How a Liberal Arts Education Helped Derek Black, the Godson of David Duke, Break with the White Nationalist Movement

Image of Ron Paul, Don Black, Derek Black (right), via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

A native of West Palm Beach, Flori­da, Derek Black grew up in one of the most promi­nent white nation­al­ist fam­i­lies in the Unit­ed States. He’s the son of Don Black, a for­mer grand wiz­ard of the Ku Klux Klan. And he’s the god­son of David Duke, “the most rec­og­niz­able fig­ure of the Amer­i­can rad­i­cal right, a neo-Nazi, long­time Klan leader and now inter­na­tion­al spokesman for Holo­caust denial” (per the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter). In short, Derek Black had every rea­son to grow up a racist, and remain a racist from cra­dle to grave. But things did­n’t turn out that way.

Below, you can hear Black explain how, as a young adult, he broke with white nation­al­ism, leav­ing behind his fam­i­ly, friends and com­mu­ni­ty. What laid the ground­work for that break? Going to a small lib­er­al arts col­lege, encoun­ter­ing new ideas, and meet­ing dif­fer­ent peo­ple. In this record­ed inter­view, he tells Michael Bar­baro of The New York Times:

In 2010, I moved across the state and start­ed col­lege at this lit­tle lib­er­al arts col­lege in Flori­da, which was about three and a half hours from home and it was the first time that I had lived away from home. Nobody knew who I was and I did not vol­un­teer who I was or any­thing about my back­ground, I made friends, hung out with peo­ple and played my gui­tar on my bal­cony in my dorm. It was nice to come back from class and be able to talk about his­to­ry or phi­los­o­phy or what­ev­er oth­er sub­ject and be around oth­er peo­ple.…

I had a friend on cam­pus who I had got­ten to know dur­ing my first semes­ter when nobody knew who I was, he was an obser­vant Jew who had Shab­bat din­ners pret­ty reg­u­lar­ly when­ev­er he was in town on Fri­day night and he would invite peo­ple of athe­ists and all sorts of dif­fer­ent reli­gions. It was just a nice din­ner. And so he actu­al­ly invit­ed me to one of the Shab­bats, and I knew him, and so I brought wine…

He had read my posts on Storm­front [a white nation­al­ist web­site cre­at­ed by Don Black] going back years — even the stuff when I was a teenag­er — and he doubt­ed that he was going to con­vince me of any­thing, he just want­ed to let me see a Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty thing so that if I was going to keep say­ing these anti-Semit­ic things that at least I had seen real Jews.

It was ulti­mate­ly in pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions with a per­son I met at the Shab­bat din­ners … we would talk about things. Not only white nation­al­ism, but even­tu­al­ly white nation­al­ism. And I would say, “This is what I believe about I.Q. dif­fer­ences, I have 12 dif­fer­ent stud­ies that have been pub­lished over the years, here’s the jour­nal that’s put this stuff togeth­er, I believe that this is true, that race pre­dicts I.Q. and that there were I.Q. dif­fer­ences in races.” And they would come back with 150 more recent, more well researched stud­ies and explain to me how sta­tis­tics works and we would go back and forth until I would come to the end of that argu­ment and I’d say, Yes that makes sense, that does not hold togeth­er and I’ll remove that from my ide­o­log­i­cal tool­box but every­thing else is still there. And we did that over a year or two on one thing after anoth­er until I got to a point where I didn’t believe it any­more.

As you stream the inter­view below, spend some time think­ing about the trans­for­ma­tive pow­er of a lib­er­al arts edu­ca­tion. Yes, more than an expe­di­ent busi­ness degree, it can change hearts and save lives.

Also pay atten­tion to Black­’s final thoughts on what Trump’s response to the Char­lottesville dra­ma did for the White nation­al­ist move­ment: “I think Tues­day was the most impor­tant moment in the his­to­ry of the mod­ern white nation­al­ist move­ment.” Trump “said there were good peo­ple in the white nation­al­ist ral­ly and he sal­vaged their mes­sage.”

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

What’s a Scientifically-Proven Way to Improve Your Ability to Learn? Get Out and Exercise

Wiki­me­dia Com­mons Image by the U.S. Navy

The ben­e­fit, nay neces­si­ty, of phys­i­cal exer­cise is unde­ni­able. The med­ical com­mu­ni­ty has iden­ti­fied seden­tary lifestyles as an epi­dem­ic, some­times called “sit­ting dis­ease” (or as peo­ple like to say, “sit­ting is the new smok­ing”). Pro­longed sit­ting has been estab­lished as a cause of all sorts of chron­ic ill­ness­es includ­ing heart dis­ease, dia­betes, and even cer­tain can­cers. Com­bine this prob­lem with the steady stream of processed foods in more and more diets and we have a full-blown pub­lic health cri­sis on our hands that requires some seri­ous inter­ven­tion on the part of doc­tors, dieti­cians, phys­i­cal ther­a­pists, and sci­en­tists.

