lectures/ideas: 11/25/16

2016-11-25

Plant ‘thermometer’ triggers springtime budding by measuring night-time heat

source: Cambridge University 2016年10月28日
A photoreceptor molecule in plant cells has been found to moonlight as a thermometer after dark – allowing plants to read seasonal temperature changes. Scientists say the discovery could help breed crops that are more resilient to the temperatures expected to result from climate change.
Find out more here: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/pl...

The attractions of magnetism: chips, cancer and crime

source: The Royal Society 2016年10月26日
Clifford Paterson Lecture 2016 by Professor Russell Cowburn FRS.
Magnetism is a very old subject and it is sometimes thought that there is little left to discover. All of that changes when nanotechnology and magnetism are brought together – without the technologies that have come out of that meeting we wouldn’t have social media, the Cloud or even the Internet.
In this talk, Professor Cowburn will explain the new physics which is currently emerging from the rapidly changing research field of nanostructured magnetic materials, and how that new physics finds use in computer memory, in novel biomedical technologies and in detecting counterfeit documents and smuggled goods.
Image credit: Chris van der Linden.

Patrik Schumacher, Elia Zenghelis, Xin Zhang, “Zaha Hadid: A Celebration”

source: Harvard GSD 2016年10月27日
This event will focus on the extraordinary contributions of Zaha Hadid as an architect. Elia Zenghelis, one of Hadid’s early teachers, will share his reflections on Zaha both as a student and as an internationally recognized architect. Patrik Schumacher, Hadid’s professional partner, will discuss their collaboration and the shifts over the years in the direction of the practice’s design approach. Zenghelis and Schumacher will then engage in a conversation together with Xin Zhang, Hadid’s close friend and client, whose company SOHO China commissioned several of her significant projects.

Grammatical Framework: Formalizing the Grammars of the World

source: GoogleTechTalks 2016年9月15日
A Google TechTalk, 9/7/2016, presented by Professor Aarne Ranta, University of Gothenburg.
Speaker's errata:
4:57: “sixteen forms” should be “twenty-six”
19:32: “more than 2000 members” should be “200” as on the slide

ABSTRACT: GF (Grammatical Framework) is a grammar formalism that was first released at Xerox Research in 1998 and later became an open-source collaborative project. GF is thus at least a decade younger than the major grammar formalisms (LFG, HPSG, TAG, CCG) and has grown up in an era when computational linguistics is dominated by statistical methods rather than grammars. Its background is in fact quite different from the major grammar formalisms, as its roots are in theorem provers and compiler construction rather than theoretical linguistics.
The original mission of GF was to make it easy to implement multilingual controlled language systems, where a semantic interlingua serves as a hub between multiple languages. In such a system, translation works as parsing the source language into an interlingua followed by generation into the target language. Unlike in many other interlingual systems, the interlingua is not fixed but can be easily changed e.g. to adapt to application domains. Thus GF has been used to implement software specification systems, spoken dialogue systems, mathematical teaching tools, tourist phrasebooks, and many other applications, in which up to 30 parallel languages are involved.
In recent years, GF has also scaled up to wide-coverage parsing and translation, resulting for instance in the mobile app GF Offline Translator. While not quite as good in open-domain tasks as state-of-the-art statistical systems, the GF translator has some advantages: compact size (15 languages available offline in 30 megabytes), inspectability (via syntax trees and other grammatical information), and domain-adaptability. The traditional weakness of grammars, their labour intensiveness, is relieved by software techniques that make the development of grammars in GF orders of magnitude faster than with traditional methods.
Another emerging usage of GF is dependency parsing. The booming initiative of Universal Dependencies (UD) has turned out to be very similar to the interlingua used in the wide-coverage GF translator, so that GF trees can be automatically converted to UD trees. Since GF trees support generation in addition to parsing, the mapping makes it possible to bootstrap UD treebanks for new languages. More generally, the use of UD data in combination with GF grammars suggests a way to build hybrid systems that combine data-driven UD parsing with the precise semantic analysis and generation of GF.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Aarne Ranta is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Gothenburg. He defended his PhD at the University of Helsinki in 1990. After seven years as Junior Fellow of the Academy of Finland, he worked at Xerox Research Centre Europe in Grenoble in 1997-1999, starting the development of Grammatical Framework (GF), after which he joined the Department of Computing Science of Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg. Ranta’s research interests have covered type theory, functional programming, compiler construction, and, as his main field, computational linguistics. His has followed the mission to formalize the grammars of the world and make them available for computer applications. In this work, he has been helped by 10 PhD graduates and by a community of over 200 GF contributors. Ranta is currently on a partial leave from the university to work for the start-up company Digital Grammars AB, which develops reliable language technology for producers of information.

