Weekend orientation events
28 Aug 2011, Posted by staff in News, 0 Comments
The Class of 2015 attend the pep rally, a night at the Nasher and the acapella concert.
Orientation 2011
28 Aug 2011, Posted by Molly Himmelstein and Samantha Brooks in News, 0 Comments
For the past week, Duke’s incoming freshman class has been getting acquainted with Duke and Durham. What does it take to be transformed into a Dukie? Check out these Orientation Week highlights in a video by Samantha Brooks and Molly Himmelstein.
Fuqua grad replaces Jobs as CEO of Apple
25 Aug 2011, Posted by Melissa Dalis in News, 0 Comments
Special To The Chronicle
Tim Cook, Fuqua ’88 and former chief operating officer of Apple, will replace Steve Jobs, who resigned yesterday, as chief executive officer of Apple Inc.
“As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple,” Jobs wrote in his resignation letter addressed to Apple’s board and the “Apple Community.”
In his previous position of COO, Cook led Apple’s sales and operations around the world as well as the entire Macintosh division according to Apple’s official press release.
Since 2007 Cook taken over twice when Jobs has taken medical leaves.
“The Board has complete confidence that Tim is the right person to be our next CEO,” said Art Levinson, Chairman of Genentech, on behalf of Apple’s Board in the press release. “Tim’s 13 years of service to Apple have been marked by outstanding performance, and he has demonstrated remarkable talent and sound judgment in everything he does.”
Cook earned his M.B.A. from the Fuqua School of Business as a Fuqua Scholar following his undergraduate career in industrial engineering at Auburn University.
The terrorists are winning
09 Aug 2011, Posted by Walker Schiff in News, 0 Comments
On July 1, Leon Panetta was promoted by President Barack Obama. He left his job as Director of the C.I.A to become the 23rd United States Secretary of Defense.
On August 4, he said to reporters, “We’re already taking our share of the discretionary cuts as part of this debt-ceiling agreement, and those are going to be tough enough. I think anything beyond that would damage our national defense.” He proposed we raise taxes and cut entitlement programs—Medicare and Social Security.
In a speech from the White House August 8, Barack Obama agreed with Panetta.
“Our challenge is the need to tackle our deficits over the long term,” Obama said. Last week we reached an historic agreement that will make historic cuts to defense and domestic spending. But there’s not much further that we can cut in either of those categories. What we need to do now is combine those spending cuts with two additional steps: tax reform that will ask those who can afford it to pay their fair share and modest adjustments to health care programs like Medicare.”
This series of events is a problem and let me explain to you why.
First, we spend a lot of money of defense:
Special To The Chronicle
I find this graph, from The Economist, troubling. I’m not an expert in military spending, but it doesn’t seem like we should be spending more than all of those countries combined, not to mention that we spend more than 2 percent of our GDP on defense than most other comparable modern countries in Europe.
How did we get to this point? Well, after 9/11 and during Bush’s presidency, defense spending skyrocketed. We entered two wars and created an arbitrary color system to scare the American people into supporting the Bush agenda. Defense spending was always going to rise after 9/11, but here is a good graph from The New York Times showing how much Bush’s defense spending has contributed to our deficit compared to other policy changes.
Bush used 9/11 to unnecessarily invade Iraq and raise defense spending to ridiculous levels. That being said, Bush does not deserve all the blame.
Special To The Chronicle
As that graph shows, Obama has slightly cut defense spending, and that graph does not factor in the small defense cuts of the recent debt-ceiling deal, but Obama has not done nearly enough.
The war in Afghanistan is still going strong, Guantanamo Bay is still operating, we have unnecessarily intervened in the revolutions of the Arab Spring and our defense spending is still far too high. One of Obama’s campaign slogans was “Change,” but there has not been nearly enough change regarding America’s defense budget.
This brings me back to Leon Panetta. Panetta said that cutting defense spending any further, “would damage our national defense.” It’s as if he was trying to give political ammunition to Republicans, who consider defense as somewhat of a sacred cow, so that Democrats wouldn’t even try to cut defense. We have to cut defense spending to reduce our deficit, but it is impossible to do that when we have a Defense Secretary saying things like that. If Democrats got serious about cutting defense at any point in the near future, Republicans would peddle a quote like that until every single American heard it. Americans do not what to “damage our national defense” at any cost.
And that brings me to my final point. Panetta, instead of cutting defense, wants taxes to be raised and entitlement programs to be cut. Let’s be honest with ourselves, despite the fact that taxes are the lowest they’ve been in decades, taxes are going to stay just about where they are. Obama might be able to fix some inefficiencies and loopholes in the tax code, but for the most part, no Republican is going to vote to raise taxes, and we can in large part thank Grover Norquist’s “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” for that.
So if it’s a not tax hikes, that leaves entitlement programs, such as Medicare and Social Security. Instead of cutting our defense budget, we are going to cut basic social programs that visibly help millions of Americans every day.
The origin of our huge defense budget can be traced back to when a small group of Muslim extremists orchestrated a tremendous attack on American soil on 9/11. These terrorists wanted to do nothing else than to kill Americans and to disrupt the American lifestyle. More than ever, they are now disrupting the American lifestyle. Right now, we are cutting basic welfare and entitlement programs to sustain our enormous defense budget.
It has long been argued that if we back out of our wars in the Middle East, the terrorists might win. But if we cut necessary programs to fund an unnecessary defense budget, then the terrorists will surely win.
Highest paying college majors
26 Jul 2011, Posted by Melissa Dalis in News, 1 Comments
Pratt students’ hard work will pay off, according to recent data from PayScale’s Best Undergrad Degrees by Salary.
The top 10 majors that lead to the highest mid career salaries on the list are petroleum engineering, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, materials science and engineering, aerospace engineering, computer engineering, physics, applied mathematics, computer science and nuclear engineering.
From the majors that we have at Duke, the top 10 highest paying are electrical engineering, computer engineering, physics, computer science, biomedical engineering, economics, mechanical engineering, statistics, civil engineering and mathematics.
Long after this large cluster of engineering and quantitative majors, the next major that Duke provides on this list is chemistry (35). Other Duke majors on the list include philosophy (48), literature (53), biology (56), environmental science (57), linguistics (58) and history (62). Many other humanities and language-related majors do not come until much later on the list.
Duke only provides 12 of the 50 highest-paying majors on the list. Engineers are clearly making the most money, yet we only provide four engineering majors.
Perhaps that is one of the reasons that Duke did not score as highly as several more engineering-focused schools, such as California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvey Mudd College, in Payscale’s rankings for highest mid career salaries by university.
Duke students, however, don’t seem to pick their majors based on how much they will pay off in the long run. As reported by The Chronicle in December, the top eight majors at Duke are economics, psychology, political science, biology, public policy, biomedical engineering, history and english. Of these eight, only economics and bioengineering are among the top 50 highest paying college majors.
Lucky for us, though, Duke’s mid-career median pay of $113,000 is higher than every major on this list, except for petroleum engineering at $155,000. So, even if you find your humanities major low on this list, odds are you’ll still be making more money than engineers from most other colleges across the country.