production, medical residency, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, P vs NP, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, social intelligence, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, University of East Anglia, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler

Some scientific journals offer expedited publication services for major papers, promising to publish them within a few weeks after submission. Of course, the reason today’s scientists are so eager to share their results is that their livelihoods depend upon it: when a scientist applies for a job, the most important part of the application is their record of published scientific papers. The phrase “publish or perish” has become a cliche in modern science because it succinctly expresses a core fact of scientific life. Modern scientists take this connection between publishing and career success for granted, but in 1610, when Galileo made his string of great discoveries, no such connection existed. It couldn’t exist, because the first scientific journals weren’t started until 55 years later, in 1665.


pages: 389 words: 109,207

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street by William Poundstone

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Albert Einstein, anti-communist, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, correlation coefficient, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, high net worth, index fund, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, short selling, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

It was unclear whether MIT would renew Thorp’s appointment, and New Mexico State offered a salary about 50 percent more than Thorp was making. Living costs would be much less. The money weighed heavily on Thorp, as he and Vivian were now raising a family. Thorp accepted the offer, transplanting himself and Vivian to a ranch house in Las Cruces, New Mexico. A mathematics professor must publish or perish. Thorp’s field was functional analysis. He was publishing learned articles with titles like “The Relation Between a Compact Linear Operator and Its Conjugate.” The publication for which he is best known came about by accident, though. In spring 1961, a book salesman visited MIT. Thorp found himself describing his blackjack system as a possible book.


pages: 351 words: 112,079

Gene Eating: The Science of Obesity and the Truth About Dieting by Giles Yeo

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, delayed gratification, Drosophila, Easter island, Gregor Mendel, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, nudge theory, post-truth, publish or perish, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, twin studies, Wall-E, zoonotic diseases

In fact, the NHS is under such constant financial pressure to find the most economical solution to all problems that if there was a genuine dietary treatment option that worked for a particular disease, they would use it. Second, pharma do indeed fund academics and clinicians to undertake studies and trials, which in this day and age have to be declared in any resulting publications and presentations. Does this constitute ‘influence’? I don’t think so. Unlike in academia, there is little pressure to ‘publish or perish’ in the pharma industry. The principal pieces of data that the industry want from any funded study is whether a treatment works or not, and if it works, are there any significant side-effects. Today, if some potential drug or compound doesn’t work, or has the potential to cause more harm than good, it will be pulled faster than you can say ‘Boo’, because anything bad that happens has the potential to bring a company down.


pages: 416 words: 118,592

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, book value, BRICs, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, framing effect, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, The Myth of the Rational Market, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

Returns are probably sensitive to general market swings, to changes in interest and inflation rates, to changes in national income, and, undoubtedly, to other economic factors such as exchange rates. Moreover, there is evidence that returns are higher for stocks with lower price-book ratios and smaller size. The mystical perfect risk measure is still beyond our grasp. To the great relief of assistant professors who must publish or perish, there is still much debate within the academic community on risk measurement, and much more empirical testing needs to be done. Undoubtedly, there will yet be many improvements in the techniques of risk analysis, and the quantitative analysis of risk measurement is far from dead. My own guess is that future risk measures will be even more sophisticated—not less so.


pages: 384 words: 118,572

The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time by Maria Konnikova

Abraham Maslow, attribution theory, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bluma Zeigarnik, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, endowment effect, epigenetics, Higgs boson, higher-order functions, hindsight bias, lake wobegon effect, lateral thinking, libertarian paternalism, Milgram experiment, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, post-work, publish or perish, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, seminal paper, side project, Skype, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, the scientific method, tulip mania, Walter Mischel

You not only have to keep producing; you have to do so quickly, before everyone has forgotten about you. And you have to do it at increasingly high levels. Something that was good for your first big break won’t sustain you over the long haul. Then, you were a neophyte. Now you’re more seasoned. In academia, it certainly doesn’t help that the world is screaming “Publish or perish!” in increasingly harsh tones. Produce, produce, produce. Produce, or be eaten alive. So what do you do? It took you so long to get that first masterpiece out into the world. But now that it’s out there, you don’t have the luxury of the same amount of time for the follow-up. To most people, it means taking a deep sigh and acknowledging that the glimpse of greatness was but that.