A Course in Miracles with Charles Whitfield

source: New Thinking Allowed 2016年3月27日
Charles Whitfield, MD, is a board certified internist who transitioned into psychiatry. He is author of Choosing God: A Bird’s Eye View of A Course in Miracles. He is also author of the best-selling book, Healing the Child Within. His numerous other books include Teachers of God: Further Reflections on a Course in Miracles, The Truth About Depression, The Truth About Mental Illness, Not Crazy: You May Not Be Mentally Ill, and – co-authored with his wife, Barbara Harris Whitfield, The Power of Humility.
Here he describes his own journey from an atheist to a Course in Miracles teacher. He points out the power of acknowledging that there is more in the universe than we can know. He summarizes the essence of the Course as making the choice, moment by moment, to allow the holy spirit of god into one’s life. He also discusses the significance of A Course in Miracles as a tool for overcoming the effects of trauma and addiction. In addition, he maintains that the Course is an excellent text in ego psychology.

New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in "parapsychology" ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He serves as dean of transformational psychology at the University of Philosophical Research. He teaches parapsychology for ministers in training with the Centers for Spiritual Living through the Holmes Institute. He has served as vice-president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and is the recipient of its Pathfinder Award for outstanding contributions to the field of human consciousness. He is also past-president of the non-profit Intuition Network, an organization dedicated to creating a world in which all people are encouraged to cultivate and apply their inner, intuitive abilities.
(Recorded on March 1, 2016)

Alfredo Jaar. Art today. How to? 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures 2016年10月2日
http://www.egs.edu Alfredo Jaar, Chilean artist, architect, and filmmaker who presently lives and works in New York. Professor at The European Graduate School / EGS. Public open lecture for the students of the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought at the European Graduate School EGS. Saas-Fee Switzerland and Valetta/Malta. March 31 2016.
Alfredo Jaar's oeuvre is unquestionably politically motivated, often exploring the very notions of politics, ethics, and representation, and complex issues such as genocide, political corruption, humanitarian crises, and the relationship between geography, power, and exploitation. Alfredo Jaar is a devoted educator, and has made approximately sixty public interventions in his career. For him, there is a strong connection between art and thinking: “I strongly believe that artists are thinkers, as opposed to object makers. My working process is 99% thinking and 1% making. That thinking process is at the core of what I do and this process is always triggered by a specific site or issue. In my career, I have been incapable of creating a single work of art out of nothing. That is why I am not a studio artist: I define myself as a project artist. I try to propose, with my projects, a creative model that responds to the particulars of a given situation. That model can then be projected into the world. I believe that this is what artists do: with each project we propose a new conception of the world; and that new conception is a new way of looking at the world. That is why I believe that we create models of thinking the world.”

