From the Vanguard

Author(s):  
Richard Susskind ◽  
Daniel Susskind

In this chapter we change pace. We run through a group of different professions and offer a glimpse of the many ways in which they are changing, largely because of technology. The picture we present, although wide-ranging and varied, is not held out as comprehensive. It reflects activity only in particular parts of the world, predominantly the Anglo-American region, and at just one point in time—the middle of the second decade of the twenty- first century. In years to come, when we look back on the pages that follow, we will no doubt see, with the acuity of hindsight, that we missed some great case studies, that we included some which might better have been omitted, and that some of our exemplars no longer exist. This is to be expected. It would require many more volumes to carry out an exhaustive survey of technological change across the professions, and it would demand supernatural prescience to isolate the eventual winners. But to dwell on any particular case—success, failure, or omission—would be to misunderstand what we are trying to achieve in this chapter and through much of the book. To paraphrase the literary critic Harold Bloom, we are seeking to look beyond any particular ripple on the surface and, with a broad sweep through our chosen professions, to capture the deeper current of change that we sense is flowing below. In The Patient Will See You Now, Eric Topol, cardiologist and professor of genomics, anticipates that ‘[w]e are embarking on a time when each individual will have all their own medical data and the computing power to process it . . . from womb to tomb . . . even to prevent an illness before it happens’. There are many other commentators who are making predictions in this spirit. And the contrast with the current and long-established practice of medicine by doctors could not be starker. Traditionally, when people suspect something might be amiss with their health they book an appointment, they show up in person, they sit in one or more face-to-face interactions with individual experts, who in turn prescribe courses of action, often to be implemented by the patients once they leave.

Author(s):  
Josh Kun

Ever since the 1968 student movements and the events surrounding the Tlatelolco massacre, Mexico City rock bands have openly engaged with the intersection of music and memory. Their songs offer audiences a medium through which to come to terms with the events of the past as a means of praising a broken world, to borrow the poet Adam Zagajewski’s phrase. Contemporary songs such as Saúl Hernández’s “Fuerte” are a twenty-first-century voicing of the ceaseless revolutionary spirit that John Gibler has called “Mexico unconquered,” a current of rebellion and social hunger for justice that runs in the veins of Mexican history. They are the latest additions to what we might think about as “the Mexico unconquered songbook”: musical critiques of impunity and state violence that are rooted in the weaponry of memory, refusing to focus solely on the present and instead making connections with the political past. What Octavio Paz described as a “swash of blood” that swept across “the international subculture of the young” during the events in Tlatelolco Plaza on October 2, 1968, now becomes a refrain of musical memory and political consciousness that extends across eras and generations. That famous phrase of Paz’s is a reminder that these most recent Mexican musical interventions, these most recent formations of a Mexican subculture of the young, maintain a historically tested relationship to blood, death, loss, and violence.


Author(s):  
Barbara Kellerman

The chapter focuses on how leadership was taught in the distant and recent past. The first section is on five of the greatest leadership teachers ever—Lao-tzu, Confucius, Plato, Plutarch, and Machiavelli—who shared a deep belief in the idea that leadership could be taught and left legacies that included timeless and transcendent literary masterworks. The second section explores how leadership went from being conceived of as a practice reserved only for a select few to one that could be exercised by the many. The ideas of the Enlightenment changed our conception of leadership. Since then, the leadership literature has urged people without power and authority, that is, followers, to understand that they too could be agents of change. The third section turns to leadership and management in business. It was precisely the twentieth-century failure of business schools to make management a profession that gave rise to the twenty-first-century leadership industry.