And as more and more researchers are find­ing out, a poor diet and lack of exer­cise can also have seri­ous­ly harm­ful effects on the brain. Con­verse­ly, as a recent Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia study shows, exer­cise boosts brain func­tion; it “enhances learn­ing and mem­o­ry, improves exec­u­tive func­tion” and “coun­ter­acts… men­tal decline.” To put the the­o­ry of enhanced learn­ing to the test, researchers have con­duct­ed sev­er­al exper­i­ments and found that phys­i­cal activ­i­ty can improve the abil­i­ty to learn new things at near­ly any age.

Stud­ies have “found cor­re­la­tions between children’s aer­o­bic fit­ness and their brain struc­ture,” reports The New York Times, and kids who exer­cise before math and read­ing tests show con­sis­tent­ly high­er scores than their seden­tary peers. Like­wise, a study con­duct­ed with col­lege stu­dents in Ire­land found that par­tic­i­pants per­formed sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter on mem­o­ry tests after 30 min­utes of cycling. One like­ly expla­na­tion is that exer­cise increas­es the pro­duc­tion of BDNF (Brain-Derived Neu­rotrop­ic Fac­tor), a pro­tein that pro­motes nerve health. And in a new paper pub­lished by researchers from Italy, Chi­na, and Thai­land, we find that that exer­cise can specif­i­cal­ly improve the abil­i­ty to learn new lan­guages.

The study test­ed 40 col­lege-age Chi­nese stu­dents who are learn­ing Eng­lish. One group remained seden­tary, while anoth­er rode exer­cise bikes at a mod­er­ate pace both before and dur­ing study ses­sions. The stu­dents who biked per­formed bet­ter on 8 sep­a­rate vocab­u­lary tests and were bet­ter able to rec­og­nize cor­rect Eng­lish sen­tences. These results are sim­i­lar to those of a recent Ger­man study which found that a group of young women rid­ing exer­cise bikes, at slow and mod­er­ate paces, per­formed much bet­ter on vocab­u­lary tests than anoth­er group who didn’t exer­cise.

Though The New York Times points to a dif­fer­ent study with con­trast­ing results, the evi­dence seems large­ly on the side of exer­cise-enhances-learn­ing pro­po­nents. “In recent years,” the Times notes, “a wealth of stud­ies in both ani­mals and peo­ple have shown that we learn dif­fer­ent­ly if we also exer­cise.” You’ll find many of those stud­ies sum­ma­rized at the BBC, The Guardian, and else­where, along with sev­er­al pos­si­ble expla­na­tions for the phe­nom­e­non. Psy­chol­o­gist Justin Rhodes notes that “aer­o­bic exer­cise can actu­al­ly reverse hip­pocam­pal shrink­age,” increas­ing gray mat­ter in an area of the brain asso­ci­at­ed with mem­o­ry and emo­tion. His con­tention is backed by recent research on mice and humans.

In any case, although it appears that more vig­or­ous exer­cis­es like cycling and run­ning cre­ate the most improve­ment, tak­ing a brisk walk before a class or study ses­sion can also help with reten­tion and alert­ness. What­ev­er kind of exer­cise one does, a sim­ple “take-home mes­sage,” says one researcher, “may be that instruc­tion should be flanked by phys­i­cal activ­i­ty. Sit­ting for hours and hours with­out mov­ing is not the best way to learn.” Hav­ing trou­ble get­ting moti­vat­ed to run or bike before you study for that math test or start a new lan­guage course? Take some advice from Har­vard Med­ical School on how to start slow­ly, find some­thing you like doing, and turn every­day activ­i­ties into exer­cise.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Sit­ting Is The New Smok­ing: An Ani­mat­ed Expla­na­tion

This Is Your Brain on Exer­cise: Why Phys­i­cal Exer­cise (Not Men­tal Games) Might Be the Best Way to Keep Your Mind Sharp