Media @ McGill - Edward Snowden

source: McGill University 2016年11月4日
Media@McGill invited Edward Snowden to give a free, public talk (via videoconference). Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, best known for leaking documents in 2013 about NSA surveillance activities, talks about surveillance in Canada.
The talk was held on Wednesday, November 2, 2016, 7 p.m. in Leacock 132, McGill University

Languages and Literatures (Wesley Cecil at Peninsula College)

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source: Wes Cecil 2012年11月11日

Egyptian Civilization and Hieroglyphics 1:04:22
Sanskrit and Indian Civilization 1:03:58
Chinese Language and Civilization 1:02:59
Greek Language and Civilization 1:02:23
French Language and Literature 55:03
Persian Language and Literature 57:24
Arabic: Literature and Civilization 57:36
Russian Language, Literature and Civilization 52:56
German Language and Literature 52:09
Spanish Language and Literature 55:04
Mayan and Nahuatl 53:02
Korean Language and Literature 52:02
Japanese Language and Literature 59:18
English Language and Literature 1:02:52
Future of Language 1:06:36
Languages and Literatures: Conclusion 1:02:09

String-Math 2016 (held at Collège de France, Jun 27-Jul 2, 2016)

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source: GraduatePhysics 2016年7月23日
Event website: https://indico.cern.ch/event/375104

1. Nima Arkani-Hamed - Physics and Mathematics for the End of Spacetime 1:28:32
2. Hirosi Ooguri - What is gravity? 1:11:47
3. Gregory Moore - Framed BPS States In Two And Four Dimensions 55:23
4. Carlos Simpson - Reduction for SL(3) pre-buildings 55:19
5. Kohei Iwaki - Exact WKB analysis, cluster algebras and Painleve equations 29:55
6. Daisuke Yamakawa - Moduli spaces of meromorphic connections on compact Riemann surfaces 22:04
7. Robbert Dijkgraaf - Quantum Geometry 1:05:32
8. Sheldon Katz - Elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau threefolds: mirror symmetry and Jacobi forms 53:47
9. Minxin Huang - Derivation of modular anomaly equation in compact elliptic Calabi-Yau spaces 28:28
10. Oleg Lisovyy - Fredholm determinant and Nekrasov type representations 31:15
11. Joerg Teschner - SUSY field theories and geometric Langlands 1:06:20
12. Stefano Cremonesi - 3D supersymmetric gauge theories and Hilbert series 29:49
13. Hiraku Nakajima - Quantized Coulomb branches of 3d N=4 gauge theories and difference operators 53:02
14. Olivier Schiffmann - Cohomological Hall algebra actions and Kac polynomials 56:57
15. Mikhail Bershtein - Plane partitions and W algebras 31:36
16. Mathew Bullimore - Monopoles, Vortices, and Vermas 21:48
17. André Henriques - What Chern-Simons theory assigns to a point? 26:37
18. Marcos Marino - Spectral theory and topological strings 53:27
19. Shing-Tung Yau - Period integrals of algebraic manifolds and their differential equations 55:48
20. Leonardo Rastelli - Higgs branches, vertex operator algebras and modular differential equations 58:22
21. Richard Thomas - A Vafa-Witten invariant for projective surfaces 49:06
22. Nikolai Gromov - Quantum Spectral Curve for AdS/CFT and its applications 28:21
23. Benjamin Basso - Hexagons and 3-point functions 21:46
24. Rahul Pandharipande - Moduli spaces of holomorphic and meromorphic differentials 57:00
25. Jaume Gomis - Correlation Functions in Superconformal Field Theories 50:03
26. Dimitri Zvonkine - The Chern character of the Verlinde bundle 33:33
27. Abhijit Gadde - Conformal constraints on defects 26:15
28. Alexander Polischchuk - Moduli spaces of curves with non-special divisors 49:09
29. Olivia Dumitrescu - From the Hitchin component to opers 28:33
30. Laura Schaposnik - Higgs bundles, branes and applications 27:26
31. Gaétan Borot - Chern–Simons theory on S^3/G and topological strings 27:09
32. Davide Gaiotto - Geometric Langlands applications of boundary conditions 54:38
33. Andrei Okounkov - Catching monodromy 1:08:22
34. Sarah Harrison - Umbral symmetry groups and K3 CFTs 34:43
35. Mina Aganagic - Two mathematical applications of little string theory 1:00:08
36. Maxim Kontsevich - Resurgence and exact quantization via holomorphic Floer cohomology 1:00:08
37. Jørgen Rennemo - Derived equivalences from a duality of non-abelian GLSM's 27:03
38. Pavol Severa - Poisson-Lie T-duality 24:01
39. Thibault Damour - Analytical Approaches to Coalescing Binary Black Holes 1:04:28