Author(s):  
John Toye

This book provides a survey of different ways in which economic sociocultural and political aspects of human progress have been studied since the time of Adam Smith. Inevitably, over such a long time span, it has been necessary to concentrate on highlighting the most significant contributions, rather than attempting an exhaustive treatment. The aim has been to bring into focus an outline of the main long-term changes in the way that socioeconomic development has been envisaged. The argument presented is that the idea of socioeconomic development emerged with the creation of grand evolutionary sequences of social progress that were the products of Enlightenment and mid-Victorian thinkers. By the middle of the twentieth century, when interest in the accelerating development gave the topic a new impetus, its scope narrowed to a set of economically based strategies. After 1960, however, faith in such strategies began to wane, in the face of indifferent results and general faltering of confidence in economists’ boasts of scientific expertise. In the twenty-first century, development research is being pursued using a research method that generates disconnected results. As a result, it seems unlikely that any grand narrative will be created in the future and that neo-liberalism will be the last of this particular kind of socioeconomic theory.


Author(s):  
Laura Salah Nasrallah

Through case studies of archaeological materials from local contexts, Archaeology and the Letters of Paul illuminates the social, political, economic, and religious lives of those whom the apostle Paul addressed. Roman Ephesos, a likely setting for the household of Philemon, provides evidence of the slave trade. An inscription from Galatia seeks to restrain traveling Roman officials, illuminating how the travels of Paul, Cephas, and others may have disrupted communities. At Philippi, a donation list from a Silvanus cult provides evidence of abundant giving amid economic limitations, paralleling practices of local Christ followers. In Corinth, a landscape of grief includes monuments and bones, a context that illumines Corinthian practices of baptism on behalf of the dead and the provocative idea that one could live “as if not” mourning. Rome and the Letter to the Romans are the grounds to investigate ideas of time and race not only in the first century, when we find an Egyptian obelisk inserted as a timepiece into Augustus’s mausoleum complex, but also of Mussolini’s new Rome. Thessalonikē demonstrates how letters, legend, and cult are invented out of a love for Paul, after his death. The book articulates a method for bringing together biblical texts with archaeological remains in order to reconstruct the lives of the many adelphoi—brothers and sisters—whom Paul and his co-writers address. It is informed by feminist historiography and gains inspiration from thinkers like Claudia Rankine, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Wendy Brown, and Katie Lofton.


2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-85
Author(s):  
Robert P. Sellers

The meaning of the death of Jesus on the cross has been interpreted differently from the first century until today. Of the many theories proposed throughout Christian history, the dominant understanding, especially among evangelical Protestants since the Reformation and perhaps dating from Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century, has been the penal-substitutionary view of atonement. Christ died to pay the penalty for human sin, so humanity can receive forgiveness by trusting in the efficacy of Jesus’s death on its behalf. This explanation is an objective theory that is “Godward focused,” understanding the work of Christ as a divine plan to satisfy what God requires: expiation for human sin. Other competing theories, however, reject this idea and propose more subjective views that are “humanward focused.” This article considers the reality of different, imperfect perspectives about matters as complex as the interpretation of God. It connects the writer’s affirmation of the plurality of religious experience with his having lived a quarter century in the multifaith milieu of Java. It touches on specific opposing theories of atonement, endorsing as more useful in our interreligious world the subjective approaches to understanding the cross. It advocates an intriguing argument for the plurality of end goals, or “salvations,” among the world’s religions. Finally, it uses the less dominant models of martyr motif and the moral example theory to investigate how the concept of atonement might be understood in the context of four major world religions other than Christianity, suggesting that acknowledgment of the legitimacy of different approaches to the Divine is a distinctly “Christian” way to live in a diverse world.


Ramus ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Gagarin

A growing area of contemporary legal scholarship is the field loosely described by the expression ‘law and literature’. One of the many points of intersection between law and literature is the study of legal writing, including the opinions of judges and jurists, as a form of literature. Scholars began to study the works of the Attic orators as literature as early as the first century BC, but their specific concern was with these texts as examples of Attic prose and their literary interest primarily concerned matters of rhetoric and prose style. Similarly, modern scholars who have continued this study of the orators have generally examined legal orations not as a separate genre but as another example of prose literature in the same category with history or epideictic oratory. But forensic oratory can also be studied as a form of literature sui generis, whose worth is determined by the special requirements of this genre. As background for such a study I propose to examine the earliest examples of legal oratory, as seen in the works of Homer and Hesiod.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1963 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 737-741
Author(s):  
D. B. Dill