pages: 392 words: 114,189

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime by Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden

2021 United States Capitol attack, Amazon Web Services, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, Hacker News, heat death of the universe, information security, late fees, lockdown, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Picturephone, pirate software, publish or perish, ransomware, Richard Feynman, Ross Ulbricht, seminal paper, smart meter, social distancing, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, War on Poverty, Y2K, zero day

It shot two streams of venom from its extended fangs, the left stream going off to the side and the right stream just passing my head at eye level, barely missing my right eye. * * * Although he completed his doctorate, Popp gradually lost interest in an academic career. Field research felt like drudgery. “He was not drawn to publish or perish,” said his nephew Timothy Furlan. “He was drawn to adventure.” Popp did have an interest in making more money—and making it faster—than academia customarily offered. “He probably wouldn’t have had too much trouble getting a professorship somewhere, but he didn’t feel that he would be paid enough,” said John Augustine, who, like Ron Schilb, was a college roommate and lifelong friend.


pages: 370 words: 112,809

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital map, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Grace Hopper, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, iterative process, job automation, Lao Tzu, large language model, lockdown, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, microaggression, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, occupational segregation, old-boy network, OpenAI, openstreetmap, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, randomized controlled trial, remote working, risk tolerance, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, work culture , you are the product

The few who can afford to pay someone to do many of these second-shift jobs—hire a nanny, a cleaner, a driver—rely on the cheap labor of poor women to mitigate the gendered tensions of the upper class. When I was just starting my teaching and research career on a tenure track, the pressures of “publish or perish” loomed large. We were a cohort of younger academics, fresh out of graduate programs, racing against the tenure clock to produce scholarship, become outstanding teachers, and manifest good citizenship within our universities by serving on committees, mentoring even newer researchers, participating in professional organizations, and attending the notorious, never-ending faculty meetings.


pages: 481 words: 121,669

The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can't See by Gary Price, Chris Sherman, Danny Sullivan

AltaVista, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, dark matter, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, full text search, HyperCard, hypertext link, information retrieval, Internet Archive, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, machine readable, machine translation, natural language processing, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, publish or perish, search engine result page, side project, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Ted Nelson, Vannevar Bush, web application

While there is a definite trend toward moving government information and public records online, the sheer mass of information will prohibit all of it from going online. There are also privacy concerns that may prevent certain types of public records from going digital in a form that might compromise an individual’s rights. Scholarly journals or other “expensive” information. Thanks in part to the “publish or perish” imperative at modern universities, publishers of scholarly journals or other information that’s viewed as invaluable for certain professions have succeeded in creating a virtual “lock” on the market for their information products. It’s a very profitable business for these publishers, and they wield an enormous amount of control over what information is published and how it’s distributed.


pages: 482 words: 121,672

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Eleventh Edition) by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, book value, butter production in bangladesh, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, framing effect, George Santayana, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, Teledyne, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Returns are probably sensitive to general market swings, to changes in interest and inflation rates, to changes in national income, and, undoubtedly, to other economic factors such as exchange rates. Moreover, there is evidence that returns are higher for stocks with lower price-book ratios and smaller size. The mystical perfect risk measure is still beyond our grasp. To the great relief of assistant professors who must publish or perish, there is still much debate within the academic community on risk measurement, and much more empirical testing needs to be done. Undoubtedly, there will yet be many improvements in the techniques of risk analysis, and the quantitative analysis of risk measurement is far from dead. My own guess is that future risk measures will be even more sophisticated—not less so.


pages: 611 words: 130,419

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

None of the above-listed data collections is likely to reach the desired scope in the academic research mill any time soon. The payoff to such research is far in the future, and the judgment of such resources is too hard to formalize. Academic research conducted by individuals, who are under pressure to “publish or perish,” is unlikely to start data-collection efforts that will help us understand the relatively rare, but serious, depressions and financial crises that occur from decade to decade, but perhaps no more than twice in a lifetime. Many survey organizations have been collecting some of the data outlined in the wish list above.