Hear Aer­o­bic Exer­cise: When Sovi­et Musi­cians Record­ed Elec­tron­ic Music for a Sub­ver­sive Home Fit­ness Record (1984)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The Illustrated Guide to a PhD: 12 Simple Pictures That Will Put the Daunting Degree into Perspective

Matthew Might, a com­put­er sci­ence pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Utah, writes: “Every fall, I explain to a fresh batch of Ph.D. stu­dents what a Ph.D. is. It’s hard to describe it in words. So, I use pic­tures.” In his Illus­trat­ed Guide to the PhD, Pro­fes­sor Might cre­ates a visu­al nar­ra­tive that puts the daunt­ing degree into per­spec­tive. Any­one who has already pur­sued a Ph.D. will see the wis­dom in it. (Or at least I did.) And young, aspir­ing aca­d­e­mics would be wise to pay it heed.

You can see a con­densed ver­sion of the the illus­trat­ed guide above. Or fol­low it in a larg­er for­mat below.

Imag­ine a cir­cle that con­tains all of human knowl­edge:

By the time you fin­ish ele­men­tary school, you know a lit­tle:

By the time you fin­ish high school, you know a bit more:

With a bach­e­lor’s degree, you gain a spe­cial­ty:

A mas­ter’s degree deep­ens that spe­cial­ty:

Read­ing research papers takes you to the edge of human knowl­edge:

Once you’re at the bound­ary, you focus:

You push at the bound­ary for a few years:

Until one day, the bound­ary gives way:

And, that dent you’ve made is called a Ph.D.:

Of course, the world looks dif­fer­ent to you now:

So, don’t for­get the big­ger pic­ture:

Keep push­ing.

You can find Mat­t’s Illus­trat­ed Guide host­ed on his web site. This guide/reality check is pub­lished under a Cre­ative Com­mons License. You can also buy a print ver­sion for $6.50. The mon­ey goes to char­i­ty.

This guide first appeared on our site in 2012. But, with all of the wis­dom it packs into a small space, it seemed worth bring­ing back.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 14 ) |

How Finland Created One of the Best Educational Systems in the World (by Doing the Opposite of U.S.)

Every con­ver­sa­tion about edu­ca­tion in the U.S. takes place in a mine­field. Unless you’re a bil­lion­aire who bought the job of Sec­re­tary of Edu­ca­tion, you’d bet­ter be pre­pared to answer ques­tions about racial and eco­nom­ic equi­ty, dis­abil­i­ty issues, pro­tec­tions for LGBTQ stu­dents, teacher pay and unions, reli­gious char­ter schools, and many oth­er press­ing con­cerns. These issues are not mutu­al­ly exclu­sive, nor are they dis­tinct from ques­tions of cur­ricu­lum, test­ing, or achieve­ment. The ter­rain is lit­tered with pos­si­ble explo­sive con­flicts between edu­ca­tors, par­ents, admin­is­tra­tors, leg­is­la­tors, activists, and prof­i­teers.

The needs of the most deeply invest­ed stake­hold­ers, as they say, the stu­dents them­selves, seem to get far too lit­tle con­sid­er­a­tion. What if we in the U.S., all of us, actu­al­ly want­ed to improve the edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ences and aca­d­e­m­ic out­comes for our children—all of them? Where might we look for a mod­el? Many peo­ple have looked to Fin­land, at least since 2010, when the doc­u­men­tary Wait­ing for Super­man con­trast­ed strug­gling U.S. pub­lic schools with high­ly suc­cess­ful Finnish equiv­a­lents.

The film, a pos­i­tive spin on the char­ter school move­ment, received sig­nif­i­cant back­lash for its cher­ry-picked exam­ples and blam­ing of teach­ers’ unions for America’s fail­ing schools. By con­trast, Finland’s schools have been described by William Doyle, an Amer­i­can Ful­bright Schol­ar who stud­ies them, as “the ‘ulti­mate char­ter school net­work’ ” (a phrase, we’ll see, that means lit­tle in the Finnish con­text.) There, Doyle writes at The Hechinger Report, “teach­ers are not strait-jack­et­ed by bureau­crats, scripts or exces­sive reg­u­la­tions, but have the free­dom to inno­vate and exper­i­ment as teams of trust­ed pro­fes­sion­als.”

