Great Innovators Research Articles

Abdominal Wall Hernias

Books dedicated to abdominal wall hernias are vanishingly few and of great interest to general surgeon. “He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the great innovator” – Sir Francis Bacon 1625. The ‘new remedies’ in hernia amount to a paradigm shift from the old regime and this book by a renowned herniologist like Bendavid epitomizes this sea change in the management of hernia in the new millennium. Illustrated by 738 figures including 48 in colour it is a visual treat. As many as 10 chapters discuss the pathology of hernia including a brilliant exposition on the metabolic aspects of hernia which is a pioneering concept. Almost universal use of synthetic mesh in hernia surgery has necessitated inclusion of 17 chapters on biomaterials. Other interesting and useful bits of information are to be found in the chapters on paediatric and geriatric hernia, emergencies, female hernia and medico-legal aspects. The technical aspects of all common procedures including laparoscopic surgery are of course extensively covered. Authors from both sides of the Atlantic have been given an even role in the elucidation of the hernia diathesis. All in all, it is a wonderfully fresh product that will serve as a point of reference for years to come.

Bacon on Business: Advice From an Elizabethan Sage to 21st Century Medical Leaders

Bacon on Business: Advice From an Elizabethan Sage to 21st Century Medical Leaders

C. C. Little, cancer and inbred mice.

IN January 1929 the Regents of the University of Michigan accepted the resignation of C. C. Little as President. He had become increasingly controversial during his tenure and was often at odds with the Regents. He was a great innovator and always wanted more than they were able to deliver. Often he

Gregor Mendel: the genius of genetics

'The Genius of Genetics', an exhibition celebrating the work of Gregor Mendel through science and art, opened in Brno on 21 May 2002 at the Abbey of St Thomas, where Mendel lived from 1843, becoming its Abbot in 1867. The exhibition is intended to be the first step in a larger programme to reestablish the abbey as a centre for life sciences, and its opening was accompanied by a major international conference on 'Genetics after the Genome'. This essay traces Mendel's intellectual development through his education in Vienna, his meteorological and astronomical studies, and his seminal experiments in plant breeding which at the time went unnoticed but fifty years later formed the foundations of classical genetics. The question is asked how it was that Mendel, an Augustinian friar in an out of the way abbey in Moravia, was able to make his momentous discovery. It is suggested that his was the most singular career of any of the great scientific innovators, and that his genius derived from his commitment to natural philosophy in the old sense, from his application of experimental techniques from the mathematical sciences to subject matter situated firmly in the natural sciences.

The persistence of innovative activities: A cross-countries and cross-sectors comparative analysis

This paper examines the persistence of innovative activities at the firm level in a comparative perspective. A new data set is used composed of six panel data, one for each of the following countries: France, Germany, Italy, UK, Japan and the USA. For each country, we use data on patent applications to the European Patent Office in the period 1978–1993 by 1200–1400 manufacturing firms. Using a transition probability matrix (TPM) approach, we find evidence for the existence of persistence in innovative activities, although, it is not very high in the aggregate and it declines as time goes by. However, both great innovators and non-innovators have a high probability to remain in their state and persistent innovators originate a disproportionate share of innovative activities. In this sense, persistence in innovative activities is quite strong. These tendencies apply to all countries considered here, although, clear country-specific properties are observed. Moreover, there is heterogeneity also across industrial and size classification. Intersectoral differences are invariant across countries, suggesting that persistence is (at least partly) a technology-specific variable. Persistence tends to increase with firm size, but the relationship between firms’ size and persistence is strongly-country-specific and it is not a simple one.

The Classical Silva and the Generic Development of Scientific Writing in Seventeenth-Century England

