105 Animated Philosophy Videos from Wireless Philosophy: A Project Sponsored by Yale, MIT, Duke & More

in Education, Philosophy | October 20th, 2015

You may remember that we featured Wireless Philosophy, an open access philosophy project created by Yale and MIT, back in 2013 when it first got started. Wi-Phi, for short, has kept on keeping in with its mission of producing free, informative and entertaining animated videos meant to introduce a host of philosophical issues. Our own Josh Jones called it “a necessary service to those just beginning to wade out into the sea of The Big Questions” in 2013, and now, in 2015, you can wade in from a wider expanse of the Big Question coastline than ever before. There are currently 105 Wiphi videos in total.

At the top of the post, you can watch a whole playlist of Wi-Phi’s videos on cognitive biases, which add up to a surprisingly thorough half-hour primer on the forces that knock our thinking askew, from the “alief” (an automatic or habitual mental attitude, as opposed to a deliberate belief) to reference dependence and loss aversion to what we might perhaps describe as a meta-bias amusingly called the GI Joe fallacy (the tendency for our biases to stick around even when we should know better). Just above, we have Wi-Phi’s three-part guide to the good life, as examined by Plato, Aristotle, and Kant.

Both of those playlists do come with a certain practicality, at least by philosophical standards: who, after all doesn’t want to think more correctly (or at least less incorrectly), and who doesn’t want to live the good life (or at least a better life than they live now)? But the harder core of casual philosophy enthusiasts — always a demanding group — should rest assured that Wiphi also offers video series on more abstract or historical philosophical topics, such as the seven-part playlist on classical theism above. Dig deeper into their Youtube channel and you’ll find more simple but not simplistic lessons on the philosophy of mathematics, language, ancient China, and much more.

The list of university stakeholders in Wireless Philosophy nowadays includes, we should note, Duke, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and U. Toronto, in addition to Yale and MIT. Plus, you’ll find that profs from other universities have contributed to the video collection. For example, Chris Surprenant (University of New Orleans) created the videos on Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. Also find complete courses taught by Surprenant on our list of Free Online Philosophy Courses, a subset of our list, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

The Partially Examined Life: A Philosophy Podcast

Philosophy Bites: Podcasting Ideas From Plato to Singularity Since 2007

Philosophize This!: The Popular, Entertaining Philosophy Podcast from an Unconventional Teacher

Download 90 Free Philosophy Courses and Start Living the Examined Life

Take First-Class Philosophy Lectures Anywhere with Free Oxford Podcasts

Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Apply to the New David Lynch Masters in Film Program, Where You’ll Meditate & Create

in Education, Film | October 20th, 2015

Image by amoebafinger on Flickr Commons.

When the American Film Institute set up its conservatory for Advanced Film Studies in 1969, its first round of students included Terrence Malick, Caleb Deschanel, Paul Schrader, and the Master of Absurd himself, David Lynch. (Now that’s a class reunion worth going to!) Now some 40 years on, the Maharishi University of Management, in Fairfield, Iowa, is accepting applications for its David Lynch MA in Film program.

Lynch has been practicing Transcendental Meditation for as long as he’s been a filmmaker, and in interviews and in books like Catching the Big Fish, he espouses the wonders of meditation for creativity. (See him talk more about that here.) Students enrolled in the David Lynch Film program will follow Lynch’s example by combining meditation with filmmaking. You might not create the next Eraserhead (Lynch’s AFI project that turned into his career-defining debut), but, according to Lynch, students are promised to discover

the ability to dive within—to transcend and experience that unbounded ocean of pure consciousness which is unbounded intelligence, creativity, happiness, love, energy, power, and peace.

Before one gets too excited and thinks that the director himself will be teaching every class and that you’ll get to hang out with him during office hours, that’s not the way the program works.

Classes are taught by director/cinematographer Michael W. Barnard (and once the head of the Maharishi’s film department), screenwriter Dorothy Rompalske, and David Lynch Foundation Television founder Amine Kouider. Guest speakers have included Jim Carrey, Peter Farrelly, script doctor Dara Marks, Twin Peaks alum Duwayne Dunham, and many other Hollywood insiders.