Last year, Michael Moore fea­tured many of Finland’s inno­v­a­tive edu­ca­tion­al exper­i­ments in his humor­ous, hope­ful trav­el­ogue Where to Invade Next. In the clip above, you can hear from the country’s Min­is­ter of Edu­ca­tion, Krista Kiu­ru, who explains to him why Finnish chil­dren do not have home­work; hear also from a group of high school stu­dents, high school prin­ci­pal Pasi Majas­sari, first grade teacher Anna Hart and many oth­ers. Short­er school hours—the “short­est school days and short­est school years in the entire West­ern world”—leave plen­ty of time for leisure and recre­ation. Kids bake, hike, build things, make art, con­duct exper­i­ments, sing, and gen­er­al­ly enjoy them­selves.

“There are no man­dat­ed stan­dard­ized tests,” writes Lyn­Nell Han­cock at Smith­son­ian, “apart from one exam at the end of stu­dents’ senior year in high school… there are no rank­ings, no com­par­isons or com­pe­ti­tion between stu­dents, schools or regions.” Yet Finnish stu­dents have, in the past sev­er­al years, con­sis­tent­ly ranked in the top ten among mil­lions of stu­dents world­wide in sci­ence, read­ing, and math. “If there was one thing I kept hear­ing over and over again from the Finns,” says Moore above, “it’s that Amer­i­ca should get rid of stan­dard­ized tests,” should stop teach­ing to those tests, stop design­ing entire cur­ric­u­la around mul­ti­ple-choice tests. Han­cock describes the results of the Finnish sys­tem, and its costs:

Nine­ty-three per­cent of Finns grad­u­ate from aca­d­e­m­ic or voca­tion­al high schools, 17.5 per­cent­age points high­er than the Unit­ed States, and 66 per­cent go on to high­er edu­ca­tion, the high­est rate in the Euro­pean Union. Yet Fin­land spends about 30 per­cent less per stu­dent than the Unit­ed States.

Moore’s cam­era reg­is­ters the shock on Finnish edu­ca­tors’ faces when they hear that many U.S. schools elim­i­nat­ed music, art, poet­ry and oth­er pur­suits in order to focus almost exclu­sive­ly on test­ing. Though light­heart­ed in tone, the seg­ment real­ly dri­ves home the depress­ing degree to which so many U.S. stu­dents receive an impov­er­ished education—one bare­ly wor­thy of the name—unless they luck into a vouch­er for a high-end char­ter school or have the inde­pen­dent means for an expen­sive pri­vate one. In Fin­land, says the Min­is­ter of Edu­ca­tion, “all the schools are equal. You nev­er ask where the best school is.”

It’s also ille­gal in Fin­land to prof­it from school­ing. Wealthy par­ents have to ensure that neigh­bor­hood schools can give their kids the best edu­ca­tion pos­si­ble, because they are the only option. Many peo­ple in the U.S. object to com­par­isons like Moore’s by not­ing that soci­eties like Fin­land are “homoge­nous” next to what may seem to them like mad­den­ing cul­tur­al diver­si­ty in the U.S. How­ev­er, Fin­land has incor­po­rat­ed (not with­out dif­fi­cul­ty) large immi­grant and refugee pop­u­la­tions—even as its schools con­tin­ue to improve. The gov­ern­ment has respond­ed in part to ris­ing immi­gra­tion with edu­ca­tion­al solu­tions such as this one, a “nation­al ini­tia­tive to rein­force Finnish high­er edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tions (HEIs) as sig­nif­i­cant stake­hold­ers in migrants’ inte­gra­tion.”

The sub­tan­tive dif­fer­ences between the two coun­tries’ edu­ca­tion­al sys­tems may have less to do with demog­ra­phy and more to do with eco­nom­ics and the train­ing and social sta­tus of teach­ers.

In Fin­land, writes Doyle, no teacher “is allowed to lead a pri­ma­ry school class with­out a master’s degree in edu­ca­tion, with spe­cial­iza­tion in research and class­room prac­tice.” Teach­ing “is the most admired job in Fin­land next to med­ical doc­tors.” And as Dana Gold­stein points out at The Nation—a fact Wait­ing for Super­man failed to mention—Finnish teach­ers are “gasp!—unionized and grant­ed tenure.” Per­haps an even more sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence the doc­u­men­tary glossed over: in Fin­land, “fam­i­lies ben­e­fit from a cra­dle-to-grave social wel­fare sys­tem that includes uni­ver­sal day­care, preschool and health­care, all of which are proven to help chil­dren achieve bet­ter results at school.”