pages: 554 words: 149,489

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Eyjafjallajökull, fulfillment center, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, managed futures, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Minecraft, multi-sided market, Network effects, post-work, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, two-sided market, ubercab, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Information in this section draws on Bharat Anand and Peter Olson, “The Random House Response to the Kindle,” HBS No. 709-486 (Boston: Harvard Business Publishing, February 27, 2009); Peter Olson and Bharat Anand, “The Kindle: Igniting the Book Business,” Book Business 12, no. 4 (June 2009): 26–28. Disclosure: I taught a paid executive education program for senior executives at Penguin Random House in 2013 and 2015. “Reinventing the Book” Steven Levy, “Amazon: Reinventing the Book,” Newsweek , November 17, 2007. “If it’s allowed to take hold” Ken Auletta, “Publish or Perish: Can the iPad Topple the Kindle, and Save the Book Business?,” New Yorker, April 26, 2010. the top ten CEOs of the past decade “The Entrepreneurs of the Decade: 2000 to 2009,” Inc ., December 2009. is the day big problems and questions arose Luis Alfonso Dau and David T. A. Wesley, “Netflix Inc.: Streaming Away from DVDs,” Northeastern University College of Business Administration no.


Multitool Linux: Practical Uses for Open Source Software by Michael Schwarz, Jeremy Anderson, Peter Curtis

business process, Debian, defense in depth, Free Software Foundation, GnuPG, index card, indoor plumbing, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, MITM: man-in-the-middle, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, publish or perish, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, seminal paper, SETI@home, slashdot, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, two and twenty, web application

Or you go under the radar and implement your own Web server that you control, and you put all your team's stuff up there. That last solution is the topic of this chapter. My co-authors and I like to think we coined the term undernet when we did this at HealthPartners in 1996, but a quick Web search showed us that other people have done this and called their systems undernets. Publish or perish, I guess. The concept of undernets is an obvious one, and with the terms Internet, intranet, and extranet already taken, even the name is obvious. What else would you call a Web service set up by a small team for its own purposes and not linked to the rest of an organization's network strategy?


pages: 547 words: 160,071

Underground by Suelette Dreyfus

airport security, Free Software Foundation, invisible hand, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Loma Prieta earthquake, military-industrial complex, packet switching, PalmPilot, pirate software, profit motive, publish or perish, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, zero day

He spent almost 15 years of his life not only obeying the law, but enforcing it. Disrespect for the law is disturbing to him. Here comes the interesting paradox. The anarchist-inspired ethos of the early computer underground has contributed to a new creation – WikiLeaks. Yet the existence of this publisher with its single-minded intent to publish or perish may be the very thing that ultimately prevents the spread of anarchy. It may be the frontline of the push to put an end to the Secret State and its oppressive security. For just that reason, this new media creation is embraced by those who have fought on both sides of the computer underground – the orderly and the anarchists.


pages: 578 words: 168,350

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

The reward system for obtaining an academic position, for gaining promotion or tenure, for securing grants from federal agencies or private foundations, and even for being elected to a national academy, was becoming more and more tied to demonstrating that you were the expert in some tiny corner of some narrow subdiscipline. The freedom to think or speculate about some of the bigger questions and broader issues, to take a risk or be a maverick, was not a luxury many could afford. It was not just “publish or perish,” but increasingly it was also becoming “bring in the big bucks or perish.” The process of the corporatization of universities had begun. Long gone were the halcyon days of polymaths and broad thinkers like Thomas Young or D’Arcy Thompson. Indeed, there were now scant few broad intradisciplinary thinkers, let alone interdisciplinary ones, who were comfortable articulating ideas and concepts that transcended their own fields and potentially reach across to foreign territory.


pages: 506 words: 167,034

Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut by Mike Mullane

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, feminist movement, financial independence, Gene Kranz, invisible hand, Magellanic Cloud, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pepto Bismol, placebo effect, Potemkin village, publish or perish, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, space junk, space pen, Stephen Hawking, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent, your tax dollars at work