However, students do get a field trip to Los Angeles to meet Lynch and spend time with the filmmaker. The aspiring filmmakers should consider themselves lucky, seeing that the director is busy working on Twin Peaks’ new season and apparently writing an autobiography.

There are two scholarships up for grabs for applicants who have a film or script to submit, but the deadline is fast approaching on Nov. 1.

via Criterion

Patti Smith and David Lynch Talk About the Source of Their Ideas & Creative Inspiration

David Lynch Explains How Meditation Enhances Our Creativity

David Lynch Creates a Very Surreal Plug for Transcendental Meditation

David Lynch Talks Meditation with Paul McCartney

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Cultured Are You? Test Your Knowledge With Cultural Quizzes from 1958

in Art, Education, History, Literature | October 20th, 2015

Do you consider yourself well-educated? Cultured, even? By whose standards?

We may superficially assume these terms name immutable qualities, but they are in any analysis dependent on where and when we happen to be situated in history. The most sophisticated of Medieval doctors—a title then closer to the European “docent” than our general use of Dr.—would appear profoundly ignorant to us; and we, with our painfully inadequate grasp of church Latin, Aristotelianism, and arcane theological arguments, would appear profoundly ignorant to him.

What does it mean to be cultured? Is it the acquisition of mostly useless cultural capital for its own sake, or of a set of codes that helps us navigate the world successfully? In an attempt to address these fraught questions, Ashley Montagu, a student of hugely influential German-born anthropologist Franz Boas, wrote The Cultured Man in 1958. Rebecca Onion at Slate describes the book as containing “quizzes for 50 categories of knowledge in the arts and sciences, with 30 questions each.” In the page above, we have the first 22 questions of Montagu’s “Art” quiz (with the answers here).

You’ll probably notice right away that while most of the questions have definite, unambiguous answers, others like “Define art,” seem patently unanswerable in all but the most general and unsatisfactory ways. Montagu defines art in one succinct sentence: “Art is the making or doing of things that have form and beauty”—which strikes me as anemic, though functional enough.

Montagu intended his book to test not only knowledge of cultural facts, but also of “attitudes”: a person “considered ‘cultured,’” writes Onion, “would not just be able to readily summon facts, but also to access humane feelings, which would necessarily come about after contact with culture.” Many administrators of “culture”—curators, art historians, literature professors, etc—would agree with the premise: ideally, the more cultural knowledge we acquire, the more empathy and understanding of other peoples and cultures we should manifest. Whether this routinely occurs in practice is another matter. For Montagu, Onion remarks, a “cultured man” is “curious, unprejudiced, rational, and ethical.”

Given Montagu’s enlightened philosophical bent, we can charitably ascribe language in his book that itself seems prejudiced to our viewing this artifact from a distance of almost seventy years in the future. We might also find that many of his questions push us to examine our 21st century biases more carefully. His approach may remind us of frivolous internet diversions or the standardized tests we’ve grown to think of as the precise opposite of lively, critically-engaged educational tools. Yet Montagu intended his quizzes to be “both dynamic and constructive,” to alert readers to areas of ignorance and encourage them to fill gaps in their cultural knowledge. Many of his answers offer references for further study. “No one grows who stands still,” he wrote.

To see more of Montagu’s quiz questions—such as those above from the “Culture History” category (get the answers here)—and find out how you stack up against the cultured elite of the 50s, head over to Rebecca Onion’s post at Slate.

Hermann Rorschach’s Original Rorschach Test: What Do You See? (1921)

Take the 146-Question Knowledge Test Thomas Edison Gave to Prospective Employees (1921)

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

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NBC University Theater Adapted Great Novels to Radio & Gives Listeners College Credit : Hear 110 Episodes from a 1940s eLearning Experiment

in Education, Literature, Radio | October 9th, 2015

Creative Commons image by Joe Haupt

Before the internet became our primary source of information and entertainment—before it became for many companies a primary revenue stream—it promised to revolutionize education. We would see a democratic spread of knowledge, old hierarchies would crumble, ancient divisions would cease to matter in the new primordial cyber-soup where anyone with entry-level consumer hardware and the patience to learn basic HTML could create a platform and a community. And even as that imagined utopia became just another economy, with its own winners and losers, large—and free—educational projects still seemed perfectly feasible.

