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Apple CEO Tim Cook tells MBA students at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business when to follow business rules and when to throw them out. Cook spoke as part of his class reunion at the school.(www.fuqua.duke.edu)

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APPLE CEO AND FUQUA ALUM TIM COOK TALKS LEADERSHIP AT DUKE

Tim Cook spoke to students and alums when he returned for his 25th reunion



"Explore everything. Push the corners of your mind. Just get on this kind of continual learning roller coaster and see what happens."

This was among the advice Apple CEO Tim Cook shared with students at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business on April 26th. Back on campus for his 25-year reunion, Cook took part in an hour-long dialogue with Fuqua Dean Bill Boulding and the students in a jam-packed Geneen Auditorium buzzing with excitement to hear from the leader of the world's most profitable company.

The Apple CEO has embarked on a career far different than he had envisioned after graduating from Fuqua's Evening Executive MBA program in 1988. "For me the journey was not predictable at all. You have to find your own north star and stay with your north star."

As 450 Daytime MBA students prepared to graduate, Cook advised the students to heed Abraham Lincoln's words of wisdom: "I will prepare and someday my chance will come."

Cook shared the three keys to his leadership at Apple: people, strategy, and execution. "If you get those three right the world is a great place."

Students were able to get a unique glimpse into Cook's motivation, inspiration and leadership role models. Raised in the south and a witness to racial injustice, Cook described his admiration for Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior's bravery in risking their lives to fight for what they believed in. He has just three photos in his office: two of Kennedy and one of King.

Cook was asked when to follow strict principles of business theory and when to break the rules. His response stressed the importance of risks and learning from failure. "You should rarely follow the rules. What Fuqua teaches you so well is how to learn and how to collaborate. Write your own rules."

This message resonated with first-year MBA student Shelby Hall. "I know this follows Steve Jobs' belief that Apple creates products which consumers didn't ever know existed," she said. "It was interesting to hear Tim Cook's perspective on how we should balance writing our own rules while applying the foundations of business taught here at Fuqua."

Cook also spoke about some of his recollections from Fuqua. "The people made it an incredible experience. It was great for me to see how bright people approached solutions in different ways."

First-year MBA student Juan Danzilo says Cook's willingness to share his experiences shows a deep commitment to Fuqua. "Tim Cook's presence reflects Fuqua's sense of community. His humility and eloquence is admirable. It certainly was a unique opportunity for MBA students to hear from such an inspirational leader."

A Duke graduate student's research into how male magnolia green jumping spiders interpret the appearance of other spiders as a friend or foe finds that the pheromone scent of a female makes them respond more quickly, raising their pedipalps for love or their forelegs for fighting.

While linguistic skill is a hallmark of humanity, the increasing volume of linguistic data each of us faces is causing individual and societal problems -- 'information overload' is a commonly discussed condition. Big data has enabled new tasks, such as finding the most appropriate information online, engaging in historical study using language data on the level of millions of documents, and tracking trends in sentiment and opinion in real time. These tasks need not cause stress and feelings of overload: the human intellectual capacity is not the problem. Rather, the current technological supports are inappropriate for these tasks. Linguistic information overload is not a new phenomenon: throughout history, the pace of information creation and storage has exceeded the pace of development of management strategies. Dr. Collins' research aims to bring new, richly interactive interfaces to the forefront of information management, in order to keep up with the current challenges of 'big data' and the growing power of linguistic computing algorithms.

Erving Goffman used the language of theater, and a close analysis of what happens on stage, to generate a theory of social experience. This talk illustrates an adaptation of Goffman's approach, based on elementary "strips" of interaction, and repurposes it for the quantitative study of plays as micro-encounters that build into macro-structures. The encounter provides a computational signal and an interpretive concept in the "window," an arbitrarily cut strip of a given number of speeches in a play. As the window moves through the play, a micro-network is built based on the speech-acts within the window's range. While the overall network of a play can reveal something about a play's social and dramatic structure, the window helps us capture, quantitatively, the basic units of social experience that go toward creating those larger structures. The window also allows for the comparison of many plays of varying length and structure, putting, for example, the Ancients, Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Brazilian playwrights together in a new analytical frame.

David R. Nielsen, MD

Description and Goals:
1) Review the fiscal, political, and clinical environment in which quality improvement (QI) and other reforms are taking place.
2) Discuss how otolaryngology QI activities apply evidence-based medicine methodology to clinical practice.
3) Understand gap analysis in addressing quality improvement.
4) Recognize the challenges in the concept of shared accountability in new delivery reform models.

