Uc Berkeley Graduate Council Lectures (audio)

There are two questions pertaining to the self – the metaphysical and empirical - that are often confounded. The latter is best approached through neurology as V.S. Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at UC San Diego, illustrates in this fascinating lecture at UC Berkeley. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Health and Medicine] [Humanities] [Show ID: 30558]

Power, money, gold and wine in the making of California. All that, and what it’s like to write best-selling books and operate Berkleyside, the respected local online news site. Award-winning author and journalist Frances Dinkelspiel is in conversation with Deirdre English of Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 30555]

The Montreal Protocol has limited global uses of chemicals that deplete stratospheric ozone. Ralph Cicerone, President of the National Academy of Sciences, compares its features and success with unsuccessful (to date) efforts to stabilize global climate by limiting greenhouse gas concentrations such as carbon dioxide. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Public Affairs] [Science] [Show ID: 30557]

Ralph Cicerone, President of the National Academy of Sciences,reviews up-to-date data on temperatures of air and water, rates of ice losses and of sea-level rise and illustrate the driving forces of greenhouse gases in an energy-balance model of Earth. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Public Affairs] [Science] [Show ID: 30556]

Although many recent advances, such as building codes and construction techniques, have reduced some aspects of risk to natural disasters, other features of modern society— including population density and the networking of transportation, power facilities, and communications systems—have led to increased vulnerability in California and beyond. Lucy Jones, Science Advisor for Risk Reduction, U.S. Geological Survey, discusses and answers questions about interdisciplinary research to measure the vulnerabilities of modern society and ways to increase society’s ability to respond to future events. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Science] [Show ID: 30175]

The Egyptians believed Pharaoh to be a god on earth who after his death would fly up to heaven and unite with the sun, his father. After the collapse of the Old Kingdom, this idea of royal immortality became accessible for non-royal persons but dependent on justification before a divine tribunal, the judgment of the dead. Immortality became a question, not of royalty but of morals. Jan Assmann, Professor Emeritus of Egyptology, University of Heidelberg, explores the origins and evolution of these concepts. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Show ID: 30174]

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]