In this paper I propose to explore some aspects of the development of scientific and technical writing in seventeenth- and eighteenth century England, in particular its relation to preexisting literary genres. These generic affiliations comprise numerous strands, including the aphorism, the essay, the georgic, the letter, and the silva.1 The latter form, largely unknown and unpracticed today, will be the primary focus in the discussion that follows. The silva is a genre, a miscellaneous poetic form of classical origin which enjoyed a great vogue in the Renaissance and early eighteenth century. The best-known practitioner of the form in ancient times was the Roman poet Statius, who produced a collection of thirty-two occasional poems en tided Silvae. The Latin word silva literally means wood or forest, but its use as a literary term plays on several metaphorical meanings the word acquired over time, especially pieces of raw and material for construc tion. The sanction the silva provides for literary forms of mixed character and content was to prove of the greatest importance to those who composed scientific treatises or edited and contributed to early scientific journals. One might well ask at the outset why a critical investigation of emergent scientific writing and its genres should focus on a minor classical form practised by a lesser-known poet of Rome's silver age. The simplest answer is that some great innovators in the history of science consciously invoked the silva as a model for their texts and referred to it in their critical reflections on the nature of scientific writing.2 A prominent instance of this is Francis Bacon, whose Sylva Sylvarum: or a Natural History (1627) parades its literary pedigree on its title page. Equally noteworthy is John Evelyn, a founding member of the Royal Society, who published Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest Trees in 1664. As late as 1765, the poet and gentleman agriculturist Walter Harte recom mended the title Sylvae to the youthful Arthur Young for a collection of miscellaneous essays on agriculture he had previously published in the periodical Museum Rusticum. At the same time, the silva enjoyed a revival

Alain Fournier, 1943-2000

Alain Fournier, 1943-2000 An Appreciation There are thinkers of great repute and intellect who would suggest that any objective measure of humankind is in fact a mismeasure. While I am not of a moo...

Thinking Outside The Box

It is rare and special honor for Chemical & Engineering News to pay tribute in our cover story to Arnold Beckman, great innovator, chemist, businessman, and philanthropist. This week's C&EN is dated April 10, the 100th birthday of this remarkable scientist. The event is being celebrated by symposium at California Institute of Technology, the publication of biography from the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF), and gala dinner in his honor at Caltech, where he spent many years as professor and where he invented the device that revolutionized scientific instrumentation—the pH meter. C&EN Associate Editor Elizabeth Wilson portrays man who is truly beloved by all who have crossed his path. CHF President Arnold Thackray calls him a prince of man—an opinion widely shared by friends and colleagues. There are so many things to find appealing in this man, who was born in tiny town in Illinois and went ...

Built to last: why BAAN continues to be successful

A company that is built to last is no flash in the pan, but one that will continue to grow and have a long-term influence on its environment. Vision and dynamism are determinative in order to achieve this. The combination of innovation and conservatism is striking. The core values and the core objective form the immutable, guiding values, principles, and preconditions. This paper describes the Baan Company as a visionary company, and discusses in particular the timeless aspects. Baan's immutable values, principles, and preconditions relate to the work ethic, stewardship, pioneering, the industrial approach, entering into strategic cooperative relationships, client-orientation, an open, informal organisation and serving leadership. Stability in this area has allowed Baan to be a great innovator in other areas.

On the eve of the 21st century: statistical science at a crossroads

Modern statistical science is one of the major scienti c achievements of the 20th century. While many of the concepts had been laid down earlier, it was not until the 20th century that a true science of statistics had come into being. It has been my privilege over the course of my professional life to have known many of the seminal gures in the history of modern 20th century statistics. Regrettably, I did not have a chance to know Karl Pearson and R.A. Fisher, but I did know many of this century’s greatest contributors to statistical theory such as Egon Pearson, Jerzy Neyman, David Blackwell, C.R. Rao, Harold Hotelling, R.C. Bose, Wassily Hoe ding, Gertrude Cox, Jimmie Savage, and Harald Cramer to name a few. Of course, many great contributors are still active today. I often contemplate what these earlier innovators of the 20th century might think about the state of statistical science as we approach the 21st century. The computing revolution we have seen in the last 20 years has thrust upon us great changes in the way we collect data and our general attitude towards both data and methodology. In a real sense, statistical science is at a crossroads. Statistics as a discipline, it seems to me, is all too often de ned by the set of techniques, tools and methodology rather than by the goal of data analysis and inference. De ning the science by its techniques, tools and methods is a prescription for insularity while de ning by its goals is a prescription for openness and expansion. I rather think the great innovators of statistical methodology mentioned above would opt for a rather more goal oriented worldview of statistical science than seems to prevail today in general.