THE STUDY of work performance as related to age began in this country when Sid Robinson joined the group at the Fatigue Laboratory of the Harvard School of Business Administration. In the winter of 1936-7, he persuaded five champion milers who were in Boston for indoor meets to run on the Laboratory's treadmill on week-ends. Simultaneously, he was chiefly engaged in studying treadmill performance as related to age. This was the subject of his doctorate thesis published later under the title: "Experimental Studies of Physical Fitness as Related to Age". The 91 subjects ranged in age from boys 6 years of age to one man of 91. There were eight 6-year-olds, 10 between 8 and 13 and 20 between 48 and 76. Robinson's background as an Olympic middle-distance runner and as an assistant track coach at Indiana University gave him skill in dealing with the many diverse problems that confronted him. Often he was faced with sociological-psychological problems more difficult to solve than the physiological problems. Indicative of his success is the fact that the subjects were volunteers—no money was offered as an inducement to come to the laboratory. Also worthy of note is that there was no untoward incident throughout the study. Robinson's plan included respiratory, circulatory and metabolic observations in the basal state and in two grades of exercise. He describes the work experiments as follows: (pp. 251-3, reference 2) "After the above observations were completed, the subject performed two grades of work on a motor-driven treadmill, set at an angle of 8.6% in all experiments. Each subject below 73 years of age first walked at 5.6 km per hour for 15 minutes; this raises the oxygen consumption 7 or 8 times the basal level. After resting 10 minutes, he ran or in some cases, walked, at a rate which exhausted him in 2 to 5 minutes.


2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 67-78
Author(s):  
Ileana Dumitru

To calculate the potential impact of grid on the enterprise, one just needs to look back a decade or so ago. Those who remember how LANs developed in company years before the Web was born can easily get a picture of how Grid Computing in corporations may change in the years to come. In the early days of the Internet, there was a strong opposition to linking computers together in a network. Ultimately, however, the Internet has become a ubiquitous tool, and many experts predict the same outcome for Grid Computing on the enterprise. There are still concerns to consider and obstacles to be overcome, but the momentum behind corporate Grid Computing is quickly gathering pace. The integration of Grid Computing technologies into enterprise computing systems can provide a much richer range of possibilities. This integration should provide enhanced capabilities and interoperability to meet current virtual organization demands.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Partington

AbstractThis article contributes to debates about how to respond to the changing profile of Higher Education (HE) students, and the marketisation of HE, by challenging prevailing views about student engagement, in order to develop learner-centric and inclusive pedagogies which are relevant to the twenty-first century. The concepts of ‘participatory culture’ and ‘co-creativity’ are often associated with the digital world in which the current generation of students have grown up. But it is a mistake to assume that some learning styles are inherently more participatory than others: participation is not an effect of the medium or form, (analog vs digital), or the space (actual vs virtual), or the mode of interaction a (face-to-face vs networked) through which the learner participates – it is an effect of the practices involved. Students engage with a complex network of both digital and analog texts and spaces, and it is this postdigital hybrid setting within which student engagement takes place. Marketisation provides an opportunity to actively demonstrate our commitments to student-centredness and inclusive practice, by transcending the binary opposition between ‘Student as Partner’ and ‘Student as Consumer’ and recognizing that students are learner-consumers, and allowing students’ diversity to drive innovation, rather than continuing to disempower students by bolstering practices which privilege some learning styles above others, informed by the assumption that innovation is technology-led.


2008 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Henze

AbstractThe roots of early Jewish apocalypticism are diverse. Within the realm of ancient Israel, one of the main contributory streams is the wisdom tradition. The present essay examines the impact of Israel's sapiential tradition, and specifically of that of the book of Qoheleth, on the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch, a Jewish apocalypse of the late first century C.E. My thesis is that, while both authors agree in their assessment of the present human condition, they draw dramatically different conclusions. Qoheleth persistently points to the limits and fallibility of this world and advises his readers to enjoy life before they die, whereas the author of 2 Baruch looks to the world to come and, in the meantime, calls on his readers to live their lives in compliance with the Mosaic Torah.


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