The Re-education of Baxter Wood

UCSD, P Sc104A, The Supreme Court and the Constitution, Glenn C. Smith

2011-11-29T13:49:00.004-06:00

If this sounds interesting download it now and listen later, as it will likely disappear in the coming weeks. Glenn Smith is a professor at the California Western School of Law, San Diego, and is a visiting professor at UCSD. This is a night class of about 150 students (all seemingly quite tired) with nine weekly two-and-a-half-hour lectures.

The course centers on one case from 1803. A story I have never heard. It’s how the Supreme Court became “Supreme.” It is Marbury v. Madison. Basically, John Marshall laid the last stone in place in the structure of the US Government. That stone is now so integral we all assume it was there in the US Constitution. That stone is “judicial review”- the authority to declare a law unconstitutional. It covers most of the first four lectures after the introduction.

Here’s the short version. Marbury was nominated by President Adams to be Justice of the Peace in the District of Columbia. He was confirmed by the US Senate, but the physical commission was mistakenly not hand delivered. Comes a new President Jefferson who orders his Secretary of State Madison not to deliver said commission in order to make his own choice.

A law, the Judiciary Act, said Marbury could petition the Supreme Court to force delivery of the commission. But the US Constitution seemed to limit the Supreme Court from this type of “original jurisdiction,” it being overwhelmingly an appellate court. John Marshall saw an opening and took it. For the first time in the Western World a court ruled a law “unconstitutional.” The rest is history, or is it?

Glenn Smith says that legislators and presidents have forfeited their own charge to defend the Constitution as they interpret it. He says the black robes have no magical properties, and he points to Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln as presidents who had enough chutzpah to simply ignore the Supreme Court. I think the Supreme Court lost all their clothing in 2000 with Bush v. Gore, and scholars like Smith are pushing back.

Smith is friendly and casual and tries his best to keep his students awake with questions, but it was like pulling teeth. I found the course a revelation and found new and better reasons to be skeptical. Smith at times does seem to have an agenda. But more often he imparts what most of us love about the law-“Reasonable minds can disagree.”

Yale University, EVST 255 Environmental Politics and Law, John P. Wargo

2011-11-19T19:39:00.001-06:00

Sometimes you just can’t stay positive. This course has given me fits. I listened to it some time ago and could not figure out what to say about it. Usually when I don’t like a course I simply ignore it. This one, however, begs comment.

First, I must say I do not disagree with any of John Wargo’s basic premises or issues covered in the course. Also, John Wargo is a likable, easy going teacher, who is very well qualified to teach this content. I also learned a lot, but now I’m not sure how much of that to trust. I have not read his books.

My basic problem with this course also covers many other “survey” courses. They are like the North Platte River in Nebraska, two miles wide and two inches deep. Wargo’s content is all over the place: toxic military waste, air quality, water, food, nuclear, vehicle emissions, tobacco, plastics, property rights, land use planning, alternative energy and environmental legislation. So nothing gets covered in enough depth to make an impact.

My second objection is that he is preaching to the choir. Except for a few truck drivers, we all get it. We are now far beyond the introductory phase of environmental awareness. Now comes the nitty gritty hard choices of how to implement and actuate. Now we need courses that explore in-depth the facts and issues that Wargo only touches. Actually, that is exactly what we already have. Consider these:

- Kelly Brownell at Yale has the best course on food anywhere. Psych 123, The Psychology, Biology and Politics of Food, which I reviewed on May 16, 2010.

-Robert Wyman at Yale with a sobering course, MCDB 150, Global Problems in Population Growth which I reviewed on March 28, 2010.

-Stephen Mayfield at UCSD with BIBC 140, Introduction to Bio-fuels, reviewed by guest reviewer Saeed Ahmed here on May 22, 2011. (This course is sadly no longer available from UCSD.) Mayfield is involved in the research of several bio-fuel tecnologies. I just read that several airlines are testing a fuel blended with bio-fuels. There have been eighteen test flights so far-the last one with passengers.

UCSD has seven environmental/ecology courses available right now. Berkeley and other universities have scores more. But ideally, environmental education should be incorporated as appropriate into all subjects in K-12 and beyond, and I think we are on our way to achieving that goal. (Fifth graders are perhaps our most avid environmentalists.)

There is another difference between Wargo’s course and the ones mentioned above. Whereas Wargo’s lectures tend to be a laundry list of what's wrong with the world, the others end up pointing to solutions. This is not so much a reflection on Wargo, but the nature of courses that don’t explore a subject in-depth.

Wargo does cover wind power, although not very well, but I haven’t found anyone who has. It occurs to me that perhaps truck drivers are among the select Americans who realize just how many wind generators there are out there. Solar energy may have been mentioned, but that’s about all.

John Wargo conducted a study about the harmful effects of diesel exhaust fumes from school buses. Also, he was involved in a study of trucking on Interstate 95 in New England at the time of this course in Spring of 2011. Many truck drivers just roll their eyes when university professors get mentioned. They think professors are out of touch with reality and basically don’t know what they are talking about. Unfortunately, John Wargo fits that mold all too well when it comes to big trucks. Let me explain.

Wargo states that semi trucks run 24 hours a day because they have to power their refrigerated trailers. Actually, ALL temperature controlled trailers have their own power source. These power units are easy to see on the front of every trailer or van. And only a small percentage of trailers are refrigerated. Many big trucks do idle far too much but only to provide heat and cooling to the cab. Now comes the story that should have been included in this course. The high price of diesel fuel has made truck owner-operators and truck company executives unlikely environmentalists. With cheap diesel, idling was the easy solution. But it no longer makes sense to use a huge engine and $40.00 in fuel to heat or cool a closet-sized bunk for one 10 hour period. The solution is called APUs - auxilliary power units. They are mostly small diesel generators, but some are battery powered systems that keep truck drivers cozy and cool. A growing percentage of the 1.3 million big trucks in the US have these units, and they recently became a factory option. They are the only practical solution to avoid violating no-idle laws in much of the country.

But that’s not what really got my feathers ruffled. Somehow John Wargo got some more bad information. He states repeatedly that big trucks last up to 30 or even 35 years. He says diesel engines can last up to 5 million miles. You can now roll your eyes. This is sheer poppycock! His point is that old polluting diesel engines will be around a long time.

The biggest issue in most environmental questions is “How good is your information?” Exaggerating and twisting data to make a point is still around, but this information is off the charts. There simply are no 30-35 year old trucks on the road and there are no trucks working today that will be on the road in the year 2046. Here are the facts. Swift Transportation and Crete Carrier Corp. both advertise an average fleet truck age of 24 months. Celedon Trucking advertises a fleet truck age of 1.3 years. The trade-in point for most truck companies is 500,000 miles. That’s when warranties run out. That's when the manufacturers know the trucks will break down. Wargo’s point is not only wrong, it goes in the wrong direction. Semi trucks would be more environmentally friendly if they reliably lasted 10 years and a million miles. The enormous energy costs of manufacturing the trucks would be amortized far better. Today’s engines are cleaner and more efficient and can last more than 500,000 miles, but everything else under the hood finds ways to fail. Metal does not age well.

After several careers, I’ve been driving a big truck around the US and Canada for nine years. The first half of that time I listened to books on tapes. Since then I’ve listened to university podcasts. I’ve treasured the free time to spend on my re-education. All that is to say that the only reason you are reading this is because my five-year-old big truck is broken down. I’m in a motel room waiting on parts. This was in me and it had to come out. I just needed the time and a little motivation.

Postscript

I've often wondered where all the used trucks go. I don't really know. Some are exported to be nursed into more service (but still not 5 million miles worth.) How much recycling goes on, I also don't know but surely bulk metal gets melted down.

UC Berkeley, Legal Studies 140: Property and Liberty, Robert B Brown

2011-11-07T10:54:00.002-06:00

“Fish are always the last to see the water.” That’s how Professor Brown describes the difficulty in grasping the nature of this course. We live in a sea of property but never think of property as a singular concept. And what does liberty have to do with property? Brown shows how they are almost alter-egos engaged in a tug of war. Property rights have limits. Liberties have limits. How they dance together is the subject of this course. Actually, the title of the course could be “Property, Liberty and Government.” Government, or at least social mores, is a big part of the course. It is the rope in the tug of war.

Robert B Brown is extraordinarily well qualified to teach this. He is primarily a historian, but he practiced law at some point. His lectures are clear and easy to follow. Nothing is really difficult except reorganizing how your mind looks at the world. The course involves huge swathes of history, philosophy, economics and political science. Western ideology is the focus but native systems in America and New Zealand are examined. Alas, there is very little on Eastern property or liberty.

The first two lectures are an extended introduction, but not the boring kind. Brown goes back to William the Conquerer, giving a solid look at the English property system. The role of women in property in “Pride and Prejudice” is covered at length in Lecture 2 and near the end of the lecture Brown begins with John Locke, who is the founding father for the course. Next come Blackstone, Rousseau, Marx, Mills, Thornstein Veblen, Henry George and Milton Friedman. Veblen is the rock star who tells it like it is. Since all these guys are viewed through the same lens, their distinctions really stand out. Also, there are many other contemporary scholars examined throughout the course. Berkeley students have some heavy reading.

Brown’s lectures are topical but he consistently goes back to the philosophical underpinnings. There are also perhaps a dozen notable court cases examined in detail. Here are some of the topics: American Revolution, Native American property systems, colonialism, slavery, the tragedy of the commons, property and poverty-homelessness, government regulation, eminent domain, Oregon land-use laws, environmental conflict, copyrights, patents and the internet.

The course builds on itself, but there are two possible stand alone lectures. In Lecture 21 Brown gives a summary of the book “A Good Forest for Dying” about the conflict between Earth First and Pacific Lumber concerning the cutting of redwood trees in Humboldt County, California, in the nineties. And the final lecture about the internet gives new meaning to property and includes a rousing conclusion to the course.

This course is entirely unique. It’s a wonderful marriage of theory and application. Moreover, it really does describe the world we live in.

"A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-45" by Vasily Grossman

2011-10-21T16:37:00.006-05:00

The facts are clear, and historians agree, that the Red Army deserves most of the credit for defeating Hitler. However, it's not what historians say, but rather how much time they give a subject that really counts. And in the West the time limit for coverage of the Eastern Front is under two minutes. This is a gross injustice to the 24 million war deaths in the Soviet Union. By the time the Allies landed in Normandy, Hitler had been been retreating on the Eastern Front for eighteen months. I've said before, and I don't mind repeating, that the Battle of Stalingrad was the turning point in WWII and indeed the 20th century. Everything before led to it. Everything after followed.

I've just discovered Vasily Grossman. His two major novels ("Life and Fate" and "Everything Flows") surely deserve the accolades they receive but I've only read "A Writer at War". This book contains four years of Grossman's notes and some letters masterfully blended with a flowing commentary by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova. This is source material we ordinary people rarely get to see. There is only one set of eyes between the reader and the trenches and it tells the story of the Eastern Front with amazing clarity.

Like most everyone, Grossman signed up for the army when Hitler invaded. Unfit as a soldier and with some recognition as an author, Grossman was assigned to the front as a correspondent for the official Red Army newspaper which was also widely read by civilians and by Stalin. His articles were popular and he became well known. After the carnage of Stalingrad, Grossman followed the army west interviewing civilians and telling their stories as well. Until this time Grossman's status as a secular Jew seemed barely relevant. Then the reality of mass exterminations became clear. Grossman interviewed eyewitnesses at Treblinka and other extermination sites. He was the first to reconstruct the horrors and his writing here is careful, painful prose that simply tells what he found.

It is generally agreed that it was only Stalin's death in 1953 that spared Grossman's life. His novels were suppressed in the USSR until the 1980's, but even now he is not celebrated in Russia. He has a daughter who is eighty years old living in a Moscow flat surrounded by his life's work.

Note: Antony Beever is the author of "Stalingrad-The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943. It is excellent.

Photograph from Wikipedia. Vasily Grossman in Schwerin, Germany 1945

Columbia University, W3903 History of the World Since 1500 CE, Richard Bulliet

2011-10-20T23:15:00.004-05:00

Professor Bulliet has returned to complete this two semester course on world history. (See my Jan. 4th review of the first semester.) As one of the authors of the world history textbook,"The Earth and its Peoples" Bulliet has spent many years contemplating how to approach this subject. As he says, "This course presents and at the same time critiques a narrative of world history..." Trying to eliminate bias, trying to give equal coverage to all peoples turns out to be practically impossible, but these same issues are wonderful tools for exploring history. This is a major part of the course.

But these lectures are not out of the text. Bulliet assumes we know the standard version. The lectures impart themes and insights from over fifty years of research by one of the best history professors anywhere. So you never know what's coming and you'll never hear it anywhere else. When Congress or the media needs to be informed about Iranian issues they call Richard Bulliet, the acknowledged scholar. But I haven't been able to detect where Bulliet's knowledge runs thin. He has read more books than anyone I know, not to mention the fifteen he has written. And although he will be retiring soon, his ideas are fresh and fluid. Listening to him lecture is a privilege.

Professor Bulliet gives high praise to Charles C Mann's new book "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created." It has been selling well and will probably surpass Mann's previous work "1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus".

This course is available from iTunesU and from YouTube. Tip: on YouTube in the top right hand corner choose...Sort by: "Upload date".

Yale University, Hist 116 The American Revolution, Professor Joanne B Freeman

2011-07-21T16:38:00.008-05:00

This is one of the ten new courses offered by Yale and it's outstanding! (Just search "open yale courses.")There are twenty-five fifty-minute lectures, each one carefully prepared and beautifully delivered by Professor Freeman. Her goal is to impart a realistic portrait of the American Revolution embedded in the years 1760 to 1790. Freeman teaches history and how to think about history.

Joanne B Freeman has been at Yale since 1997. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1998, and before that she worked as a public historian at the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress and other institutions. Her 2001 book "Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic" won 'Best Book of the Year' prize in 2002 by the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic. She also edited "Alexander Hamilton: Writings" in 2001. Yale was impressed and promoted her to full professor in 2002.

Freeman fits well into a stellar cast of Yale history professors such as David Blight and John Merriman. She too has that wonderful combination of passion and intimate knowledge of her subject. She adds subtlety to the founders descriptions with her humor and her "reading between the lines" as in Madison's response to Jefferson's proposal to write a new Constitution every 21 years, "Yea, right!" But her portrait of how ordinary citizens were drawn toward revolution is the core of the course. What I got was not only new interesting details, but the human psychology of the Revolution. I had something of a eureka insight.

On March 14th 2009 I posted a review of of a course from UCSD on "Changes in Modern South Africa" by Professor Ivan Evans. (It, like most of their older courses, is sadly no longer available.) Evans is a South African, Coloured, who received his undergraduate degree from the University of Western Cape, South Africa, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the U. of Wisconsin, Madison. He spent time in South Africa during the volatile final years of the apartheid regime. Speaking personally about that experience he said, "I've never felt so alive." Those words stuck fast. During this course they came back to me to summarize, I think, what Freeman was describing as the mind-set of founders and citizens alike in 1776. The whole population was involved in a special moment of history and they knew it. They knew that no matter what happened nothing would ever be the same again.

Freeman teaches a follow-up course beginning in 1790. Hopefully, Yale will share that one too.

Yale University, Early Modern England: Politics, Religion, and Society under the Tudors and Stuarts (Hist. 251) Professor Keith E Wrightson

2011-06-22T21:40:00.018-05:00

AND A BOOK BY CAROLINE ELKINS "IMPERIAL RECKONING: THE UNTOLD STORY OF BRITAIN'S GULAG IN KENYA"

I like everything about this course. Professor Wrightson has been researching, writing and teaching this content for 40 years. Listening is a privilege. Students do not ask questions here; there is no reason for questions when lectures are this well designed, smooth and complete. And Wrightson's Cambridge accent makes this course, well, perfect.

Only one third of the course is top down, kings and queens and government. Most of the lectures are themes digging into the nitty-gritty daily life in England between 1500 and 1700. Some of these are: Witchcraft and Magic, Crime and the Law, Popular Protest, Education and Literacy. Economics is covered in several lectures and is a strong element of the course as there were tremendous changes in industry and trade. Another theme is the tug of war between Monarchy and Parliament. And of course religion plays the lead in most of the conflicts.

As I was listening to this course, I was also reading "Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya" by Caroline Elkins. Spending my days listening to Wrightson and my nights reading Elkins was surreal. I think it's safe to say that every lecture in this course makes reference to the rule of law, the desire for individual rights and for liberty. Every page of Elkin's book is about tyranny, slaughter, enslavement, injustice, and unbelievable torture. The most remarkable thing about Elkin's book is that this story has never been told. Mau Mau, I thought, was a bloody but brief uprising in which 32 settlers were murdered in the early 1950. That it covered eight years and perhaps seventy thousand deaths, that unspeakable torture of men, women and children was institutionalized on a huge scale is mind-numbing. That it was carried out by the descendants of Early Modern England is a disconnect. Early Modern England was a society admirably constrained by laws and its very effective judicial system. In the 1950's their sons lost it, shooting Africans at random and administering torture that would have shocked their ancestors.

The following excerpt from "Imperial Reckoning" is from an interview with a settler who joined the Kenya Regiment, a volunteer militia of several thousand. "We knew the slow method of torture (at the Mau Mau Investigation Center) was worse than anything we could do. Special Branch there had a way of slowly electrocuting a Kuke-they'd rough up one for days. Once I went personally to drop off one gang member who needed special treatment. I stayed for a few hours to help the boys out, softening him up. Things got a little out of hand. By the time I cut his balls off he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket. Too bad, he died before we got much out of him."

Elkins book has been controversial, mostly because she says the numbers of deaths could be as high as 100,000 to 300,000. But that is not the point. (The British destroyed all records so we will never know the numbers.) The main point of the book is that torture and murder was British policy over many years. Rule of law was discarded like old shoes. I also found it interesting that the The New York Times and others reviewers took exception to Elkin's reference to Kenya's colonial society as rife with sex and drugs, as though such things were impossible. In fact, the settlers' debauchery is well known and a staple chapter in Kenya's history. I've read stories that would make Keith Richards blush.

Elkins is a Professor of History at Harvard. She graduated magnum cum laude from Princeton and went on to Harvard for her Ph D. "Imperial Reckoning" won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. She continues to research, write and teach this history.

"Imperial Reckoning" was the second of three books I've just read about colonial Africa. The first was "King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa" by Adam Hochschild. I can highly recommend it. My third and current read is "A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962" by Sir Alistair Horne which was first published in 1978. It is compelling and very relevant today. I grew up in South Africa in the 1950's and I'm still reflecting on those memories. I may have more to say about these books in future posts.

Postscript (June 24, 2011)
I just watched a (2007) YouTube lecture by Caroline Elkins entitled "Colonial War Crimes in Kenya: Prospects for Reconciliation." In person, so to speak, Elkins is even more impressive as a scholar, a speaker, and perhaps a force. Her book has opened wounds that have festered for 50 years. Families and governments are coming to terms with these revelations. The story continues, but now perhaps, the healing can begin.