Die Ironie des Sokrates, insbesondere im Blick auf Prozeß und Tod

Abstract Socrates was one of the great innovators of Greek philosophy inasmuch as he discovered the principal role of the general notion as such in finding truth. Without a doubt, his criterion in doing so was, besides an absolute confidence in reason, something like a response to an instance he believed to be somehow divine. This included a certain distance, rational and existential, from all the principles and values of the community in which he lived. A deeper analysis of Socrates' essential intentions reveals a special view of existential honor which made it impossible for Socrates to escape what he considered his destiny. This existential attitude took the form of irony, as his fellow-citizens were quite incapable of understanding what he meant.

From Drawing to Narrative: Contiguous Clarity in Hergé's The Calculus Affair

From Drawing to Narrative:Contiguous Clarity in Hergé's The Calculus Affair Jean-Louis Tilleuil (bio) Translated by William Moebius and Anne Cirella-Urrutia 1. Introduction As my title shows, I want to study a comic strip that was created by the Belgian Hergé (1907-1983). More precisely, it is the eighteenth of the twenty-three Tintin comics published when Hergé was alive, The Calculus Affair (1956). More precisely yet, most of my semiotico-narrative analysis focuses on the first page of this comic and on the twelve frames that form it. But before beginning my discussion of this inaugural page and drawing my conclusions, I want to give some context about my subject, to take a moment for the author and his work. 2. Hergé: An exceptional creator of comic strips, a great innovator of contemporary imagery International and multimedia recognition Hergé created many characters: Quick et Flupke; Jo, Zette et Jocko. But the famous reporter Tintin is his best loved creation.1 In their Mondial Dictionary of the Comic Strip, Patrick Gaumer and Claude Moliterni consider Tintin "one of the most important series in the international history of the comic strip" (625). Speaking in quantitative terms, in 1993, 172 million Tintin comic books had been sold worldwide, translated into forty-five languages. Speaking in financial terms, this comic series provided the Belgian publisher Casterman with more than half of his revenue. But Tintin also owes much of his international recognition to the film adaptation of his adventures made by Ellipse (in Paris) and Nelvana (in Toronto), which was distributed in more than fifty countries.2 Tintin the character: forty-seven years in the service of adventure and disorientation Tintin, emulator of Albert Londres, began his reporting career on 10 January 1929 in Le Petit Vingtième, the weekly supplement for children of the Belgian daily newspaper Le XXe siècle. The title of his first "tintinesque" adventure was Tintin in the Soviet Country. Twenty-two other adventures were to be published after this one, up to the last complete story, Tintin and the Picaros, which dates from 1976.3 On this occasion, Tintin goes back to San Theodoros, an imaginary country in South America, a setting that Hergé had used in 1933 for L'oreille cassée (literally The broken ear).4 Between the first and the twenty-third comic books, the Hergean heroes visited, among other places, the United States in Tintin in America.5 But for The Calculus Affair, Tintin found himself once again in the militarily aggressive Bordurie, which Hergé locates—as was obligatory during the Cold War—in eastern Europe.6 Tintin the magazine: a visual support for the second "Golden Age" of the Francophone comic strip Tintin is not only a character. The name is also the title of a comic magazine for young people that contributed to the popularity of Hergé's character. The Tintin magazine was founded in 1946 by the publisher Raymond Leblanc, who asked Hergé to take complete responsibility for the magazine's content. Besides the young reporter's adventures, which were later serialized in the magazine, the reader of those days could read tales by such writers as Jacques Martin, Edgar P. Jacobs, and Paul Cuvelier, many of them writers who led the "Brussels School." For about thirty years, from 1946 to 1975, the Belgian magazine Tintin (distributed in France since 1948), built an essential part of the history of the French language comic strip, together with another Belgian magazine and rival to Tintin, Spirou.7 Tintin the style: Hergé's contribution to contemporary imagery In 1993, with the publication of the Frederic Tuten novel Tintin in the New World: A Romance, "tintinesque" imagery passed beyond the boundary of comic strip fiction to become literary fiction, even American fiction! But well before the nineties, Hergé's work gave birth to a particular aesthetic in the world of the comic strip with the invention of "clear line." Clear line is defined by Thierry Groensteen as an "ideal of legibility and transparency, which can be translated into refusal of shadow, linearization of the drawing and schematic realism of tine scenery" (100). As we can see from looking at the opening...