Hun­dreds of stud­ies in recent years sub­stan­ti­ate this claim. It would seem intu­itive that stress­es asso­ci­at­ed with hunger and pover­ty would have a per­ni­cious effect on learn­ing, espe­cial­ly when poor­er schools are so egre­gious­ly under-resourced. And the data says as much, to vary­ing degrees. And yet, we are now in the U.S. slash­ing break­fast and lunch pro­grams that feed hun­gry chil­dren and decid­ing whether to unin­sure mil­lions of fam­i­lies as mil­lions more still lack basic health cov­er­age. Most every Amer­i­can par­ent knows that qual­i­ty day­cares and preschools can cost as much per year as a decent uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tion in this coun­try.

It seems to many of us that the atro­cious state of the U.S. edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem can only be attrib­uted to an act of will on the part our polit­i­cal elite, who see schools as com­pe­ti­tion for fun­da­men­tal­ist belief sys­tems, oppor­tu­ni­ties to pun­ish their oppo­nents out of spite, or as rich fields for pri­vate prof­it. But it needn’t be so. It took 40 years for the Finns to cre­ate their cur­rent sys­tem. In the 1960s, their schools ranked on the very low end—along with those in the U.S. By most accounts, they’ve since shown there can be sys­tems that, while sure­ly imper­fect in their own way, work for all kids, embed­ded with­in larg­er sys­tems that prize their teach­ers and fam­i­lies.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Study Shows That Teach­ing Young Kids Phi­los­o­phy Improves Their Aca­d­e­m­ic Per­for­mance, Mak­ing Them Bet­ter at Read­ing & Math

In Japan­ese Schools, Lunch Is As Much About Learn­ing As It’s About Eat­ing

Med­i­ta­tion is Replac­ing Deten­tion in Baltimore’s Pub­lic Schools, and the Stu­dents Are Thriv­ing

Mal­colm Glad­well Asks Hard Ques­tions about Mon­ey & Mer­i­toc­ra­cy in Amer­i­can High­er Edu­ca­tion: Stream 3 Episodes of His New Pod­cast

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Stanford Researchers Discover a Smarter Way to Prepare for Exams: Introducing MetaCognition, the Art of Thinking About Your Thinking

Ear­ly in the sec­ond sea­son of Noah Hawley’s excel­lent Far­go series, one of the gruff, lacon­ic Ger­hardt broth­ers shakes his head dur­ing a tense crime fam­i­ly moment and mut­ters sage­ly, “know thy­self.” Chal­lenged to pro­duce the quotation’s source, he says, with irri­tat­ed self-assur­ance, “It’s in the Bible.” The quote does have an ancient origin—maybe the tem­ple of Apol­lo at Del­phi, maybe the tem­ple court at Luxor—and it’s an idea that reap­pears in every philo­soph­i­cal sys­tem from age to age. Even if the self doesn’t real­ly exist, some thinkers have rea­soned, we should still study it.

These days, psy­chol­o­gists call a cer­tain kind of self-knowl­edge “metacog­ni­tion,” a new word for what they rec­og­nize, Jen­nifer Liv­ingston notes, as a con­cept that has been around “for as long as humans have been able to reflect on their cog­ni­tive expe­ri­ences.” Devel­op­men­tal psy­chol­o­gist John Flavell used the term in 1979 to refer specif­i­cal­ly to “how human beings learn and process infor­ma­tion, as well as indi­vid­ual knowl­edge of one’s own learn­ing process­es.” Often defined as “think­ing about think­ing,” megacog­ni­tion involves know­ing what con­di­tions best enable con­cen­tra­tion and mem­o­ry reten­tion, for exam­ple, and prac­tic­ing it can immense­ly improve study skills and aca­d­e­m­ic achieve­ment.

A new study pub­lished in Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence by Stan­ford psy­chol­o­gy researchers has val­i­dat­ed the idea with exper­i­men­tal data. In two dif­fer­ent exper­i­ments, stu­dents in a con­trol group stud­ied for exams in their ordi­nary way. Those in anoth­er group received an exer­cise called “Strate­gic Resource Use.” “They were asked,” Stan­ford News reports, to think about what might be on the exam, “and then strate­gize what kinds of resources they would use to study most effec­tive­ly.” Then they reflect­ed on “why each resource they chose would be use­ful” and how they planned on using them. It may seem like seri­ous­ly front-load­ing a study ses­sion, but the inter­ven­tion paid off. Stu­dents who got it scored on aver­age a third of a let­ter grade high­er than those who didn’t.

