Differentials: Poetry, Poetics and Pedagogy written by Marjorie Perloff Introduction: Differential Reading. Download HERE
Archive for the ‘Education’ Category
Ircam: “Images of a Work” Documentary Series
August 5, 2011
See the series of short documentaries in their entirety on the IRCAM website. IRCAM’s Department of Education and Cultural Outreach initiated the Images of a Work series, produced in cooperation with the Centre Pompidou. HERE
Artists’ Books Online
August 4, 2011
Artists’ Books Online is designed to promote critical engagement with artists books and to provide access to a digital repository of metadata, scans, and commentary. The project serves several different communities: artists, scholars and critics, librarians and curators, and interested readers. ABsOnline operates as an online collection with curatorial guidelines established by an advisory board of professionals. Founded in 2004 ABsOnline is an ongoing project hosted at the University of Virginia under the direction of Johanna Drucker and with assistance from staff and interns working with the University Library and its units in digital scholarship. Anyone interested in participating in the project should contact us directly for guidelines on submissions.
http://www.artistsbooksonline.org/
DO Lectures
August 3, 2011
The idea is a simple one— that people who Do things can inspire the rest of us to go and Do things, too. So each year we invite a set of people down here to come and tell us what they Do. They can be small Do’s or big Do’s or just extraordinary Do’s. But when you listen to their stories, they light a fire in your belly to go and Do your thing, your passion, the thing that sits in the back of your head each day, just waiting, and waiting for you to follow your heart. David & Clare Hieatt (Co-founders of The Do Lectures)
Google Public Data Explorer
June 23, 2011
The Google Public Data Explorer makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate. As the charts and maps animate over time, the changes in the world become easier to understand. You don’t have to be a data expert to navigate between different views, make your own comparisons, and share your findings.
How do YOU wash your hands?
March 29, 2011It’s in your hands
Diarrheal and respiratory infections kill over 3.5 million children under the age of five every year. Hand washing with soap is the most effective and an inexpensive way to prevent these deaths. It can save the lives of 1.2 million children every year.
The tippy tap is a low cost, low tech, low water, hands-free device to promote hand washing with soap.
tippytap.org is a partnership between WMG) and Grampari.
Filmed and directed by Andrew Hinton at Pilgrim Films.
Taking Earth’s Pulse
March 17, 2011
In the wilds of the San Jacinto Mountains, along a steep canyon, scientists are turning 30 acres of pines and hardwoods in California into a futuristic vision of environmental study.
They are linking up more than 100 tiny sensors, robots, cameras and computers, which are beginning to paint an unusually detailed portrait of this lush world, home to more than 30 rare and endangered species.
Much of the instrumentation is wireless. Devices the size of a deck of cards – known as motes, after dust motes – can measure light, wind speed, rainfall, temperature, humidity and barometric pressure, detecting the presence of a warm body or tracking the progress of a chill wind up the canyon. Keep reading HERE.
Pre-Incan psychoacoustics and archaeo-acoustics
February 10, 2011
Graduate student Miriam Kolar, in the Lanzon gallery at Chavin, making acoustic measurements using the ‘bouquet’ Countryman B6 mic array designed by the Stanford archaeoacoustic research team. (Photo by Jose Luis Cruzado Coronel)
Ancient shells meet high-tech: Stanford researchers study the sound of pre-Incan conches.
Archaeologists and acousticians strike an unusual partnership to understand the mesmerizing role of conches in the temple culture around Peru’s Chavín.
The sound is ancient and eerie. For a palpable sense of time, blow into the sawed-off spire of a conch. Feel the ache in your lungs and hear the oceanic roar as it vibrates the hefty shell in your hand.
In the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, the warriors blew conches to announce battle. In Buddhism, the conch’s deep and penetrating drone proclaims the far reach of the dharma. Tibetan monks still use them to summon devotees.
But in the Andean sierra of South America, what did it mean when, three millennia ago, the pre-Incan residents of Chavín de Huántar raised those ornately decorated conch shells to their lips in the underground corridors of their temple?
Read this article by Cynthia Haven @ Standford University News
Professor Jonathan Abel with a microphone array like the one used in the Chavin site.
Aesthetics Lectures Online
February 5, 2011
The Aesthetics Research Group at the University of Kent and their archive of lectures in audio format. HERE.