The Celine Effect: A 1992 Survey of Contemporary American Writers

The Céline Effect: A 1992 Survey of Contemporary American Writers Alice Kaplan (bio) Louis-Ferdinand Céline confounds the paradigm for fascist writers. A doctor for the poor with clear populist tendencies who emerged on the literary scene from out of nowhere, he produced a runaway best-seller, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night) (1932), then a misunderstood bildungsroman, Mort à crédit (Death on the Installment Plan) (1936), that revolutionized the look of written French and exploded narrative convention. In the late 1930s he published two anti-Semitic pamphlets ( Bagatelles pour un massacre [Trifles for a massacre] and L’École des cadavres [School for corpses]), both wildly successful, that pushed back the envelope of acceptable hate speech. In occupied France, he wrote letters to the editors of collaborationist newspapers and was identified with the racial policies of Vichy, but he was inconsistent and fairly useless as a polemicist for the “new order,” since his spleen turned against Vichy as well its enemies. Nonetheless his camp was chosen: he was the writer who had passionately demanded the extermination of the Jews. At the end of the war he fled, following the Vichy government to the castle town of Sigmaringen, then to Denmark, where he was imprisoned by the Danes and released into exile. He was not extradited back to France during the early days of the purge, when collaborators such as Robert Brasillach were being condemned to death. By the time Céline stood trial, in absentia, the fury days of the purge had ended. Amnestied in 1951 as a veteran of World War I, he returned to a semireclusive life in the Paris suburb of Meudon, where he penned a trilogy of novels about the immediate [End Page 117] postwar moment, featuring a shattered Europe and a paranoid, misunderstood, and wildly comic narrator. His novels (but obviously not his complete works) have been edited in the prestigious “Pléiade Collection”; his work appears on the French state agrégation examination, which certifies teachers of literature at the highest level. He is generally acknowledged, along with Marcel Proust (perhaps as an anti-Proust, in terms of class and syntax), as the great literary innovator of the century. Céline’s pamphlets, according to the wishes of his widow, have not been reedited since the war; pirate versions have been seized by his estate. There is currently a debate in France about whether or not his pamphlets should be reedited; whether, on the one hand, there is enough “Céline” in them to make them valuable as literary objects, or, on the other hand, whether it isn’t dangerous, in a current French climate of escalating racism and electoral successes by Le Pen’s Front National, to make this writer’s hate speech available to a public who reads him as great literature. Céline has figured in the American literary context at least since the early 1930s; the story of his American reception runs along not quite parallel tracks to the French story, with some fascinating differences. This essay concentrates on one part of the American picture: Céline’s reception among writers. The Miller Paradigm Georges Brassaï, in a memoir entitled Henry Miller: grandeur nature (Henry Miller: lifesize), tells the following, now famous story: Henry Miller was living in Paris in 1932 and struggling with the manuscript of Tropic of Cancer, which had already been rejected by publishers. 1 An agent connected with the French publishing firm of Denoël and Steele gave Miller galley proofs of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit. This was Frank Dobo, also of the Winkler International Literary Agency, the agent who would help sell and promote the English version of Céline’s first novel with Little, Brown and Company, and who was soon after to become deeply involved in Miller’s literary career. According to Brassaï, reading Céline so affected Miller that he rewrote Tropic of Cancer. 2 Miller told Brassaï that “no writer had ever given him such a shock”; Brassaï went so far as to claim that Miller moved to the working-class suburb of Clichy to...

Earth‐based remote sensing of solar system objects

It can be said that remote sensing began with Galileo's invention of the telescope and covers the entire history of observational astronomy to this day. Recently, the subject has rapidly advanced with the development of observing techniques made possible by the invention of new detectors and telescopes over the entire electromagnetic spectrum from gamma rays to meter‐wavelength radio emission. Superbly quantitative measurements of distant planets, satellites, comets and asteroids are now routinely made using the techniques of visible, IR and microwave spectrometry in addition to radar mapping and broadband photometry in all bands. Beautiful results, often reaching the sublime, have been obtained with ingenious instruments aboard robotic spacecraft, in particular the Voyager and Magellan vehicles. Equally ingenious are observations and experiments made from Earthbound astronomical facilities operated by distant relatives of the great master and innovator. Here, we limit this 5‐year review to these latter efforts, partly because there have been few spacecraft successes in this period (except for Magellan), but also because our understanding of the solar system has continued to grow in this period with the use of Earthbased techniques. The Earth orbiting Hubble Telescope is now a magnificent success in the visible and near IR bands and is proving to be a powerful tool for solar system imaging, easily exceeding that of the Earthbound telescopes. This subject is too vast to review here. There is as yet no real progress to report on the search for other solar systems. These investigations await the development of arrayed telescopes in all wavelength bands, (such as the two Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea), a program that will probably remain “Earthbound” for the next decade or so. Preliminary work has been carried out with arrayed telescopes in the millimeter wavelength band. Many ideas and very preliminary results can be found in Beckwith and Sargent [1992], and Sargent and Beckwith [1993].

