| Martin Luther King's Acceptance Speech, on the Occasion of the Award of the Nobel Peace Prize Oslo, December 10, 1964 The Nobel Foundation has granted the publication Folly permission to publish the Nobel lecture by Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King is the sole author of the text. © The Nobel Foundation 1964. Right photograph: KING Jr., Martin Luther. Nobel Laureate PEACE 1964. © Nobelstiftelsen. Martin Luther King, © Nobel Foundation (see January 2007 issue) |
| The Poet by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The essay, The Poet was written by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1844. (see January 2007 issue) |
| Your Brain on Jazz: Researchers Use fMRI to Study Improvisation, Creativity Research, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and musician volunteers from the Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute, sheds light on the creative improvisation that artists and non-artists use in everyday life. A pair of Johns Hopkins and government scientists have discovered that when jazz musicians improvise, their brains turn off areas linked to self-censoring and inhibition, and turn on those that let self-expression flow. It appears, they conclude, that jazz musicians create their unique improvised riffs by turning off inhibition and turning up creativity. In a report published February 27, 2008 in Public Library of Science (PLoS) ONE, the scientists from the University’s School of Medicine and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders describe their interest in the possible neurological underpinnings of the almost trance-like state jazz artists enter during spontaneous improvisation. (see July 2008 issue) |
| Photograph courtesy of and with permission from Johns Hopkins Medical © 2008 |
| The X PRIZE Foundation is a non-profit organization that awards monetary prizes to individuals and teams that discover solutions to global challenges in the areas of energy and the environment, life sciences, education, global entrepreneurship and exploration (space and ocean). It is widely recognized as a model for fostering innovation through competition. The foundation hosts competitions to achieve a goal, set by the foundation, which has the potential to benefit humanity. Rather than awarding money to honor past achievements or directly funding research, an X PRIZE fosters cross-disciplinary innovation through competition, public interest and entrepreneurship. (see September 08 issue) |
| What's the difference between a challenge and a banning and who challenges books? According to the American Library Association (ALA), a challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group. A banning is the removal of those materials. Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others. Throughout history, more and different kinds of people and groups of all persuasions than you might first suppose, who, for all sorts of reasons, have attempted—and continue to attempt—to suppress anything that conflicts with or anyone who disagrees with their beliefs. According to the “The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books, Challenges by Initiator, Institution, Type, and Year,” parents challenge materials more often than any other group. (see October 08 issue) |
| Ideas |
| Audubon Insectarium: By the Numbers ♦ Audubon Insectarium comprises 23,000 square feet and features 70+ dynamic and interactive exhibits with thousands of live and mounted specimens. ♦ Insects make up nearly 90 percent of the world’s species. At any one time, it’s estimated there are 10 quintillion individual live insects (10,000,000,000,000,000,000). ♦ Worldwide, some 900 thousand different insects are known – with thousands more discovered each year. The US has approximately 91,000 species of insects; another 73,000 species may still be undiscovered by science. ♦ There are 31 different classes of insects. The largest and most common are: Diptera (flies and mosquitoes); Hymenoptera (bees, ants and wasps); Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths); and Coleoptera (beetles). ♦ Beetles are the largest single group of animals on the planet, with more than 300,000 different known species and thousands more discovered each year. If you lined up all the animals on earth, every 4th one would be a beetle. ♦ Beetles are so popular in Japan, there are more pet beetles than dogs or cats. (see August 2008 issue) |
| "Kosovo's Sorrow: Fleeing Kosovo" by Carol Guzy, The Washington Post. Feature Photography winner, 2000 |
| NEWSEUM Pulitzer Prize Photographs Gallery This gallery contains the largest and most comprehensive collection of Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalism ever assembled. Visitors can view a documentary in which photographers explain their craft and can access an electronic database that will feature 1,000 images and 15 hours of video and audio compiled from interviews with 68 Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers. Image (right) courtesy Newseum. (see August 2009 issue) |
| A National Summit on Arts Journalism/ October 2, 2009, 9AM PDT The Summit will present a range of ideas and projects representing current thinking in covering the arts. Five projects were selected in an open call this summer that attracted 109 submissions. Five additional projects will be presented representing broad trends in the field of journalism. Presentations will be made in front of a live audience, streamed over the internet. The Summit will also include two roundtable discussions about the art and business of arts journalism. A National Summit on Arts Journalism is a project of USC Annenberg School for Communication and the National Arts Journalism Program. (Live Video of Summit October 2, 2009 9AM-1PM PDT www.najp.org/summit) |
| From Music to Painting: The Strange Yet Not-So- Strange Tales of Pardhaans by Udayan Vajpeyi All transformations give materiality to the otherwise immaterial thing called time. This time lives in tales. Perhaps we may claim that the point of all tales is to underline one or other kind of transformation. The one I am going to talk about is no different. It is about an extremely strange transformation that took place not long ago. It is about Pardhaans, a sub-community of the Gonds, one of the largest ‘tribes’ of central India, and one that has ruled portions of that region for centuries, both before and after Mughal rule. I must express my reservations about the use of the word ‘tribal’ in the Indian context, because I feel those who are called ‘tribal’ in the modern discourses about India are in fact various castes; their complementarity to each other, like that of castes in various localities, is one of the reasons why this is so. I believe that they were conceptually and practically segregated from other communities living in India, to serve the purposes of colonial rule -- even though their lifestyles were in continuity with those of other communities. But that is a different story, which will have to wait for some more time if it wants to be told in greater detail and with authenticity. (see November 2009 issue) |
