publish or perish

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description: phrase coined to describe the pressure in academia to rapidly and continually publish academic work to sustain or further one's career

51 results

Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth
by Stuart Ritchie
Published 20 Jul 2020

  ‘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
Published 25 Oct 2011

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: 172 words: 51,837

How to Read Numbers: A Guide to Statistics in the News (And Knowing When to Trust Them)
by Tom Chivers and David Chivers
Published 18 Mar 2021

It’s worse than that, because scientists know that journals often won’t publish negative results. So they won’t even send them in. Or they will make little tweaks – perhaps reanalyse the data in a new way or remove some outliers – so that their results look positive. Scientific careers are ‘publish or perish’: if you’re not getting papers published in scientific journals, then you won’t progress, you won’t get tenure. So scientists are hugely incentivised to get their papers published – in essence, they are incentivised to p-hack. And it’s worse than that if you’re a reader of the popular press.

But doctors complained in 2017 that hospital administrators were refusing admission to some very sick patients on the basis that they were likely to die and would therefore bring the in-hospital mortality stats up.10 In 2006 the US Medicare programme began the ‘Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program’ (HRRP), which measured how many heart-failure patients were readmitted to hospital within thirty days of being discharged. A 2018 study found that this actually increased mortality, apparently because hospitals delayed readmission to day thirty-one to avoid the patients appearing in their statistics.11 We’ve already discussed another example – the ‘publish or perish’ model in academia, where the worth of a scientist is measured by how many scientific papers they publish; and, relatedly, the convention which says that papers are a lot less likely to be published if they don’t reach statistical significance (and find a positive result). It leads to scientists desperately trying to get papers published, even if they are worthless junk, and fiddling the statistics to get them to p<0.05, or simply filing them away if they find a null result.

pages: 289 words: 22,394

Virus of the Mind
by Richard Brodie
Published 4 Jun 2009

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
Published 14 Jun 2017

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
Published 13 Aug 2012

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: 361 words: 100,834

Mapmatics: How We Navigate the World Through Numbers
by Paulina Rowinska
Published 5 Jun 2024

He refused to blame it on ‘the fact that no one reads Polish scientific journals – even those written in an international language’ (a conclusion which would leave me personally offended). In Mandelbrot’s opinion, Steinhaus himself hadn’t considered his insights worthy of publication; they had found their way onto the printing press only because of the pressure on scientists to publish – and publish a lot. This might be the only case where the problematic ‘publish or perish’ approach, so common in academia, has resulted in something positive. Maybe Mandelbrot wasn’t the first to notice the need for fractal dimensions, but he was the first to understand its importance. Being an excellent science communicator, he managed not only to popularize fractals among fellow mathematicians but also to bring them to the wider world.

Gauss and Spherical Geometry Bühler, Walter K. Gauss: A Biographical Study. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1981. Dunnington, G. Waldo, and Jeremy Gray. Gauss: Titan of Science. Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of America, 2004. Spivak, Michael. A Comprehensive Introduction to Differential Geometry, vol. 2, 3rd ed. Houston: Publish or Perish, 1999. 2. Flat Map Projections Klinghoffer, Arthur Jay. The Power of Projections: How Maps Reflect Global Politics and History. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006. Snyder, John P. Map Projections: A Working Manual. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1395. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1987, https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1395/report.pdf.

pages: 428 words: 103,544

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics
by Tim Harford
Published 2 Feb 2021

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
Published 2 Nov 2021

, The Conversation, accessed 29 October 2019, available at https://theconversation.com/human-intelligence-have-we-reached-the-limit-of-knowledge-124819 Braben, Donald W. (2020), Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization, San Francisco: Stripe Press Brennan, Reilly (2019), ‘The State of Autonomous Transportation’, Exponential View, accessed 11 January 2021, available at https://www.exponentialview.co/p/the-state-of-autonomous-transportation Brockliss, Laurence (2019), The University of Oxford: A Brief History, Oxford: Bodleian Library Brockman, John (ed.) (2020), Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking At AI, New York: Penguin Bromham, Lindell, Dinnage, Russell, and Hua, Xia (2016), ‘Interdisciplinary research has consistently lower funding success’, Nature 534, pp. 684–7 Buck, Stuart, ‘Escaping Science's Paradox’, Works in Progress, accessed 7 April 2021, available at https://worksinprogress.co/issue/escaping-sciences-paradox/ Burke, Peter (2020), The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press Bush, Vannevar (1945), Science: The Endless Frontier, Washington DC: United States Government Printing Office Callard, Agnes (2020), ‘Publish and Perish’, The Point, accessed 6 October 2020, available at https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/publish-and-perish-agnes-callard/ Callaway, Ewen (2020), ‘“It will change everything”: DeepMind's AI makes gigantic leap in solving protein structures’, Nature, accessed 23 December 2020, available at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4 Campbell, Chris, and Mathurin, Patrick (2020), ‘Hollywood “sequelitis”’, Financial Times, accessed 9 March 2020, available at https://www.ft.com/content/6d5871d8-3ea7-11ea-b232-000f4477fbca Cancer Research UK (2019), ‘Worldwide cancer statistics’, accessed 20 April 2019, available at https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/worldwide-cancer#heading-Zero Caplan, Bryan (2018), The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Princeton: Princeton University Press Carey, Nessa (2019), Hacking the Code of Life: How Gene Editing Will Rewrite Our Futures, London: Icon Books Carey, Ryan (2020), ‘Interpreting AI compute trends’, AI Impacts, accessed 11 January 2020, available at https://aiimpacts.org/interpreting-ai-compute-trends/ Chai, Sen (2017), ‘Near Misses in the Breakthrough Discovery Process’, Organization Science, Vol. 28 No. 3, pp. 411–28 Chai, Sen, and Menon, Anoop (2018), ‘Breakthrough recognition: Bias against novelty and competition for attention’, Research Policy, Vol. 48 No. 3, pp. 733–47 Chawla, Dalmeet Singh (2019), ‘Hyperauthorship: global projects spark surge in thousand-author papers’, Nature, accessed 29 March 2021, available at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03862-0 Christensen, Clayton M. (2013), The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms To Fail (reprint edition), Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press Clancy, Matt (2020a), ‘How bad is publish-or-perish for the quality of science?’, New Things Under The Sun, accessed 12 January 2021, available at https://mattsclancy.substack.com/p/how-bad-is-publish-or-perish-for Clancy, Matt (2020b), ‘What ails the social sciences’, Works in Progress, accessed 12 January 2021, available at https:// worksinprogress.co/issue/what-ails-the-social-sciences/ Clancy, Matt (2021a), ‘More Science Leads to More Innovation’, New Things Under The Sun, accessed 12 April 2021, available at https://mattsclancy.substack.com/p/more-science-leads-to-more-innovation Clancy, Matt (2021b), ‘Ripples in the River of Knowledge’, New Things Under The Sun, accessed 12 April, available at https://mattsclancy.substack.com/p/ripples-in-the-river-of-knowledge Clearfield, Chris, and Tilcsik, András (2018), Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It, London: Atlantic Books Clery, Daniel (2013), A Piece of the Sun: The Quest for Fusion Energy, London: Duckworth Overlook Coggan, Philip (2020), More: The 10,000 Year Rise of the World Economy, London: Economist Books Collier, Paul (2018), The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties, London: Allen Lane Collison, Patrick, and Nielsen, Michael (2018), ‘Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck’, The Atlantic, accessed 7 December 2018, available at https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminishing-returns-science/575665/ Colvile, Robert (2017), The Great Acceleration: How the World Is Getting Faster, Faster, London: Bloomsbury Conde, Jorge, Pande, Vijay, and Yoo, Julie (2019), ‘Biology is Eating the World: A Manifesto’, a16z, accessed 15 January 2020, available at https://a16z.com/2019/10/28/biology-eating-world-a16z-manifesto/ Conference of the Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise Systems, pp.