Professor Carl S. “speed” Marvel

AbstractProfessor Marvel was one of the great polymer pioneers and innovators. He contributed throughout his lengthy career to every aspect of organic polymer chemistry.His many contributions and activities can be outlined in the following list: education; research; industrial consulting; government; american chemical society; awards; human beingI shall discuss each of these in turn.

Jules Laforgue and poetic innovation

This work devotes itself entirely to the poetry of Jules Laforgue (1860-87). Based on detailed study of his manuscripts as well as printed texts, it analyzes the evolution of Laforgues's poetic evaluation as he understood himself. It presents a detailed investigation of his changing poetic techniques and illustrates both his poetic versatility and the significance of his adoption of free verse. The author argues that Laforgue is the great innovator in the use of free verse in French poetry. She sheds light on his method of composition by detailed analysis of variants, and defines the precise nature of his experiment with interior monologue. Setting Laforgue firmly in the context of contemporary French poetry, Anne Holmes highlights the influence on him of Walt Whitman and Impressionist painting. Comparison is also made to T.S. Eliot, for whom Laforgue was a major inspiration.

AVOIDING NEW EVILS BY APPLYING NEW REMEDIES: TAXES AND THE CROSS-BORDER TRANSACTION

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator; and if time of course alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end? 1992 Morgan Stanley.

E.H. Chamberlin and Contemporary Industrial Organisation Theory

Edward Hastings Chamberlin, a great innovator in economic theory, has been badly served by his “followers”, who have “blanked” and “distorted” his message. Today it is the Chicago critics of monopolistic competition, not his self‐appointed followers at Harvard, who are developing an economics of industrial organisation that more nearly captures the spirit of Chamberlin′s work. Chamberlin′s central insight was that quality dimensions and other means of product differentiation are essential elements (in addition to nominal prices) in the analysis of how economic markets actually work. Although Chamberlin initially tried to fit his theory into the conventional mould of Marshallian economics, with predictably unsatisfactory results, this should not be allowed to obscure the novelty and robustness of his contribution.

Dating Charles Ives's Music: Facts and Fictions

i ECENT SCHOLARSHIP HAS aggressively questioned the image of Charles I ves as a remarkably original musical thinker and one of the great innovators of the early twentieth century. Under attack is the credibility of the dates Ives provided for his music, indications of when he developed his unique musical conceptions and innovative techniques. H. Wiley Hitchcock and Noel Zahler, quoting from an interview of Elliott Carter in 1969, argue that as Ives's musical taste changed, he revised his music: he had a tendency in the late 1920s and thereafter to go back to earlier scores and

ANOTHER MASS BY BUSNOYS?

IN the past ten years or so there has been a remarkable upsurge of publications dealing with the life and music of Antoine Busnoys.' Increasingly, musicologists regard the composer as one of the great innovators of the Okeghem generation, a man who in his sacred works introduced and developed many of the traits that were to characterize the style of the next generation.2 Busnoys has earned his present reputation on the basis of a small sacred oeuvre exceeded in size by those of several lesser fifteenth-century composers: two Masses and a handful of smaller sacred works.3 Since these few compositions alone show him to have been a bold experimenter, one would expect each work that can be added to his sacred output to reveal new and unsuspected aspects of his musical personality. The present article describes and attributes to Busnoys an anonymous Mass which-if it is by him-fully lives up to this expectation. The work in question, the Missa 'L'Ardant desir', survives only in Vatican Library, MS Cappella Sistina 51, a source dating almost certainly from the 1470s, perhaps as early as 1474.4 Joseph Llorens has already tentatively attributed the L'Ardant desir Mass to Busnoys in his catalogue of the musical manuscripts of the Sistine Chapel.5 Like most of the tentative attributions in the catalogue, this ascription stems from Laurence Feininger.6 So far, Busnoys specialists have not seriously