Entries Tagged 'Culture' ↓

I’m going to be attending the von Neumann Memorial Lectures this evening at McCosh 50 Lecture Hall at Princeton.

Here is the program information:

Lecture and Panel Discussion
8 pm, Saturday October 6, 2007
McCosh 50 Lecture Hall
Princeton University

Introduction by Charles Harper

Lecturers:
Thomas Schelling, University of Maryland College Park,
Nobel Laureate, Economics
George Dyson,
von Neumann biographer

Panel Moderator:
Eric Gregory, Princeton University

Panelists:
Freeman Dyson, Institute for Advanced Study
Martin Nowak, Harvard University
Robert Wright, Princeton University

Free and Open to the Public

Look out for a summary tomorrow afternoon or evening.

My good friend Mark Dobbins has been publishing his thoughts on society at large on the web for quite a few years. These pages are updated relatively frequently and contain, in my humble opinion, vast amounts of thought that are becoming more and more essential as the pages’ of modernity turn. While the design and layout may be threadbare, the concepts contained within are invaluable.

Mark Dobbins on “Higher Education”:

What is Higher Education?
The human experience starts in childhood. Childhood is when the being is molded from a biological potentiality to a human actuality. Once a mature human, whatever that may mean, finds its way out of childhood higher education should be there to offer whatever knowledge and skill will help it push itself and its society forward. In any society that values freedom, truth, and beauty “offer” is a word of primary importance. One of my main criticisms of our modern education system is its unnecessarily restrictive and demanding nature. Not demanding in the sense of challenging, but externally demanding. It is full of requirements and structures that only serve to limit freedom and minimize the possibilities. I understand the argument that all students should know some part of literature, or history, or science. But understanding cannot be forced. Understanding must be sought. If we live in an age of uninquisitive minds, then that is the fault of childhood, of primary education, and it would be best to deal with the problem there, and not attempt to bandage it by limiting freedom and possibility in higher education. Furthermore, these unnecessary limits breed not only totalitarianism and conformity, often the two things that the required courses are meant to deter, but also inefficiency. The walls of rules that maze higher education make it more expensive, more prone to politicking, and lead to power being held not by the customers, not by those eager to learn, but by administration, by authority, as if the school was paying the students. As you will hopefully come to understand, I am not belittling the very necessary organizational tasks of administration, I only strongly question the place of administration as a commander, or perhaps a demander. To simplify, I believe there is a more free, efficient, and inexpensive way to conceive of and structure higher education.

To say that the creative capabilities of children are, for the most part, being squandered away in public education systems is an understatement. Whether or not this is the fault of any supposedly accountable person, people, association, council, agency, etc is not for us to judge or concern ourselves with. What is most important at this time is steadfast solidarity. We must demand of ourselves and our hierarchical superiors support for all children. Every generation that is created without an intimate understanding of the creative tools at their fingertips will become another generation of adults without the imagination and compassion to create progressive, pragmatic tools for change.

Anita Hill wrote an article for the New York Times regarding Clarence Thomas’ attack on her character in his new memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son.” Thomas personifies her as an incompetent, “touchy”, “combative left-winger” who only had a government job because he had “given it” to her. He was, of course, forgetting the fact that she had graduated from Yale Law School (just like Thomas) as well as passing the D.C. bar exam.

Here is a piece of the article regarding the current state of affairs:

“Regrettably, since 1991, I have repeatedly seen this kind of character attack on women and men who complain of harassment and discrimination in the workplace. In efforts to assail their accusers’ credibility, detractors routinely diminish people’s professional contributions. Often the accused is a supervisor, in a position to describe the complaining employee’s work as “mediocre” or the employee as incompetent. Those accused of inappropriate behavior also often portray the individuals who complain as bizarre caricatures of themselves — oversensitive, even fanatical, and often immoral — even though they enjoy good and productive working relationships with their colleagues.

Finally, when attacks on the accusers’ credibility fail, those accused of workplace improprieties downgrade the level of harm that may have occurred. When sensing that others will believe their accusers’ versions of events, individuals confronted with their own bad behavior try to reduce legitimate concerns to the level of mere words or “slights” that should be dismissed without discussion. “

Duane Hanson was born in 1925 in small city in Minnesota. He received his BA at Macalester College in Minnesota and his MFA at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. As he was in school and later professing abroad, he began sculpting in an eerily real style. While teaching in Munich, Germany, he came into contact with the philosophy of the Post Expressionists. He would lated be considered to be a Verist, a movement of Post Expressionism who, as described by the art historian Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, “… tear the objective form of the world of contemporary facts and represent current experience in its tempo and fevered temperature.” As such, his focus turned to creating accurate, surreal recreations of regular people. Duane Hanson died on January 6th, 1996.

Pictures of a few of these amazing sculptures after the jump.

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An article at the New York Times discusses the possibilities of health risks associated with being reserved in marital conflicts. The idea of open lines of communication between couples has only recently been integrated into marital common sense and there are still certain mores and synthesized, unspoken agreements (no pun intended) creating emotional boundaries between loved ones.

Here is a snippet:

Recent studies show that how often couples fight or what they fight about usually doesn’t matter. Instead, it’s the nuanced interactions between men and women, and how they react to and resolve conflict, that appear to make a meaningful difference in the health of the marriage and the health of the couple.

A study of nearly 4,000 men and women from Framingham, Mass., asked whether they typically vented their feelings or kept quiet in arguments with their spouse. Notably, 32 percent of the men and 23 percent of the women said they typically bottled up their feelings during a marital spat.

In men, keeping quiet during a fight didn’t have any measurable effect on health. But women who didn’t speak their minds in those fights were four times as likely to die during the 10-year study period as women who always told their husbands how they felt, according to the July report in Psychosomatic Medicine. Whether the woman reported being in a happy marriage or an unhappy marriage didn’t change her risk.