Uc Berkeley Graduate Council Lectures (audio)

A fundamental of scientific analysis is the rejection of stories. Anecdotes can mislead you and solid analysis of the data is needed to ensure that coincidence is not mistaken for correlation. But one of the fundamentals of communication is the human need for stories to make an emotional connection to the information provided. Lucy Jones, Science Advisor for Risk Reduction, U.S. Geological Survey, explores the successes and challenges in bridging this gap between scientists and the larger public. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 30176]

John Witt explores the subject of how American constitutional law was “reinvented,” as he proposes, during the early twentieth century. Taking up a small cast of characters who self-consciously aimed to disrupt the ideological structures of American law, Witt tells a story of social experiment and constitutional transformation that explains our constitutional past and offers powerful, if sometimes troubling, implications for our constitutional future. Witt is the Allen H Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at the Yale Law School. Professor Witt’s work has ranged widely over the history of American law from the founding era to the Cold War. His most recent book Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (2012) was awarded the 2013 Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 30083]

Paul Goldberger holds the Joseph Urban Chair in Design and Architecture at The New School in New York City. In this follow-up to his previous lecture (The Generic City), he discusses whether, despite their similarities, cities are catalysts for creativity and why. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Show ID: 29298]

Architecture critic and The New School professor Paul Goldberger looks at whether cities are becoming more and more the same, and why, and what the implications for this are. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Show ID: 29297]

Daniel B. Rodriguez, Dean of Northwestern University Law School, considers the dynamic relationship between structures of constitutional governance within the United States through an exploration of federalism (national/state relations) and localism (state/municipality relations). Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Public Affairs] [Show ID: 29296]

Economic growth around the world is influenced by who is in the workforce and what they are paid. Women’s participation and compensation are shifting under the influence of social and economic trends at the national level and on a global scale. UC Berkeley Professor Laura Tyson shares some of her own experiences, observations, and analysis as she makes a case for greater gender parity for economic growth, including how economic policy can influence the recruitment and retention of women in workplaces worldwide. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Public Affairs] [Business] [Show ID: 29294]

A leading moral and political philosopher, Kwame Anthony Appiah is Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. He explores the ideas of the philosopher Hans Vahinger, who argued that our theories of the world involved understanding things “as if” what is in fact false were true. He uses Vahinger’s ideas to discuss a contemporary philosophical proposal, due to Dan Dennett, that says that human beings can be understood by way of an “intentional strategy” that “consists of treating the object whose behavior you want to predict as a rational agent with beliefs and desires and other mental states …” Since, as Appiah suggests, we are not fully rational, there is a puzzle about why this should work. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Show ID: 29293]

UC Berkeley Professor Yuri Slezkine is an innovative historian whose work focuses on the early years of the Soviet Union. In this lecture, he focuses on the private lives of Bolshevik government officials: their wives, maids, lovers, children, and other comrades. The argument is that revolutions devour their parents and that they begin as tragedy and end at home. By centering the cultural and political upset of revolution within domestic space, Slezkine reimagines the story of the Bolsheviks’ rise. This Moses Lecture follows on Slezkine’s work as translator and co-editor, with Sheila Fitzpatrick, of “In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War” (2000), which reexamined the societal upheavals of those years through the lens of Soviet women’s autobiographical writings, oral testimonies and private documents. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Show ID: 29041]

The founding fathers were political theorists of the highest order, and founded the modern era of constitutional design. But how have their propositions fared over the course of the subsequent two centuries, in which over 900 constitutions have been written? Tom Ginsburg, Professor of International Law, and Deputy Dean, University of Chicago Law School, summarizes empirical work on constitutions relevant to the founders’ conjectures about design. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 28835]

The Neanderthals are the closest extinct relatives of all present-day human and the Neanderthal genome sequence provides unique insights into modern humans origins. Svante Pääbo, a biologist and evolutionary anthropologist, describe the current understanding of the genetic contributions of Neanderthals to present-day humans and to extinct human groups. He also describes preliminary analyses of genomic features that appeared in present-day humans since their divergence from a common ancestor shared with Neanderthals and discusses how they may be functionally analyzed in the future. Pääbo is the Director of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Science] [Show ID: 28720]

Sarah Broadie, a specialist in classical philosophy and professor at the University of St. Andrews, explores the human being as theoretical adventurer, through the eyes of Plato and Aristotle. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Show ID: 28101]

University of Virginia’s Charles McCurdy explores how the Founding Fathers dealt with the unanticipated emergence of hotly contested, increasingly political interpretations of the Constitution during the first decade of the Early Republic and also how they responded to fact that constitutional change had occurred through interpretation rather than through constitutional amendment. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Show ID: 28227]

Nell Painter combines the discursive meanings of scholarship with the visual meaning of painting, to answer, literally, why white people are called 'Caucasian,' what that looks like, and how they all relate to our ideas about personal beauty. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Show ID: 26025]

Telomeres were first recognized in the late 1930s as important structures on chromosome ends. In the 1970s the sequence of these structures was identified in the ciliated protozoa Tetrahymena by Elizabeth Blackburn. In the 1980s telomerase was discovered as an enzyme that elongates telomeres and compensates for natural telomere shortening. Carol Greider, Director of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Johns Hopkins University, discusses the journey from these curiosity driven discoveries to the appreciation of the role of telomeres in human disease. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Science] [Show ID: 28053]

Telomeres are the chromosomes end-part, that are needed to protect chromosome ends. Due to the way chromosomes are copied, these telomeres shorten with each round of cell division. This shortening is kept in check by the enzyme telomerase which elongates telomeres. However because of the limited amount of telomerase, telomere shorten with age in humans. People who cannot effectively elongate telomeres may show manifestations of a Telomere Syndrome, which include age-related diseases such as bone marrow failure, immune senescence and pulmonary fibrosis. Carol Greider, 2009 Nobel Laureate and professor at Johns Hopkins University, discusses how the seemingly benign structure on chromosome ends can underlie human disease. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Science] [Show ID: 28052]

Why don't people just say what they mean? In this lecture, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker explains the paradoxical appeal of euphemism, innuendo, politeness, and other forms of shilly-shallying. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Show ID: 27932]

Believe it or not, violence has been in decline for long stretches of time, and we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species existence. Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker presents the data supporting this surprising conclusion, and explains the trends by showing how changing historical circumstances have engaged different components of human nature. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Show ID: 27931]

Drawing on fieldwork in new charismatic evangelicals churches in the Bay Area and in Accra, Ghana, Tanya Luhrmann, Stanford University, explores the way that cultural ideas about mind and person alter prayer practice and the experience of God. Luhrmann's work focuses on the way that objects without material presence come to seem real to people, and the way that ideas about the mind affect mental experience. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Show ID: 26087]

Geographer Carl Ortwin Sauer demonstrated through his work and writings that landscapes are the long-term contingent product of interactions between natural processes and cultural forces. In this lecture, Patrick Kirch, Professor of Anthropology and Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, applies the concept of landscape to the islands of Polynesia. Drawing upon recent multi-disciplinary research, Kirch shows how certain natural properties of islands shaped the course of cultural and social evolution of island peoples, at the same time that cumulative effect of human actions irreversibly altered island environments. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Science] [Show ID: 26014]

The Fulbright Program, administered by the U.S. Department of State, was founded in 1946 for the purposes of fostering exchange between American and international students. In this lecture Harriet Fulbright provides an intimate look into the origins of the program, describing how the idea for international exchange evolved over the course of her husband’s career in Congress. She traces the program’s history from the passage of Senator Fulbright’s 1945 Bill, and what she sees as the future of his legacy. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Education] [Show ID: 26013]