The European Graduate School
February 4, 2011
Faculty:
Giorgio Agamben
Chantal Akerman
Pierre Alferi
Hubertus von Amelunxen
Pierre Aubenque
Alain Badiou
Nicholson Baker
Judith Balso
Jean Baudrillard†
Philippe Beck
Geoffrey Bennington
Yve-Alain Bois
Catherine Breillat
Victor Burgin
Judith Butler
Hélène Cixous
Simon Critchley
Diane Davis
Claire Denis
Suzanne Doppelt
Atom Egoyan
Heinz Emigholz
Bracha Ettinger
Mike Figgis
Morgan Fisher
Alessandro De Francesco
Christopher Fynsk
Heiner Goebbels
Antony Gormley
Peter Greenaway
Durs Grünbein
Werner Hamacher
Barbara Hammer
Donna Haraway
Michael Hardt
Martin Hielscher
Brian Holmes
Michel Houellebecq
Shelley Jackson
Mitchell Joachim
Tom Kalin
Friedrich Kittler
Chris Kraus
Manuel De Landa
Claude Lanzmann
Sylvère Lotringer
Geert Lovink
Greg Lynn
Erin Manning
Lev Manovich
Laura Marks
Brian Massumi
Colum McCann
Carl Mitcham
Jean-Luc Nancy
Gaspar Noé
François Noudelmann
Cornelia Parker
Stephen & Timothy Quay
Jacques Rancière
Laurence Arthur Rickels
Avital Ronell
Sterling Ruby
Wolfgang Schirmacher
Volker Schlöndorff
Michael Schmidt
Hendrik Speck
DJ Spooky – Paul Miller
Bruce Sterling
Elia Suleiman
Michael Taussig
Margarethe von Trotta
Friedrich Ulfers
Gregory Ulmer
Agnès Varda
Paul Virilio
Victor Vitanza
Samuel Weber
Lebbeus Woods
Caveh Zahedi
Krzysztof Zanussi
Siegfried Zielinski
Slavoj Zizek
Thomas Zummer
Alenka Zupancic
Jan Zwicky
PLASTIC BAG | FUTURESTATES | ITVS
February 2, 2011View all 11 FUTURESTATES episodes at: http://www.futurestates.tv/
Plastic Bag
by Ramin Bahrani
Struggling with its immortality, a discarded plastic bag (voiced by Werner Herzog) ventures through the environmentally barren remains of America as it searches for its maker.
Moths later a similar one came out. This One narrated by Jeremy Irons.
The Sociology of Emotions
December 22, 2010
UCSB emeritus professor of sociology Thomas Scheff explores the place that emotion holds in cognition.
Yale University on iTunes U
December 22, 2010
Yale University on iTunes U: A selection of downloadable podcasts.
More species means less disease
December 5, 2010
The Bornean clouded leopard
“Pinocchio” Frog. Photograph by Tim Laman, National Geographic
New Guinean Bee-bat. Photograph by Tim Laman, National Geographic
From Nature:
Biodiversity protects ecosystems against infectious diseases, researchers have concluded. The finding suggests that loss of species from an environment could have dangerous consequences for the spread and incidence of infections, including those that affect humans. Felicia Keesing, a biologist at Bard College in Annandale, New York, and her colleagues reviewed several dozen studies published in the past five years and found that the link holds true across various ecosystems, pathogens and hosts. “A pattern is emerging which shows that biodiversity loss increases disease transmission,” says Keesing, whose study is published today in Nature.
The researchers don’t know why the effect occurs. But they speculate that species that are better at buffering disease transmission — for example because they have low rates of reproduction or invest heavily in immunity — tend to die out first when diversity declines, whereas species that have high rates of reproduction or invest less in immunity — and thus are more likely to be disease hosts — survive for longer.
More HERE.
Just Ask
August 18, 2010
This site puts philosophers at the service of the general public. Send in a question that you think might be related to philosophy and they will do their best to respond to it. To date, there have been 3109 questions posted and 4064 responses.
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Architecture’s Expanded Territories
August 3, 2010
99th ACSA Annual Conference
Architecture’s Expanded Territories
Topic chairs: Lola Sheppard, University of Waterloo / Mason White, University of Toronto
In Rosalind Krauss’s 1979 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” (PDF) Krauss observed that the practice of sculpture had been obscured and could only qualify itself in opposition to architecture and landscape. Krauss identifies three additional practices of sculpture that sculpture had previously been burdened with and names them “site-construction,” marked sites,” and “axiomatic structures.” Taking up a similar cause in 2004, Anthony Vidler offered emergent practices for “Architectures Expanded Field,” (DOC) by arguing that “underlying the new architectural experimentation is a serious attempt to reconstrue the foundations of the discipline, not so much in singular terms, but in broader concepts that acknowledge an expanded field, while seeking to overcome the problematic dualisms that have plagued architecture for over a century: form and function, historicism and abstraction, utopia and reality, structure and enclosure.”