These days, that potential hasn’t exactly evaporated, but we’ve had an increasing number of reasons—the threatened status of net neutrality prominent among them—to curb our enthusiasm. Yet as we remind you daily here at Open Culture, free educational resources still abound online, even if the online world isn’t as radical as some radicals had hoped. Frequently, those resources reside in online libraries like the Internet Archive, who store some of the best educational material from pre-internet times—such as the NBC University Theater, a program that comes from another transitional time for another form of mass media: radio.

Before payola and television took over in the fifties, radio also showed great potential for democratizing education. In 1942, at the height of the Golden Age of Radio, NBC “reinaugurated” a previous concept for what it called the NBC University of the Air. “Throughout the mid-1940s,” writes the Digital Deli, an online museum of golden age radio, “NBC produced some twenty-five productions specifically designed to both educate and entertain. Indeed, many of those programs were incorporated into the curricula of high schools, colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and Canada.”

After 1948, the program was retooled as NBC University Theater, then simply NBC Theater. “Irrespective of the title change,” however, the program “continued to maintain the same high standards and continued to expand the number of colleges offering college credit for listening to and studying the programs’s offerings.” Digital Deli has the full details of this proto-MOOC’s curriculum. It consists of listening to adaptations of “great American stories,” great “world” stories–from Voltaire, Swift, and others–and adaptations of modern American and British fiction and “Great Works of World Literature.”

In short, the NBC University Theater adaptations might substitute for a college-level literary education for those unable to attend a college or university. In the playlist above, you can hear every episode from the show’s final run from 1948 to 1951. We begin with an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and end with Thomas Hardy’s “The Withered Arm.” In-between hear classic radio drama adaptations of everything from Austen to Faulkner and Hemingway to Ibsen. There are 110 episodes in total.

Each episode features commentary from distinguished authors and critics, including Robert Penn Warren, E.M. Forster, and Katherine Anne Porter. “Apart from the obvious academic value” of the series, writes Digital Deli, “it’s clear that considerable thought—and daring—went into the selections as well.” Despite the tremendous increase in college attendance through the G.I. Bill, this was a period of “rising hostility towards academics, purely intellectual pursuits, and the free exchange of philosophies in general.”

The ensuing decade of the fifties might be characterized culturally, writes Digital Deli, as an “intellectual vacuum”—anti-intellectual attitudes swept the country, fueled by Cold War political repression. And radio became primarily a means of entertainment and advertising, competing with television for an audience. Quality radio dramas continued—most notably of excellent science fiction. But never again would an educational program of NBC University Theater’s scope, ambition, and radical potential appear on U.S. radio waves.

Hear Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and 84 Classic Radio Dramas from CBS Radio Workshop (1956–57)

Dimension X: The 1950s SciFi Radio Show That Dramatized Stories by Asimov, Bradbury, Vonnegut & More

Free: Listen to 298 Episodes of the Vintage Crime Radio Series, Dragnet

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Inmates in New York Prison Defeat Harvard’s Debate Team: A Look Inside the Bard Prison Initiative

in Education | October 8th, 2015

If you want to prepare for a career practicing law, you could do much worse than joining Harvard University’s debate team. But if, far on the other end of the spectrum of the American experience, you end up deep on the wrong side of the law, going to prison rather than college, you need not relinquish your dreams of excelling at this traditional intellectual sport. We now have the precedent to prove it: “Months after winning a national title,” reports the Guardian’s Lauren Gambino, “Harvard’s debate team has fallen to a group of New York prison inmates.”

“The showdown,” which revolved around the question of whether public schools should be allowed to turn away undocumented students, “took place at the Eastern correctional facility in New York, a maximum-security prison where convicts can take courses taught by faculty from nearby Bard College, and where inmates have formed a popular debate club.” They call this program the Bard Prison Initiative, under which inmates have the chance to earn a Bard College degree (through a non-vocational “liberal arts curriculum, including literature, foreign language, philosophy, history and the social sciences, mathematics, science, and the arts”) at satellite campuses established in six New York state prisons. You can see this selective, rigorous and highly unusual educational institution in action in the Washington Post video above. And also in a 2011 PBS News Hour profile below.