In his 2013 Duke commencement address, Andrew Barnhill, MDiv '13 and a native of Wilmington, spoke of "sacred moments" students should treasure at Duke -- "moments filled with laughter; moments filled with awe. Through each of them, we are challenged to find our voices born in the crevice of Duke's identity as a place of innovation and a space of sacred leadership." Read more about Barnhill here: http://today.duke.edu/2013/04/barnhill.

The Graduate Students of the Duke University Department of History were pleased to invite Dr. Thomas Laqueur, professor of history at University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Laqueur was the keynote speaker for Navigating Place and Power, an annual one-day conference at Duke University, which took place on Friday, February 15, 2013. This interdisciplinary conference sought to promote dialogue between scholars of various disciplines in order to explore how individuals and groups negotiate systems of power. In this talk, Dr. Laqueur discusses the concept of deep time & necrogeography while analyzing the impact of the collective dead on building culture & communities throughout human history.

Held at the Washington Duke Inn on Friday, April 26th, 2013
http://cit.duke.edu/showcase2013/plenary/

MOOCs and other forays into online learning are not only changing Duke by the fact that they are being offered, they are also spurring conversations about teaching innovation and curricular innovation more broadly at Duke. Conversations are being held that would not have been able to be held even a year ago, instigated by Duke's involvement in Coursera and Semester Online/2U -- conversations about credit, quality, the student experience, what is learning and how do we "certify" it, the connection of external experience to the classroom, the role of the professor in guiding student learning, the connection of the broader community to the Duke classroom and more. What does Duke of the next few years look like? What changes can be foreseen, and which are too fuzzy to anticipate?

Susan Lozier, chair of the Advisory Committee for Online Education (ACOE) and the Academic Council, and Professor of Ocean Sciences in the Nicholas School; David Bell, chair of Trinity College's Online Learning Advisory Committee (OLAC), Professor of Romance Studies, and soon-to-be interim director of FHI; and Keith Whitfield, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, presented and took questions on these topics.

A new prototype gigapixel camera creates color photographs 10 times sharper than 20/20 vision and with 100 times the resolution of a consumer camera with 10 megapixels.

Duke University professor David Brady and his colleagues developed the AWARE2 Gigapixel Camera with a single lens, 96 microcameras and a 110-degree field of view. The prototype device improves upon a previous version.

"What's really unique about this camera is that it has very high pixel count for things at finite range," said Brady, the Michael J. Fitzpatrick Professor of Electric Engineering at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering. "It does that in a way no other camera has before because each of the microcameras focuses individually, so objects at various depths can all be in focus."

Brady and his team used the camera to take a picture of Duke's 2013 graduation ceremony in Wallace Wade Stadium. View that image here: http://bit.ly/13U3wNB.

The prototype camera is large -- about three feet cubed -- but Brady and his team are working to condense it.

Learn more here: http://disp.duke.edu/projects/AWARE/.

Saying "humanity in the abstract will never inspire you in the same way as human beings you meet," Melinda Gates urged Duke University's graduates Sunday to use new technology to connect with others, including people in the developing world whose lives Americans can now touch in a more personal way. Gates recalled attending Duke basketball games and spending long nights writing computer code as a student, long before she became co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest transparently operated private foundation. Read more here: http://today.duke.edu/2013/05/commence2013.

On April 27, 2013 BBC Persian aired a TV piece on the situation in the Uyghur Xinjiang Autonomous Region. The feature was followed by an interview with Haiyun Ma, an Adjunct Professor of Chinese History who specializes in the study of Islam and Muslims in China at George Mason University. He provided some background on the Xinjiang region and its tense relationship with China — noting that outbreaks of violence earlier that week cannot be easily labeled as terrorism or a human rights violation.

Both features have been dubbed in Persian. (ISLAMiCommentary facilitated this interview).

For more detail and a summary in English see: http://islamicommentary.org/2013/04/haiyun-ma-violence-in-xinjiang-human-rights-violation-or-terrorism/

UNC-Chapel Hill Islamic Studies Professor Carl Ernst and Duke University Muslim Chaplain Abdullah Antepli discuss Sharia at a public talk at Duke, April 18, 2013, in response to a question about what it means in the U.S.

See here for more information about the talk and the panel: http://islamicommentary.org/2013/04/watch-duke-and-unc-scholars-muslim-chaplainwral-tv-anchor-discuss-boston-marathon-attacks-islamophobia-nc-muslims-and-interfaith-relations/