Vidler’s potent proclamation and offer to architecture to evolve with its time has incubated for more than 6 years. Where are we now in this (still) expanding field? This session will table the messy and contentious territory between architecture, landscape, ecology, and urban design. A territory whose foundation was cultivated by Benton MacKaye, planned by Constantinos Doxiadis, designed by Cedric Price, with recent developments chronicled by Keller Easterling, among others. In short, the session will look at where the XXL and the S meet, or a new architecture within our expanding territories.
It could be argued that the potential of an expanded territory is increasingly being hijacked by an agenda of “good practice,” in the name of sustainability, often reducing architecture to the operational concerns of construction efficiency and building performance on a particular site. This session asks what form, format, and programs might exist in the new territory afforded by a deeper understanding of site? Or, what is sustainable design without the burden of sustainability?
What defines these expanding territories? Architecture’s recent privileging of operational costs over capital costs is a paradigm shift in scale, program, and function. No longer relegated to façade design only, we are seeing ever-expanding ambiguities of architecture’s envelope. This session seeks to find these large territorial lines, interrogate them, design them, and expose them. What potential lies in the tools encouraging a widening envelope of design influence – environmental data, maps, politics, economies – upon a give site? Sometimes it might not even look like architecture.
The session calls for speculative design research proposals or critical papers to think big. How does design operate at the scale of the region or the globe? Forgoing utopian ambitions to design the region or the globe, how can design participate in the temporal space of emerging natural and artificial systems – energies, ecologies, mobilities, and, possibly most importantly, economies? What is the role and operation of the big project in our age of urgent environmental issues and crippled economy? Where do you stand in the expanding territory?
Text by InfraNet Lab.
Dead Birds
June 16, 2010
Dead Birds
Directed by Robert Gardner
1964, 84 min.
“A cinematographic interpretation of the life of a group of Grand Valley Dani, who are mountain Papuans in West New Guinea (Irian Barat, Indonesia), studied by the Harvard-Peabody Expedition (1961-1963). This film was made by Gardner in 1961, before the area was pacified by the Dutch government. The film focuses on Weyak, the farmer and warrior, and on Pua, the young swineherd, following them through the events of Dani life: sweet potato horticulture, pig keeping, salt winning, battles, raids, and ceremonies.” — Karl G. Heider
PUBMED
May 17, 2010
BBC – The beauty of maps – Seeing The Art In Cartography
May 11, 2010
BBC The Beauty of Maps: Seeing the Art in Cartograpyis a BBC television series which focuses on matters concerning data visualization and how is becoming an interesting feature in popular press.
Scientists Discover How the Brain Encodes Memories at a Cellular Level
March 31, 2010
UCSB Scientists Discover How the Brain Encodes Memories at a Cellular Level.
Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have made a major discovery in how the brain encodes memories. The finding, published in the December 24 issue of the journal Neuron, could eventually lead to the development of new drugs to aid memory.
The team of scientists is the first to uncover a central process in encoding memories that occurs at the level of the synapse, where neurons connect with each other.
“When we learn new things, when we store memories, there are a number of things that have to happen,” said senior author Kenneth S. Kosik, co-director and Harriman Chair in Neuroscience Research, at UCSB’s Neuroscience Research Institute. Kosik is a leading researcher in the area of Alzheimer’s disease.
“One of the most important processes is that the synapses –– which cement those memories into place –– have to be strengthened,” said Kosik. “In strengthening a synapse you build a connection, and certain synapses are encoding a memory. Those synapses have to be strengthened so that memory is in place and stays there. Strengthening synapses is a very important part of learning. What we have found appears to be one part of how that happens.”
Continue HERE.
Myxomycetes a.k.a. Slime Molds
March 25, 2010
Slime molds are fungus-like organisms that have previously been classified as fungi, and later as Myxomycetes. They are no longer classified as fungi. Depending on the sources, there are now two or three different groups of slime molds, one of which is the myxomycetes. These now fall under the broader category of eukarya.
