PACS 164A (Lecture 1): Introduction to Nonviolence I

Fall 2006


(1 hr 12 min)

Michael N. Nagler, professor emeritus of classics and comparative literature, lectures:

An introduction to the science of nonviolence, mainly as seen through the life and work of Mahatma Gandhi. Historical overview of nonviolence East and the West up to the American Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr., with emphasis on the ideal of principled nonviolence and the reality of mixed or strategic nonviolence in practice, especially as applied to problems of social justice and defense.

Who killed Moghaniyah?

Al Jazeera news 13 Feb 2008

Part 1

(12 min)

Part 2

(12 min)

Really?

Hezbollah has accused Israel of assassinating one of its important leaders.

Physics C10 (Lecture 1): Atoms and Heats

Spring 2006


(1 hr 14 min)

Lecture: Professor Richard A. Muller

Homepage of the course

SIMS 141: Google News, Print, Maps and Earth

Jan 2008


(50 min)

Speaker: Peter Norvig, Google Director of Search Quality

Marketing@Google: Dean Crutchfield

(1)
Feb 2008


(37 min)

Dean Crutchfield, a brand consultant, discusses how to shape brands people can truly love.

(2)
his example of London olympic logo is so funny. it's hackable; it's mashupible.

(3)
if somebody say CSR, Crutchfield said, corportarte social responsibility, fire him. and fire him fast. but now? let's see Google.

Mapping Travel Medicine

Feb 2008


(36 min)

Emporiatrics or Travel Medicine is a discipline within medicine that prepares a traveler using vaccines, medicines and knowledge to avoid disease when visiting a foreign destination.

D. Scott Smith discusses

the current mapping of interventions offered to patients planning trips and illustrate with examples how the constraints of patient needs and the risks at a specific destination overlap to arrive at a list of recommendations that are offered a traveler before departure.

Call him Hero

Steven Spielberg said Tuesday that he was withdrawing as an artistic adviser to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, after almost a year of trying unsuccessfully to prod President Hu Jintao of China to do more to try to end Sudan's attacks in the Darfur region. His statement:

Sudan's government bears the bulk of the responsibility for these ongoing crimes but the international community, and particularly China, should be doing more to end the continuing human suffering there. China's economic, military and diplomatic ties to the government of Sudan continue to provide it with the opportunity and obligation to press for change.

Google Mobile Ad & Green Consumer

Feb 2008


(51 min)

Bruce B. Cahan, President Urban Logic, Inc., a nonprofit organization, presents

Internet searching and advertising increasingly plays a role in consumer decisions and purchases, yet pertinent information for making value-judgments is currently awkward to ferret out and certainly not universally accessible or useful. There is rarely a feedback loop aligning vendor or manufacturer's environmental, social or governance policies with a shopper's values, so shoppers, over time, rarely cause industries to change their behavior.

There needs to be a way for shoppers to aim their purchasing power at achieving social values of highest regional priority. There needs to be a way to accumulate and redeem "social values rewards". What's missing is timely and impactful analysis of a candidate purchases' impact on the Shopper's family, region and planet (expressed according to their values), so that the purchaser can more easily make informed purchasing decisions.

With some modifications to Google ads and Google product search, Google could solidify the feedback loop and help consumers, by their actions, build a greener and better world.

Winter in Afghanistan

Al Jazeera news 12 Feb 2008


(3 min)

A winter in Middle East can be terrible:

Afghan hospitals have experienced a sharp rise in amputations - not because of fighting, but because of the worst winter weather to hit Afghanistan in more than a decade.

Robert Fisk: From Beirut to Bosnia

Discovery Channel documentary

Part 1
The Martyr's smile

(51 min)

Part 2
The road to Palestine

(51 min)

Part 3
To the ends of the Earth

(51 min)

The introduction:

Why have so many Muslims come to hate the West? In this controversial three-part series filmed in Lebanon, Gaza, Israel, Egypt, and Bosnia, Robert Fisk, award-winning Middle East and Balkans correspondent for the London Independent, reports on Muslim unrest as ideology, religion, history, and geography come into conflict.

NY Times review: Review/Television; An Islamic Indictment of the West, 27 Apr 1994

Saved by words

(1)

(Photo: Astrid Chesney/NY Times)

Simiyu Barasa, a Kenyan filmmaker and writer, said words can make "difference between not being dead or being serious dead" (Kenya's war of words, 12 Feb 2008).

Many of my friends have now resorted to taking crash courses in the dialects of the tribes indicated on their identity cards, "just in case it comes in handy."

(2)
Orphaned in Kenya
Al Jazeera news 12 Feb 2008


(2 min)

"Did they cut your father's neck?" John Cookson, the press, asked

"Yes," Jeremy , a massacre survivor, said.

"And did you see that?"

"Yes."

Some in Kenya need some psychological counselling. They sing a song for Peace, the news reported said.

Authors@Google: Reese Erlich

25 Sep 2007


(62 min)

Reese Erlich, a foreign correspondent and author, presents his book The Iran Agenda: The Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis. And explains why the US shouldn't bomb Iran.