pages: 505 words: 142,118

A Man for All Markets
by Edward O. Thorp
Published 15 Nov 2016

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
Published 24 Apr 2015

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 and Ben Collins-Sussman
Published 6 Jul 2012

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 and Jinho Kim
Published 10 Jun 2013

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
Published 10 Mar 2020

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
Published 1 Dec 2010

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: 200 words: 67,943

Working Identity, Updated Edition, With a New Preface: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career
by Herminia Ibarra
Published 17 Oct 2023

How do we decide which to pursue further and which to drop? All experiments, even the most preliminary, come at a cost. Ben, the professor turned nonprofit director, was aware from the start that his side projects would not provide the kind of résumé that would be rewarded by promotion at a “publish or perish” business school. Carol, who founded a health food products company, had to sacrifice her full-time consulting job in order to fully research her three options. For Leif, the banker who went into the travel business, going to an executive program heightened his growing intolerance of his old job.

pages: 193 words: 19,478

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext
by Belinda Barnet
Published 14 Jul 2013

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: 272 words: 78,876

Heart: A History
by Sandeep Jauhar
Published 17 Sep 2018

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: 259 words: 76,915

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
by Peter Godfrey-Smith
Published 6 Dec 2016

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.

Longshot
by David Heath
Published 18 Jan 2022

She devoted her career to trying to understand RNA, an infatuation that ironically made her a highly underrated scientist. If a professor teaches history or English, universities pay them a decent salary. But if the professor is a scientist, they are expected to bring in money themselves through grants. The old saying “publish or perish” applies especially to scientists working at research universities. The top-tier scientists publish in the most elite medical journals and get six-to-seven-figure grants. That can be difficult if the researcher pursues a topic in which the rest of the scientific community has lost interest. For many, RNA was seen as a lost cause.

pages: 271 words: 83,944

The Sellout: A Novel
by Paul Beatty
Published 2 Mar 2016

“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 and Yuri van Geest
Published 17 Oct 2014

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
Published 6 Mar 2018

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
Published 29 Dec 2015

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 and Dan Heath
Published 10 Feb 2010

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
Published 16 Dec 2013

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
Published 31 Dec 2012

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: 400 words: 94,847

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science
by Michael Nielsen
Published 2 Oct 2011

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: 313 words: 101,403

My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance
by Emanuel Derman
Published 1 Jan 2004

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: 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
Published 18 Sep 2006

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
Published 3 Jun 2019

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
Published 10 Jan 2011

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
Published 28 Jan 2016

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 and Daniel Golden
Published 24 Oct 2022

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
Published 17 Oct 2022

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 and Danny Sullivan
Published 2 Jan 2003

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
Published 5 Jan 2015

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
Published 14 Oct 2019

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.

Multitool Linux: Practical Uses for Open Source Software
by Michael Schwarz , Jeremy Anderson and Peter Curtis
Published 7 May 2002

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
Published 1 Jan 2011

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: 554 words: 149,489

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change
by Bharat Anand
Published 17 Oct 2016

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.

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
Published 15 May 2017

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
Published 24 Jan 2006

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: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021

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: 505 words: 161,581

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
by Jimmy Soni
Published 22 Feb 2022

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: 626 words: 181,434

I Am a Strange Loop
by Douglas R. Hofstadter
Published 21 Feb 2011

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
Published 22 Sep 2003

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
Published 1 Jun 2015

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
Published 22 Jun 2009

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
Published 23 Oct 2011

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
Published 17 Sep 2012

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.