In general however, slime molds are characterized by the production of relatively large, single-celled, multinucleate bodies called plasmodia (singular = plasmodium). Plasmodia are the feeding stages of slime molds, and they are frequently seen on lawns, small plants, mulch, and decaying wood in late summer. Slime molds are not plant parasites, but they may injure plants by covering and shading them. (text from Cornell University Plantclinic)
From the introduction to Steven Johnson’s 2001 book, Emergence: If you’re reading these words during the summer in a suburban or rural part of the world, chances are somewhere near you a slime mold is growing. Walk through a normally cool, damp section of a forest on a dry and sunny day, or sift through the bark mulch that lies on a garden floor, and you may find a grotesque substance coating a few inches of rotting wood. On first inspection, the reddish orange mass suggests that the neighbor’s dog has eaten something disagreeable, but if you observe the slime mold over several days — or, even better, capture it with time-lapse photography — you’ll discover that it moves, ever so slowly, across the soil. If the weather conditions grow wetter and cooler, you may return to the same spot and find the creature has disappeared altogether. Has it wandered off to some other part of the forest? Or somehow vanished into thin air, like a puddle of water evaporating?
Get more images and their description HERE.
Discovering Species in Nangaritza, Ecuador
June 26, 2009
A Refuge for Species
“Located in southeastern Ecuador, near the Peruvian border, the Nangaritza River valley is mountainous, heavily forested and relatively inaccessible to most people. The upper river valley is known for its Tepuyes, or tabletop mountains, which are home to many species that are found nowhere else on earth, as well as other species whose populations are threatened in other locations but remain plentiful here.
Nangaritza’s isolation has not only helped to protect the mountain ecosystem from destruction, it has also long posed a challenge to detailed scientific study. Part of the region is under the protection of the Nangaritza Protected Forest, but wildlife experts believe that more land must be protected for this unique environment to thrive.
The Shuar indigenous association and a local farming organization have been granted management over much of the protected forest, but these groups are proposing that the lands be upgraded to a higher protection status, where they will be more sustainably managed. Before this step can be taken, however, more scientific data is needed.”
Text by CONSERVATION INTERNATIONAL
Viva Neil deGrasse Tyson!!!
March 13, 2009In case you want to know more about this friendly lucid astrophysicist:
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Tyson’s Wiki
and then:
Isaac Newton
How your brain creates God
March 13, 2009
“The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare, enabling these groups to outcompete others. In this way, the theory goes, religion was selected for by evolution, and eventually permeated every human society.”
Read this article at NEW SCIENTIST
…Ecology – A New Opium for the Masses
February 15, 2009
In this essay Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek discusses the ‘naturalization’ of capitalism and how ecology became a new field of capitalist investment. He also argues that the ultimate consequence of recent developments in biogenetics will be the ‘end of nature’ – anyone cares to introduce the good man into nextnature thinking? According to Žižek ecological apartheid will divide our urban society. Capitalism is not in control of nature and due to techno-scientific interventions the essence of the ecological order will be lost.
Written by Slavoj Žižek, originally published at Lacan.com. Via Volume.
Marco Cicala, a Leftist Italian journalist, told me about his recent weird experience: when, in an article, he once used the word “capitalism,” the editor asked him if the use of this term is really necessary – could he not replace it by a synonymous one, like “economy”? What better proof of the total triumph of capitalism than the virtual disappearance of the very term in the last 2 or 3 decades? No one, with the exception of a few allegedly archaic Marxists, refers to capitalism any longer. The term was simply struck from the vocabulary of politicians, trade unionists, writers and journalists – even of social scientists… But what about the upsurge of the anti-globalization movement in the last years? Does it not clearly contradict this diagnostic? No: a close look quickly shows how this movement also succumbs to “the temptation to transform a critique of capitalism itself (centered on economic mechanisms, forms of work organization, and profit extraction) into a critique of ‘imperialism’.” In this way, when one talks about “globalization and its agents,” the enemy is externalized (usually in the form of vulgar anti-Americanism). From this perspective, where the main task today is to fight “the American empire,” any ally is good if it is anti-American, and so the unbridled Chinese “Communist” capitalism, violent Islamic anti-modernists, as well as the obscene Lukashenko regime in Belarus may appear as progressive anti-globalist comrades-in-arms… What we have here is thus another version of the ill-famed notion of “alternate modernity”: instead of the critique of capitalism as such, of confronting its basic mechanism, we get the critique of the imperialist “excess,” with the (silent) notion of mobilizing capitalist mechanisms within another, more “progressive,” frame.