Post­doc­tor­al fel­low Patri­cia Chen, the study’s main author, under­took the exper­i­ment when she noticed that many of her own stu­dents gen­uine­ly worked hard but felt frus­trat­ed by the results. “Describe to me how you stud­ied for the exam,” she began ask­ing them. After con­duct­ing the metacog­ni­tion stud­ies, Chen con­clud­ed that “active­ly self-reflect­ing on the approach­es that you are tak­ing fos­ters a strate­gic stance that is real­ly impor­tant in life. Strate­gic think­ing dis­tin­guish­es between peo­ple of com­pa­ra­ble abil­i­ty and effort. This can make the dif­fer­ence between peo­ple who achieve and peo­ple who have the poten­tial to achieve, but don’t.”

Think­ing about your think­ing can’t make all the dif­fer­ence, of course, but the effect is dra­mat­ic among groups in rel­a­tive­ly sim­i­lar cir­cum­stances. An Aus­tralian study of 2000 Ph.D. stu­dents dis­cov­ered a close cor­re­la­tion between “how they thought about the learn­ing process,” notes Big Think, and “their suc­cess­es and fail­ures in achiev­ing their degrees.” A broad­er study in Britain that account­ed for class dif­fer­ences eval­u­at­ed Year 6 and 7 stu­dents in 23 pri­ma­ry schools. In eleven of these schools, stu­dents were instruct­ed in some­thing called “Self-Reg­u­lat­ed Strat­e­gy Development”—a means of con­scious­ly mon­i­tor­ing the writ­ing tech­niques they used in assign­ments: “Over­all,” the authors write, “the project appeared to have a large pos­i­tive impact on writ­ing out­comes,” espe­cial­ly among “pupils eli­gi­ble for free school meals.”

Each of these stud­ies neces­si­tat­ed meth­ods of teach­ing self-reg­u­la­tion and metacog­ni­tion, and each one for­mu­lat­ed its own ped­a­gogy. The British study spe­cial­ly trained a group of Year 6 teach­ers. “Part of the appeal of Chen’s approach,” writes Jen­ny Ander­son at Quartz, “is its sim­plic­i­ty: any stu­dent, teacher or even par­ent could use it.” And one might rea­son­ably assume that any­one could teach it to them­selves. For par­ents and teach­ers of strug­gling stu­dents, Chen offers some straight­for­ward advice. Rather than sug­gest­ing more study time and resources, first “Look at the way they are doing things. Do you think they could have gone about it in a bet­ter way?” As near­ly every ancient philoso­pher would affirm, we bet­ter our­selves not by acquir­ing more, but by under­stand­ing and using wise­ly what we already have to work with.

via Stan­ford News

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Game The­o­ry & Strate­gic Think­ing: A Free Online Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

32 Ani­mat­ed Videos by Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy Teach You the Essen­tials of Crit­i­cal Think­ing

Why You Do Your Best Think­ing In The Show­er: Cre­ativ­i­ty & the “Incu­ba­tion Peri­od”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The Map of Chemistry: New Animation Summarizes the Entire Field of Chemistry in 12 Minutes

Philoso­phers, tech­nol­o­gists, and futur­ists spend a good deal of time obsess­ing about the nature of real­i­ty. Recent­ly, no small num­ber of such peo­ple have come togeth­er to endorse the so-called “sim­u­la­tion argu­ment,” the mind-bog­gling, sci-fi idea that every­thing we expe­ri­ence exists as a vir­tu­al per­for­mance inside a com­put­er sys­tem more sophis­ti­cat­ed than we could ever imag­ine. It’s a sce­nario right out of Philip K. Dick, and one Dick believed pos­si­ble. It’s also, per­haps, ter­mi­nal­ly the­o­ret­i­cal and impos­si­ble to ver­i­fy.

So… where might the per­plexed turn should they want to under­stand the world around them? Are we doomed to expe­ri­ence real­i­ty—as post­mod­ern the­o­rist Jean Bau­drillard thought—as noth­ing more than end­less sim­u­la­tion? It’s a lit­tle old-fash­ioned, but maybe we could ask a sci­en­tist? One like physi­cist, sci­ence writer, edu­ca­tor Dominic Wal­li­man, whose series of short videos offer to the layper­son “maps” of physics, math, and, just above, chem­istry.

Walliman’s inge­nious teach­ing tools excel in con­vey­ing a tremen­dous amount of com­plex infor­ma­tion in a com­pre­hen­sive and intel­li­gi­ble way. We not only get an overview of each field’s intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ry, but we see how the var­i­ous sub­dis­ci­plines inter­act.