Two Courses on the History of Photography: UC San Diego, VIS 158 by Siobhan Arnold; and Photo 1105, College of DuPage by Jeff Curto

2011-06-07T18:07:00.013-05:00

These are both excellent courses. They cover the same content; both professors are experienced teachers as well as working photographers. I listened to Arnold's course first, took notes, and looked up images at night online. I bought the textbook-used from Amazon, and was ready to write a glowing review when I discovered Jeff Curto at College of DuPage. Now I have no choice but to give the nod to Jeff Curto as the better course. It's simple. He has pictures.

Curto's podcast is enhanced. All the slides he shows his class are embedded in the audio as well as being available on the course web page (photohistory.jeffcurto.com). But I also found several other reasons to go with Curto. He's more personable, more engaging, and more freely expresses his views and opinions. This gives the lectures "purchase." He's been teaching this course for 27 years and it shows. Both professors described the event in 1936 when Dorothea Lange captured the "Migrant Mother" photograph. But Curto also gives us a photo made in the seventies of the same migrant mother with her children, and an audio interview with her describing the 1936 event.

Curto races through a chronological history of photography in the first few lectures and follows with thematic lectures. In lecture six, Curto explores the interaction between "Photography and Painting." This lecture is nothing but revelatory. Curto quotes Picasso "When one sees what one can express with photographs, it becomes clear that some things are no longer the task of the painter. Why should the artist insist on portraying something that could be captured just as well by the camera. That would be stupid. Photography has come forward just at the right time to free painting from all literature, from the anecdote and even from the object......Shouldn't painters use their newly won freedom to do something different." Wow, photography gave us Picasso and all that followed.

I downloaded Curto's lectures from iTunes and I occasionally lost the enhanced slides. Downloading directly from the course page may be better. One more Curto caveat, don't listen to the first 1hr 50min of the first lecture. There's no content. It's just a long, boring, introduction to a spectacular course.

These courses are 50% history, 70% art and culture, and 30% technology. One need not have any interest in making photographs to thoroughly enjoy the courses. On the other hand, they are probably the most important courses for someone who is interested in making photos. There are vast resources online but this material is fundamental, a prerequisite to all technical courses.

Unlike everything digital, photography was born fully formed. Even the earliest daguerreotypes had amazing detail as did photos from the wet plate colodion process. Classes in these techniques are growing. Retro processes are now popular with both professional and amateur photographers. It's an interesting phenomena here in the middle of the digital explosion.

If I had listened to Curto's course first, Arnold's course may have had more traction. The content is very similar. However, in Arnold's last lecture, she gives a list of "who's who" in contemporary art photography, many of whom are not mentioned by Curto. It's a good stand alone lecture.

These are courses that will touch your life.

Photo: FSA photo by Rondale Partridge of Dorothea Lange in 1936 (public domain)

Guest Review by Saeed Ahmed: University of California San Diego, BIBC 140: Introduction to Biofuels, by Stephen Mayfield.

2011-05-22T20:34:00.005-05:00

(When I first saw this course I saw it only as an introduction to biofuels and passed it over. But Saeed, an accomplished university podcast connoisseur, says the content includes climate, energy and food. Saeed also says that this is an important course, that it is riveting, but most critically, it may disappear very soon as UCSD courses often do. I am downloading these lectures immediately. Saeed Ahmed is a psychiatrist living in Pennsylvania.) Baxter Wood

Despite the fact that food and energy are probably the two most important "things" (after air and water) for us to live, a remarkably small number of available academic podcasts have focused on these. Classes on environment may mention or perhaps spend a few lectures on these, but in general these don't get a comprehensive treatment. Furthermore, it is shocking how few non-academic podcasts are devoted to these topics, although you'll find science podcasts will cover these sporadically.

It may be of some interest to podcast listeners to check out BIBC 140: "Introduction to Biofuels" by Stephen Mayfield, currently offered from UCSD. As with other UCSD podcasts, if you are interested in this, get it now, before it disappears (although I hope it is one of the one's
they retain.) Both the material and delivery are excellent.

Everyone has heard of global warming by now (despite the best efforts of Fox News), but how many people realize that this is the century when many things we take for granted will start to run out. Peak oil in the US occurred in the 1970s, and worldwide peak oil is probably occurring now (there is some dispute about this, because for a variety of reasons, oil-producing countries and companies are not very transparent about the reserves they control). But peak oil isn't all we have to worry about: there is peak coal, peak gas, and peak phosphorus. Peak phosphorus? Turns out it may become one of the rate limiters in food production. Food and fuel are tied together more than ever before. The reason food is comparatively cheap is because of fossil fuel. Locavores, the movement toward locally produced foods, may be on to something, despite what some pundits say. The pundits discount the transportation element, which is going to become much more expensive. On the flip side, renewables aren't cost effective yet. But things are improving. Storage, intermittency, and grid issues limit growth here. At some point, in the not too distant future, they will catch up economically.

Mayfield covers these topics and their interrelationships systematically and comprehensively, occasionally with the help of other lecturers. It seems that, given where we are in the early part of the 21st century, we may all benefit from learning about this material (even if much of it is very scary). In addition, I believe that after listening to these lectures many items in the news and market trends become much more comprehensible, and often faulty analyses by media talking-heads become more apparent.

Harvard University's Extension School, Computer Science E-7, Exposing Digital Photography, Dan Armendariz, Instructor

2011-04-17T21:29:00.002-05:00

At minute 38 in the first lecture, light bulbs went off in my head and before the end of the lecture I had decided on a plan. Dan Armendariz strongly and repeatedly advised his students not to buy a new digital SLR camera. He suggested going back a couple of generations and buying a used, mid-level professional Canon or Nikon SLR. Buying "used digital" anything had never occurred to me, but I'm now the new owner of a like-new Canon EOS 30D purchased on eBay. Mr Armendariz also convinced me to buy a sweet little lens, Canon's EF 50mm f/1.8. These two purchases cost less than my Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H9 which is dying after two years.

This course is downloadable. It is eleven lectures, each about 110 minutes long. Dan is in the unenviable position of having to start from ground zero, even though many of his students are not newcomers to photography. But he quickly advances to really interesting details in equipment, exposure, software tools, histograms, color and more software, and I think he does this as well as anyone could. I have listened to all lectures, but audio is too limiting here. I now have all lectures in video to view at my leisure.

Photography, I think, is equal parts equipment, skill, perseverance and luck. But sometimes it's mostly luck. The above photograph was taken two years ago. It was one of 33 shots taken from my big truck off I-40 in the Texas panhandle with my Sony. Thirty-two shots went straight to the recycle bin.

Photo by Baxter Wood

Terrence W. Deacon and the Curious Case of Language and Natural Selection

2011-03-26T21:17:00.005-05:00

How did our ancestors first acquire language, and when did it happen? The short answer is nobody knows. Much of the speculation says something happened about 60 to 100 thousand years ago to prime our language acquisition. Some happy genetic accident or big mental bang and we started having village council meetings, painting on cave walls and making lists of things to do. I was surprised to learn that no one had been able to apply natural selection to language acquisition and that many scholars still scoff at the prospect. Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom wrote a paper on natural selection and language but I never grasped what they were trying to say. How did we move beyond the expressions we now observe in chimps such as verbal warnings for "snake" or "leopard" to Tarzan saying, "Jane has pretty hair, Tarzan like"?

In 1997 Deacon published a highly influential book "The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain". At that point Deacon might have agreed with the happy accident thinking, but he is now challenging that idea. In two almost identical video lectures listed below Deacon presents the first clues as to a possible mechanism of natural selection and how it might play out in acquiring speech. I will try to summarize that story. Also, below are other courses and papers by Deacon.

A long time ago our ancestors made their own Vitamin C as most animals do. Then they started eating fruit, providing an external source of the vitamin. Sometime after that, selection for the gene that prompted our manufacturing of Vitamin C went to Costa Rica on a long vacation and never came back. Actually, we still carry around a remnant of that gene called a "pseudo gene". This is "relaxed selection" or perhaps "slacker selection". As one form of selection declined, new selections were needed. Any advantages in acquiring Vitamin C came into play. We needed to know when the fruit was ripe so selection for color vision was helpful. This is the basic mechanism; the next story gets closer to our subject.

This is the tale of two birds: the domesticated Bengalese Finch and its feral cousin the White-Rump Munia for control. In this case, and as a rule, domestication leads to multiple "relaxed selection". Deacon says we homo sapiens are a self-domesticated species. The Bengalese Finch was bred for its color not its singing. But no longer needing to sing for a mate or for any other instinctive reasons, singing selection was relaxed. Now the Bengalese Finch "learns" its songs from its parents. This requires much more neural activity. After only 250 years of domestication, the Bengalese Finch now uses far more and very different neural circuits for singing than its cousin. It's early to be handing out prizes but this could be a major breakthrough. Much of this research is being done in Japan by Kazuo Okanoya at the Riken Brain Science Institute with whom Deacon is collaborating. They have a "Laboratory for Biolinguistics".

Deacon also believes that we acquired language far far earlier than anyone else. Perhaps 1.5 to 2 million years ago. His reasons are no less speculative than those of the 60,000 year club, but they are based on his lifetime of rummaging through brains. He says our language circuitry is widely distributed throughout the brain. Nothing was plugged in, nothing added. We basically have a nice ordinary primate brain somewhat enlarged in which language and symbolic thinking has taken over existing structures. This, says Deacon, could not have happened in a mere 60,000 years. This makes sense to me. But Deacon has overlooked two more pieces of evidence. Literacy is perhaps 8,000 years old. Every schoolteacher, at least in the U.S., will affirm that students prefer talking to writing or reading by a factor that would agree with his estimates. Also, if you search YouTube for Steven Pinker you will find 679 results. Nobody could learn to talk like that in just 60,000 years.

Here are my sources for Deacon.

1. YouTube. "Language and Complexity: Evolution inside out" 1hr 17min.
This is the complete story right here.

2. Almost the same as above is a lecture "Whence Language" 51 min. given to the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquia of the National Academy of Sciences, Dec. 2009. It's on their site.

3. "The Symbolic Species". I recently bought a used hardback on Amazon for $1.97 in excellent condition!

4. Anthropology 1. Berkeley. Audio Podcast. I posted a review of this in June 2009. It's hard to find, but it is currently being taught and I'm going to listen to it again. The Spring 2011 version is missing the first few lectures. This is not introductory content. It's deep and wide.

5. Anthropology 112. Berkeley. Audio Podcast. Deacon is very much interested in the brain and this is all about the brain and language. Without any graphics you need to find some or do as I do and use your imagination. This begins with a tour of the brain. Later there is more than you want to know about encephalization-the size of the brain in relation to the body. In the latter lectures Deacon gives a history of cases of aphasia-various language impairments. Much of his own work and thoughts are reserved for the last lecture which stands well by itself. It's a great complement to the YouTube lecture in No. 1 above.

6. Search "on the human" then search that site for Terrence Deacon. The article is "On The Human: Rethinking The Natural Selection of Human Language". The article covers our subject succinctly but there are 30 responses, some at length, from various scholars with Deacon's replies. This is an interesting glimpse into academic banter.

7. On Deacon's Wikipedia page at the bottom is a link to an interview done in 2003. It's long but it is broken into many topics for quick access. It's very good reading.

8. This one we have to wait for. Deacon's new book "Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter" will be published on Nov 21, 2011. This promises to have what I haven't discovered. Deacon has made a lifelong study of the ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce (see my Jan 9th post) and somewhere I gathered that Peirce is discussed in his new book.

It could happen. Terrence W. Deacon gets a 4 A.M. call from Stockholm.

Harvard University Extension School, Open Learning Initiative, Hist E-1825 China: Traditions and Transformations, Peter K. Bol and William C. Kirby.

2011-02-24T08:33:00.004-06:00

Harvard was left standing on the dock when Berkeley, and many other universities began putting a lot of really good courses online. Harvard still doesn't get it. They act like podcasts are a hole in the bottom of their money bag, instead of one of the best public relations moves of all times. Their online courses are very limited and the history courses are not downloadable. They are "streaming" only. Heaven knows why. Nonetheless, ignore Harvard's reluctance to play and get this course anyway you can. It's overwhelmingly relevant and not to be missed.

This course has 37 lectures, 50 minutes each, covering the five-thousand-year history of China. It is traditional, linear, dynasty after dynasty which at this level I think is unavoidable. With 31 hours of lecture it is still a survey course. It is taught by two professors, Peter Bol and William Kirby. The first two lectures involve both professors with give and take and dialog that I was hoping would last the whole course. After the second lecture, Dr Bol teaches everything through the Ming Dynasty and then professor Kirby brings us up to today. What John Merriman at Yale is to all things French, these gentlemen are to all things Chinese-wonderfully obsessed. Both professors are consumed by Chinese scholarship, each a little more than the other, and I honestly have no preference between them. It is sheer pleasure listening to them.

In lecture 19 on the Ming Dynasty professor Bol takes a detour. At minute six Bol begins what I have to describe as a Richard Bulliet story, (see my Jan 4 post) even his introduction is Bullietesque. It's about smugglers, pirates and silver, tons and tons of silver. It's about corn, sweet potatoes and chilies from the New World. It about globalization, fine porcelain, mulberry trees and silk. It's about 25,000 Chinese merchants in Manilla. It's a crash course in economics and trade. Even Madonna has a cameo. It is certainly a beautiful lecture which leaves me with dueling conclusions. First, Bulliet is so right in his thematic approach to history. Second, we need the top down, ruler driven history in part because that is the way history is taught in China. And this course really shows how that history is still in play in today's China. I guess we need both approaches.

Rob Gifford studied under Kirby and Bol at Harvard and spent six years in China as a NPR correspondent. He published "China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power" in 2007. The book was required reading and an excellent complement to this course. He made a 20 minute guest appearance in one lecture and I bought his book. It is a page turner. He combines history and reflections of his years living in China, with a narrative of a three-thousand-mile westward road trip. It's personal, often profound, often funny and about the next best thing to being there.

After this course and many books on China, I still don't know what to think. And according to Gifford that would put me and the majority China's citizens in the same boat. So much change so fast cannot stay in focus. Four hundred million Chinese have been lifted out of poverty according to the World Bank. That is a huge accomplishment. The infrastructure is also very impressive. What China needs money can't buy. A free press. An independent judiciary. Surely world history points in this direction.

One thing I learned from this course is that with a good phone you can get a good education. It seems one could bypass the laptop entirely and not miss much. And after leaving my Kindle at home I discovered my DroidX is also just as good an ereader.

Photo by Danny Talmage: My bride, Thressa, in her Chinese dress at our wedding reception, Feb 12, 2011

Berkeley, Intellectual History of the United States since 1865, American Studies C132B, History C132B, Richard Candida Smith

2011-01-09T19:32:00.012-06:00

This course comes with my highest recommendation. The content is unique and in depth. Professor Smith is a calm, kindly teacher, and both a candid and a precise lecturer. This is not an easy course. It's full of complex, abstract, subtle ideas, something like a paint sample card with 50 shades of gray. Some of this content I have heard nowhere else, but one discovery, one man, stands out like the Washington Monument.

CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE, pronounced "purse", is surely the most important thinker America has ever produced. He lived from 1839 to 1914, but was and remains, just under the public radar. Smith says that in any other country Peirce's likeness would be on one of our currency bills, and as to his stature and influence, Smith says Peirce is up there with Abraham Lincoln. He is a scholar's scholar. He was a logician, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, cartographer, and much more, but he was also a certified ass. He was arrogant beyond words, in part perhaps, because he was a genius of first order and didn't hesitate to remind everyone of that fact. He founded the discipline of semiotics, the study of signs, in large part by the time he was 11 years old. He also founded pragmatism and co founded propositional logic.

I will risk summarizing some of his ideas and thereby risk making us both sound looney. Aptly, one of those ideas is that our beliefs must involve some active risk or have something at stake in order to be meaningful. I've heard those exact words from Berkeley philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, the resident Heideggerian.

Here goes. People and objects, as well as everything in the universe from the smallest subatomic particle to the largest galaxy cluster, exist only in relation to other objects. Each of those relationships is dynamic and interactive. Objects do not interact directly but through signs. Moreover, each exchange of signs affects both parties. This is not as strange as it may seem. Consider a mother and infant-the baby cries; the mother begins to lactate. In Peirce's words "all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs." Today aspects of this concept are fundamental to quantum mechanics, molecular biology, DNA, neuroscience and perhaps sections of psychology, such as consciousness. Werner Heisenberg credited Peirce as the inspiration in his breakthrough "uncertainty principle". Heisenberg influenced Heidegger, but I haven't found any direct Peirce-Heidegger link.

Between minutes 40 and 42 in lecture 11, Smith gives a potent short description of Peirce on "choice" and "purpose". Peirce certainly believed in choice, but seems to have connected choice to a overarching purpose of life and purpose of the universe! Also, for Peirce everything came in 3's. Triads within triads within triads for which he developed a mathematical proof which apparently holds for some mathematicians today. Did I mention he also foresaw electrical circuits as useful in computation. If we dug him up after 96 years and somehow got him breathing again, he would love the ipad and our venture to the moon, but in many areas of philosophy he would probably be disappointed, and no doubt critical. Like da Vinci, he was very far ahead of his time.

Peirce taught only six years before Johns Hopkins University made up reasons to fire him, ending his teaching career. He had a student there named John Dewey. Peirce blew a sizable inheritance and died penniless living on the good will of William James and others. His only published book was inconsequential. He did publish 10,000 pages in articles, some of which are available online. "The Fixation of Belief" is perhaps the most readable. But he left hundreds of thousands of pages of notebooks explaining his thinking and going into great detail to resolve apparent inconsistencies. This seems to me quite altruistic, especially for a certified ass. It really was all about scholarship. He knew generations of academics would pore over his notebooks. Many of his ideas have yet to be worked out fully, but I found long lists of Ph.D. candidates citing Peirce in their research. Indiana University is the center for Peirce study in America but there is perhaps even more interest in Peirce in Brazil and all over Europe.

Peirce had a wonderfully simple attitude toward learning. In his First Rule of Logic, Peirce states that the first rule and "in one sense this sole rule of reason is that to learn one needs to desire to learn and desire it without resting satisfied with that which one is inclined to think". We desperately need a good biography of the man and his ideas. It's a rich story which includes a whole trunkful of his notebooks lost for decades in the basement of the Harvard library. Perhaps a movie would also be in order. Actually, Smith says that the movie "Matrix" is obviously based on the ideas of Peirce. Right now the best source of information on Peirce is lectures 10 and 11 of this course. Smith has obviously studied Peirce in depth and these lectures are entirely comprehensible and truly profound. I also found that many other scholars such as Terrence Deacon at Berkeley have made Peirce a lifelong study.

Lecture 21 is about totalitarianism. The middle 30 minutes is on Hannah Arendt and I now have to go back and finish her book "The Origins of Totalitarianism". It was a best seller in the 50's; it's well written and not difficult. I just needed Smith to summarize the book and to point out its findings. Richard Candida Smith is a bottomless source of content and inspiration.