The Bard Prison Initiative’s debate victory over Harvard made for a notable event in the program’s history indeed. “But it’s also worth pointing out,” writes Peter Holley, author of the Post article, “the fallacy of our underlying assumptions about such a matchup — the first (and most pernicious) being that criminals aren’t smart. If a definitive link between criminality and below-average intelligence exists, nobody has found it.” The Bard Prison Initiative has operated on that premise since 2001, and its debate team’s previous high-profile win saw it beating that of West Point — all, you may hardly believe, through old-fashioned research, without any kind of access to the internet. If you’d like to leave your condolences for the Harvard College Debating Union, you may do so at their Facebook page. You can also make a worthwhile financial contribution to the Bard Prison Initiative here.

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Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch Noam Chomsky & Lawrence Krauss Talk About Education, Political Activism, Technology & More Before a Sold-Out Crowd

in Education, Philosophy, Science, Technology | October 6th, 2015

Founded and directed by physicist Lawrence Krauss, Arizona State’s Origins Project has for several years brought together some of the biggest minds in the sciences and humanities for friendly debates and conversations about “the 21st Century’s greatest challenges.” Previous all-star panels have included Krauss, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Brian Greene, and Richard Dawkins. Stephen Hawking has graced the ASU Origins Project stage, as has actor and science communicator Alan Alda. And this past March, in a sold-out, highly-anticipated Origins Project event, Krauss welcomed Noam Chomsky to the stage for a lengthy interview, which you can watch above.

Although Krauss says he’s wary of hero worship in his laudatory introduction, he nonetheless finds himself asking “What Would Noam Chomsky Do” when faced with a dilemma. He also points out that Chomsky has been “marginalized in U.S. media” for his anti-war, anarchist political views. Those views, of course, come widely into play during the conversation, which ranges from the theory and purpose of education—a subject Chomsky has expounded on a great deal in books and interviews—to the fate of political dissidents throughout history.

Chomsky also gives us his views on science and technology, particularly in the Q&A portion of the talk above, in which he answers questions about artificial intelligence—another subject he’s touched on in the past—and animal experimentation, among a great many other topics. Krauss mostly hangs back during the initial discussion but takes a more active role in the session above, offering views on medical and scientific ethics that will be familiar to those who follow his atheist activism and championing of rationality over religious dogma.

What you won’t see in the video above is a conversation Chomsky and Krauss had with Motherboard’s Daniel Oberhaus, who caught up with both thinkers during the ASU event to get their take on what he calls “another great space race.” As Oberhaus makes clear, the current competition is not necessarily between global superpowers, but—as with so much modern research and development—between public and private entities, such as NASA and Space X. As we briefly discussed in a post yesterday on the huge amount of public domain space photography freely available for use, private space exploration makes research proprietary, mitigating the potential public benefits of government programs.

As Chomsky puts it, “the environment, the commons… they’re a common possession, but space is even more so. For individuals to allow institutions like corporations to have any control over it is devastating in its consequences. It will also almost certainly undermine serious research.” He refers to the example of most modern computing—developed under publicly-funded government programs, then marketed and sold back to us by corporations. Krauss makes a case for unmanned space exploration as the cost-effective option, and both thinkers discuss the problem of militarizing space, the ultimate goal of Cold War space programs before the fall of the Soviet Union. The conversation is rich and revealing and makes an excellent supplement to the already rich discussion Krauss and Chomsky have in the videos above.

Noam Chomsky Spells Out the Purpose of Education

Noam Chomsky Explains Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

An Animated Introduction to Virginia Woolf

in Animation, Education, K-12, Literature | September 21st, 2015

It’s a pity writer Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) drowned herself before the advent of the Internet.

Industrialization did not faze her.

It’s less clear how the great observer of “the Modern Age” would’ve responded to the proliferation of Mommy bloggers.

Their sheer numbers suggest that perhaps female writers do not need a “room of one’s own” (though presumably all of them would be in favor of such a development.)

Woolf’s name is an enduring one, inspiring both the title of a classic American play and a doggy day care facility. Its owner passed away nearly 75 years ago, yet she remains a perennial on Women’s Studies’ syllabi.