Strings 2016 (held at Tsinghua University, Beijing, Aug 01-05, 2016)

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source: GraduatePhysics 2016年8月7日
Event website: http://ymsc.tsinghua.edu.cn:8090/strings/

1. John Schwarz - String Theory in the Twentieth Century (Strings 2016 opening ceremony) 26:52
2. Nima Arkani-Hamed - Towards deriving string theory as the weakly coupled UV completion of gravity 42:24
3. Malcolm Perry - Soft Hair on Black Holes 29:01
4. Andrew Strominger - Soft Hair on Black Holes 30:52
5. Juan Maldacena - Entanglement and spacetime geometry 1:04:58
6. Daniel Baumann - Primordial Cosmology 58:03
7. Henry Tye - Linking Dark Matter to Dark Energy in a String Theory Scenario 28:31
8. Vyacheslav Slava Rychkov - Hamiltonian truncation methods for strongly coupled RG flows 30:26
9. Katrin Becker - Space-time action for G_2 compactifications in superspace 25:45
10. Shamit Kachru - Counting problems and N=4 string vacua 30:41
11. Steven Gubser - P-adic AdS/CFT 30:50
12. Ashoke Sen - Some Applications of String Field Theory: Dealing with the Infrared Issues 29:57
13. Pei Ming Ho - Information loss paradox and asymptotic black holes 30:54
14. Hong Jian He - Higgs Boson: from Collider Test to SUSY GUT Inflation 30:30
15. Zohar Komargodski - Strings from Massive Higher Spins 36:15
16. Soo-Jong Rey - DFT A Pathway to Quantum Strings 30:29
17. Matthias Gaberdiel - Higher Spin Algebras and Plane Partitions 29:47
18. Gary Horowitz - Recovering the spacetime metric from a holographic dual 30:38
19. Frederik Denef - Higher Spin de Sitter Holography 33:19
20. David Gross - Visions (Strings 2016) 56:53
21. Cumrun Vafa - 6d Superconformal Field Theories 1:04:33
22. Kimyeong Lee - Aspects of 6 dim superconformal theories and little string theories 24:19
23. Robbert Dijkgraaf - Negative Branes, Supergroups and the Signature of Spacetime 36:08
24. Xi Yin - Super Conformal Bootstrap in 2D 27:15
25. Rajesh Gopakumar - Conformal Bootstrap in Mellin Space 29:36
26. Eva Silverstein - Massive non Gaussian distribution 33:54
27. Gong Show (Strings 2016) 1:28:23
28. Hirosi Ooguri - Gravitational Positive Energy Theorems from Information Inequalities 31:21
29. Tadashi Takayanagi - Quantum Operations in CFTs and Holography 31:34
30. Nikita Nekrasov - Gauge origami 22:54
31. Matthew Headrick - Bit Threads and Holographic Entanglement 34:43
32. Sergei Gukov - Fun with RG flows 39:09
33. Public Talk by Nima Arkani Hamed (Strings 2016) 1:23:38
34. Dieter Lüst - Classical & quantum black hole hair from Goldstone modes 28:17
35. Public Talk by Robbert Dijkgraaf (Strings 2016) 53:57
36. Igor Klebanov - Three Dimensional CFTs and Emergent Supersymmetry 30:29
37. Douglas Stanford - The Sachdev Ye Kitaev model and AdS 2 31:20
38. Mirjam Cretic - Abelian and Discrete Symmetries in F theory 30:13
39. Yifang Wang - Particle Physics in China 23:22
40. Kevin Costello - Integrable spin systems and four dimensional gauge theory 25:12
41. Nathan Seiberg - A Duality Web in 2+1 Dimensions and the Unity of Physics 31:11
42. Francesco Benini - Black Hole Entropy from Gauge Theory 30:33
43. Hong Liu - Effective field theory for dissipative fluids 31:16
44. Shiraz Minwalla - The Large D Black Hole Membrane 32:53
45. Edward Witten - A New Look At Integrable Spin Systems 40:06
46. Daniel Harlow - Wormholes, Emergent Gauge Fields, and the Weak Gravity Conjecture 30:54
47. Mina Aganagic - Some mathematical applications of little string theory 27:27