Photo: Charles Sanders Peirce from Wikipedia

Columbia University, W3902 History of the World to 1500, Richard Bulliet

2011-01-04T21:16:00.005-06:00

History, according to professor Bulliet, does not revolve around people. But we have all been fed a history dominated by pharaohs, caesars, emperors, kings and queens, generals and presidents. More books have been written about Napoleon than any other person. We read endless biographies of Abraham Lincoln and consider this mainstream history. At the beginning of these lectures I felt something was missing. When I discovered I was waiting for the people to show up, I woke up to the fact that we are simply addicted to history with people in the driver's seat.

Bulliet history is done with a 12 inch roller, painting huge murals of themes such as religion, language, animals, technology, weather and weaving these with the actions of people and cultures. People are always there, but mostly peripheral. Following is a summary of one of his best narratives about waterwheels from lecture sixteen. (Fast forward to minute 32 for the short version.)

Dates are not too important. Generally the story covers the last 2000 years. Geography is also broad. A wide swath of arid lands from Morocco to the borders of China is contrasted to all or most of Europe.

The story is not about who invented the various mills. Romans left their technology everywhere. The story is about why Europe and the arid regions differed so much in how they powered their mills. The mills in the arid lands were small backyard affairs powered by donkeys, camels or horses and used more or less as needed. This system was economical because the cost of animal maintenance was very little. The land provided free grazing. They did not seem to need more elaborate technology.

A thousand years ago in Europe the sun came out and warmed things up. The population began to grow, putting more demand on the land and thus making animals more expensive to feed. Waterwheel mills began to rapidly displace smaller operations including animal powered mills. In fact, it was a waterwheel boom, comparable to smartphones sales in the past few years. The large initial investment waterwheel mills required was provided by landowners and some monastaries, and these investments soon paid off. Land owners hired millers. Millers prospered and moved up in the world. Inside the mills they watched the shafts going round and round and began tinkering, creating new applications, trip hammers for metal and for paper making, sawmills, tanning mills, iron forges,then more and more applications. Not a hundred thousand apps, but just enough to prime the industrial revolution in a few hundred years.

The story is absent people as prime movers. People react to their environment, experiment and do what people do best, improvise. We don't need as many heros or villains in Bulliet history. Bulliet does, however, suggest that the waterwheel story has a lesson for us today. Invest in green energy!

The second part of this course will not be offered this semester as originally planned. Bulliet is taking a leave of absence and will be back next Fall to teach the next 500 years of World History. I'm already wondering how he will deal with the 20th century. I don't expect the usual suspects-Hitler, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt. Perhaps a review of Hannah Arendt's "Origins of Totalitarianism" will be on the menu. Anyway, I can hardly wait.

Photo by Baxter Wood

Some More Thoughts about University Podcasts or The Damascus School

2010-12-05T21:21:00.003-06:00

The most promising new global institution doesn't have a name and if you want to talk about something it really helps if it has a name. So until a better name comes along I will refer to university podcasts and other educational podcasts as "The Damascus School". The name comes from the qualities of Damascus Steel; see my post on Oct 9.

My first point is that we as students in The Damascus School who just listen to university courses are not getting the full impact of those courses. University enrolled students in the classroom, attending sections (discussion groups), doing all the required readings, taking exams and writing papers are the only ones getting it all. Just listening to lectures is perhaps half of the total course. Damascus School students who are listening to lectures plus doing most of the reading and following leads can perhaps gain 75% of the benefits of enrolled students. Studying for and taking exams, however odious they may be, does promote learning. My main point is we should not delude ourselves into thinking that by merely listening to a course, we "took" the course.

The biggest advantage of The Damascus School is the ability of the student to control the lecture. Choosing the time and place to listen and controlling the "pause" and "backup" buttons are invaluable tools that really do enhance learning. Furthermore, the most effective secret to learning something is repetition. It's not sexy, it does not apply to very very bright students, but for most of us it works beautifully. During the first listen everything is new. The mind is just trying to take it in. In the second listen your mind is primed. It knows what's coming, and it therefore can "think" about it and digest it. The second listen often doubles what is learned.

Here comes the good part, where The Damascus School shines. If you take the same course, the same content, from different professors, learning is not doubled it's tripled. If you take the same course three times from three different professors you get nine times the benefit of taking it once. This "exponential" learning hypothesis comes from my own experience. If it's in the literature, please tell me. However, until The Damascus School came along this type of repetition was not practical.

I experienced this for the first time over two years ago. Gerald Schneider at MIT laid the first layer of knowledge with three closely related courses on neuroscience. To that I added Frank Hanson's Biol. 305 Comparative Animal Physiology at UMBC. At this point I was getting pretty excited about the rich details of the axon, all brand new to me. When I found a third version of the same content, it was like a continuing epiphany. New facts, new insights began bouncing off what I already knew like the ball in a pin ball machine in the hands of a master. Thus, I'm calling this "The Pinball Effect".

There are two caveats to the Pinball Effect. I think its effects are more dramatic in upper level courses with concentrated content. Introductory courses and survey courses need not apply. Also, this effect might be more noticeable in the harder sciences.

Another hidden potential of The Damascus School is the option of students to organize and listen to "playlists". A string of lectures with similar content from many schools would certainly activate the pin ball effect. But there is also the opportunity of selecting lectures and interviews that would juxtapose content-contrasting issues and ideas. This is a rich minefield to be explored in future posts.

It's safe to say The Damascus School provides over a million students with content for their self-directed study (or re-education). It's the best idea the internet ever spawned. Layers of potential knowledge wait to be forged into something beautiful and useful.

Photo credit: Photobucket.com

University of Wisconsin, Madison, Western Culture: Political, Economic and Social Thought, Charles W Anderson. (Course was tape recorded in 1985 for

2010-11-22T10:25:00.004-06:00

This is a remarkable course delivered over two semesters in 1985. It is 54 lectures, each 45 minutes long. Listed below are the titles of each lecture which will probably be more useful than my comments. These lectures are available on iTunesU or search Charles W Anderson, Wisconsin.

Professor Anderson seems to be a good Catholic but he is an astounding political economist and a marvelous speaker. Words and ideas flow like cream in complete easy sentences projected from a rich baritone voice. This course covers the same territory as Pol. Sci. 114 at Yale with Steven B Smith but with more detail in some subjects. (See my review in Feb.) Both courses cover the classics very well. Anderson has many references to Christianity and this might be a strength or distraction depending on ones point of view. I slipped out the side door myself during parts of the lectures on Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. But there is no weakness in content anywhere. In fact for Christian scholars Anderson has very deep roots. From Hobbs forward, Anderson paints a continuous mural of political, economic and social thought. He explains how these themes are manifest in American government and politics. This is by far the best and most complete coverage of Marx I've ever heard. His lectures on Keynes are maybe even more applicable to today's economy than they were in 1985. That this course is 25 years old is all but irrelevant.

#1. Introduction to Political Philosophy
# 2. Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Ancient Israel
# 3. Ancient Greece: Democratic Experiments
# 4. Ancient Greece, cont. The Pre-Socratics
# 5. Plato: The Republic
# 6. Plato, The Republic, cont.
# 7. Plato, cont. The Republic, Statesman, and the Laws
# 8. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics
# 9. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, cont.
# 10. Ancient Rome: Overview
# 11. Rome and the Hellenistic Philosophers
# 12. Roman Stoics
# 13. What was Jesus About?
# 14. Christianity, cont.
# 15. Augustine: The City of God and The City of Man
# 16. The Decline of Rome to The High Middle Ages (400 AD to 1200 AD)
# 17. Thomas Aquinas: The Return of Western Thought
# 18. Aquinas, cont.
# 19. The Medieval Synthesis
# 20. Rejecting the Medieval Synthesis: Overview of Renaissance & Civic Humanism, Reformation, Scientific Revolution, and the Rise of Nationalism
# 21. Machiavelli, The Prince
# 22. Machiavelli,# 23. The Reformation: Martin Luther
# 24. Luther, cont.
# 25. John Calvin
# 26. The Scientific Revolution: Beginnings
# 27. The Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Bacon, and Newton, and the Influence of Their Theories on Our Conceptions of Politics and Economics
# 28. Philosophical Foundations of the American Political & Economic System
# 29. Background Lecture Focused on Political and Economic Transformation from 1500-1650
# 30. Thomas Hobbes: LEVIATHAN; Justifying the Power of the Sovereign Ruler
# 31. Hobbes and John Locke
# 32. John Locke’s Political Economy: The Naturalness of Property
# 33. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and His Social Contract
# 34. The Implications of Rousseau’s Theory
# 35. Contract Theory, and Part I on Adam Smith
# 36. 3 M’s: the Rise of the Middle Class; Mercantilism; Precursors to the Market
# 37. Smith, cont.
# 38. Smith, cont.
# 39. Federalist Papers & the American Revolution
# 40. Jeremy Bentham and Utilitarianism
# 41. John Stuart Mill
# 42. Moving from the Newtonian to an Historical & Organic Paradigm
# 43. Hegel
# 44. Marx
# 45. Marx, cont.
# 46. Marx, cont.
# 47. M# 47. Marx to Marxism
# 48. Marx to Marxism
# 49. John Dewey & Pragmatism
# 50. Pragmatism, cont.
# 51. John Maynard Keynes
# 52. Keynes, cont.
# 53. Contemporary Political, Economic & Social Theory
# 54. Contemporary Theory, cont.

However, there is a big problem with this course. Individual lectures or sections stand well by themselves, but it is the scope of the course that is flawed, and this critique applies to all our "Western" social science courses. Allow me to explain. Hemianopsia is a visual impairment from stroke or brain damage that results in blindness of half the visual field. Victims see half a plate of food in front of them; half their image in the mirror. I'm saying American universities are equally impaired. They see the West. They do not see the East.

The fundamental goal of universities is to produce graduates who can read and understand the newspapers. But with courses like this, graduates cannot follow President Obama to India, Korea and Japan and really understand the issues at hand, because they have in some subjects only half an education. We have high numbers of graduates who when reading the labels in their clothes have no idea where Bangladesh is on the globe.

I'm saying that at the undergraduate level "Western" anything in the college catalog is obsolete. By teaching Western civilization by itself, we imply it is more important and superior to Eastern civilization. That is the take home message even with the best of intentions. By offering a little bit of Eastern and a lot of Western we do no better. By offering separate Eastern courses we still end up teaching "us" and "them". The solution is simple, though traditions must be broken. As there is no Northern Astronomy and Southern Astronomy, no Western Biology and Eastern Biology, there must be no Western History and Eastern History, just World History, just Political Science. (Obviously, there is no such thing as a Western Economy.) We're all connected now. UCSD has actually done this with it's "Making of the Modern World" series of history courses. Richard Bulliet spoke at length about this issue in lecture one of his current World History course at Columbia.

We need to try to move beyond living in a world of unintended consequences.

Conversations with History, with Harry Kreisler

2010-10-27T16:17:00.016-05:00

Rafa, a reader and friend, suggested I listen to some of these interviews. Dara also recommended this site back in January. Now I've listened to seven and intend to take advantage of many more.

Harry Kreisler is executive director of the Institute of International Studies at U C Berkeley and has been doing these interviews since 1982. Now the collection numbers nearly 500 interviews with academics, writers and notable figures. Kreisler has just published a book including 20 of these interviews "Political Awakenings - Conversations with History".

Here are some thoughts on three interviews with three history professors who are prolific and notable writers. I am greatly enamored with two of them. One of them I have written about here and there but never explained my disenchantment.

If you have not encountered David M Kennedy it is my pleasure to introduce him. He's at Stanford and has written several really good books including the Pulitzer Prize winning "Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (Oxford History of the United States)". Looking at this book on Amazon, I was impressed by so many reviewers commenting on how good a writer Kennedy is. I bought it on my Kindle and it is a masterpiece, albeit a long one. Unfortunately, there are no podcast courses by Kennedy and I'm wondering if begging would change that. There is one other lecture by him on the Gilman Lehrman Institute of History site and it is an excellent complement to this interview as it covers the WWII portion of his book "Freedom from Fear".

The Gilman Lehrman Institute site is filled with excellent lectures by our best historians and I have been negligent in not reviewing them. They are easy to find and easy listening.

Garry Wills, David M Kennedy and many more of our best historians are not coming out of history programs but American Studies Programs. I gather that American Studies is a good serving of history with sides of culture, literature and economics. Garry Wills taught at Johns Hopkins for about sixteen years, then at Northwestern for twenty five, and is now professor emeritus at Northwestern. He too won a Pulitzer for his book "Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America". This is a wide ranging interview about his life, his books and his new book "The Bomb: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State". And for no extra charge, Wills offers us the best critique of President Obama I've heard anywhere.

Some time ago when Niall Ferguson's name started surfacing with various and emotional references by professors, I started looking around on YouTube. What I found early on was so damning, in my opinion, I cannot even pretend to be "fair and balanced" in what I'm about to say.

With Oxford under his belt, Ferguson taught at NYU and now hold two chairs at Harvard: the Fox News chair in the History Department, and the Petro Truck Stop chair at the Harvard Business School. Let me explain.

I saw with my own eyes and heard with my ears Ferguson giving a speech on Empire in which he quoted the GNP of Zambia for several years before independence and then several years after independence. He clearly cited the downturn in GNP as evidence that The British Empire wasn't so bad. I flipped my wig and have never recovered. I have to conclude that Ferguson is far too smart to believe this. I must further conclude that Ferguson has already figured out history and is simply looking for evidence to support his theories. After all, if a high school student made that (GNP) argument they would earn a "D". If an undergraduate made that argument they would be advised about the benefits of trade schools.

Throughout the history of decolonization from George Washington to Nelson Mandela, GNP has never raised its head. Everyone understood two things. Revolutions are expensive and no matter the cost it will be the best money ever spent. It is impossible that Niall Fergusons doesn't know this. I don't believe he is an honest scholar. He is a propagandist. I believe his books are written for the sole purpose of selling books. After all, controversy has made him rich and famous.

But you may say that Ferguson seems pleasant and intelligent and makes a lot of sense, and I would agree. That's why I gave him the Fox News chair. Fully 60% of the news on Fox is verifiably accurate. Thirty percent weaves a devious line between truth and fiction. Only 10% of Fox News is falsifiable lies. This is the devil's own formula.

You may also find on YouTube that Ferguson has coined a new word "Chimerica" for a fictional country combining China and America. I happen to know, however, that Ferguson stole this word from a truck driver in a Petro Truck Stop who was pining for the days when Walmart sold only items that were made in America. A Harvard professors couldn't come up with Chimerica all by himself.

I seriously believe that Niall Ferguson has been a victim of his own success. He has made far too much money and has fallen in love with his face on the TV screen. Even if I'm right about this, the real story is that this is an anomaly. Global academia is a bastion of integrity. Our university professors really are the creme de la creme.

Columbia University, W3902 History of the World to 1500 CE, Richard Bulliet

2010-10-18T11:34:00.006-05:00

Our good friend Dr Bulliet is back with a current course on World History to 1500 CE. More good news is that this will continue next semester with the balance of World History from 1500 CE to present. The sad news is that this will be Bulliet's last year teaching at Columbia.

I am admittedly a fan of Richard Bulliet (see my August review of his course on Iran). He doesn't just teach history he includes the history of the history. In the first lecture, (video only) he explains the status of World History in American educational systems and its inherent bias toward Western Civilization. I was surprised to learn that State Legislatures were a prime mover in demanding a more global approach. He also explores the problems with textbooks and explains the approach he will take in this course. This is a brand new course for Columbia and before he retires Bulliet wants to make it an auspicious beginning.

Bulliet does make a passing reference to the U.C. San Diego effort to redesign World History. Their six quarter "Making of the Modern World" has been a big hit at least in the podcast world, and the courses taught by Matthew Herbst are especially good.

I've only managed to watch the first two lectures of World History but I can highly recommend this. I'm halfway through his 1975 book, "The Camel and the Wheel" which explains how the camel displaced the wheel, where, when and why, and that will surely be included in the course.

Bulliet is not a spell-binding orator nor an entertainer. It is the careful organization and the meticulous examination of his content that is the attraction. Moreover, if you spend some time listening to him you will begin to understand how historians work and how they think. It just rubs off.

I did not review Bulliet's course on the History of the Modern Middle East as I intended because my partial deafness and the audio quality of those lectures could not be reconciled. All Bulliet's courses are available on iTunesU and this World History course is also on YouTube.

The Damascus School

2010-10-09T14:38:00.011-05:00

From the center of a developing star it's impossible to know what's really going on, but I have been trying to gather a long view of the educational podcast world. In barely five years educational podcasts have gone from being totally novel to being almost institutional. The question I want to ask and address is this: Is the educational podcast world cohesive enough to be considered a school or an institution? I believe it is.

The educational podcast world is global and diverse but it has the same two components of every established educational institution: the mission to share knowledge, and an established delivery system. Educational podcast students are not randomly scattered internet users. They are like all other students defined as "persons engaged in purposeful pursuit of knowledge".

University podcasts are now so well established there is no turning back. There is also a fast growing catalog of independently produced educational podcasts. Many of these equal the high standards of the better university courses. From these and many other resources students of educational podcasts engage in self-directed, individualized courses of study. Slicing and dicing is allowed.

Now for a modest proposal. Given the above, would it not be desirable for this evolving institution to have a name? It now goes by podcasts, university podcasts, webcasts, iTunesU, iPodU, and many others, none of which really fit. Consultants would say this institution needs a name. Our psychology professors would agree. After all, educational podcasts have more students and more really good teachers than any other educational institution ever.

Names come about by devious routes, seldom by choice. Nevertheless, and even considering the presumptuousness of this suggestion, I want to open a search for an appropriate name for our beloved institution.

A thousand years ago when West met East under dubious circumstances, Europeans discovered an unusual metal in Damascus and named it Damascus Steel. It was, and is still, made by welding, folding, and forging together many layers of dissimilar metals into a product that is at once strong, beautiful, serviceable, valuable and unique. Each piece of Damascus Steel is by definition one of a kind. Perhaps this is an appropriate metaphor and name for our institution. I suggest "The Damascus School".

Two Current Berkeley History Courses

2010-10-09T10:40:00.019-05:00

I'm listening to two current Berkeley history courses that are very good. Both of them dig deeply into their material. Both professors are excellent.

"American Studies and History 132B, Intellectual History of the United States Since 1865" with professor Richard Candida Smith.
This is part philosophy, part history, and political thought over the past 200 years.

I thought I knew what "common sense" meant. But no, it's not "ordinary" sense, it's "shared" sense. Smith also tends to pull up obscure figures I've barely heard of and examines them in depth.

"History 130B, The United States and the World Since 1945" with professor Daniel Sargent.
This is undoubtedly the best coverage of the Cold War in the podcast world. Sargent gives us generous coverage of the big picture and historical details. His contrast between the personalities and styles of FDR and Truman is nothing but profound.

You will become accustomed to Sargent's diction, I promise.

I will probably listen to these courses once more in quick succession once they are completed and post a review of each at that point. I find real time lectures far too spread out. By the time I get to the end of these, the beginnings will be long forgotten. But that is the beauty of Podcasts.

Emory University, Mini Law School

2010-09-26T19:43:00.007-05:00

This is five, ninety minute lectures based on course content from the first year of law school. It was offered as a community outreach event in the Fall of 2008. It follows the example of their Mini Medical School offered to the Atlanta community since 1994 and is also available on their iTunesU site. The Mini Medical School is next on my "to do" list.