In Search of Kurdistan

30 May 2007


(13 min)

Authors@Google: Amatzia Baram

(1)
11 Jan 2008


(1 hr 10 min)

Amatizia Baram, an Iraq expert and the author of Victory in Iraq, One Tribe at a Time, shares his thought about Iraq and Middle East. (Amatzia Baram, "Victory in Iraq, One Tribe at a Time", NY Times, 28 Oct 2003)

(2)
even Google Maps can't zoom in most cities in Iraq...


檢視較大的地圖

Authors@Google: Garrett Graff

11 Feb 2008


(45 min)

Garrett Graff, the political blogger, discusses his book The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House.

See his blog: the news & telegraff

"Wake up, fellow Israelis, it's over, we've won!"

(1)
Daniel Gavron, an author, suggested that Israelis should treat themselve like a winner. (Israel's secret success, 11 Feb 2008) What they should not be doing is what they are doing now:

1. besieging and blacking out Gaza,
2. killing and arresting dozens of Palestinians in the occupied territories every month, and
3. constructing walls and fences between Israel and neighbors.

(2)
"between us and our neighbors":


檢視較大的地圖

Fortunetellers in Afghanistan

(1)
11 Feb 2008
Al Jazeera news


(3 min)

(2)
Fortunetelling is unislamic. just like a kind of black magic in west. really? any source? (the building(?) at the end of the news is petty.)

Sizwe's Test

(1)
Jonny Steinberg, an South African journalist, reported AIDS, the "gravest medical crisis" in his country:

More than one out of every eight South Africans is H.I.V. positive, Steinberg reports; every day roughly 800 South Africans die of AIDS and more than 1,000 additional people are infected. A recent survey found that in the previous month, the average South African was more than twice as likely to have been to a funeral as to a wedding. [...] Almost one out of three pregnant women in Lusikisiki [a district in the country] was H.I.V. positive.

Adam Hochschild wrote a book review of Jonny Steinberg's book, Sizwe's Test. (Death March, 10 Feb 2008)

(2)
Steinberg reported through a man's eyes: Sizwe Magadla, who lives in Lusikisiki. He explained why so many South Africans are not willing to take AIDS test.

The first layer of fear is lack of privacy. If one in South Africa was going to test, everyone knows

And if you get your H.I.V. test results at one of the clinics, hundreds of your fellow villagers are waiting in line behind you. If you immediately leave the nurse's office and go home, they know you’re H.I.V. negative; if you're kept behind for an hour of counseling, they know you're positive.

And the next layer:

He fears any sign of weakness or vulnerability could lose him customers or get him robbed.

There is a even deeper layer, related to the long, sad racial history

If whites already took so much farmland and mineral wealth, the thinking goes, could not the very needle the white doctor or his nurses use to draw blood be what's spreading AIDS in the first place? And if an enemy does attack you, what more deadly way than with an illness that seems connected to a man’s potency and ability to procreate?

(3)
Where is Lusikisiki?


檢視較大的地圖

(4)
Steinberg spent a few pages to blame Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa since 1999:

Hundreds of thousands of South Africans who have died of AIDS might still be alive today if Mbeki had repeatedly spoken out about safe sex and AIDS testing and treatment, and had thrown the full weight of his ruling party apparatus behind such a campaign

Frost interviews Koroma, Sierra Leone president

10 Feb 2008


(13 min)

Ernest Bai Koroma:

a former insurance broker, won the presidential election last year. He now faces the daunting task of reviving Sierra Leone's fortunes after years of corruption, economic mismanagement and violence.

Bolivia battles rising flood waters

(1)
31 Jan 2008
Al Jazeera news


(3 min)

(2)
"Capitalism brings global warming," Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, said, "the poor paid for the consequences." Oh, really? Sue the US government. Global warming, sea level up, flooding, the end of the story.

Don't mention the causation; there is a minor tech detail.


檢視較大的地圖

Bolivia doesn't have coast. Worse, there is "high land" between them. It doesn't look very good, but it doesn't prevent the media. If the so-called global warming was invented 10 years earlier, the president could blame it for the national debt and hyperinflation too.

Anyway, he could blame global cooling, the fashable global crisis ten years ago.

種族清洗

今日有一封NY Times的讀者來信(Call It Genocide, 9 Feb 2008)很道理:

To the Editor:

Re "A New Chapter in Ethnic Cleansing" (editorial, Feb. 2):

The continued use of the term "ethnic cleansing" to describer murder and widespread violence against targeted ethnic groups around the world is offensive. Both "ethnic" and “cleansing” are positive words. Why do we persist in using "cleansing" when we mean genocide?

Let's call it what it is. Or use a negative word like "ethnocide", but please stop calling a profound and horrifying sin by a spiritually and scientifically positive word like “cleansing.”

Dorothy Stoneman
Belmont, Mass., Feb. 2, 2008

我們的華文傳媒倒不會有這問題.

Authors@Google: Christopher Hitchens

16 Aug 2007


(68 min)

Christopher Hitchens discusses his book "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything". (NY Times Book Review: Michael Kinsley, In God, Distrust, 13 May 2007)

Sub-word Language Models and Speech Recognition

Feb 2008


(49 min)

Speaker: Mikko Kurimo