Ergo, it’s possible for the general public to know of her, without knowing much of anything about her and her work. (Find her major works on our lists of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books).

The latest animated installment in The School of Life humanities series seeks to remedy that situation in ten minutes with the video above, which offers insight into her place in both the Western canon and the ever-glamorous Bloomsbury Group, and celebrates her as a keen observer of life’s daily routine. And that by-now-familiar cut-out animation style takes full advantage of the author’s best known head shots.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

- Virginia Woolf

Watch Patti Smith Read from Virginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Surviving Recording of Woolf’s Voice

Virginia Woolf and Friends Dress Up as “Abyssinian Princes” and Fool the British Royal Navy (1910)

Virginia Woolf’s Handwritten Suicide Note: A Painful and Poignant Farewell (1941)

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

New Research Shows How Music Lessons During Childhood Benefit the Brain for a Lifetime

in Education, K-12, Music, Science | September 4th, 2015

As a sometime musician, it’s only natural that I want my four-year-old daughter to take an interest in music. Sure, it’s a fun bonding activity, and sure, there may be a bit of a stage dad lurking inside me at times. But I’m also convinced of the tangible benefits playing a musical instrument can have on one’s personal development. New science, it seems, backs up this intuition. The Washington Post reported last year on a recent study from Northwestern University which found that “Music training not only helps children develop fine motor skills, but aids emotional and behavioral maturation as well.”

This may not come as a surprise. And yet, the details of the study provide insights our intuitions about the power of musical education may lack. For one thing, as you can see in the CNN report above, the benefits of learning to play music as a child can last for decades, even if someone hasn’t picked up an instrument since those early lessons. As Dr. Nina Kraus, director of Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, explains, good musical timing is strongly correlated with reading skills and general mental acuity. According to a co-author of the study, James Hudziak, professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont, early musical training was shown to have “accelerated cortical organization in attention skill, anxiety management and emotional control.” These brain changes can accompany us well into old age.

Another, Canadian study, published in February in the The Journal of Neuroscience, found that childhood music lessons boost the ability of older adults to hear speech, a skill that begins to weaken later in life. The study found “robust” evidence that “starting formal lessons on a musical instrument prior to age 14 and continuing intense training for up to a decade appears to enhance key areas in the brain that support speech recognition.” Even music lessons taken later life can help rehabilitate the brains of older adults. “The findings,” writes Science Daily, “underscore the importance of music instruction in schools and in rehabilitative programs for older adults.”

Music teachers certainly need this kind of evidence to bolster support for ailing programs in schools, and musically-inclined parents will cheer these findings as well. But before the stage parent in you begins enrolling your kid in every music lesson you can fit into the schedule, take heed. As Dr. Kraus discovered in the Northwestern study, forcing kids to show up and participate under duress won’t exercise their brains. Real, active engagement is key. “We like to say that ‘making music matters,’” says Kraus, “because it is only through the active generation and manipulation of sound that music can rewire the brain.” While musical training may be one particularly enjoyable way to strengthen cognition, it isn’t the only way. But even if they don’t stick with it, the kids willing to put in the hours (and yes, the longer the better) will experience positive change that lasts a lifetime.

The Neuroscience of Drumming: Researchers Discover the Secrets of Drumming & The Human Brain

This is Your Brain on Jazz Improvisation: The Neuroscience of Creativity

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

105 Animated Philosophy Videos from Wireless Philosophy: A Project Sponsored by Yale, MIT, Duke & More

Apply to the New David Lynch Masters in Film Program, Where You’ll Meditate & Create

How Cultured Are You? Test Your Knowledge With Cultural Quizzes from 1958

NBC University Theater Adapted Great Novels to Radio & Gives Listeners College Credit : Hear 110 Episodes from a 1940s eLearning Experiment

Inmates in New York Prison Defeat Harvard’s Debate Team: A Look Inside the Bard Prison Initiative

Watch Noam Chomsky & Lawrence Krauss Talk About Education, Political Activism, Technology & More Before a Sold-Out Crowd

An Animated Introduction to Virginia Woolf

New Research Shows How Music Lessons During Childhood Benefit the Brain for a Lifetime

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