The Mini Law School lectures are as follows: State and Federal Court Structure, Religion and the First Amendment, Constitutional Law, Introduction to Torts, and The Financial Meltdown. Apparently the lecturers are Emory's best professors in each field and they are all masterful. In fact, that is the singular trait in all these lectures. These guys are very very good at what they do.

Instead of a taste of law school it might better be viewed in the podcast world as an introduction to the American Legal System. There's quite a bit of history and quite a bit on the U.S. Supreme Court, including the following revelation I had not come across. The Supreme Court stubbornly blocked FDR's main legislation to stimulate the economy. So FDR hatched his ill-advised court packing scheme, which is usually portrayed as one of his biggest mistakes. Even the heavily Democratic Congress rejected out of hand this plot to get around the Court. Nevertheless, FDR got what he wanted when the Court reversed itself and endorsed the legislation. New to me is the fact that ever since this event, the Supreme Court has refused to rule on matters of "economics". Perhaps FDR knew his plot would fail but that his message to the Court would stick. But no one could have predicted that this event cured the Supreme Court from ever again meddling in the dismal science.

Although the financial meltdown lecture is dated, it offers an up close analysis from a late 2008 perspective. Professor Fred Tung seems in retrospect a little too sympathetic with the system. Yes, the intent to offer home ownership to more Americans did play a bit role in the drama, but the road to hell was paved entirely with greed.

Allow me to recommend an excellent book about the recession which has been selling very well. "The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine" by Michael Lewis. In our desire to attach blame, no one seems more deserving than the short sellers who made tons of money as the economy tanked. But Lewis's page turner tells a far different story. They made a lot of money, but many of these characters heroically tried their best to alert powerful people to the impending disaster. Through their stories, Lewis explains what happened, how it happened and why.

This course is the best seven and a half hours of law school. It's all downhill after this.

The icon for the Mini Law School seems to have vanished from Emory's iTunesU site, but a search will pull it up.

Columbia University, W3710 History of Iran to the Safavid Period, Richard W. Bulliet

2010-08-15T19:48:00.006-05:00

Lately I've really enjoyed browsing motorcycle dealers because when the young salesman comes over and eventually asks the right question I can answer, "I've been riding for fifty years!" So when Dr. Bulliet says that he has been studying Iran for fifty years, I understand completely. He also has been teaching this course for 40 years.

In Sept. 2007 President Ahmadinejad was invited to speak at Columbia. I remember being appalled at the introduction given by Columbia's President Bollinger. It was unspeakably rude and will sit beside President Bush's "axis of evil" comment in diplomatic infamy. Bulliet was a prime mover in extending the invitation to Ahmadinejad and I'm sure he needed medication when Bollinger dropped his bomb. This story is covered in the first lecture and Bulliet explains why it was much worse than I realized from the Iranian viewpoint and how it eventually played out there.

It took me a while to warm to Dr. Bulliet and his material. I simply lacked the prerequisites. The first time I listened to this course I absorbed maybe 33%. The second time I got another third and now I seem to be going for a third round. This is scholarship at a very high level. It requires all your attention and should be savored. Bulliet is amazing. He knows this history from every possible angle. He knows all the scholars; he has read all the books and has left his own scholarly impact in many areas. You could say he invented the wheel and wrote the textbooks and you would be right. Dr. Bulliet is a Harvard man from freshman to PhD. He also taught there a few years and taught at Berkeley two years before settling down at Columbia in 1978. He's authored over 14 books, including four novels, and is a noted scholar of Islamic history and institutions. He also has made over 250 media appearances as a Middle East expert, and like all good professors can be found on YouTube.

The early lectures on the wheel and animals are rich. So much so, I ordered his 1975 book "The Camel and the Wheel". Other interesting titles include "Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers" and "Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran". Bulliet loves to get sidetracked into the areas he has written about, but these are really high points in the course. His areas of expertise are legend: the wheel, animals, water systems, languages, religious conversion, weather and many many more. And Bulliet's humor is as dry as Iran.

Bulliet says he is not a neutral party when it comes to Iran because of his long immersion in it's history and culture. (Actually, he's a good Methodist from Illinois.) And yet the material is presented without any agenda, and his own views are clearly stated as such. He also states that he is not a supporter of the current Iranian government but he is "comfortable" with it. What Bulliet and Boroujerdi (see my previous post) have in common is the inside picture of Iran. They understand what is going on and they are not disturbed by Ahmademijad's rhetoric. The West continues to react to Iran as a "spooky action at a distance". The West continues to see it's own hostility as perfectly reasonable and theirs as crazy. But there is room for optimism. Boroujerdi tell us that Iran's population has a mean age of 24 years and that nearly one in three Iranians is a student. That, he says is a recipe for change. The West needs to do two things it finds rather difficult-show good will and be patient.

This course can be found on Columbia's iTuneU page under "Permanent Course Archives". It's a Fall 2008 course. I've just started Bulliet's other course, W3719 History of the Modern Middle East, which is found under the "Year 2008-2009" courses. (There's also some good jazz under the "Recently Added to iTunesU" icon.)

The Persian Perspective: How Tehran's Leaders See the World" A lecture by Mehrzad Boroujerdi on Feb 2, 2010.

2010-08-07T09:25:00.011-05:00

(From the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Institute of World Affairs, Great Decisions 2010)

Profound, eloquent and timely lectures that can change minds and influence history are hard to find. The message in this lecture has that potential. Iran is front and center in 2010 and the world doesn't know what to do with it. Dr Boroujerdi perhaps better than anyone knows all sides of the issues. As a teenager he participated in the 1979 Iranian revolution. Today, his generation governs Iran, he went to school with them, he knows some personally and understands their mindset because "..we read the same textbooks". He is now assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University and Founding Director of their Middle Eastern Studies Program. He has a PhD from American University in International Relations and was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard and the Rockefeller Foundation at UT Austin. He talks to people in Washington. I hope they are listening.

He begins by dispelling five myths about Iran. The first myth is that President Ahmadinejad controls foreign and nuclear policy. The second is that Iran is ripe for revolution. Three, four and five are the various ways the west views Iran's leaders as "crazy people". Later on he dispels the myth that Iran always acts in solidarity with other Islamic states.

In this nearly 90 minute lecture, Boroujerdi shows both sides of the picture in some detail. Iran has never forgotten the 1953 coup and we can't forget the 444 days of the 1979 hostages. But the question is, how much of the policy differences are substantive and how much are cultural and political testosterone. I'd say it's 80-90% puff and bluff, and I think the lecturer would agree. He uses two movie analogies, first Rodney Dangerfield's line speaking for Iran "I don't get no respect", and Kramer vs Kramer, a love affair gone horribly wrong.

The following suggestions will not be used I'm sure, but they illustrate ways of getting around the problems. The west should designate a country, say Sweden to act as proxy in certain foreign policy issues. Iran will do likewise, say with Indonesia as proxy. If that doesn't work then we do what all good American doctors do and prescribe a pill, actually, nose spray-the hormone oxytocin has been shown to generate enhanced feelings of trust and generosity. Stalin tried plying Truman by keeping his wine glass filled at Potsdam, and I would guess there's at least one dissertation on alcohol and foreign relations. Most of the world would like to see democratic reform within Iran. That's the goal we all tend to lose sight of.

What we can do in earnest is study each others history and culture. This surely is the solution. Courses on the Middle East are scarce throughout our education system. When I listened to this lecture I had almost completed a course from Columbia U on Pre-Modern Iran with Dr. Richard Bulliet. However, I was having problems building a clear picture of the material, so inspired by this lecture I went back and started over. Now, Columbia has another course by Bulliet on The History of the Modern Middle East. These will be the subject of my next posts. I was also very much impressed that Boroujerdi and Bulliet seem to take the same positions on today's Middle East issues.

This lecture and Columbia's courses are available on iTunesU, a little hard to find but worth the hunt.

The Brain Science Podcast, Dr. Ginger Campbell

2010-07-05T14:34:00.014-05:00

If you add all the varieties of disciplines beginning with "cognitive" to all the ones beginning with "neuro" you have a very long list. "Brain Science" nicely covers them all. Remember the left brain right brain division we tried to keep straight. Clear that shelf, there's new information. The new research is staggering but there are a lot of new very readable books available and this podcast is based on those books.

Dr Ginger Campbell is an emergency room physician with a keen interest in this field. Most of the podcasts are interviews with authors and scholars but there are several "discussions" of topics and books by Campbell herself. It's all easy listening, easy to follow, candid and very interesting. The podcasts are available both on iTunes and through her site. Her feed has descriptions of each podcast. Far from obscure, there have been over one million downloads over the past three years. Dr Campbell does all this on her own. There are links, transcripts, notes and discussion forums. She accepts donations and some volunteers to help make transcripts.

It's tempting to just pick a few of these 69 podcasts like chocolates from a box. I now wish I had started from the beginning. They do stand alone but listening sequentially would be simpler and turn this into a powerful course of study.

Last August I reviewed John Kihlstrom's course, "Scientific Approaches to Consciousness". It is excellent and covers some of the same topics and viewpoints. Kihlstrom is objective but also adds his own opinions with which I tend to agree. Some of the controversies are complex and volatile and we need guides to explain who means what. Campbell does occasionally express her opinions, but she is more focused on the interview and getting to the content. She controls the interviews but asks simple short questions and give the guests plenty of time to answer.

Here are notes on a few session:

BSP-44 Meditation and the Brain
This interview with Daniel Seigel, author of "The Mindful Brain", combines hard neuroscience with mindful meditation. Seigel came to meditation only in the past few years so he brings a fresh viewpoint. His book also relates his first person experiences in meditation and some of the research on the effects of mindful meditation. His definition of mind is as follows: "A process that regulates the flow of energy and information..." He is very convincing.

BSP-65: Affective Neuroscience with Jaak Panksepp
Jaak Panksepp played the system like Perlman plays violin. He did what he needed to do to get tenure, then he started his life's work. This is a monumental discovery (but as yet only partially acknowledged) that our emotions are found way down deep in our most primitive brain. Our brain is the only organ that is evolutionarily layered and the subcortical cortex goes back before humans, before primates. There, he unambiguously identified and mapped the circuits of seven emotions: seeking, rage, lust, fear, care-nurture, panic and play, with seeking being by far the most dominate. Whereas neuroscience has mostly ignored these findings, psychiatrists find them meaningful and useful.

This sounds like very lab-rat-cold-science-stuff, but Jaak is actually warm and cuddly. He got his start as a night orderly in a psychiatric hospital reading patients charts and wanting to help them. He constantly refers to practical applications of his findings such as more play being needed in our schools. The man deserves a Nobel Prize.

BSP-58: Alva Noe author of "Out of Our Heads"
The full title tells all, "Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness". I had trouble hearing Noe, so I bought the book. The main concept here is straight from Heidegger. We do not exist inside in our brains. We are an interaction with our environment. Heidegger said, "We are always already in the world." Daniel Seigel above says something similar. We are the interactions of three things: Mind, Environment and Relationships.

BSP-20: Louann Brizendine discusses "The Female Brain".
Brizendine's book, "The Female Brain" at the time of this interview was on the NYT bestseller list and had been translated into twenty-one languages. There is a lot of really good information here and quite applicable too. Toward the end Ginger and Louann get into a bit of girl talk. This is enjoyable and often very funny. By now there should be a companion book, "The Male Brain".

BSP-55: Interview with Patricia Churchland

Churchland is a neurophilosopher at UCSD, but her main job seems to be stirring controversy. She represents an extreme view of materialism and reductionism. Basically, saying it's all neurons, all the time, and nothing but neurons. There is no self, no consciousness and no free will. Most scientists are materialists but most leave the door open to the unknown. Churchland calls the unknown "spooky", and repeats that term about eight times in this interview. However, over the past million years, things that are first thought to be spooky turn out to be okay: fire, lightning, thunder, albinism, tubeless tires, ball point pens, how Amazon knows what I want to read and how Google can answer my searches with 601,000 results in .11 seconds. Einstein rejected quantum mechanics because of its "spooky action at a distance". Today quantum mechanics is considered the most successful scientific theory in history.

Controversy is also about the only content in this interview. She gives very simplistic illustrations of her points and doesn't read her critics writings. This is reminiscent of old time behaviorism and will surely suffer the same fate.

The teenage brain, Alzheimer's Disease, plasticity, memory and so much more is covered in this podcast. But again, start at the beginning and skip if you like. Don't end up like me lost and confused as to what I have and to what I have not listened. Campbell has another podcast, "Books and Ideas" and also hosts several other science podcasts at "sciencepodcasters.org".

I just finished BSP 51 with Seth Grant at Cambridge. He manages to explain extremely complex procedures and findings that has neuroscience buzzing. Synapses grew the brain not the other way around. By finding all the involved proteins and working back to single cell organisms he has chartered the evolution of the synapse and how extremely complex it is in humans. This is deep stuff and yet so very accessible.

Thank you, Dr. Ginger Campbell.

UC San Diego, History 2C The United States in the 20th Century, Michael Parrish

2010-06-22T20:50:00.006-05:00

Michael Parrish has been abroad for two years and so is new to podcasting, but he's been a professor at UCSD since 1968! He is eloquent, easy listening and now wears the earned title of Distinguished Professor of History. The only thing wrong with this course is that it's too short and some lectures are missing. Nevertheless, this is all very good history. Somehow he manages to cover topics everyone else has missed.

Really. This is new information, especially about FDR, a period Parrish has written a lot about. Poking fun at Hoover has been an American sport for 80 years, and yet he was anything but a buffoon. He had all the qualifications needed to deal with the depression; it just didn't work out. The country needed a victim and he was handy. And FDR did not shake things up as soon as he arrived in the White House. In fact FDR and Hoover were not radically different in their thinking. Both believed religiously in a balanced budget. Parrish covers in some detail FDR's successes and failures, and says it was his "conservative" economic policies that failed. The alphabet programs we all associate with FDR get so much ink the true picture has been blurred.

Everyone seems to think Reagan was an important president, but I was there and I still don't get Reagan's popularity. Parrish goes as far as to say that Reagan ran huge budget deficits (military spending) to ensure that social programs never had a chance. I don't think Reagan was that thoughtful. Parrish does say Bush was right about voodoo economics. I just can't forgive Reagan for killing Carter's solar energy subsidies and trashing the White House solar panels. Where might we be today?

Parrish gives us a long career's worth of reflection and this may be his last and only podcasted course. Don't miss it, and as UCSD takes down some of these courses, get it right away.

Berkeley, History 151C The Peculiar Modernity of Britain 1848-2000, James Vernon

2010-05-31T18:35:00.000-05:00

About ten years ago two young British historians landed in America looking for work. Niall Ferguson hired on with NYU before worming his way into a big history chair at Harvard. Ferguson is all over YouTube and television and speaking tours and seems to do everything well except think clearly. Berkeley landed James Vernon. Berkeley got a scholar, Harvard got glitter and fluff.

This is straight ahead history, topical and chronological and tightly focused on Britain, it's politics and it's culture. Vernon simply explains what happened, why and how. He concentrates on political themes that are woven throughout many lectures. He does not bother to present all sides of an issue because it's all pretty objective stuff. Vernon doesn't like Churchill and offers no apology. Especially in the later lectures his personal anecdotes add real insight. And Vernon's discussion of his grandfather's experience in The Great War is incredibly moving. As in many courses, I found the twentieth century most interesting. I can remember all the Prime Ministers going back to Churchill, now I have a narrative.

Vernon not only has a great sense of humor, he's funny as hell. He could also teach a pretty good course on "punk" for which he has an affinity and scholarly insight.

Suffer through or skip lecture two's bad mike, the rest of the course is good audio. This is really good history. Forget Harvard, Berkeley rocks.

Wesleyan University, Western Movies: Myth Ideology and Genre, Richard Slotkin

2010-05-31T16:33:00.006-05:00

This course is not what you think it is. It is about Westerns, 27 of them, but it's really about American culture, both popular and political. Richard Slotkin is an highly acclaimed historian who has spent most of his career examining the "American Frontier". His trilogy forms the academic foundation for many disciplines dealing with "frontier" including history, literature and film. The trilogy begins with, "Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860 (1973). In 1985 he added "The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890". Finally, his masterpiece in 1992, "Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America". This course is about the film portion of "Gunfighter Nation". This was the last course he taught before retiring in 2008.

Slotkin has looked into the soul of America and found John Wayne. Like it or not that's who we are. I can't disagree. My earliest memories include a toy "cap" gun, a revolving six shooter with the genuine smell of spent gunpowder from the caps.

The lectures include an introduction to each movie and cuts straight to the post-viewing discussion. Although I had only seen about half of the movies I enjoyed all lectures. Gradually Slotkin makes his case, with frequent references to the history and politics of the times and with a great deal of time given to the film's directors. You could say half the subject matter here is psychology but we're talking Westerns and they are basically "fun" and both students and professor enjoy the movies. Slotkin is engaging, entertaining and never boring. He is a scholar who gives a good deal of credit to Clint Eastwood and little to Kevin Costner.

The final lecture begins with an excellent summary of the course. The Western died in 1973. Attempts to resuscitate the genre failed. Hollywood stopped believing after Vietnam. Instead it morphed into Star Wars and bad Bruce Willis movies. I don't think Slotkin actually says we are in Iraq because of cowboys in the White House; he didn't have to.

Yale, Psych 123, The Psychology, Biology and Politics of Food, Kelly D Brownell

2010-05-16T22:00:00.004-05:00

"Eat food, not too much, mostly plants", Michael Pollen.

This is a compelling and terribly relevant course. When the White House or Congress or the UN needs an authority on food related issues they call Kelly. Kelly D Brownell is a modest, unassuming scholar and an excellent teacher. I get the idea he is the moral and spiritual guru in food academia. He is a professor of psychology, epidemiology and public health as well as the founder and director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale. And he knows everyone. He brings in some stellar guest lecturers who wouldn't do it for anyone but Kelly. In 2006 TIME named him "Among the 100 Most Influential People in the World".

This course is everything you need to know about food. It's in depth, thorough and comprehensive. It's also global and a great follow up to Wyman's course on population. (See my March 28th review.) Topics include: the definition of food, nutrition, global farming, genetically modified foods, the green revolution, eating disorders, public health policies, economics, marketing, food in schools and sustainability Guest lecturers add in-depth looks at food psychology, eating disorders, and big business (Pepsico) trying to do the right thing. My favorite is a powerful and finely tuned presentation by Stephen Teret from Johns Hopkins. He will convince you that public health policy needs to focus on the manufacturing side of the food industry. I agree. It doesn't make sense to fill supermarket aisles with obscenely over salted chips and then tell the public "watch your salt". Salt is at least twice as deadly as automobiles, yet it requires no seat belts or air bags. Last month Pepsico announced it would reduce salt content in its Lay's chips but that still may be too little too late. Regulations are in the works. Likewise, General Mills has announced it will reduce sugar in cereals marketed to children but they also are behind the curve.