| Delfeayo Marsalis SWEET THUNDER HONORING DUKE ELLINGTON AND SHAKESPEARE Delfeayo studied literature at the University of New Orleans, nurturing his love for William Shakespeare and exploring his long- term affinity for both Duke Ellington and Shakespeare. In 2004, he received an MA in jazz performance at the University of Louisville. It was there he made the first connection between the Bard and Duke in the form of a thesis paper. He was invited by Stratford (Ontario) Shakespeare Festival to create a fresh new interpretation of the 1957 Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s Such Sweet Thunder. By combining Shakespeare and Ellington, Delfeayo’s Sweet Thunder reaches beyond the niche jazz audience; it's a significant musical and theatrical event - a major departure from the original Such Sweet Thunder. It is hard to imagine an interpretation by a musician less versatile than Delfeayo. Sympathetic to the musical requirements, he explores the original material in the distinctive language of his native New Orleans, while his melodic alterations and formal additions are seamlessly composed and orchestrated. (see January 2011 issue) YouTube Link |
| Delfeayo Marsalis (image courtesy of the artist) |
| The Neuroscience of Aesthetics: Artists and perceptual researchers start a conversation on what they can learn from one another by Nicky Penttila The neuroscience of music has a relatively rich history, at least in hearing and the mental processing of sound. Only recently, though, have the mental processes involved in producing music been studied. Dana grantee Charles Limb, a neurosurgeon at Hopkins and a professor at Hopkins's Peabody Institute of Music, is trying to trace the changes in the brain as trained musicians improvise. Limb described a series of experiments he ran in 2008 of jazz musicians improvising on a specially designed keyboard while undergoing fMRI brain scanning. Activity in a broad patch of the frontal cortex, thought to be controlling self-monitoring and self-inhibition, went down, while that of a tighter patch, thought of as an autobiographical area, went up. "That's a very tidy way to frame something [musical expression] that isn't tidy at all," he said. "Artistic creativity is a neurologic product that can be examined using scientific methods," Limb said. “The question is: Is it truly possible to study creativity scientifically, and if it is, why should scientists study it?" His answer is yes to both. (see December 2010 issue) |
| Music and the Spark of Spontaneity By Carl Sherman Why improvisation? It may represent “the essence of creativity,” one panel member suggested: a sustained flight of the mysterious process that generates art, literature—and great ideas in science. “Jazz is a good model… it’s amenable to experimentation,” panelist Charles Limb said in a telephone interview after the symposium. Limb, a Dana Foundation grantee who teaches at both Johns Hopkins Medical School and the Peabody Conservatory of Music, has used fMRI to look into the brain of the improviser. “Music affects the brain globally,” he said at the symposium. “We were trying to figure out what part of the brain is involved specifically when you improvise.” In his study, he had several highly proficient jazz musicians play a keyboard adapted for use in the scanner, and compared brain activity while they improvised and played a memorized passage. One distinctive feature of the improvising brain was a pattern of dissociation in the prefrontal cortex: increased activity in the medial part of this brain region, and reduced activity in lateral areas. (see July 2011 issue) |
| Photo by Kellyann Estrem |
| A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan A Documentary Seamus Murphy The project spans over 15 years of my traveling and reporting in Afghanistan. I first went there in 1994 and it became a baptism of fire for me. It was the first time I had exposure to real war and it left a deep impression on me that I carry to this day. I saw things and heard stories that changed my life. The suffering, cruelty and waste was unimaginable. But it was the humanity of the people which compelled me to return, again and again. The result is a large archive of images documenting those years, 1994 up to the present, which documents the stories and experiences of the Afghan people. We will hear from the people who lived through those years and who live in Afghanistan now, distilling their hopes and fears for the future. We seldom hear what it is the Afghan people want and need. Stories of what happened and why things happened can give us a greater understanding of the country, and possible solutions for stability in the future. YouTubeLink |
| UNESCO, U.S. Library of Congress and Partners Launch World Digital Library Paris, Washington DC, 21 April - UNESCO and 32 partner institutions launched the World Digital Library, a Web site that features unique cultural materials from libraries and archives from around the world. The site – located at www.wdl.org – includes manuscripts, maps, rare books, films, sound recordings, prints and photographs. It provides unrestricted public access, free of charge, to this material. The WDL functions in seven languages – Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish – and includes content in more than forty languages. Browse and search features facilitate cross-cultural and cross-temporal exploration on the site. Descriptions of each item and videos, with expert curators speaking about selected items, provide context for users and are intended to spark curiosity and encourage both students and the general public to learn more about the cultural heritage of all countries. (see April 2009 issue) |
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Brain wiring a no-brainer?
Scans reveal 3D grid structure
The brain appears to be wired more like the checkerboard streets of New York City than the curvy lanes of Columbia, Md., suggests a new brain imaging
study. The most detailed images, to date, reveal a pervasive 3D grid structure with no diagonals, say scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health.
“Far from being just a tangle of wires, the brain's connections turn out to be more like ribbon cables — folding 2D sheets of parallel neuronal fibers that cross
paths at right angles, like the warp and weft of a fabric,” explained Van Wedeen, M.D., of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), A.A. Martinos Center for
Biomedical Imaging and the Harvard Medical School. “This grid structure is continuous and consistent at all scales and across humans and other primate
species.” (see July 2012 issue)
Scans reveal 3D grid structure
The brain appears to be wired more like the checkerboard streets of New York City than the curvy lanes of Columbia, Md., suggests a new brain imaging
study. The most detailed images, to date, reveal a pervasive 3D grid structure with no diagonals, say scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health.
“Far from being just a tangle of wires, the brain's connections turn out to be more like ribbon cables — folding 2D sheets of parallel neuronal fibers that cross
paths at right angles, like the warp and weft of a fabric,” explained Van Wedeen, M.D., of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), A.A. Martinos Center for
Biomedical Imaging and the Harvard Medical School. “This grid structure is continuous and consistent at all scales and across humans and other primate
species.” (see July 2012 issue)