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...
Dec 14, 2015•1 hr 5 min
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 Prof...
Nov 02, 2015•1 hr 12 min
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]
Jun 22, 2015•1 hr 25 min
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]
Jun 15, 2015•1 hr 26 min
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]
Jun 08, 2015•1 hr 17 min
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 workp...
Apr 20, 2015•1 hr 27 min
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 ...
Apr 13, 2015•1 hr 27 min
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’ ri...
Feb 16, 2015•1 hr 29 min
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 A...
Jan 05, 2015•1 hr 8 min
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 shar...
Nov 03, 2014•1 hr 22 min
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]
Jul 14, 2014•59 min
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]
Jun 30, 2014•59 min
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]
Jun 09, 2014•58 min
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 appr...
Jun 02, 2014•59 min
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...
May 26, 2014•58 min
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]
May 12, 2014•1 hr 25 min
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]
May 05, 2014•56 min
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]
Feb 24, 2014•59 min
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 cultura...
Feb 17, 2014•59 min
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...
Jan 20, 2014•59 min
Robert Brandom, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, argues that genealogies (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault) present the revenge of naturalism on rationalism. Hegel teaches us how to replace the genealogical hermeneutics of suspicion with a hermeneutics of magnanimity that allows us to see naturalism and rationalism as complementing rather than competing with one another. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Show ID: 25074]
Jun 17, 2013•1 hr 25 min
Domestic dogs, Canis familiaris, have insinuated themselves into our society and imagination: long present in our art and narratives, they are now ubiquitous in American homes. Alexandra Horowitz, Barnard College, Columbia University, discusses the dog's historical and contemporary role, attributions typically made to dogs, and an alternative empirical approach to considering dogs. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Show ID: 25113]
Jun 10, 2013•53 min
Women have achieved parity in obtaining doctoral degrees, but do not experience the same career trajectory as men. Is this discrimination or family formation? Mary Ann Mason, Professor of the Graduate School and Faculty Co-Director of the Earl Warren Institute for Law and Social Policy, University of California, Berkeley explores twelve years of research to address the question of the effect of family formation from the graduate student years though retirement. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lect...
Apr 08, 2013•58 min
Top incomes represent a small share of the population but a very significant share of total income and total taxes paid. Emmanuel Saez, Professor of Economics and Director, Center for Equitable Growth, University of California, Berkeley presents evidence on income inequality gathered by a collective group of researchers in the World Top Incomes Database. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Public Affairs] [Business] [Show ID: 24689]
Mar 11, 2013•59 min
Leon Wieseltier is an American writer, critic, and longstanding literary editor of The New Republic. In this UC Berkeley Forester lecture, he discusses the Jewish belief in a Messiah. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Show ID: 24599]
Jan 07, 2013•59 min
Are intelligent machines possible? If they are, what will they be like? Jeff Hawkins, an inventor, engineer, neuroscientist, author and entrepreneur, frames these questions by reviewing some of the efforts to build intelligent machines. He posits that machine intelligence is only possible by first understanding how the brain works and then building systems that work on the same principles. He describes Numenta’s work using neocortical models to understand the torrent of machine-generated data be...
Dec 10, 2012•1 hr 27 min
How the brain creates intelligence is viewed by many as the greatest scientific quest of all time. We are living at the time when rapid progress is being made and a comprehensive theory of brain function is emerging. Jeff Hawkins, an inventor, engineer, neuroscientist, author and entrepreneur, presents the big picture of what we know so far and describes recent progress in a core issue: why neurons are arranged as they are in the neocortex, how this arrangement builds models of the world, and ho...
Dec 03, 2012•59 min
There is widespread agreement that happiness is good, but is it the sole ultimate good? Princeton University Professor Peter Singer explores arguments for and against such a conclusion. He considers the implications for public policy that take happiness as one of the most important goods that individuals can achieve. Singer specializes in applied ethics, approaching ethics from a secular preference utilitarian perspective Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Show ID: 24344]
Nov 26, 2012•1 hr 25 min
Theda Skocpol surveys the current political landscape and explores its most consequential questions: What happened to Obama’s “new New Deal”? Why have his achievements enraged opponents more than they have satisfied supporters? How has the Tea Party’s ascendance reshaped American politics? At this moment of economic uncertainty and extreme polarization, as voters prepare to render another verdict on Obama’s historic presidency, Skocpol reviews its triumphs and setbacks to see where we might be h...
Nov 04, 2012•59 min
All the ancient philosophers, pagans and Christians alike, agreed that death is the separation of a soul and a body. While there was much disagreement on the precise relationship between a being and his soul, as well as what sort of thing they took a soul to be, it is the agreement among the philosophers rather than their differences that calls for critical attention. Jonathan Barnes examines why ancient philosophers believed that beings were composed of two parts, the divorce of which is death....
Jun 04, 2012•57 min