The course is extremely objective on issues like genetically modified plants and organic products. Kelly does not tout solutions but rather a full understanding of the issues. Nevertheless, some solutions like farmers markets and gardening are obvious. Yale has a farm. One very important and productive acre. Some issues like the US farm subsidies for corn are explored but without any obvious solutions in sight. Lawmakers tell Kelly they can't even discuss the subsidies. So public education is required before Congress will act. The Rudd Center combines academics and advocacy. Visit their site and subscribe to their newsletter. The issues are innumerable, the solutions complex and daunting.

Since this course (Fall 08) Brownell has co-authored an article in the New England Journal of Medicine (April 30 2009) calling for a tax on sugared soft drinks. There seems to be public support if the taxes are spent on better health and nutrition. Some states like New York are interested but sugar is not going down without a fight. The sugar lobby makes the mafia look like girl scouts. They are by far more powerful, have unlimited money and are more pernicious than all criminal enterprises combined. According to Michael Pollen they have managed to get the US to set the "calories from sugar" limit at 25% of total calories. The WHO suggests 10% and the sugar mafia has made threats to cut the US support for the WHO unless they raise it. If it quacks like a duck....

Brownell speaks so highly of Michael Pollan's books, I read "In Defense of Food" right after listening to this course. It's an inspirational, informative quick 6 hour read, but this course is an education, 27 hours worth and begging for more.

Kelly is not alone. Food academia is much larger and more diverse than I ever imagined. I think the tide has turned and the food giants are now on the defensive. Kelly ended the class exhorting his students to never give up in their endeavors with a quote from Gandhi which I believe is Kelly's own mantra, "First, they ignore you, then they make fun of you, then they fight you, then you win".

Princeton, The Free Will Theorem, John Horton Conway

2010-04-21T10:46:00.003-05:00

This has to be the most difficult blog to date and I still don't know what to say about these six video lectures, but here goes. I dabble in quantum mechanics and philosophy so I've been listening to these lectures over and over trying to make sense of them. They've lead me to revisit other works on free will and to pull up my continuing interest in the philosophy of time.

John Conway and Simon Kochen both Princeton mathematicians collaborated on this theorem in 2004 then with a "strong" version in 2006. I can't really speak to how significant it is or may become but I applaud the effort. The theorem assumes three axioms, all of which have been around and are not controversial but also not fully understood. First is the finite speed of information transfer. Second is the peculiar quality of entangled particles; they always give the same (spin) answer regardless of their proximity. The third is a dizzying array of directions in which spin can be measured and that the answers vary depending on the order being asked. The theorem does not prove free will, it only says that if a person has free will then particles also have free will. Conway does not walk us through the proof step by step and I wish he had. Strictly speaking "free will" only refers here to causality or indeterminacy. Somehow the theorem links the "choice" the experimenter makes, deciding which direction of spin to measure, with the "choice" the particle makes in "deciding" its spin. Conway says the particle has no idea of its (spin) direction until asked and decides "on the fly".

Conway and Kochen make two assumptions that I question. First they assume that free will and determinacy are incompatible. However, there's a long tradition of thinkers called "compatibilists" who beg to differ. But this is very messy philosophy as everyone has their own version of compatibility.

Second, they assume that time is a linear river of past, present and future, as do most of us. Enter Julian Barbour. He is also a mathematician (Cambridge) and astrophysicist (Munich) and he has spent his career studying time and concluded it doesn't exist. This at first seems shocking but I remember when someone, probably my father, told me the earth was not flat and I had to do some very difficult rethinking. My point is this. If Barbour is right the very question of free will, will have to be reconfigured, (along with a great deal of science).

For an excellent introduction to Barbour's ideas, go to YouTube and search "barbour, killing time". This is a new 23 minute well produced video from the Netherlands. Barbour builds on the ideas of Huygens, Liebniz and Mach but with all the advantages of 21st century science. He claims time and motion are illusions created by our limited ability to perceive a totality of "nows". His 1999 book, "The End of Time: The New Revolution in Physics", has sold well. Amazon has had 50 customers review it and most do so positively.

Conway and a lot of scientists spend quite a bit of time talking to particles. It helps. Here is a conversation I had with a photon. It helps me visualize how time and timelessness might coexist.

ME: Hi there, where you been?
PHOTON: What do you mean "been". According to Einstein, I do not experience "time". I have no past, no future. I am very thin and very very long although I have some shorter cousins. I have two ends but no direction. Now let me tell you my perception of you........................(At this point my mind freezes.) Apparently we have no problem living side by side with timeless photons. Scientists at CERN are looking for extra dimensions. Surely time itself should be on the table.

I'm currently reading, "Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point" by Huw Price at the University of Sydney. His main point is that we need to climb outside of time to get a better perspective. Buddhists consider time an illusion. John McTaggart's, 1908 classic "The Unreality of Time" is still the cornerstone of "The Philosophy of Time Society". But Julian Barbour and the authors of this theorem are scientists not philosophers Their work however, will and must change philosophy. Scientists are philosophers with more rules to follow. Indeed, after listening to Daniel Dennett's version of free will, Conway and Kochen seems positively refreshing. They base their conclusions on something a lot more tangible. Barbour now has some laws, which someday I might understand.

These are exciting times indeed.

Yale, MCDB 150, Global Problems in Population Growth, Robert Wyman

2010-03-28T15:37:00.002-05:00

Here is yet another high quality offering from Yale. The course has it's roots in biology but you get slices of just about every discipline in the catalog. However everything points to population and that what this course is about. According to Wyman this course is offered almost nowhere else and that's a shame.

Apparently demographers get to travel a great deal. Professor Wyman weaves his considerable travels into the lectures which are delivered in an easy listening style.He starts off looking at apes. Seems we act in much the same ways. Later, Malthus is covered in some depth and Wyman concludes that with some tweaking Malthus wasn't far off.

Throughout the course Wyman deals at length and in depth on womens' issues. It's a sobering theme of the course with a lot of data and anecdotal evidence. Population imbalances between the sexes are as high as 20% in some places. Sonograms are cheap, available and a huge industry. Many thousands of doctors do nothing else, especially in India. This and many other issues regarding women and fertility make up about half of the course content. Most of the students in the class were women.

The bottom line is every year there are 80 million more mouths to feed. Beyond that the story gets very complicated. Fertility rates are examined in detail as are examples of governments' manipulation in both directions. Demographers love numbers and are very good at collecting numbers but demographers live by a rule that says, don't make predictions that will be realized within your lifetime. There's just not a lot of projection in this course. Nevertheless, the trends are pretty clear, as are the solutions.

Lecture 22 is by a guest speaker, William Ryerson, president of the Population Media Center. Check out their site. I had heard something about this but never realized the enormous reach of these projects. How this started is a great story, (get this lecture if nothing else) but basically they are producing regional television soap operas that run several times a week for years! Using local writers and relevant plots they are "using media to motivate family planning, Aids prevention and respect for women." We had "Leave It To Beaver", but these programs are used with some very deliberate social goals in mind and with the governments' involvement. The Population Media Center is in dozens of countries and reaches tens of millions of viewer. The collection of data on these programs is well done and irrefutably positive.

The final lecture really sums up the course and looks at environmental impact. The most disturbing thing I learned was that the Ogallala Aquafir in the mid west was filled around 18,000 to 10,000 years ago as the glaciers melted. As that water is used it is not being replaced, indeed, the ground itself is sinking in many places. Moreover, the water tables are being lowered most drastically in those regions that supply much of the world's grains.

How did we get in such a mess? Well here's one version that Wyman will surely confirm.

God was nearly finished making Adam and Eve and contemplating some finishing touches. He reached for a shaker with "pleasure powder" labeled on it. He sprinkled some on Adam's genitals and then on Eve's, then some on Eve's breasts and neck and spilled some on her here and there. God then added a little more on Adam then Eve, stopped and said, "Oh what the hell," and proceeded to vigorously shake the rest of the pleasure powder on his unsuspecting couple.

But that's not the whole story. It was a double whammy. You see just before God breathed life into Adam and Eve he open a bottle of pills gave one to Eve, one to Adam, and he might have slipped Eve a double dose, I'm not sure. On the bottle in fine print was written, "Induces a strong feeling that babies are the most wonderful things on earth."

Yale, Pol. Sci. 114 Intro to Political Philosophy, Stephen B Smith

2010-02-26T19:57:00.006-06:00

Stephen B Smith is a mild mannered, smooth talking professor with an incredible grasp of his subject. This is a comprehensive, in depth coverage of all the usual suspects from Plato to de Tocqueville, but the lectures are well suited to stand alone by philosopher.

Here's the breakdown:
Plato 5 lectures
Aristotle 3
Machiavelli 2
Hobbs 3
Locke 3
Rousseau 3
Tocqueville 3

I've always liked Rousseau but after reading the beginning of his "Confessions" I began looking for a good lecture on him. I found three and wanted more. Smith is planning a whole seminar on Rousseau. I started with the Rousseau lectures but became enamored with Smith and went back for the whole course. Here is Plato that makes sense. It's all good though he might have put some lipstick on Hobbs, I'm not sure.

Perhaps the best lectures are on de Tocqueville. He has been referenced by more professors and more authors more times than anyone in the western world. His insights are legendary but for the first time I got the long version of his life and work. This is even more valuable to those of us who have never read "Democracy in America" and who probably never will.

Start with Rousseau or de Tocqueville, you might get hooked and take it all. Once again Yale lives up to it's luminous reputation. Google "open yale" to find this and much more.

George Mason U, Hist 312 Nationalism in Eastern Europe, T Mills Kelly

2010-02-19T21:42:00.005-06:00

This is a gem of a course, really a free trip to Europe. Go to itunes U and at the George Mason University site under Humanities and Social Science you will find your ticket. There's seven lectures and six walking lectures because this really is a traveling class. It's amazing how visually stimulating audio can be. I was there, I saw what they saw, I walked the streets with Kelly and I kept up.

Like John Merriman at Yale, Mills Kelly has resided in Europe and like Merriman that makes all the difference. In both cases you get intimate portraits that only come from years of being embedded with your subject. I can't recall if it was Kelly or Merriman, who while talking to someone apparently fluent in 18 languages, asked them about Hungarian. "Oh no", was the response, "Hungarian is too hard". Kelly is an excellent lecturer and a serious scholar well grounded in earlier European history. This is a graduate course and Kelly employed a unique tool by setting up a blog for the course. Students were required to blog. Very interesting.

You're going to enjoy this.

Berkeley, Hist 181b Modern Physics, Cathryn Carson

2010-02-10T20:52:00.004-06:00

This is a course I listened to two years ago but never reviewed due to my less than stellar recall. Now, a new book on one of the major players in quantum mechanics has brought me back to repeat a few lectures and to review this subject. This course is comprehensive, forty-two lectures on the history of modern science. Dr. Carson is an excellent teacher in both disciplines. She earned a MS in Physics before she got her PhD in the History of Science, both from Harvard.

Her work has centered on the key player in the quantum revolution, Werner Heisenberg, and it's this period that interests me most. The new book however is on another player in the quantum evolution, Paul Dirac, a more obscure but essential figure in making of quantum mechanics.

The book is "The Strangest Man, The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac..." by Graham Farmelo. It's a big ambitious book with an amazing degree of detail, rivaling the recent biographies on Einstein and Oppenheimer. For the first time I understand his role in this complex story and it's larger than I thought. He did a lot more than tidy up the mathematics of the other players. Unfortunately too much ink has always gone to the odd behavior of Dirac. He was perhaps the most brilliant mathematician of all times, he's not going to act like Hugh Downs. What impressed me most was his ability to maintain lifelong friendships and in spite of his sparse conversational skills he lived a rather leisurely lifestyle wearing out many passports. Farmelo does a good job of explaining the math and physics without getting bogged down in it.

Another book on this subject is "Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics" by Gino Segre. This books explores the characters who worked very tightly together in the 20's and 30's to build a new quantum world. Segre is a physics professor at the U of Penn, but this is about the human side of these scientists.

Finally, a book and a blog by the same title, "Not Even Wrong..." by Peter Woit. The book is about the "failure of string theory" the blog reviews many many other issues. Woit is a voice in the wilderness of science. His main virtue is that he has both feet on the ground. If you have read "Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang.." by Steinhardt and Turok, you need to read Woits review of same. He also reviews "The Strangest Man.." in some detail. He is a professor of mathematics at Columbia.

Yale - Hist 202, European Civ 1648-1945 - John Merriman

2010-02-05T11:53:00.008-06:00

John Merriman and I have at least one thing in common, we both own only one tie. (His wife convinced him to dress up for the lecture on the Middle Classes). He's an old lefty made good, perhaps the best American scholar on all things France. He lives, breathes dreams and thinks in French, so I was a little surprised when he explained the unending complexities of Eastern Europe far better than I've ever heard. Likewise, his coverage of the fall of the Soviet Union is profound. He's a little hard on Napoleon but most people are.

Merriman wrote the text for this course, so the normal history is there. The lectures are all color. As a part time resident and frequent traveler of Europe he brings an insiders view to his lectures. It's an absolute honor to listen to a course like this. What we get is a lifetime of scholarship, forty years of reflection and a wonderfully interesting man. On my list of professors I'd like most to have dinner with, John Merriman is close to the top.

Search "open yale" for a smorgasbord of high quality offering from Yale in both audio and video. See my review last April of his other course "France since 1871".

UCLA - Pol. Sci 115c Citizenship and Public Service - Brian Walker

2010-01-12T22:42:00.004-06:00

This is a most interesting and provocative course. Here's the background. After the sixties our education system eliminated all "civics" courses. "Don't encourage them, for heavens sake", seemed to be the reasoning. Bad mistake. Now that we're over the sixties it's time to get back in the saddle and Dr. Walker is leading the way.

I really enjoyed Walker's PS 114b, see review Oct 6th. That was a classic academic presentation of American political thought. But this course, although very academic in it's material, has at it's root - advocacy. Walker simply exhorts his students to consider public service. After some ground work, starting of course with Greeks and weaving in some Confucianism, Walker devotes most of the course to "Seven Paths to Citizenship". These are: -Soldier
-Public Servant
-Politician
-Activist
-Capitalist
-Artist
-Environmentalist.

Next year he plans to add Scientist and Journalist.

Walker put together a makeshift reader for the course and is planning to write a text. Included in his reader is one color photograph. It's of FDR late in life, sickly with dark bags under his eyes. In the "Public Servant" section he pulls up the photo and says like an evangelical, "This is the face of public service. This is what happens when you take responsibility. This is what happens when you worry". I was in the back seat saying "amen brother". Walker promises his students who choose public service less money but "the data shows greater happiness and fulfillment. What Walker doesn't say is that college professors are perhaps the best example of this.

In his PS 114b Walker presents all sides of political views so well, his students were never sure of his own views. In this course as he says, "I try to keep the devil down in the hole but sometimes....". We do learn where Mr Walker stands on many issues, but he always draws a line between his view and the opposing view. He is both academic and candid and that makes it easier to form ones own opinion.

You will learn of Florence Nightingale, who also had bags under her eyes. She is Walker's iconic public servant. Confucianism is threaded throughout the course and is essential since they more or less invented public service. Teddy Roosevelt introduced America to civil service examinations about 800 years after the Chinese.

Hopefully, this course will become a trend. Hopefully someone will water this down and put it in High Schools. Nonetheless, I feel certain that more than one UCLA student taking this course because it "looks good on the transcript" will end up making public service a part of their life's work. Advocacy works why not use it.

Ohio State U - Astronomy 141 Life in the Universe - Richard Pogge (continued)

2009-12-29T21:48:00.008-06:00

This turned out to be as good as I hoped it would be. It's a riveting look into what science will be doing for the next 50 years. It's amazing how much useful information can be gained from such sparse data. Pogge is a spectrophotometer and he actually builds the equipment. In some detail he explains that life has it's own spectrum markers, and that there are also tell tail signs that may tell us what phase of evolution that life may be in. We haven't yet found an earth-like planet outside our solar system but when we do we can gather a lot of data without having to spend 100,000 years going there.

Richard Pogge is the consummate scientist, and yet he kept using a phrase inherited from Sagan that is just plain wrong, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". Sounds good but it's fatally flawed. First, use of the term "extraordinary" is totally subjective, nothing more than a value judgment. What is "extra-ordinary" differs from person to person, culture to culture and even more so from time to time. Second, the phrase "extraordinary proof" is an oxymoron. One cannot arbitrarily raise and lower the bar of proof. To do so is fundamentally anathema to science. What is proof for the goose must be proof for the gander.

This subject is perhaps the most basic of all questions humans ask. Are we alone? Our culture has taken that question and turned it into a huge industry, to the point we can't think clearly about it anymore. Pogge brings us back to reality in a beautifully organized course. Are we alone? Don't bet on it.

Ohio State U - Astronomy 141, Life in the Universe - Richard Pogge

2009-10-27T13:36:00.003-05:00

This course is ongoing but I'm going to review it now even though we haven't got to the best part yet and (I'm broke down in Chicago).

I sometimes question the way universities slice and dice content into new sexy courses. However this one makes sense. Just twenty years ago we didn't have evidence of another planet outside our solar system. Now we know of around 300 and we can safely project that there are tens, hundreds of millions in our galaxy alone. Now the question of 'life in the universe', which we have addressed mainly with novels, movies and TV, must be addressed by science. How do we do that? This course is built around that question. As Pogge says it's not just a question of are there microbes somewhere, what we really want to know is, "is there somebody to talk to".

Pogge is famous for his Astronomy 161 and 162, the solar system and the universe. These are two in depth courses, beautifully organized into self contained lectures. Two gigs of 'the greatest story ever told'. See my January review.

After an introduction, Pogge begins with five revolutions in Science including geological, chemical and biological. Next is a long section about earth and a lot on topics outside astronomy. When you get to know Pogge you know this guy does his homework. So the interdisciplinary lectures are really fresh. Geology is excellent, the story of oxygen is amazing. How did life get started, the magic jump from molecules to a single cell are topics addressed in some depth. Life goes back 3.5 billion years and evolution took forever. We almost didn't make it. Key terms and timelines will become meaningful. With 'extinctions' we're moving into the solar system, halfway through the course.

After years of false starts I'd nearly given up on Plato until I discovered Steven B Smith at Yale. If science has left you a little cold perhaps you just haven't found the right teacher. Meet Richard Pogge. Go to itunesU. Search "life in the universe".

Walker Walker and Johari

2009-10-06T23:46:00.005-05:00

When I started this project in January business was down 30% and I had plenty of time between loads to write. Now, thankfully, for the past three months I've been busier than ever with barely time to go online. More time to listen but no time to write. Nevertheless, I will try to at least document the courses I listen to and add whatever commentary I can.

Here are three short reviews.

Brian Walker, UCLA Political Science 114b (US Political Thinking from 1865)

This is what I love about academia. Walker takes on the "right" and the "left" in a passionate and yet completely objective analysis. His students are required in their papers to argue both sides of a given topic and then give their own opinion. The first several lectures are the best coverage you'll ever hear of the American conservative movement. It's not negative it's not positive it's just what is. The last lecture is on the 60's and 70's, Walker's specialty, and it's not at all what you might expect.