One of the odd­i­ties of chem­istry is that it was once just as much, if not more, con­cerned with what isn’t. Many of the tools and tech­niques of mod­ern chem­istry were devel­oped by alchemists—magicians, essen­tial­ly, whom we would see as char­la­tans even though they includ­ed in their num­ber such tow­er­ing intel­lects as Isaac New­ton. Wal­li­man does not get into this strange sto­ry, inter­est­ing as it is. Instead, he begins with a pre­his­to­ry of sorts, point­ing out that since humans start­ed using fire, cook­ing, and work­ing with met­al we have been engag­ing in chem­istry.

Then we’re launched right into the basic build­ing blocks—the parts of the atom and the peri­od­ic table. If, like me, you passed high school chem­istry by writ­ing a song about the ele­ments as a final project, you may be unlike­ly to remem­ber the var­i­ous types of chem­i­cal bonds and may nev­er have heard of “Van der Waals bond­ing.” There’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty to look some­thing up. And there’s noth­ing wrong with being a pri­mar­i­ly audi­to­ry or visu­al learn­er. Wal­li­man’s instruc­tion does a real ser­vice for those who are.

Wal­li­man moves through the basics briskly and into the dif­fer­ences between and uses of organ­ic and inor­gan­ic chem­istry. As the ani­ma­tion pulls back to reveal the full map, we see it is com­prised of two halves: “rules of chem­istry” and “areas of chem­istry.” We do not get expla­na­tions for the extreme end of the lat­ter cat­e­go­ry. Fields like “com­pu­ta­tion­al chem­istry” are left unex­plored, per­haps because they are too far out­side Wal­li­man’s exper­tise. One refresh­ing fea­ture of the videos on his “Domain of Sci­ence” chan­nel is their intel­lec­tu­al humil­i­ty.

If you’ve enjoyed the physics and math­e­mat­ics videos, for exam­ple, you should check back in with their Youtube pages, where Wal­li­man has post­ed lists of cor­rec­tions. He has a list as well on the chem­istry video page. “I endeav­our to be as accu­rate as pos­si­ble in my videos,” he writes here, “but I am human and def­i­nite­ly don’t know every­thing, so there are some­times mis­takes. Also, due to the nature of my videos, there are bound to be over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tions.” It’s an admis­sion that, from my per­spec­tive, should inspire more, not less, con­fi­dence in his instruc­tion. Ide­al­ly, sci­en­tists should be dri­ven by curios­i­ty, not van­i­ty, though that is also an all-too-human trait. (See many more maps, exper­i­ments, instruc­tion­al videos, and talks on Wal­li­man’s web­site.)

In the “Map of Physics,” you’ll note that we even­tu­al­ly reach a gap­ing “chasm of ignorance”—a place where no one has any idea what’s going on. Maybe this is where we reach the edges of the sim­u­la­tion. But most sci­en­tists, whether physi­cists, chemists, or math­e­mati­cians, would rather reserve judg­ment and keep build­ing on what they know with some degree of cer­tain­ty. You can see a full image of the “Map of Chem­istry” fur­ther up, and pur­chase a poster ver­sion here.

Find Free Chem­istry Cours­es in our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Map of Physics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Physics Fit Togeth­er

The Map of Math­e­mat­ics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Math Fit Togeth­er

Isaac Newton’s Recipe for the Myth­i­cal ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ Is Being Dig­i­tized & Put Online (Along with His Oth­er Alche­my Man­u­scripts)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Discover “Unpaywall,” a New (and Legal) Browser Extension That Lets You Read Millions of Science Articles Normally Locked Up Behind Paywalls

Ear­li­er this month, Impact­sto­ry, a non­prof­it sup­port­ed by grants from the Nation­al Sci­ence Foun­da­tion and the Alfred P. Sloan Foun­da­tion, launched, Unpay­wall, a free brows­er exten­sion that helps you “find open-access ver­sions of pay­walled research papers, instant­ly.”

As the co-founders of Impact­sto­ry describe itUnpay­wall is “an exten­sion for Chrome and Fire­fox that links you to free full-text as you browse research arti­cles. Hit a pay­wall? No prob­lem: click the green tab and read it free!”

Their FAQ gets into the mechan­ics a lit­tle more, but here’s the gist of how it works: “When you view a pay­walled research arti­cle, Unpay­wall auto­mat­i­cal­ly looks for a copy in our index of over 10 mil­lion free, legal full­text PDFs. If we find one, click the green tab to read the arti­cle.”