Integrability in Gauge and String Theory 2016 (held at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Aug 22-26, 2016)

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source: GraduatePhysics 2016年9月9日
Event website: http://igst2016.physik.hu-berlin.de/

1. Tadashi Takayanagi - Quantum Entanglement and Tensor Network Description of AdS/CFT 56:16
2. Nima Arkani-Hamed - Scattering Forms as Binary Code 1:06:58
3. Ines Aniceto - Massless Luscher corrections and AdS_3 Integrability 44:10
4. Asger Ipsen - One loop one point functions in AdS/dCFT 48:50
5. Arkady Tseytlin - Deformed sigma models and generalized supergravity equations 54:34
6. Zohar Komargodski - Correlation Functions of Coulomb Branch Operators 46:48
7. Cristian Vergu - Smooth Wilson loops in N=4 super Yang Mills, integrability and kinematics 51:27
8. Vladimir Kazakov - New integrable QFTs from strongly twisted N=4 SYM 53:01
9. Alessandro Torrielli - Massless modes in AdS_3/CFT_2: algebraic and geometric aspects 46:53
10. Olof Ohlsson Sax - Massless modes in AdS_3/CFT_2: Symmetries, Bethe equations and dressing phases 51:11
11. Amit Sever - Factorization at Finite Coupling 43:14
12. Song He - Scattering Amplitudes, Riemann Spheres and Twistor Strings 53:06
13. Konstantin Zarembo - N=2* theory at strong coupling 53:24
14. Leonardo Rastelli - Mellin amplitudes for AdS_5 x S_5 54:30
15. Nikolay Gromov - Quark-anti quark potential in N=4 SYM 50:47
16. Aleksander Garus - Yangian Symmetry of the planar N=4 SYM 38:23
17. Benjamin Basso - Structure constants at wrapping order 54:41
18. Burkhard Eden - Structure constants from the OPE and from the hexagon 54:57
19. Didina Serban - Semiclassical limit of the three point function in N=4 SYM 49:59
20. Volker Schomerus - Integrability and the Conformal Bootstrap 53:42
21. Matthias Wilhelm - Form factors in N=4 SYM theory and beyond 51:46
22. Rafael Nepomechie - Non diagonal boundaries and AdS/CFT 51:45
23. Valentina Forini - Worldsheet superstring on the lattice and AdS/CFT 52:52
24. Victor Gorbenko - On the Worldsheet Theory of QCD Flux Tubes 53:19
25. Zoltan Bajnok - Three point functions and form factors 46:08

The Elements of Economic Analysis, Fall 2011 (E. Glen Weyl / U of Chicago)

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source: The University of Chicago 2011年12月6日
ECON 20100: The Elements of Economic Analysis.
The first part of this course discusses markets with one or a few suppliers. The second part focuses on demand and supply for factors of production and the distribution of income in the economy. This course also includes some elementary general equilibrium theory and welfare economics.
For readings associated with this lecture and slides, visit: http://www.glenweyl.com/teaching