Walker is an excellent lecturer; he tackles tough topics and is always interesting always objective.

Richard Walker, Berkeley Geog 110 (Economic Geography of the Industrial World)

This is a course from Fall 2007. Geography is by definition interdisciplinary. This course leans towards economics. Walker maintains that economics without geography is not good economics. He may have something there. Another contentious claim and one that comes from quite a few professors, regards Mexican immigration. Walker says "tear down that wall" and the sky will not fall. Indeed our economy needs every immigrant. I recall another economist putting a number on the value of every illegal Mexican immigrant. It was around $500,000 net gain to our economy.

Richard Walker occasionally goes on a political tirade which serves no purpose except to embarrass himself. "Obama hasn't got a prayer of a chance". He also seems to abuse his students with far too many slides. If the concept is off-shore banking, the slide shows crystal clear water and some beautiful beaches of the Cayman Islands. Unfortunately the slide reinforces just about everything but off-shore banking. The slides wag the lectures.

Berkeley has another Geography professor I actually prefer but have never reviewed, Nathan Sayre. Any course by Sayre gets my highest rating.

Ramesh Johari, Stanford, The Future of the Internet

This is excellent. It's a continuing education course, four long lectures and one short one. It needs to be four times longer. Johari is young but a great teacher, he never lost me. The course concentrates on the big issues and although it's two years old it's not seriously dated.

He maintains that the 'net neutrality' issue is not as simple as most parties want it to be. "There's problems on both sides". I listened to this course twice and when it's offered again I'll be there.

As pertinent as this is to all our lives and as amazing as the story is, I don't know why there are not many more courses like this. The internet needs the sunshine of academic analysis and we need the insights of Ramesh Johari. The internet works remarkably well. How not to screw it up is the challenge.

Heidegger, All Too Heidegger

2009-08-18T17:10:00.007-05:00

Heidegger is an acquired taste. A very expensive taste. If you have lots and lots of time and don't mind getting little back on your investment and are willing to exercise your neurons till they hurt, then help yourself. Repeating these lectures over and over is required before they make sense, and you will never arrive at a complete understanding of Heidegger. So why are there students standing in the hallway trying to get into Hubert Dreyfus's course on Heidegger? Why does Amazon's Kindle ereader already have 60 books available when you search Heidegger? Why was Heidegger's impossibly obtuse, "Being and Time" so influential? Because what he said was revolutionary and simply very interesting.

There's two courses. Berkeley's Phil.185 with Dreyfus and now a course at Hampshire College with John Drabinski. Search 'jdrabinski.com' and find the "Between Husserl and Heidegger" podcast. But the place to start is a new youtube post. It's a five part BBC interview with a red headed Hubert Dreyfus made perhaps 25 years ago. Bryan Magee is the host. Fifty minutes total, it's an excellent introduction.

Heidegger's brilliant innovation was to get out of the Cartesian confines of 'subject-object'. Heidegger says, "we are that in which we operate", and "we are always already in the world". Existence is to be one and the same with our environment. From this basic premise he builds a complex language and philosophy. Following is my take on a little bit of evidence that tends to support this concept.

Artists develop a style uniquely their own. They also sense that their tools and their art are really integral extensions of who they "are". We go to a museum and we look at a Vermeer painting and we say that "is" Vermeer. Heidegger works! (although I'm stirring in some psychology). The motorcycle rider does not ride on the bike, the bike and the rider are inseparable and one with the road, mountains, sky and sometimes rain.

When John Drabinski was six years old he asked his parents how could he be sure he was not the last human on earth and everyone else was a robot. His father said that he was not a robot and of course little John replied "but that's just what a robot would say". We were all philosophers at six. (Truck drivers are all philosophers but really bad ones.)

Dreyfus and Drabinski are kindly patient teachers. Dreyfus gets down to incredible details. You'll learn some German and realize how arbitrary translators can be. Drabinsky paints with a broader brush. At first I skipped Drabinski's Husserl lectures but went back for them because he's part of the picture.

These lectures have another side effect. Everything else seems so uncomplicated.

Dan Carlin - Hardcore History - Ghosts of the Ostfront

2009-08-18T15:12:00.008-05:00

Anne is supposed to be vacationing but he can't help himself. He just scooped me on this but great minds..... I'm a big fan of Dan Carlin; he's always fired up, well researched and always interesting, but I think his current episodes on the Eastern Front of WWll "Ghosts of the Ostfront" are his most compelling, most important podcasts ever. There's three parts posted and one or more to come.

This story is important because it's not a part of western consciousness. Our history books, our movies and especially Ken Burns documentary hardly give lip service to the Eastern Front. And if you don't understand what happened on the Eastern Front you don't know beans about WWll.

Six months in Stalingrad from Aug. 1942 to Feb. 1943 was the pivotal point in the 20th century! Everything prior led up to it. Everything after followed from that event. Stalin was a monster and that's a fact. That Stalin (with American jeeps and boots and rations) whipped the Germans 17 months before D-Day and by D-Day had them cowed has never been acknowledged. Why? Because Stalin was a monster. We cannot hold these two concepts in our heads. They're like rubbing two pieces of sandpaper together. Perhaps two years ago in an article in the Atlantic on this topic, a brave academic said, "Stalin saved the world for democracy". And whereas this outcome seems heroic, the way Stalin did it was by being his old ruthless self; shooting in the back anyone who retreated. A Russian soldier was captured by the Germans and then escaped back to his company. He was so badly abused when he returned, he went back to the Germans.

I also recently listened to Carlin's three part series, "Punic Nightmares". I had just finished Stanford's short course on Hannibal which seemed to be missing the final reel. Carlin's three episodes are just as good as Stanford's unless you really really have to know which route Hannibal took over the Alps. And Carlin gives the devastating ending.

Berkeley - Scientific Approaches to Conciousness - John F Kihlstrom

2009-08-17T16:41:00.005-05:00

This course is as good as podcasting gets. Two years ago I listened to Kihlstrom's Intro. Psych. course and enjoyed Kihlstrom but got restless with the content halfway through. But this is a graduate course rich in detail, rich in controversy and Kihlstrom brings 40 years of hard work to these lectures. It's hard to imagine anyone better qualified to teach this course. His specialties include memory, hypnosis, social cognition, unconscious mental processes and many related areas. He's taught at Penn. Harvard, Stanford, Wisconsin, Arizona, Yale and since 1996 at Berkeley. His lecture style is relaxed but he stays on point. He covers all academic viewpoints including his own with both candor and conviction. And he has at least three cats.

The problem with consciousness is that we don't know precisely what it is or how it happens. Berkeley's philosophy prof. John Searle, says it's what happens between the time we wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night. So the first 6 lectures are on philosophy, from Descartes and James down to Pat and Paul Churchlands at UCSD. Basically the Churchlands have lost their minds. They believe it's neurons 'all the way down', that there is no mind, nothing we can't see and touch. At the other end are small groups who tend to think consciousness is not only a property of humans but of computers and coke cans; some include pet rocks and the universe.

Kihlstrom is dismissive of both extremes. He believes we have a consciousness and it's pretty cool. That psychology has a lot to say about how the body and mind play together. He explains where the Churchlands went wrong. Psychology has to tell the neurocognitive researchers and neurophilosophers what to look for or they wouldn't know what they've found. Without psychology there is no neuroscience. And to rub it in, psychology got along quite well without high tech scanners (thank you very much). Neurocognitive science has much to contribute but it can't stand on it's own.

Both Kihlstrom and Gopnik (see previous post) cite the same experiments measuring awareness of self in children and animals with mirrors and a spot on the forehead. Children respond predictably at around 18 month (5% at 12 months). Most chimps and orangutans pass but no gorillas except Coco responded and there was some reaction from dolphins and from one out of three elephants in the Brooklyn Zoo. Now there's a cottage industry of these experiments but Darwin started it at the London Zoo with a mirror in the orangutan exhibit.

The rest of the course goes through what we know about the following: Attention and Automaticity, The Explicit and the Implicit, Anesthesia and Coma, Sleep and Dreams, Hysteria and Hypnosis, Daydreaming Absorption and Meditation, Consciousness and the Self, The Origins of Consciousness and Conclusion. Twenty-six fifty minute lectures, all excellent.

Berkeley - Psych 140, Developmental Psych - Alison Gopnik

2009-08-08T21:29:00.003-05:00

I've been browsing for a good Dev. Psy. course and I found it. This covers everything from birth through early school years. Professor Gopnik combines academic theory with thorough coverage of past and present research and adds her first hand accounts into a terrific course. The focus is always on the infant or child and on what's happening at each stage of development. These lectures are vital, always interesting and often very funny. You will meet Gopnik's three sons, her brother Adam Gopnik who writes for the New Yorker and his daughter Olivia and her imaginary friend Charlie Ravioli.

The technical term for the terrible twos is "The Terrible Twos". Gopnik legitimizes and goes into some detail about this period. Then Dr. Gopnik backs up and gives us a first person account of giving birth and her novel innovation, 'gravity assist' combined with "shaking like a bottle of ketchup" when the baby got stuck. And once delivered, Gopnik refused to hand the newborn over to do whatever they do to newborns. Almost a whole lecture is given to breast feeding; it's cheap, always handy, sterile, never too hot, never cold and really really nutritious.

When Gopnik was born about 50 years ago, the doctor told her mother, newborns couldn't see. But the doctors were holding the eye chart 8 feet away. At 12 inches newborns can recite the charts quite well, if they could read and speak. This is really the theme of this course - the development of Developmental Psy. Psychologist are getting smarter, they're learning from infants.

In conclusion she gives the results of 50 years of research on 'early learning intervention'. "The data are as clear as anything in psychology". It works. And it works when the child, the parents, the teachers, the environment (learning, medical, nutritional) all work together.

The lecture on 'emotions' given by an assistant has some errors. Newborns are said to have 'rudimentary' smiles. They're really just muscle contractions that look like rudimentary smiles. And the 'social' or 'responsive' smile does not begin as stated at 4 to 6 weeks but rather 6 to 8 weeks. I have 43 years of my own observations and none other than Charles Darwin's observations of his 10 kids to back me up.

Gopnik has a brand new book, "The Philosophical Baby" published Aug. 4 2009. She began her academic career in philosophy and it's influence seems to have had a wonderfully gounding effect. She's brilliant and makes perfect sense.

Columbia University - Masterpieces of Western Art

2009-07-18T18:36:00.003-05:00

If you think flying buttresses are cool you need to see this. This is a series of videos, eight on the Amiens Cathedral, two on Raphael, one on Michelangelo and one on on Frank Lloyd Wright (which is totally out of place). Available from Columbia's 'itunes u' site under the 'Permanent Course Archives' tab. They are short, all together around 90 minutes.

'Part ll Revelation' on the Amiens Cathedral has impressive 3D computer graphics showing the origins of it's design and it's construction. Watch it going up, see the weak points and the added solution.This is very impressive and suitable for all ages.

Raphael's 'School of Athens' is also exceptional with close ups and wonderful narration.

Another Columbia video can be found under the tab for Courses 2008-2009, "Medieval Architecture". I believe Stephen Murray who is the tour guide here is also involved in the 3D graphics mentioned above.

Also of interest is a course I haven't yet sampled. This is the Intro. to Science courses C1000 and C1100. It looks like both have 'enhanced podcasts', the in-class power point visuals, which really do enhance the experience.

Columbia's offerings are pretty slim but also, as you might expect, very good.

Columbia University - Conceptual Foundations of International Politics (U6800) - Lisa Anderson

2009-07-18T16:19:00.007-05:00

This is a graduate course with guest lecturers and Lisa Anderson putting it all together. It's on Columbia's 'itunes u' site under the 2007-2008 tab, available in audio and video. The video lectures are sequenced correctly the audio, all mixed up. Some lectures like Jeffrey Sacks' are available on itunes.

The 'conceptual foundations' are the three broad theories of international relations; Realism, Liberalism and Contructivism (also called Idealism). Realism is dismissed by some professors, defended by others but these theories are a recurring theme not the core of the course. Each lecture stands on it's own but they are well chosen and well coordinated. Here's several I found outstanding.

Jeffrey Sachs - 'The Future of Globalization' This is probably the most profound lecture in my podcast career. I listened to it in audio then after the course went back to watch it on youtube. Do the video, some of the charts are 'must see'. He shows convincingly that Western hegemony is a product of the industrial revolution and 'divergent' globalization'. Since 1950 and more particularly right now, we are in a 'convergent' global economy. Charts on percentages of world GDP, charts on the population growths show that by 2050 (or later) demographics will go back to what they were in the 16th and 17th centuries. That Western Civ may be a 300 year bubble is a new perspective to me but it fits the data. Sachs also addresses the ecological crises, 'bad but not too expensive to fix' and speaks at length about Africa and his work there. What I found amazing is that he is an economist and an optimist and manages to make sense all at once. Sachs is a special advisor to United Nations Sec-Gen Ban Ki-moon and has been twice named by Time as among the 100 most influential leaders in the world.

Edward Luck - 'Do International Institutions Matter' I understand why American politicians never speak of the United Nations - there's no votes there, but why does academia ignore the UN? Luck speaks to this and goes on to give a positive, optimistic insiders look at the operations and effectiveness of the UN.

Sheri Berman - 'Democratization and Institutional Change' A solid historical background of how democracies have developed with a take home message - democracies seldom succeed in the first attempt.

Stephen Sestanovich - 'American Foreign Policy in Historical Perspective'. Again we have a scholar and a player. An excellent lecture and he illustrates the differences in the three theories in real world applications.

UCLA - History 1c Western Civ - Lynn Hunt

2009-07-15T22:58:00.003-05:00

Before I met 'Anne is a Man' and Dara,'the do it yourself scholar', I spent a lot of time looking for really good podcasts. Now my searches are more like Sunday buffet. They both praised this course and Lynn Hunt's skills as a teacher and I must add that she is indeed a dynamo.

The second lecture has bad audio and I skipped it initially but went back - fortunately. It's on 'the enlightenment', which as Hunt says is "the foundation for the rest of the course". These early lectures are powerful, I found myself hanging on every word, and as Anne points out she gives the best ten minute summary of 'Nietzsche' imaginable. The whole course is strong and totally enjoyable. Excellent coverage of the Soviet dissolution and Gorby.

One of the treats of listening to university podcasts is a form of synchronicity. Professors seem to reinforce each others themes and ideas and reference the same scholars. Hunt shows 20 minutes of the film, "The Battle of Algiers" in lecture. Ivan Evans at UCSD, in MMW6 (Making of the Modern World-20th century) also repeatedly exhorted his students to see this film. I watched it on youtube in 13 segments but it's also available by searching the 'democracy now' website. It's riveting.

Three professors in three days, Hunt being one, dropped the name of Harvard's Niall Ferguson. But here's the rub; Hunt mentioned him regarding WW1 and positively. Vinay Lal and Jeffrey Sacks mentioned him regarding 'colonial history' and in a most negative manner. I don't know what to make of Ferguson but he's on my 'to read' list. Perhaps Tom Waits described him in the lyric, " He's not the kind of wheel you fall asleep at." Actually, that's a pretty good description of Lynn Hunt.

UCLA - Hist 175A - The Cultural and Political History of South Asia - Vinay Lal

2009-07-04T12:15:00.004-05:00

I had high expectations for this course. The first sentence is an intriguing comment that Kabul was a very modern place in the fifties. But Dr Lal who is from northern India states early on that he will concentrate on India because that's where the scholarship is. Actually it's all India all the time. He covers the interminable conflict in Kashmir, the dynamics of the partition but very little about Pakistan itself, 15 minutes on Sri Lanka and absolutely nothing about Bangladesh (the 7th most populous country on earth) and again nothing on Nepal or Bhutan.

Nevertheless this is a great inside look at the history and culture of India since 1947. It's politics, religions, languages, agriculture, industry, castes, classes, rural-urban migration and education. Lal's personal stories of his schooling, his neighborhood add a lot of color. Required reading is a debut novel that won the Booker last year, "The White Tiger". I got it from Audible and it's the perfect read to accompany this course.

Vinay Lal is one of India's best scholars going back to the Indus Valley, but I got the impression that regarding contemporary politics he is not that objective. Comments like, "India is a country with an army. Pakistan is an army with a country", are beneath a course like this. That's truck stop politics. I also have to question why some of the most critical issues get barely a minute's coverage in the last lecture. Lal states that there is not 'a' Taliban but many, maybe 50. Please tell me more. He also states that Islam in Pakistan is very different from Islam in the Middle East but under great pressure to change in that direction. Surely this deserves more than three sentences. Instead we get three whole lectures on Hindi movies.

Finally, I have to call Dr Lal on his ridiculous excuse that he spends the whole course on India because that's where the scholarship is. Baloney! As the White Tiger would say, "What a joke". This is still a worthwhile course, don't blow it off. It's just that it could be soooo much better.

Commentary - Inheriting the Wind

2009-06-20T22:30:00.007-05:00

This has nothing to do with podcasts and yet it requires comment. I'll just call it "commentary".

When I started driving truck in 2002, wind generators were only in California. Trucks hauling the generators or the towers or the beautiful long blades were a rare sight. By 2007 I was seeing trucks hauling them nearly every day all over the country. Meanwhile those blades grew from about 70 feet to maybe 130 feet. West Texas is now home to thousands of wind generators, the most of any state. This may be the only time in my life I say something positive about George W, but as governor he gave a nod to windpower and somebody ran with it. Now, they're growing like weeds in dozens of states.

Today, for the first time, halfway between Dallas and Amarillo, I saw a train with a load of wind generator blades, the long ones. I tried counting but failed. It was the train's only cargo, perhaps 60 blades loaded in pairs on every other flat car.

It took my breath away, warmed my heart. Somebody is spending a lot of money. As Obama has been preaching, capitalism and green power can make a beautiful marriage. Looks like they are getting along famously.

Berkeley - Intro to Biological Anthropology - Terrence Deacon

2009-06-20T21:20:00.004-05:00

Don't let the "intro" tag fool you, this is in-depth science from a luminary; 32 lectures, each 75 minutes long. It begins with evolution and genetics, moves to evolutionary behavior of primates and great apes then to the fossil records of our ancestors, nature and nurture issues and then what makes us human. Terrence Deacon is a '84 Harvard Ph D. He taught there for eight years, moved to Boston University then to Berkeley as Professor of Biological Anthropology and Neuroscience. His primary area of research is how we acquired language and his '97 book "The Symbolic Species - The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain", continues to be highly influential in the field. So when you get to the language lectures you're listening to the man who knows as much as anyone, and that's a privilege. But what continued to impress me is how much he knows about, well, everything.

The early lectures are a fresh presentation of evolution and genetics; I found nothing repetitive, although I've been down that road many times. He shows a lot of videos with good sound so with only audio you can follow nicely. The later videos of language with chimps, I was able to easily find on youtube. And while on youtube check out "Shatner goes Ape over Koko the Gorilla". "Love" is a complicated word indeed.

Coverage of our ancestor's archeology is excellent, and for the first time the various time lines began to settle in my mind. Whenever I felt I needed some visuals, Wikipedia came to the rescue.