I wanted to say, “I don’t need to read anything to know the situation I’m in…It’s called deep shit,” but held my tongue. I glanced at the cover page,Leadership as Related to Astronaut Corps, by Terence F. McGuire, M.D., Consultant in Psychiatry. It was undated. My curiosity was piqued by the title. Why was McGuire writing about astronaut leadership? I could only assume it was a self-initiated private work. “Publish or perish” was the order of the day for university professors. I rolled the document into my hand, thanked McGuire for listening, and departed. I wasn’t about to be found at my desk reading anything with McGuire’s name on it, so I put the document in my briefcase and took it home. That evening I popped a beer and began reading.


pages: 505 words: 161,581

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

These internships exposed Musk to the world of technology start-ups, and he found people who, like him, labored around the clock, relished video games, and solved math puzzles for fun. As in his physics classes, to be a nerd here was a feature, not a bug. Most importantly for Musk, though, he saw how his work could marry ideas with impact. At Pinnacle, the researchers weren’t publishing-or-perishing; they were producing—crafting technologies to change cars forever. Musk’s Bay Area summer spawned blue-sky brainstorming with his brother, Kimbal—they briefly considered building a social network for medical doctors. While the idea amounted to nothing, it planted the start-up seed. And they were keenly aware of the opportunity sprouting all around them.


pages: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

They then applied the same techniques to a range of other companies and institutions outside the automobile sector: Thornton created Litton Industries, America’s first major conglomerate, and McNamara moved to the Pentagon, where he tried to win the Vietnam War by escalating kill rates, and then the World Bank.46 The two institutions that cemented the relationship between business and trained intelligence were business schools and consultancies. In 1966, the Carnegie and Ford foundations combined to publish a searing report that argued that business schools needed to justify their place in universities by producing more original research. Thereafter, the schools embraced both the publish-or-perish mentality and the intellectual star system that prevailed in the rest of academia. Business schools hatched professors who were notable not just for their knowledge of particular businesses but for their ability to produce intellectual models: strategists such as Michael Porter and finance theorists such as Michael Jensen, who tried to bring the rigour of economics to the study of business.


pages: 626 words: 181,434

I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Conway, John von Neumann, language acquisition, mandelbrot fractal, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, place-making, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, publish or perish, random walk, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, Turing machine

In part because of the success of Gödel, Escher, Bach, I have had the good fortune of being given a great deal of freedom by the two universities on whose faculties I have served — Indiana University (for roughly twenty-five years) and the University of Michigan (for four years, in the 1980’s). Their wonderful generosity has given me the luxury of being able to explore my variegated interests without being under the infamous publish-or-perish pressures, or perhaps even worse, the relentless pressures of grant-chasing. I have not followed the standard academic route, which involves publishing paper after paper in professional journals. To be sure, I have published some “real” papers, but mostly I have concentrated on expressing myself through books, and these books have always been written with an eye to maximal clarity.


pages: 612 words: 187,431

The Art of UNIX Programming by Eric S. Raymond

A Pattern Language, Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Boeing 747, Clayton Christensen, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, correlation coefficient, David Brooks, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, end-to-end encryption, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, finite state, Free Software Foundation, general-purpose programming language, George Santayana, history of Unix, Innovator's Dilemma, job automation, Ken Thompson, Larry Wall, level 1 cache, machine readable, macro virus, Multics, MVC pattern, Neal Stephenson, no silver bullet, OSI model, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, premature optimization, pre–internet, publish or perish, revision control, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Steven Levy, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, transaction costs, Turing complete, Valgrind, wage slave, web application

There was effectively no Unix-based ARPANET access until after 1980, and it was uncommon for any individual to have a foot in both camps. Collaborative development and the sharing of source code was a valued tactic for Unix programmers. To the early ARPANET hackers, on the other hand, it was more than a tactic: it was something rather closer to a shared religion, partly arising from the academic “publish or perish” imperative and (in its more extreme versions) developing into an almost Chardinist idealism about networked communities of minds. The most famous of these hackers, Richard M. Stallman, became the ascetic saint of that religion. Internet Fusion and the Free Software Movement: 1981-1991 After 1983 and the BSD port of TCP/IP, the Unix and ARPANET cultures began to fuse together.


