Showing papers on "Surprise published in 1971"

Status, Achievement, and Motivation in the American High School

Abstract: It is difficult to find an area within Western sociology that has been as thoroughly debated and examined as social stratification, and within the stratification sphere no single set of issues has commanded the attention of theoreticians, researchers, and social policy makers more than that which surrounds social mobility and its antecedents.' Although the conclusions that are drawn about rates of social mobility and their governing processes vary somewhat from country to country, two main features seem universal: First, the link between occupational prestige and socioeconomic status (or social class, depending on which side of the debate you fall) is both direct and strong. Second, the major precondition for acceptance into most of the occupations which rank at or near the top of the prestige hierarchy is an extensive amount of formal education. Since neither of these points comes as a surprise to the average layman, elaborate documentation of these kinds of facts is often viewed as a trivial exercise.2

Computers and policy-making: the CASCON experiment:

Abstract: Most observers of US foreign policy decision-making would probably agree that, whatever the virtues or defects of a particular policy choice, the process by which decisions are reached on crisis or incipient crisis situations leaves something to be desired. Despite good intentions, there persists an all-toofrequent tendency to be taken by surprise, to lurch from crisis to crisis, to under-use instruments of preventive diplomacy, and to be faced with situations in which only undesirable military options are available. The Nixon administration has identified some aspects of this problem, and announced various organizational and methodological means to overcome them. The results to date are, to say the least, not entirely convincing. And while as Americans our first concern is with US policy, the problem is by no means confined to the US decision-making apparatus. Rather, this tendency represents a weakness of governments in general, and of in-

Do you want to be my friend

Abstract: "Do you want to be my friend?" asks a little mouse of a horse, a peacock, an alligator and others in this classic and charming story. Only when he meets another little mouse, is the answer unequivocally, "Yes!" 'Each page of this ingenious, all but wordless picture book affords surprise, suspense, and repeated pleasure for the viewer' - "Booklist".

Toward a Phenomenological Aesthetic of Cinema

Abstract: It was probably Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s essay, “Le Cinema et la Nouvelle Psychologie,” which started this train of thoughts some years ago. Although they have led through a good deal of reading and writing on phenomenology and film over the years, the point of departure is still Merleau-Ponty: Phenomenological or existential philosophy is largely an expression of surprise at... [the] inherence of the self in the world and in others, a description of this paradox and permeation, and an attempt to make us see the bond between subject and world, between subject and others, rather than to explain it as the classical philosophies did by resorting to absolute spirit. Well, the movies are peculiarly suited to make manifest the union of mind and body, mind and world, and the expression of one in the other. ... Contemporary philosophy consists not in stringing concepts together but in describing the mingling of consciousness with the world, its involvement in a body, and its coexistence with others; ... this is movie material par excellence. ... If philosophy is in harmony with the cinema, if thought and technical effort are heading in the same direction, it is because the philosopher and the moviemaker share a certain way of being, a certain view of the world which belongs to a generation. It offers us yet another chance to confirm that modes of thought correspond to technical methods and that, to use Goethe’s phrase, ‘What is inside is also outside.’1