It seems we are stuck with a biology that is mostly 100,000 years behind our times. We've outpaced evolution and now live in a foreign environment we not adapted to. We're basically hunter-gatherers; we haven't adapted to agriculture (which allows the accumulation of wealth) much less technology. So the men in a small culture in New Guinea who spend all there time on tall lookouts to protect their yams and pigs from enemies and our astronomical Pentagon budget are two ends of the same maladaption. This is in the final lecture which is jam packed full of profundity and might even be a great stand alone lecture.

Both Dara, The do it Yourself Scholar and Anne is a Man have excellent reviews of this course.It's an enthusiastic three thumbs up.

Dacker Keltner " Born To Be Good "

2009-06-07T20:49:00.006-05:00

Berkeley's Dacker Keltner teaches two of the best psychology courses being podcast, Human Emotions and Social Psychology. While repeating the Emotions course I discovered his new book, Born To Be Good - The Science of a Meaningful Life, which I've just read thanks to my new Amazon Kindle.

The book is a trimmed down and polished version of the Human Emotions course but with a focus the title gives away. His premise comes directly from Darwin, that we have evolved to express positive emotions. Darwin believed that sympathy is our strongest instinct. One chapter is titled 'Survival of the Kindest'. Keltner uses a Confucian concept "jen" throughout the book. Jen is a behavior that brings the good in others to completion. Keltner believes we are happiest when we make others happy and that research shows we are hardwired (to some extent) to be kind, to be good, to be altruistic, and to have a jolly good time. For an excellent podcast interview with Keltner about his book, search "point of inquiry". Lots of other good things there.

Keltner was a post-doc in Paul Ekman's lab. Ekman spent seven years mapping facial expressions and developed a new science. (See him on youtube) In a most amazing bit of research Kelner piggybacked on an existing longitudinal study of 110 women who graduated from Mills College in '59 and '60. Keltner coded the smiles in their graduation photos. The warmest smiles, the "D" smile at age twenty ".. reported less anxiety, fear, sadness, pain and despair on a daily basis for the next thirty years." They also felt more connected to those around them, were more organized, mentally focused and achievement oriented. They made a better impression on people and had more satisfying marriages thirty years later. (To see a beautiful "D" smile, click on my link to "The Do It Yourself Scholar" and "about Dara". Ekman named this smile for some guy but for us "D" stands for Dara.) Has nature selected for this smile over the past million years? Keltner and this blogger think the answer is yes.

We know why babies cry, but why do they smile? Why does a seven week old infant give a perfect stranger a smile, if that infant is not predisposed to be happy. This is not mentioned in Keltner's book, but he does mention that Darwin measured the days to the first smiles in his ten children. It was "about 50 days". For 42 years I've been measuring the first smiles of infants and several years ago decided it was 'seven weeks'. It's nice to have Darwin confirm my data but I learned a wonderful lesson. I'm thinking 'weeks', Darwin's thinking 'days'.

Embarrassment is Keltner's specialty and the research is surprising. This display, seen in many species is an appeal for atonement. It's an emotion that pulls our strings and endears the 'embarrassee' to us.

Teasing turns out to be quite positive. It's a prickly form of affection and bonding and Keltner suggests that we relax our PC attitudes and let children be children. Better to learn how to tease on the playground than to be a jerk in the boardroom.

The chapter on touching is compelling. One little touch from a doctor and patients believe the visit lasted twice as long as it did.

Keltner is constantly referencing other scholars. One day it backfired, as he tells in a lecture. After a long hard day, lecturing to 300, he's introducing the work of Karen Armstrong and just as he opens his mouth to say her name, MARGE SIMPSON blurts out instead. Keltner's lectures are personable, but so is the book and it's nice to have both.

Also check out 'Greater Good Science Center' and magazine. This is Keltner's 'outreach' site.

PBS WWII - Behind Closed Doors

2009-05-18T02:41:00.004-05:00

I just watched episode 2 of the BBC production, "WWII Behind Closed Doors, Stalin, The Nazis and the West". Finally, Americans get a look at what really happened in WWII. It took the BBC to put it together and PBS to broadcast it. This is the story Ken Burns should have told in his recent series on WWII. But he told (once again) just our version of the War. For over sixty years Americans have patted themselves on the back for saving the world again, just like WWI. The facts are not as complementary, not for WWII (and not for WWI).

Stalin was a monster. Nevertheless, in the three long years before D Day he suffered the advance of the Nazis for 1 1/2 years, then turned the tide at Stalingrad and drove them back to Poland. North Africa and Italy were no picnic, D Day and the advance to Berlin were hard fought and costly but the scope of the Eastern Front can only be realized by counting the dead. The Soviets lost 500,000 at Stalingrad alone. Americans lost 418,000 total in WWII. Britain lost 450,000 total. The Soviet Union lost 27,000,000. Total WWII deaths may be 72,000,000.

Pink Floyd phrased it correctly, "us and them" has been the way the world has always worked. Up until now. I'm not sure how or when it started but there's at least two attempts to remove ethno-geo-centric bias from education. One is 'World History', the second is the MMW (Making of the Modern World) courses at UCSD and maybe many other places.

One could study 'The Weather of Oklahoma' without looking at any data outside Oklahoma. But obviously one needs to study the really big weather picture in order to understand the local. David Kilivas in his course in World History and Matthew Herbst at UCSD have made this very point in their coverage of slavery. Americans have one very specific image of slavery. But slavery goes back to ancient times and took many surprising forms. The question is; when do you bring up those other forms of slavery? While teaching about American slavery or when covering other cultures. The better answer is; while teaching American slavery. We can only understand the Eastern Front if we cover it in concert with the Western Front.

BBC focuses on Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt and they all get beat up pretty bad. Dialog is taken straight from archives. Interviews are in the style of Ken Burns. Reenactments give ambiance and color, real footage keeps it anchored. This is very very good history, and it's about time.

There's three episodes, two hours each.

Three Current Courses at UCSD

2009-05-09T11:34:00.004-05:00

Here are three courses I'm listening to that are currently available at 'podcast.ucsd.edu. Soon after the final lecture the courses are taken offline.

They are:
Making of the Modern World 3 with Matthew Herbst (MMW3 - 100 BCE - 1200 CE)
Making of the Modern World 6 with Ivan Evans (MMW6- 20th Century and Beyond)
Politics and Warfare with Victor Magagna

The MMW series have been favorably reviewed by Anne and Dara and I must add another endorsement. Here is a welcomed alternative to the "Western Civ." approach to history. It's a horizontal view of history. Six time periods, six courses, cross-cultural and global in perspective.

MMW3
I really like Matthew Herbst's style. He goes back and forth from a wide angle landscape of historical trends to detailed descriptions of key players and their sordid exploits. He knows his subject, has a good voice, tells a good story and clearly loves his job. Herbst also teaches MMW4, not currently available, but it should be coming around soon and it's just as compelling. (Chamberlain and Keller-Lapp also teach MMW3 and 4 but I started with Herbst and I'm partial.)

MMW6 is missing the first 4 lectures,(also lectures on 4/24 & 5/4) and the last part of lecture 5. (MMW3 is missing the first 2 lectures.) Nevertheless, lecture five begins after WW1 in Russia, then we go to China, Mexico, Israel / Palestine and on. Evan's lectures on China are excellent. Chang's book, "The Rape of Nanking" is assigned reading and on the final exam, which tells me these students are getting more than their money's worth. Chang's book is a chapter of Chinese history long hidden, that needs telling. Evans also shines in the lectures on Israel and Palestine. He is a South African, and brings a semi non-western perspective with him. His portraiture of the British is spot-on and hilarious. He manages to be academic and candid all at once. I've listened to many courses covering the 20th century, and yet there's no repetition. Each professor comes from a different angle, adding new color and insight to a story we'll never fully understand.

Politics and Warfare
This is a look at the theories and dynamics of war. Magagna goes back and forth from theory to examples and uses WW1 as the key reference point. His 'structural - balance of power' explanation of the roots of WW1 is nothing but profound. It's so simple and was basically how the players saw the dynamics at the time. However trying to apply these theories to the war in Iraq baffles Magagna. I'm hoping there will be some mention of Costa Rica, a country that constitutionally abolished it's army over 60 years ago. How do the theorists handle that?

I must mention two other courses taught by Evans and Magagna. Both are one of a kind and stellar. Evan's course, not currently available, but maybe soon since it was popular, is 'Changes in Modern South Africa'. I reviewed this back in March. It's information you can't get anywhere else. Magagna's course is available from 2008. It's 'East Asia Thought...' which holds that China is now introducing Confucianism as a cultural glue. Magagna is at his best here.

Okay, here's a final exam essay question: Draw a connection between the MMW approach to teaching history to a country's students and that country's future ability to go to war.

Four Seconds with Susan Boyle

2009-04-21T21:55:00.003-05:00

I'm listening to Berkeley's 'Human Emotions' course with Dasher Keltner again, still trying to get a grip on emotions. Then I watch the long version of Susan Boyle singing 'I Dreamed a Dream', on youtube and then I watched it again and again and again....

On April 11th 2009, Susan Boyle walked on stage on 'Britain's Got Talent' TV show. Overweight, bad hair, homely, 48 years old, and pretty weird in her one minute introduction, Susan made a terrible first impression. The audience and judges had the lowest possible expectations, but backstage she had said, "I'm going to make that audience rock". She knew what was about to happen. She's been practicing for thirty years and she has confidence, determination and oh my what a voice.

What happened next, happened in the first four seconds of her performance. In that short span the audience went from "who invited her", to infatuated screaming fans. (The following 135 seconds just reinforced and added strength to the transition.) Exactly how so many people uniformly changed strong negative feelings to strong positive feelings, so quickly, is the question. I honestly don't believe this has ever happened before. Never.

The live audience witnessed history with intensity only possible in a crowd, but I think all viewers, all 100 million (really), went through the first four seconds something like this:

Second 1. Exponential levels of surprise.

Second 2. Shock. Cognitive, sensory and emotional gridlock. Signals collide and cancel. Circuits overload. Surreality. A break in the flow of time.

Second 3. Integration, recovery, reality checking and rechecking. "This is Real?", "omagodomagodomagodomagod...". The amygdula in the back of our brains is turning inside-out like an old torn tennis ball. The tipping point- in three seconds.

Second 4. Physical manifestations: goose bumps, hair stands up, eyebrows rise, eyes enlarge, mouths open, can't swallow normally. The live audience needs to voice approval with applause and screams. At home, jaws drop, babies stop crying, Easter lilies perk up. Tear ducts are getting the message everywhere. There just might be an emotion that feels like this: 'I was wrong-sooo wrong...this is good... this is much better... I'm sooo glad I was wrong....this is soooo good...'.

Halfway through the perfect song when Susan climbs five notes and holds the high one, even more people wet their pants.

I've never seen anything like this in my 63 years. I don't really understand it. I don't know what it means. Something powerful happened. Something very human. And I have a new reference point for Keltner's lectures.

Susan Boyle walked off the stage crowned a queen. Afterwards, in her words, "...emotional...unbelievable and emotional...fantastic!"

Haverford College - American Political Thought Since the Civil War - Wilson Carey McWilliams

2009-04-15T20:29:00.004-05:00

In memory of Wilson Carey McWilliams 1933 - 2005

Listening to McWilliams lecture, you sense the fifty years of scholarship that backs everything he says. You sense a kind, warm, generous and very modest personality. He sounds like a big bear with a growl for a laugh. A big bear with a lovely sense of humor and complete mastery of his discipline. He's generous with his opinions, makes fun of liberals and conservatives and loves to poke fun at Harvard. His lectures are easy to listen to, weaving in contemporary references and bounces the topics against Marx and other references. This course is unique.

As a visiting professor at Harvard in 1998 he taught a popular evening seminar on ' Am. Political Thought in the 19th century', with several professors attending. He was a fixture at Rutgers and visiting professor at Haverford. Students arranged their schedules around his classes. Sadly, Wilson Carey McWilliams died of a heart attack a day after lecture 12 on March 29, 2005.

He spends a lot of time with Henry Adams and William Sumner. The lectures on T. Roosevelt and Progressivism redefined that period for me. W.E.B. DuBois and John Dewey get very high profiles. McWilliams barely gets to FDR and the depression.

Susan McWilliams his daughter, then a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton, (now at Pomona College) together with two guest lecturers completed the course. I tried but couldn't get through the final lectures though I wanted to see how Kurt Vonnegut fit in. As so often happens, McWilliams had become a close personal friend and I wanted his take on Vonnegut. Four years after his death I too experienced his loss.

Go to Haverford.edu and search 'pols 268' and follow links.

Stanford - Global Geopolitics - Martin Lewis

2009-04-15T20:21:00.003-05:00

This is a whirlwind geography course of our planet. Countries, cultures, politics, economics, languages and history. Lewis keeps his finger on the pulse of every global region and has a chip implanted in his brain with the populations of every country. Asia is his specialty and those lectures are particularly insightful. Lewis is well spoken and enjoys teaching. There are ten 110 minute lectures.

This course really needs to be in video. He goes through a thousand maps. But if you listen plugged into Google Earth with several Wikipedia maps you can follow along quite well. Unfortunately, I had to go to the maps hours or days after the lecture and that didn't work as well. For Europe a good map site is "euratlas.com".

Nevertheless, a great deal of information stuck just from audio, both broad brush and little bits of knowledge that somehow have eluded me. Lewis is in the History Department and does an excellent job of tieing history to the contemporary. This is a 'continuing studies' course with an older, traveled group of students who added a lot and asked great questions.

PS See Anne's comment below. My mistake. This is an enhanced podcast, the maps are included - see directions under the course 'description' on itunes download page.
Looks like I'll be having dinners with the enhanced version.

Yale - France since 1871 - John Merriman

2009-04-05T12:36:00.004-05:00

A Wonderful Obsession

John Merriman fell in love with France in the 70's and never recovered. More so than any other professor I know he dominates his field. He's lived in France at least four months a year for the last thirty years. The best scholarship is joined with a boots on the ground exploration of every square kilometer of France. He's produced books galore, a ton of articles and a generation of scholars. He teaches at Yale and in France. He can tell you where every automobile in France is registered from it's license plate.

Once again, I intended to watch just the lectures on WW1 but I caught the bug then listened to the the whole course. I did the video on the Paris lecture for the pictures. I can't recall a course that so completely filled a vacuum in my education. Merriman conveys the sweep of France's history, it's place in the world and with such detail to be unforgettable.

Available in audio and video from 'open yale courses', and video only from 'academic earth' but with a nice description of each lecture. Thirteen of his books showed in 'goodread' and I'm trying to pick one.

Highly addictive.

Yale - Intro to Psychology - Paul Bloom

2009-04-04T21:48:00.004-05:00

Here's evidence of the positive impact podcasting has had on mainstream university offerings. Yale already had an excellent Intro. to Psych course but they tweaked and polished it some more for export. To find this and all Yale's courses search 'open yale courses'.

I just wanted to watch the lectures on Freud and Skinner but was so impressed with Prof. Bloom I listened to the whole 20 lecture course. I may have the advantage of both short and long term memory loss but much of this seemed like new material. But the stuff that rang a bell all needed reinforcement.

Bloom's lectures in an easy but masterful way and you can tell he likes his job. At the beginning and end of the course is a very significant disclaimer that there may be more to psychology than the brain. His video clip at 'edge.org' speaks to this and is most interesting.

Thoroughly enjoyable.

edge.org

2009-03-30T22:18:00.002-05:00

Edge.org is a site of heavyweight academics It's been mainly a text site with a few great photographs. Lately a lot of video clips have been added and grouped together. Streaming only, and most have the text below the video, which came in handy when Paul Bloom's video ended abruptly halfway through.

The video clips vary wildly in length and quality. I was able to download only one by following links back to Harvard. This was the debate between Steven Pinker and Elisabeth Spelky on "The Science of Gender and Science", re the comments of Larry Summers. This was over two hours long. (Spelky won, imo)

Edge grew out of 'The Reality Club' which you can still find in the site but it's forums were discontinued ten years ago. Too bad.

It's nice to add a face to a name you've known for years, and to hear in conversational tones what they are doing. Enjoy.

UCSD - Changes in Modern South Africa - Ivan Evans

2009-03-14T13:59:00.003-05:00

This course concluded yesterday. It was not the ending I wanted to hear. There was no bright future mentioned, no optimism, nothing even remotely hopeful. Ivan Evans tells it like it is, he's lived it, researched it and I respect his opinions. What bothers me most is what was not mentioned but what has been whispered in South Africa and all over the world by so many, "I told you so". And to quote Rush Limbaugh, America's resident simpleton, a lot of people didn't want the ANC to succeed. Nevertheless, South Africa is still relatively peaceful and prosperous, and what they inherited was not their making. In the long run, I will continue to be an optimist. The same people who disabled an oppressive government, can deal with today's many problems, but they need another Nelson Mandela desperately.

Here's some of what I learned:

It was the children 11 - 15 or so who started the mass protests. The government decided that math could only be taught in Afrikaans, (by Afrikaners). This was a stupid and contemptible move and the kids simply said "enough" and walked out and this was the beginning of the end.

The 'sunset clause', a key point in negotiations, that allowed a peaceful transition, and allowed whites to keep their wealth and their land and in many more ways the status quo, has cut many ways. As a part of the new Constitution, the ANC has had to work around it. A complex problem, with no easy solutions.

How the timing of a new South African government on the world stage played out was a new revelation. The demise of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe left South Africa with only one dance partner. And perhaps not well covered, although there are 'missing lectures', is the fact that capitalists' activism was largely responsible for the head lock on appartheid's economy.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was not the source of healing and forgiveness I had naively thought. But again, I will hold my opinion, that from Nelson Mandela to Klaus (see my Jan 25th post) it is the nature of most black South Africans to forgive the gross injustices of the past hundreds of years and move on.

I wrote my blog 'Coldwater' just before the lecture on rape. South Africa is the rape capital of humankind. It's hard to fathom.

Xenophobia is rampant. Also, South Africans are citing America's attitude and actions towards Mexican immigration as justification for their attitude and violence toward their own illegal immigrants. Lou Dobbs, CNN's resident idiot, is more pernicious than I thought.

Ivan Evans is likable, forthright and well spoken. (He rolls his "Rs" like you've never heard.) He takes some cheap shots at The World Bank; I'm just not sure how deserved they might be. Finally, one tiny bright spot. Apparently, according to Evans, this course was well attended.

Berkeley Psych 107 - Buddhist Psycholgy - Eleanor H Rosch

2009-03-12T16:18:00.004-05:00

Meditation, It's Not What You Think

If I'm anything I guess I'm Buddhist. I just think the first guy got it right and things went downhill from there. People have an irresistible urge to make rules and split hairs and write googles of books all about, well, nothing. The Dalai Lama says it's not religion but science. No one buys that but I think it's the only good way to look at Buddhism.This course is both an introduction to Buddhism and about Buddhism. Suit yourself.

I had trouble with low volume mp3s, (fixed with 'mp3gain.com') and all my lectures were hopelessly out of order, so that's how I listened to them. Rosch has a sexy voice, a calm demeanor and teaches from both an academic and experiential base. I don't like lists and there lots of lists but there lots of stories and I like stories. Stories are personal, powerful and unlike lists, you remember them. Mindfulness is the key concept. And I'm finding self-observation very helpful.

