Duke University Press Log

Duke Breaks Ground on New Marine Lab Honoring Orrin Pilkey

On July 30, Duke University broke ground on a new 20,000 square foot research facility at the Beaufort, NC campus. The facility will be named the Orrin Pilkey Marine Science & Conservation Genetics Center in honor of the retired geologist. Pilkey has taught at Duke since 1965. He is the author or editor of dozens of books, most recently Global Climate Change: A Primer, which he co-wrote with his son Keith Pilkey and artist Mary Edna Fraser. Pilkey's former editor at Duke Press, Reynolds Smith, attended the groundbreaking ceremony as did Duke University President Richard Brodhead. Pilkey told News 14 Carolina that is important the center be located in Beaufort: "Marine labs must be near the marine environment. You understand, you get an intuition for the environment. You watch the tides, you smell the smells, you see the waves, you see the storms."

Pilkey and Smith at the ceremony.

Free Chapter on Thomas J. Sargent from "The Mangle in Practice"

Earlier this month the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Thomas J. Sargent and Christopher A. Sims. Sargent, Professor of Economics at New York University, was cited by the Nobel committee for his work on "how structural macroeconometrics can be used to analyze permanent changes in economic policy." To learn more about Sargent, we invite you to read a free chapter from the recent book The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming, edited by Andrew Pickering and Keith Guzik. The chapter is called "Resisting and Accomodating Thomas Sargent," by Esther-Mirjam Sent. Sent argues that "Thomas Sargent was faced with the emergence of different interpretations of rational expectations in different periods as a result of the dance of human and disciplinary agency."

Bipartisan Policy Center Urges Research Into Geoengineering

Today the Bipartisan Policy Center's Task Force on Climate Remediation Research issued a report that urges the United States to step up research into geoengineering techniques that might help slow or stop the progress of global climate change. In interviews with the New York Times, "some of the panel members said they hoped that the mere discussion of such drastic steps would jolt the public and policy makers into meaningful action in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which they called the highest priority." Climate change expert Orrin H. Pilkey believes "the potential for adverse side effects" in any geoengineering project is "high and unpredictable." His new book, Global Climate Change: A Primer, written with his son Keith C. Pilkey, features a chapter on geoengineering that lays out some of the potential technologies, such as seeding the oceans to provide cloud cover, carbon sequestration machines, and the pumping of aerosols into the stratosphere. Pilkey ultimately comes down against geoengineering, writing: "that climate change is so dire a challenge as to propel some in the scientific community to seriously consider geoengineering should scare us all the more. The anthropogenic climate change criss that we face requires a political rather than a geoengineering solution."

EASTS Contributor Wins 2011 Zhu Kezhen Award

Congratulations to Li Cho-ying, the recipient of the 2011 Zhu Kezhen award for the article “Contending Strategies, Collaboration among Local Specialists and Officials, and Hydrological Reform in the Late-Fifteenth-Century Lower Yangzi Delta,” published in the June 2010 issue of EASTS: East Asian Science, Technology and Society.  The Zhu Kezhen award is the highest honor given by the society of East Asian History of Science,Technology, and Medicine for an essay of original scholarship in the history of science, technology and medicine in East Asia.

 

Read the award-winning article here.

Books for Earth Day

Happy Earth Day! Check out some of our recent and forthcoming titles in Environmental Studies to celebrate.

In Beyond the Sacred Forest: Complicating Conservation in Southeast Asia, scholars rethink the translation of environmental concepts between East and West, particularly ideas of nature and culture; what conservation might mean; and how conservation policy is applied and transformed in the everyday landscapes of Southeast Asia.

 

 

 

In The Struggle for Maize: Campesinos, Workers, and Transgenic Corn in the Mexican Countryside, Elizabeth Fitting argues that maize biodiversity in central and southern Mexico is threatened as much by rural out-migration as by the flow of genes from genetically modified to local corn varieties.

 

 

Global Climate Change: A Primer, by Orrin H. Pilkey and Keith C. Pilkey, takes on climate change deniers in an outstanding and much-needed primer on the science of global change and its effects. Suitable for students or interested laypeople, it's illustrated with gorgeous full-color reproductions of batiks by artist Mary Edna Fraser. Available in July.

