This November is the 100th anniversary of the Armistice, the end of World War I. To mark the occasion, I thought I would dig into the early history of the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research to highlight some of the work that was carried out there during World War I. 

This Friday Carnegie Mellon will inaugurate it’s 10th president, though we don’t actually have much experience with inauguration ceremonies.  Not only are we a relatively young institution, but most of our presidents served relatively long terms.  Hamerschlag stayed for 19 years, Doherty for 14, Warner for 15, and Cyert almost broke Hamerschlag’s record with 18 years.

Science research output has historically been difficult to access and reuse. It is often published in journals with very expensive subscription costs, typically paid for by university libraries. The data and code used to generate figures in publications are commonly not shared or are only shared by request.  These practices have made it difficult for scientists to access, reuse, and reproduce the work of others, and have in part led to a widely reported "reproducibility crisis" in science.  A related concern is that the public, which pays for a lot of science research with tax dollars, cannot access much of it.

What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race In America by Michael Eric Dyson (St. Martin's Press, 2018)

In May 1963, Robert F. Kennedy called for a meeting with James Baldwin, one of the most powerful voices of the civil rights movement. Baldwin brought the singers Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, scholar Kenneth Clark, and freedom rider Jerome Smith. Kennedy expected a polite, deferential meeting, but his guests weren’t willing to be patient
and work on policies. Smith was recovering from a savage beating by white supremacists; Baldwin and his friends angrily gave witness to “blackness seen through the prism of pain and trauma.”