Reincarnation is somehow barely mentioned. The methods and means of meditation get covered well as does some of the recent scientific findings. Google university also has some very good lectures with some good data about the benefits of mindfulness. See Googletechtalks - Cognitive Neuroscience of Mindful Meditation with Philippe Goldin, Feb 28, 2008. But I've also found some very interesting research being done out of the U of Virginia about well documented reincarnations, though nothing conclusive. A great deal about Buddhism is understood and accepted in the west but as usual the mass media and science lags behind the public.

Regarding practice, I like the SABC method. Growing up in South Africa, the South African Broadcasting Corp. was not my favorite radio station but we listened to it's news. In the 50's at least they stopped broadcasting any signal at the top of every hour for maybe one full interminable minute. At the time I thought it was corny. Now I think it was profound. And it's the perfect metaphor.

Stanford-History of the International System-James Sheehan

2009-03-12T13:50:00.003-05:00

This is a sophisticated and scholarly review of the last 120 years. Thirty percent political science, sixty percent history, ten percent geography and 100 percent enjoyable. In 28 lectures there's not one question from students. Sheehan is not that kind of lecturer. He's always on a roll, slow, deliberate, finely crafted phrases in complete sentences. There's no need to ask questions, he asks them and answers them. He tells you where he's going and it all unfolds like a tapestry. But above all it's pure scholarship. Sheehan is not without passion or opinion but everything is carefully weighed, balanced and explained. This is about the fundamental nature of states and how they interact.

There's detailed insight into the Cold War and post Soviet Union era, modern wars and conflicts including Iraq, terrorism and the European Union. I know of 435 persons in Washington DC who could benefit from his analysis. China and the Pacific get coverage but little time is allotted South America or Africa.

As I've noted, Sheehan is married to Berkeley's dynamic historian, Margaret Lavinia Anderson and I wondered what they might discuss over breakfast. They seem synched, historically, and they teach much the same content so I'm quite certain one of them has asked, "Can I borrow your 1453 map?".

Footnote: I read one of this courses' readings by Yale's Johnathan Spence, 'Mao Zedong: A Life' published in 1999. I did this to see if there was any inherent conflict with the more recent very long and very dark biography of Mao by Chang and Halliday, 'Mao, the Unknown Story'. Ten years of interviews and research by this married couple paint Mao as nothing but a megalomaniacal monster. Their documentation is extensive and difficult to refute but also hard to swallow. Spence's book in no way precludes the darker revelations. It seems both could be accurate.

Coldwater, A South African Story

2009-03-05T21:44:00.003-06:00

It was probably 1960 at our home in Queenswood, Pretoria when I heard her scream. I was about fourteen, my father was away. A scream tells everything. This one said unmistakably, "rape".

It was our neighbor's maid. Her room was just inches from a chain link fence between our properties. There was a small open window about six feet above the ground. The scream was desperate. I knew something was required of me and I quickly found a solution. We had a garden hose with a nozzle. I turned it all the way on, climbed up on something, stuck the nozzle through the window and searched for my target. In a few seconds there was a man's scream and I held my aim. Now my mother was screaming from our back door. I relented, ran inside, my mother locked the door.

I talked to the neighbor's maid a few days later over the fence. She was grateful, I was proud. I have a faint memory of her describing the effects of cold water on an overheated man. Despite everything, it was funny and we enjoyed the humor. But this isn't the story.

I later learned that our neighbors were home at the time and heard the maid scream but that they considered it none of their business. To be fair, I'm not sure what they could or might have done about it, but that's not the story. The story is that this young Afrikaner couple was very proud of their indifference. They told my father that they considered my intervention completely wrongheaded. Having one's maid raped while continuing to smoke one's pipe calmly in the living room was something to brag about to the elders of the Dutch Reformed Church. It was what you told your boss to prove your Afrikaner mettle and climb the social ladder. This was the predominate cultural attitude toward blacks and servants.

The English side of the white population was not very much different. We were all guilty of many things, but from my early years I was revolted by the Afrikaner's treatment of blacks. Even back then the Afrikaner seemed oddly misplaced in time, a culture Captain Kirk might have visited in some far part of the galaxy. But this story and the story of Klaus (see my post on 1 25 09- Ivan Evans...) are part of the history of South Africa.

The UCSD course - Changes in Modern South Africa - by Ivan Evans is nearly completed. Ive learned a great deal and highly recommend it. It's history that is not readily available but I will cover that in another blog.

'How To Think About Science' cbc.ca ideas

2009-02-25T22:10:00.004-06:00

I let my subscription to 'Scientific American' elapse, wanting something more filling. Then I heard this interview with Wendell Berry and he put words to my feelings. cbc.ca is full of good stuff especially Paul Kennedy's "Ideas". This is a series of 24 interviews by David Cayley with a great cast of thinkers. Here are some big ideas in mouthsized bites. Their site has a good summary of all interviews. Here are some thoughts about three of them.

Wendell Berry is a novelist, farmer, poet and everyone's grandfather. Long before it was obvious, Berry was warning about the bad science of industrial agriculture and he covers that but goes to much more generic concern about science. The "frontier" mindset - we're almost there. The unwarranted reliance on science to solve all problems. Ignoring what we are best at - being human.
Wendell Berry will never appear in Scientific America and that's the problem.

If I was a hot-shot therapist in NYC, I would prescribe the reading of one Wendell Berry short story per day. As soft and fuzzy as this sounds, I could write a hypothesis, make predictions, take measurements and do real science. Maybe even good science. Here's my point and the point of Lee Smolin and thousands of scientists just finding their voice. STRING THEORY IS NOT SCIENCE. It's a myth, a cult, a pretty piece of math and a tulip bulb bubble. See Woit's, 'Not Even Wrong'. String theory makes no predictions. It is no way testable or falsifiable. Society and scientist alike listen to people with shiny brains and eloquent books and when they say this is really cool and wonderful we write the really big checks and keep writing really big checks for 25 years and counting. This is a great interview and you can even hear Smolin's dog barking.

Noone writes really big checks to Rupert Sheldrake but a lot of people buy his books. Scientist love to hate him and scientist are are skillful enemies but let the man speak for himself. He at once refutes huge sections of accepted science (or dogma) and also makes a lot of sense. Morphic resonance, a field like gravity, guides and permeates both form and thought. I've pondered his writings for 20 years and I don't think he's exactly right but I don't think he's far off. He is a scientist. He has an open mind. He makes predictions. He does experiments. He thinks for himself.

Margaret Anderson - Berkeley - Hist 5

2009-02-10T18:06:00.003-06:00

"Anne is a Man" has reviewed this course more thoroughly than perhaps any other, and for good reason. There's so much to appreciate.

Margaret Lavinia Anderson is sometimes unconventional in her content and that's refreshing. Tracing Freud's influences back to Schopenhauer was new to me. And she reveals a nasty story about Freud you will never forget. Her lecture on 'What Did Women Want', is particularly unforgettable. But this is a survey course and its the big picture that she hammers home throughout.

Anderson is also one of the best spoken professors podcasting. This is elegant prose. I found myself frequently backing up just to rehear a phrase. It's probably just me, but it seemed like the course just kept getting better and better. You won't find a better summery of 20th century Europe, and the best explanation of the fall of communism I've heard. The final lecture builds to a climax like the last few pages of 'A Hundred Years of Solitude'. However I'd pay double for a few comments on Clinton and Bosnia, (also Bush and Georgia).

A lot of people aren't interested in Europe in 1453. I say jump in halfway through the course because by the end you'll be hooked on Anderson and go back to the beginning like I'm tempted to do now. Besides, the mind does a great jobs of sorting out linear time.

There's rumors on the net that Anderson is sleeping with a Stanford history professor. His name is James Sheehan and the same rumors say they are married. Moreover Sheehan has a highly rated podcast course, The International System in the 20th Century, which is my next project. My goal is to figure out what they discuss over breakfast.

David Presti - Berkeley - Drugs and Behavior

2009-02-08T21:41:00.005-06:00

This is an incredibly objective examination of drugs from caffeine to opium. Presti, a neurobiologist, starts with the science then layers in history, culture, law, social issues and some of the most critical health issues of our time. A very popular course, I think there were about 700 students in this class.

Presti's objectivity is that of a scientist. He states his opinions freely, also his experiences with patients at a VA hospital and many anecdotes from his travels. This is more in-depth than you might expect, also more entertaining and dare I say, useful.

Here's a course that needs to be exploited in several ways. First, this broad, objective and honest coverage of drugs needs to get into high schools. To do that it needs to get to teachers and counselors. With a little work this could be offered online for credit to teachers and counselors for their recertification requirements. Social workers and police officers likewise.

This course is also a good example of a broader type of exploitation that could evolve from the advent of podcasts. Smaller colleges around the world don't have the advantage of a Dr. Presti on their faculty but they do have students who need this content. They can with Berkeley's and Presti's consent and encouragement, use these audiofiles as the basis of their own courses. Also, individual lectures by Presti can be used in many different ways to supplement existing courses. Presti's lifetime of insights needs to reach 7,000 per class, not 700.

Ivan Evans -Change in Modern South Africa - UCSD

2009-01-25T21:16:00.005-06:00

Get this now. It's ongoing at UC San Diego. As Dara has mentioned, so far half the podcasts are empty. Nevertheless we'll take what we can get. Ivan Evans is a South African, educated there and at Madison. From the three lectures available so far, this is history come alive. Fully academic, fully personal, Evans pulls no punches.

I grew up in Pretoria; 1953 - 1961. I want to relate an anecdote and make comments now and do the same at the end of the course.

My missionary father missed his true calling. He was a builder. Near the end of construction on our own house in Queenswood Pretoria in 1958, a white man came by to ask dad some questions. He was Afrikaans. I was thirteen and I didn't like the way he combed his hair. Ten minutes later I would have better reasons for not liking him and ten minutes after that many more.

We were laying parquet flooring in the living room with hot tar as adhesive. Klaus, one of two black workers and our Afrikaans visitor were moving the tray of hot tar into the house when somehow Klaus had the tray spilled over his arms and hands. My father was about to drive Klaus to the hospital when the Afrikaner volunteered to take him. Then for the longest ten minutes of my life my father and our visitor continued to talk. I've never forgiven my father for this.

Weeks later when Klaus came back, I asked a lot of pointed questions. I was still hot over the incident and blamed the Afrikaner. As hard as I looked into Klaus's eyes
and as many question as I asked, it was obvious that he had put the matter behind him. We laughed at his joke that he had a lot of white skin now. I didn't understand his apparent lack of malice but it made an impression. Forty years later when I read Mandela's Long Road.. I began to understand. Forgiveness comes from strength.

I can't wait to hear what Evans says about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. What has happened in South Africa is unique in the world and poorly understood. Treat yourself to an incredible story. More later...

Amy Hungerford-The American Novel since 1945-Yale

2009-01-17T10:28:00.008-06:00

In some courses I don't want to hang on every word. I want to be a fly on the wall. I can't even pretend to 'review' a course like this, but here are some impressions.

The required reading list, given below, is long, A novel a week in real time. I'd read three books on the list so long ago it didn't count and listened to the lectures without any more reading. So I really felt like the observing fly on the wall.

It was worth it. I got a good review of the selected novels and their authors; some insight into 'plot' and 'identity' and a lot of backstories.

Amy Hungerford is clear and focused. She looks young but she's been doing this for awhile. Most of the time she's the professor, but once she struggled with her own emotions, explaining why she liked Roth, in spite of his misogyny. It was moving.

I received a nice bonus by listening all the way to the end of the last (review) lecture. The students talked her into giving up her favorites (so I've decided to read 'The Known World'). But the bonus was confirming my opinion that Eggar's "What is the What", is a monumental novel, but perhaps too lengthy to make the list this time.

Don't let your children grow up to be English majors. This is a hard course. Even if I had done all the readings I'm sure I would have flunked. I'm just so impressed with these students. Hopefully we'll be reading them in a few years.

The list: Richard Wright "Black Boy"
Flannery O'Conner "Wise Blood"
Vladimir Nabokov "Lolita"
Jack Kerouac "On the Road"
J D Salinger "Franny and Zooey
John Barth "Lost in the Funhouse"
Thomas Pynchon "The Crying of Lot 49"
Toni Morrison "The Bluest Eye"
Maxine Hong Kingston "The Woman Warrior"
Marilynne Robinson "Housekeeping"
Cormac McCarthy "Blood Meridian"
Philip Roth "The Human Stain"
Edward P Jones "The Known World"
Student's choice: Johnathan Safran Foer "Everything is Illuminated"

Richard Pogge- Astronomy 161,162- Ohio State U

2009-01-13T15:42:00.004-06:00

In my two years of listening to university podcasts, these are my favorites. I've never heard a better lecturer. Richard Pogge works very hard to make it that way.

Course 161 is about our solar system. 162 is about everything else. These are both introductory and comprehensive courses, over 40 lectures in each. Not a whole lot is left out. If anyone on this planet wants know what they're looking at when they look up at night, here it is. If you teach science or astronomy at any level and want to brush up your knowledge or teaching skills, here's the source. I took notes and looked up online the visuals missed in audio. If you haven't seen the crab nebula, it hard to imagine.

After listening to both courses, I went back and listened to 162 all over again. Then I went back and listened to the lectures on star formation in 162 four more times. Especially to a liberal arts kind of mind, facts are coming at you hard and heavy, like a hailstorm. And these facts seemed to me a long sequence of events that are the cornerstone of physics, and thereby, the substance of which we and all we know are made. I wanted to understand. And so for a brief period there I can say I understood how stars and their aftermaths manufacture all elements. It's some story.

Each lecture is titled and designed to stand alone. So if you decide to download these two courses
and put them on a memory stick, you would in effect have an encyclopedia of astronomy with nearly 90 chapters.

Pogge is constantly drawing the line between what we know and what we don't know, as well as explaining how we know what we know. In one case our understanding runs out about three levels into a neutron star.

If professors played rock, Richard Pogge would be Mick Jaggar. But this guy gives some satisfaction.

Napoleon podcast

2009-01-11T20:46:00.006-06:00

The Napoleon podcast from The Podcast Network is a one of a kind, once in a lifetime production.

Cameron Reilly, the prime mover and host from Australia somehow paired up with one of the best authorities on Napoleon, J David Markham. Give Markham a bottle of scotch and a microphone and a gently guiding host and you will lose about 60 hours of your life to a fantastical tale called Napoleon 101. There's nothing like it in the world.

It started years ago, monthly posts, and now Napoleon is dead, and we're up to podcast # 48. With maybe 30,000 listeners from all over the world. The only problem is it has the inertia of a mile long freight train and it will take a while before it stops.

Napoleon takes all the credit as you might expect. He is nothing like the man in history books. Reilly is a Napoleon scholar in his own right; Markham has a lifetime of Napoleonic research and both are unabashed fans of the emperor. Nevertheless, the scholarship here is impressive. There is a huge body of information to study, and more books written on this subject than anyone else!

If I were to state here that Napoleon never picked a fight, no one would believe me, but that seems to be the case. Genghis Khan and US Grant suffer from the same kind of bad press.

Since time is no constraint, these guys are often slow to get to the show started. Groaning and yelling at them doesn't work. Fast forward and back up to the first mention of Napoleon and all is forgiven. Markham can talk forever, he is frank and honest and somehow never boring. The dialogue with the host is open, lively and makes the show. And what a story.

David Blight - Civil War 1845-1877 - Yale

2009-01-11T19:23:00.003-06:00

He will make you laugh and make you cry and put a new coat of paint on everything you know about the Civil War. Prof. Blight is easy listening, authoritative, engrossing, personable, and wonderfully academic. He brings a lot of original source material to the lecture. It seems that people have a habit of dumping letters in his lap. His dance card seems pretty full on the lecture circuit.

One third of the course is the 20 years or so leading up to the Rebellion, one third on the war and a third on the aftermath. But the whole course is an attempt to answer the question WHY. And that he does as well as anybody ever has.

I had just begun the autobiography of F Douglass at the beginning of this course (a nice touch of synchronicity and a great read), but as you might expect Blight drops titles of interesting books faster than you can write them down.

This is history at it's best.

Brad DeLong - History of Economics-Berk Econ 113

2009-01-03T22:08:00.009-06:00

Two years ago when I moved my focus from audible books to lectures, three big differences stood out; 1 the lectures were timely. A university course podcast with an o6 tag is pretty old (although sometimes that's ok); a book published in 06 is brand new. 2 Professors are personable, live,witty, funny, they have flaws, they make mistakes, they can't spell and some are no better with computers than I am. Books are none of these. 3 Professors will tell you as Brad DeLong does, that he used to believe such and such but now he has changed his mind. They will say as often as necessary "I don't know", "we have no idea". I think book editors have programs that search for these phrases and shred them before they even open a manuscript. Publishers are in the business of selling books. Professors are in the business of being honest. Knowledge is simply knowing where the line falls between what we know and what we don't know. If you rely on books for this distinction you lose.

Noone understands economics. I've held this view for 40 years and now it seems I have a lot of company. But the history of economics is manageable at least. In this course DeLong goes back to the Bering land bridge but largely the last 200 years. A good economics view of the 19th century but more time spent on the 20th. What made the great depression great. What's the deal with the New Deal. A lot about WWII and not enough time on Nixon, Carter and Reagan etc.

DeLong is infectious, easy to listen to and when he goes off on a hay ride of interesting anecdotes, pay attention; he'll wrap it up so fast and on point your head will spin and lightbulbs start flashing. He's a master teacher. Hopefully, Obama will overlook him. He was Clinton's Under Secretary of Treasury for several years.

I listened to this in the Fall of 08 a few weeks after real time. It was probably available a few hours after real time delivery. Nevertheless he was able to give daily updates and his reaction to the economic crises as it happened. Also see his blog- Grasping Reality.

I also have his Econ 101 downloaded and waiting in line. If you don't already know this you will learn that once you find a professor like DeLong you'll take anything he has to offer and enjoy it.

university podcasts

2009-01-03T17:39:00.006-06:00

Free university podcasts will change the nature of education on this planet. Several years ago some brave visionaries, at Berkeley and other top schools told the lawyers to get lost and opened our higher education system to the world. They realized simply, 'there is no downside'. Now the best minds in the world are a click away.

In the past few years I've listened to scores of complete courses. It's now what I do. It's changed my life. This blog is about that experience. I'll review the courses I'm tuned into and go back and cover my favorites. My first year I was afraid I would run out of courses. Now, I'm having to make hard decisions between excellent choices.

I might wonder aloud about the potential impact university podcasts will have on the following:
- third world people and institutions
- re-certification of teachers and other professionals
- community colleges
- retired old folks like me
- workplace applications like mine

I received a B.Ed. from the U. of Alaska-Fairbanks in 1969. I have had careers in education administration, sailing and bumming around Key West, making and selling fine crafts and now truck driving. I'm getting paid to learn, but I'm a careful driver and I reserve my lectures for wide open roads.

When Key West had cigar rolling shops,one person sat in front reading to the workers. What an idea!