While many sci­ence pub­lish­ers put a pay­wall in front of sci­en­tif­ic arti­cles, it’s often the case that these arti­cles have been pub­lished else­where in an open for­mat. “More and more fun­ders and uni­ver­si­ties are requir­ing authors to upload copies of their papers to [open] repos­i­to­ries. This has cre­at­ed a deep resource of legal open access papers…” And that’s what Unpay­wall draws on.

This seems like quite a boon for researchers, jour­nal­ists, stu­dents and pol­i­cy­mak­ers. You can down­load the Unpay­wall exten­sion for Chrome and Fire­fox, or learn more about the new ser­vice at the Unpay­wall web­site.

Note: Over at Metafil­ter, you can find a good list of sources of, or meth­ods for, obtain­ing free aca­d­e­m­ic con­tent.

via Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics/Metafil­ter

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

138 Short Animated Introductions to the World’s Greatest Ideas: Plato, Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir & More

The Open Cul­ture audi­ence, by my esti­ma­tion, divides into two basic groups: those who’ve read the col­lect­ed works of the likes of Simone de Beau­voir, Michel Fou­cault, and Pla­to, and those who’d like to. Whichev­er body of oft-ref­er­enced ideas you’ve been want­i­ng to dig deep into your­self, get­ting a brief, con­cept-dis­till­ing primer before­hand can make the task eas­i­er, improv­ing your under­stand­ing and abil­i­ty to con­tex­tu­al­ize the orig­i­nal texts when you get around to them. Online edu­ca­tion com­pa­ny Macat has pro­duced 138 such primers in the form of ani­mat­ed videos freely avail­able on YouTube which can put you in the right frame of mind to study a vari­ety of ideas in lit­er­a­ture, eco­nom­ics, soci­ol­o­gy, pol­i­tics, his­to­ry, and phi­los­o­phy.

De Beau­voir, in Macat’s analy­sis, argued in The Sec­ond Sex that “the views of indi­vid­u­als are social­ly and cul­tur­al­ly pro­duced. Fem­i­nin­i­ty is not inher­ent,” but a soci­etal mech­a­nism long used “to keep men dom­i­nant.”

Accord­ing to their video on Fou­cault’s Dis­ci­pline and Pun­ish, that famous book “explores the evo­lu­tion of pow­er since the Mid­dle Ages,” cul­mi­nat­ing in the argu­ment that “mod­ern states have moved away from explor­ing their author­i­ty phys­i­cal­ly to enforc­ing it psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly,” a phe­nom­e­non exem­pli­fied as much by late 18th- and ear­ly 19th-cen­tu­ry philoso­pher Jere­my Ben­tham’s Panop­ti­con as by mod­ern closed-cir­cuit tele­vi­sion urban omni-sur­veil­lance (a tech­nol­o­gy now spread far beyond the infa­mous­ly CCTV-zeal­ous Lon­don all the way to Seoul, where I live). In The Repub­lic, Pla­to asks more basic ques­tions about soci­ety: “What would an ide­al state look like, and how would it work?”

For that ancient Greek, says the video’s nar­ra­tor, “the ide­al soci­ety offered the guar­an­tee of jus­tice and would be ruled over not by a tyrant, but by an all-pow­er­ful philoso­pher-king.” Whether or not that strikes you as an appeal­ing prospect, or indeed whether you agree with de Beau­voir and Fou­cault’s bold propo­si­tions, you stand to sharp­en your mind by engag­ing with these and oth­er influ­en­tial ideas, includ­ing (as cov­ered in Macat’s oth­er three- to four-minute analy­ses) those of Machi­avel­li, David HumeEdward Said, and Thomas Piket­ty. “Crit­i­cal think­ing is about to become one of the most in-demand set of skills in the glob­al jobs mar­ket,” insists Macat’s mar­ket­ing. “Are you ready?” Whether or not you’ll ever ref­er­ence these thinkers on the job, prepar­ing your­self to read them with an active mind will put you on the fast track to the exam­ined life.

You can find the com­plete list of ani­ma­tions here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

47 Ani­mat­ed Videos Explain the His­to­ry of Ideas: From Aris­to­tle to Sartre

Plato’s Cave Alle­go­ry Ani­mat­ed Mon­ty Python-Style

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Fem­i­nist Phi­los­o­phy of Simone de Beau­voir

Watch Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to 25 Philoso­phers by The School of Life: From Pla­to to Kant and Fou­cault

Edward Said Recalls His Depress­ing Meet­ing With Sartre, de Beau­voir & Fou­cault (1979)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

« Go BackMore in this category... »
Quantcast