Word: canonical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Less than a decade ago, Xerox was in serious trouble. The company whose name is synonymous with copying machines was steadily losing customers. As Japan's Ricoh, Canon and other new competitors muscled onto Xerox's turf, the company slumped from an 86% share of the world market for basic copiers in 1974 to just 16.6% by 1984. When a shaken Xerox finally studied its competitors more closely, the company discovered their secret weapon: the Japanese firms hewed to rigorous quality standards. Taking a hard-eyed look at its operations, Xerox discovered that it was slowly destroying itself with sloppiness...
...reading for History la includes most of thetraditional canon of philosophers, includingPlato's "Apology" and "Crito" Thomas Aquinas'"Moral Life and Ethics," and John Locke's "EssayConcerning Human Understanding...
Japanese researchers are pursuing more than 100 new applications for fuzzy logic. Nissan has patented fuzzy auto transmission and antiskid braking , systems. Yamaichi Securities has introduced a fuzzy stock-market investment program for signaling shifts in market sentiment. Canon is working on a fuzzy auto-focus camera. Matsushita has delivered a fuzzy automobile-traffic controller, and is about to unveil a fuzzy shower system that adjusts to changes in water temperature to prevent morning scaldings. And in the strongest endorsement of the technology to date, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry opened the Laboratory for International Fuzzy Engineering Research...
...this approach, though, that the book ultimately founders. The canon, it would seem from reading Leibowitz's digressions on everything from Paul Valery to obscure ancient Greek dramatists, is alive and well--and certainly formative in most Americans' sense of themselves...
...here the disagreement over the means and ends of a pluralist community comes to a sharp focus. Like the battle between the cultural right and left, with the literary or historical canon somehow held ransom between the two, the question over minority hiring seems to revolve around the perceived "lowering of standards" needed to diversify the faculty. Just who sets--and who judges--the standards of course is the most difficult question of all to answer. In a pluralist society, what are the certainties...