Lecture 1 (Regular) - Theory of the Firm 1:14:03
Lecture 1 (Turbo) - Theory of the Firm 1:20:03
Lecture 7 - Theory of Monopoly Price Theory 1:19:54
Lecture 4 (Turbo) - Perfect Competition 1:17:46
Lecture 2 (Regular) - Supply and Duration 55:02
Lecture 3 (Regular) - Industry Supply and Rents 58:06
Lecture 3 (Turbo) - Industry Supply and Rents 1:15:49
Lecture 5 - Payment in Accordance with Product 1:11:29
Lecture 6 (Regular) - Assessing Externalities 1:06:33
Lecture 6 (Turbo) - Assessing Externalities 1:16:11
Lecture 8B - Product Design Price Theory 1:23:20
Lecture 7 (Regular) - Basic Monopoly Theory 1:09:28
Lecture 8 (Regular) - Price Discrimination 1:18:45
Lecture 8 (Turbo) - Price Discrimination 1:14:07
Lecture 9 (Regular) - Regulation 53:25
Lecture 9 (Turbo) - Regulation 1:08:39

Arguing God from Morality? (Closer to Truth)

source: Closer To Truth 2016年10月24日
Can we argue from morality to God? Can we construct an explanatory path from the existence of human morality to the existence of a Creator God? As with much about God, this seems obvious to some and ludicrous to others. What arguments do each side muster?
Click here to watch more interviews on God and morality http://bit.ly/2eLkny9
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Francis Collins - Arguing God from Morality? 3:33
Richard Swinburne - Arguing God from Morality? 2:20
Alan Leshner - Arguing God from Morality? 11:37

Andrew Carnduff Ritchie Lecture | "A Conversation with Yinka Shonibare"

source: Yale University 2016年10月25日
Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA) joins Kobena Mercer, Professor, History of Art and African American Studies, for a conversation. This lecture coincides with a display of Shonibare’s works on view at the Center, entitled "Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA)." It is made possible by the Andrew Carnduff Ritchie Fund with additional support from the Museum of Arts and Design and the Smithsonian Institution.
The Andrew Carnduff Ritchie lecture series, which is jointly sponsored by the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale University Art Gallery, brings distinguished members of the international visual arts community to the university. These lectures are free and open to the public, honoring Ritchie’s belief that the art museum serves as a gathering place for all members of the community.
**Photograph of Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA), by Marcus Leith, © Royal Academy of Arts, London**

Citizen Wealth with Angela Cummine

source: The RSA 2016年10月17日
Citizen Wealth with Angela Cummine. Political theorist Angela Cummine outlines what measures are needed to ensure that the management of sovereign funds truly reflects, promotes and protects the interests and values of their citizen-owners.
Watch Angela Cummine, Citizen Wealth, in our latest RSA Spotlight - the edits which take you straight to the heart of the event! Loved this snippet? Listen to the full podcast: https://soundcloud.com/the_rsa/citize...
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Pat Utomi: "Leadership and Nation Building" | Talks at Google

source: Talks at Google 2016年10月25日
Pat Utomi is a renowned Nigerian technocrat who has served in many private and public leadership positions including Volkswagen as COO and adviser to the president of Nigeria. He is a professor at Lagos business school and author of over 15 books and publications such as "Why nations are poor", "To serve is to live", and "Managing Uncertainty".
Moderated by Juliet Ehimuan.

Thought Experiments, Physicalism, & Philosophy of Mind

source: Philosophical Overdose 2015年5月18日
David Papineau argues that thought experiments and the intuitions they elicit play a central role in philosophical theorizing. They help us to identify deep-seated principles that direct our thinking. And although such principles aren't always trustworthy, they're methodologically very important. After giving an example from the history of science, he illustrates his points with examples from recent debates in the philosophy of mind regarding the hard problem of consciousness - the supposed explanatory gap between the mental and physical. He argues that the philosophical intuition of an explanatory gap is a dualistic intuition, and materialists (physicalists) who take such a gap seriously are implicitly committed to dualism, not having fully thought through their own materialist view.
This talk was part of a conference on metaphilosophy and the future of philosophy. For more with Papineau on consciousness, check out the following: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlJFO....

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