 

See all the rest of our environmental studies titles here!

 

 

 

EASTS Joins Duke University Press

Duke University Press is pleased to announce the addition of East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (EASTS) to its title list for 2011. 

Sponsored by the National Science Council of The Republic of China (Taiwan), EASTS aims to bring East Asian and Western science and technology studies scholars and communities together by publishing research on how society and culture interact with science, technology, and medicine.

Published four times a year, EASTS joins the minnesota review, Genre, and the online-only journal Limnology and Oceanography: Fluids and Environments as new additions to Duke’s list for 2011.

ASLO and Duke University Press partner to launch Limnology and Oceanography: Fluids and Environments; journal issues call for papers

Duke University Press and the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) partnered to launch the journal Limnology and Oceanography: Fluids and Environments. The journal, which will explore the link between fluid dynamics and aquatic system processes and will be offered in an online-only format, begins publication in late 2010.

Edited by Josef Daniel Ackerman at the University of Guelph, Limnology and Oceanography: Fluids and Environments will feature interdisciplinary limnology and oceanography research focusing on the interactions of fluid. To accommodate dynamic observations and model development, the journal will allow appendixes and supporting online materials such as databases and videos.

“We’re looking forward to partnering with an academic publisher for Limnology and Oceanography: Fluids and Environments,” says Carlos Duarte, ASLO president. “As a publisher of forty journals available electronically, Duke University Press brings significant expertise to our new online journal, as well as a shared mission to advance scholarship in the growing field of limnology and oceanography.” 

Brenda Weber on Gender Testing in Athletics

The case of South African track and field star Caster Semenya has recently caused many people to ask where we should draw the "line" in terms of gender in athletics. Brenda Weber, author of Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity, argues at NPR.org that a "line" is the wrong metaphor to use in the complicated issue of determining someone's sex/gender. She writes, "A line suggests that there are clear distinctions, yet the truth is that bodies are far more diverse than our popular terminology for sex and gender allow." As we approach the Olympic Games in Vancouver, Weber says, "The IOC would be better served were it to let all sexed bodies compete in the Olympics and instead re-direct their attentions and energies to a new classification system that makes other distinctions between athletes rather than the exclusive segregation of male and female."

Study in JHPPL Questions Benefits of Price Protection for Drug Companies

As Congress considers new measures that would provide twelve to fourteen years of price protection beyond patent rights for biological drugs, a new study in the current issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law documents how the European Union granted pharmaceutical companies similar protections without clear evidence that they would benefit patients or increase innovation.

The proposed United States legislation on data exclusivity prohibits generic competitors from using the data gathered to test a drug’s safety and efficacy for the public as part of their application to the Food and Drug Administration.

“Data exclusivity requires buyers to pay prices protected from normal competition,” says Sandra Adamini, the lead author of the study. “It might even apply if the patent has expired.” Drug companies argue that data exclusivity is needed beyond twenty-year patent protection in order to earn back large investments in research and to provide an incentive for more innovation.

Books on Traffic

In honor of the year's busiest travel week, NPR is doing a series on traffic safety, which inspired us to think about several recent Duke Press books nominally about the subject. Enda Duffy's The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism returns to the early days of the automobile to examine how the experience of speed has always been political and how it has affected nearly all aspects of modern culture. Speed became the quintessential way for individuals to experience modernity, to feel modernity in their bones, particularly when that speed resulted in actual broken bones! Jeremy Packer looks at automobile safety in American culture in his book Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship.  Packer analyzes how driving has been understood by experts, imagined by citizens, regulated by traffic laws, governed through education and propaganda, and represented in films, television, magazines, and newspapers. Packer, a motorcyclist himself, has an especially interesting chapter on how the motorcycle went from being seen as a cheap, easy mode of transport to a risky machine driven by outlaws. And finally, we have a new book out about the development of the anti-lock braking system (ABS). Ann Johnson's Hitting the Brakes: Engineering Design and the Production of Knowledge uses the development of ABS as a case study for examining the process of engineering design in which knowledge communities come together to produce new products and knowledge. Think about the rather tortured path from design to implementation as you stomp your own anti-lock brakes in traffic this week.