pages: 647 words: 201,252

The Mad Man: Or, the Mysteries of Manhattan by Samuel R. Delany

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, East Village, gentrification, index card, Pepto Bismol, place-making, publish or perish, rent stabilization, sexual politics

A biography of an eccentric contemporary figure, a bit on the sensational side, like Timothy Hasler: that would have been a book, in philosophical terms, not really a book—a book proving only that you could write one, that you could give an account of ideas and events that were not really, in either case, yours. In the publish or perish atmosphere that defines the modern university, a lot of people would have considered our philosophy department a model for heaven. Basically once you were on the faculty, you weren’t expected to do anything—besides teach and work on your own little two inches of carved and polished ivory. But for a more ambitious sort, like Irving, such a department could be hell.


pages: 1,201 words: 233,519

Coders at Work by Peter Seibel

Ada Lovelace, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Conway's Game of Life, Dennis Ritchie, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, fallacies of distributed computing, fault tolerance, Fermat's Last Theorem, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Guido van Rossum, history of Unix, HyperCard, industrial research laboratory, information retrieval, Ken Thompson, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Multics, no silver bullet, Perl 6, premature optimization, publish or perish, random walk, revision control, Richard Stallman, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, side project, slashdot, speech recognition, systems thinking, the scientific method, Therac-25, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, type inference, Valgrind, web application

Maybe it'll be formalized more over time. There's definitely a good corpus of knowledge. Computer science is a science. I remember somebody on Usenet 20 years ago said, “Science lite, one-third the rigor.” There's still a lot of stuff that doesn't look like it really holds up over time—there are these publish-or-perish ten-page, ten-point-font papers that often have holes in them. The journal publications are better because you get to interact with the referee; it's not just a truth or dare. And they get reviewed more carefully. The areas of mechanized proofs, that's getting impressive. But it's still not reaching programmers.


pages: 915 words: 232,883

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

Washington Post, June 7, 2010; Michael Noer, “The Stable Boy and the iPad,” Forbes.com, Sept. 8, 2010. Advertising: Interviews with Steve Jobs, James Vincent, Lee Clow. Apps: Interviews with Art Levinson, Phil Schiller, Steve Jobs, John Doerr. Publishing and Journalism: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Jeff Bewkes, Rick Stengel, Andy Serwer, Josh Quittner, Rupert Murdoch. Ken Auletta, “Publish or Perish,” New Yorker, Apr. 26, 2010; Ryan Tate, “The Price of Crossing Steve Jobs,” Gawker, Sept. 30, 2010. CHAPTER 39: NEW BATTLES Google: Open versus Closed: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Bill Campbell, Eric Schmidt, John Doerr, Tim Cook, Bill Gates. John Abell, “Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Mantra Is ‘Bullshit,’” Wired, Jan. 30, 2010; Brad Stone and Miguel Helft, “A Battle for the Future Is Getting Personal,” New York Times, March 14, 2010.


pages: 1,437 words: 384,709

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, Donner party, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, fixed income, full employment, God and Mammon, Isaac Newton, jitney, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, nuclear winter, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, the scientific method, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Works Progress Administration

Number two on Conant’s youthful list, the presidency of his alma mater, he won in 1933. He told the members of the Harvard Corporation who approached him that he didn’t want the job, which was apparently a prerequisite, but would serve if elected. He was forty at the time of his election. He created the modern Harvard of eminent scholarship and publish-or-perish, up-or-out. Conant’s third ambition achieved approximate fulfillment after the war in high, though less than cabinet-rank, appointment; his long span of voluntary government service began with the NDRC. In England in the late winter of 1941 he met with the leaders of the British government, had an audience with the King, picked up an honorary degree at Cambridge and walked the Backs afterward to see the crocuses in bloom, made room for the NDRC mission among hostile U.S. military and naval attaches, lunched with Churchill again.