The History of Visual Communication
January 16, 2009
The artist, designer and educator Elif Ayiter presents “The History of Visual Communication” , a dedicated website project that focuses on the history of the translation of ideas, stories and concepts that are largely textual or word based into a visual format, i.e. Visual Communication. Very useful piece of material. Thank you Elif Ayiter!
The History of Visual Communication
Also relevant: The Atlas of CyberSpace
Lucid Dreams with…
December 28, 2008… plants commonly known as Oneirogens.
Etymology: From the Greek “oneiros” meaning dream and “gen” meaning to create, describes that which produces a dream-like state of consciousness.
Silene capensis (syn. Silene undulata) (also known as African Dream Root) is a plant native to the Eastern Cape of South Africa, where is regarded by the Xhosa people as a sacred plant. Its root is traditionally used to induce vivid (and according to the Xhosa, prophetic) lucid dreams during the initiation process of shamans, classifying it a naturally-occurring oneirogen similar to the more well-known dream herb Calea zacatechichi.
Calea zacatechichi, also known as Dream Herb, Cheech, and Bitter Grass, is a plant used by the indigenous Chontal of the Mexican state of Oaxaca for oneiromancy (a form of divination based on dreams.) The plant naturally occurs from southern Mexico to northern Costa Rica. It has been scientifically demonstrated that extracts of this plant increase reaction times and the frequency and/or recollection of dreams[1] versus placebo and diazepam. It is also employed by the Chontal people as a medicinal herb against gastrointestinal disorders, and is used as an appetizer, cathartic anti-dysentery remedy, and as a fever-reducing agent.
Entada rheedii is a large woody liana or climber. It is also known as African Dream Herb and Snuff Box Sea Bean. It is often spelled as Entada rheedei, though initially published as E. rheedii. The alternate spelling is to correctly honour Hendrik Adriaan von Rheede tot Draakestein (1637-1691).
Its leaves are dried and smoked to induce vivid dreams. Its seeds are found on east and southern African beaches, having grown on river and estuary banks and in swamp forest. They have thick and durable seed coats and can survive lengthy periods of immersion in sea water. These seeds are sought after as pieces of jewelry and as good-luck charms. As a result of its ready dispersal by sea, Entada rheedii is widely distributed in tropical and subtropical countries bordering the Indian Ocean.
Information here obtained from Wiki, inspired on the research of Krystle Cole from Neuro Soup. Someone to meet….Really pleasant gal, and lots of juicy (literally) information for the neuro-travelers.
post by Wanderlust
Milky Way’s Black Hole
December 10, 2008
This is the central parts of our galaxy, the Milky Way, as observed in the near-infrared with the NACO instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. By following the motions of the most central stars over more than 16 years, astronomers were able to determine the mass of the supermassive black hole that lurks there. (Image: NASA/CXC/MIT/F K Baganoff et al)
By watching the motions of 28 stars orbiting the Milky Way’s most central region with admirable patience and amazing precision, astronomers have been able to study the supermassive black hole lurking there. It is known as “Sagittarius A*” (pronounced “Sagittarius A star”). The new research marks the first time that the orbits of so many of these central stars have been calculated precisely and reveals information about the enigmatic formation of these stars — and about the black hole to which they are bound.
“The centre of the Galaxy is a unique laboratory where we can study the fundamental processes of strong gravity, stellar dynamics and star formation that are of great relevance to all other galactic nuclei, with a level of detail that will never be possible beyond our Galaxy,” explains Reinhard Genzel, leader of the team from the Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching near Munich. (text by Physorg)
Continue reading on PHYSORG
CREDIT: I. Rodrigues and I.F. Mirabel, Space Telescope Science Institute, NRAO/AUI/NSF.
post by Waderlust
DIY: A Handbook for Changing Our World
December 3, 2008
DO IT YOURSELF: A Handbook for Changing Our World / Edited by The Trapese Collective. Trapese is a Popular Education collective who offers workshops and training aimed at inspiring and promoting action for changing our world.
A Radical Guide to Ethical and Sustainable Living
Climate change, resource wars, privatization, the growing gap between rich and poor, politicians that don’t listen. Massive issues, but how can we make any difference?
This book shows how. It’s not a book about what’s wrong with the world, but a collection of dynamic ideas which explore how we can build radical and meaningful social change, ourselves, here and now. Covering nine themes, the book weaves together analysis, stories and experiences. It combines in-depth analytical chapters followed by easy to follow “How to Guides” with practical ideas for organizing collectively for change.
Obtain it here: http://www.handbookforchange.org/
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