A One-Semester Art History Course Outline for High School Students

The purpose of this paper is to establish a meaningful and applicable one-semester course in Art History for West Valley High School students. The suggested course of study presents concepts basic to the understanding of philosophical and aesthetic values which serve as the foundation of art expression

Multimodal dynamics : self-supervised learning in perceptual and motor systems

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2006.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 178-192).This thesis presents a self-supervised framework for perceptual and motor learning based upon correlations in different sensory modalities. The brain and cognitive sciences have gathered an enormous body of neurological and phenomenological evidence in the past half century demonstrating the extraordinary degree of interaction between sensory modalities during the course of ordinary perception. We develop a framework for creating artificial perceptual systems that draws on these findings, where the primary architectural motif is the cross-modal transmission of perceptual information to enhance each sensory channel individually. We present self-supervised algorithms for learning perceptual grounding, intersensory influence, and sensorymotor coordination, which derive training signals from internal cross-modal correlations rather than from external supervision. Our goal is to create systems that develop by interacting with the world around them, inspired by development in animals. We demonstrate this framework with: (1) a system that learns the number and structure of vowels in American English by simultaneously watching and listening to someone speak. The system then cross-modally clusters the correlated auditory and visual data.(cont.) It has no advance linguistic knowledge and receives no information outside of its sensory channels. This work is the first unsupervised acquisition of phonetic structure of which we are aware, outside of that done by human infants. (2) a system that learns to sing like a zebra finch, following the developmental stages of a juvenile zebra finch. It first learns the song of an adult male and then listens to its own initially nascent attempts at mimicry through an articulatory synthesizer. In acquiring the birdsong to which it was initially exposed, this system demonstrates self-supervised sensorimotor learning. It also demonstrates afferent and efferent equivalence - the system learns motor maps with the same computational framework used for learning sensory maps.by Michael Harlan Coen.Ph.D

How not to return to normal

In a March 2020 article published in Le Monde, Bruno Latour defined the Covid-19 emergency as "the big rehearsal" for the larger disaster to come: one that extends to all forms of life on Earth. The ongoing crisis, in his eyes, becomes both a risk and an opportunity to trial and develop new action plans necessary for the continuation of life. "The pandemic is a portal," wrote author Arundhati Roy a few days later, calling for a more equitable and sustainable post-pandemic future. The pandemic is an opportunity for un-learning and changing direction, particularly in how we approach risk and disaster. The dominant narrative for politicians and the media, however, is one of “returning to normal” as soon as possible, bouncing back, relying on established models of resilience based on the management of economic risk. They are also rehearsing, or modelling, worst- or best-case scenarios. Artists, designers, and institutions are shaping discourses around the growing extinguishment of our resources, but also performing, visualising, simulating and modelling responses to possible risks and imagining resilience differently. Design and art can foster new visions, pilot new modes of communication and knowledge sharing, and drive the interdisciplinary collaborations necessary to address common issues. This panel explores ways in which art and design practices can be mobilized to transform current approaches to risk and disaster in imaginative, sustainable and equitable ways. The papers selected for this session reflect a need to reassess, reframe, and reimagine the roles of museums, art and design, and thus contribute to a space for critical reflection to inform action, strategy, and practices. It is important to remember that our fields are far from immune from being complicit in the creation and reinforcement of the kinds of inequalities and injustices that have been made even more unmistakably clear in the last year: as Sasha Costanza-Shock, author of the book Design Justice, has pointed out, designers are ‘often unwittingly reproducing the existing structure of [...] who's going to benefit the most and who's going to be harmed the most by the tools or the objects or the systems or the buildings or spaces that we're designing.’ The urge to respond in an emergency, whether it's a design challenge in the context of COVID 19 or exhibition on climate change, requires space for critical thinking, inclusive conversation and production. This necessity comes across on the three papers brought together for this panel, and in the opening presentation by Emily Candela and Francesca Cavallo

Beyond the antisyzygy : Bakhtin and some modern Scottish writers

This dissertation shows how beneficial the ideas of the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin are when used to investigate both classical and more recent Scottish writing. An exploration of how a desire for a Scottish literary identity early in this century became inextricably bound up with a sense of historical necessity and psychological division, known as the Caledonian Antisyzygy, forms the basis for the first section of this work. The limitations of this mode of thinking and its failure as a 'theory' are then exposed and compared with the greater benefits of Bakhtinian thought. Succeeding chapters lead the reader from the vision of an historically centered and 'fixed' perception of Scottish literature that dominated the early decades of this century, to one which offers the possibility of endless interpretation. Close analysis of works by Robert Burns, James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Hugh MacDiarmid investigate how useful Bakhtin's theories are for reinterpreting classic Scottish texts. The remaining chapters analyze works by a selection of contemporary Scottish poets and novelists (Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Tom Leonard, Edwin Morgan, Liz Lochhead, and Muriel Spark) in an effort to display both the continuity of a literary tradition and the applicability of Bakhtin's ideas of dialogic interaction and carnival response to recent fiction and poetry that is concerned with the preservation of unique yet pluralistic community identities. It will be shown how Bakhtin's work lends itself to the project of freeing cultural identity from the bonds of a linguistic, historical, and geographical determination that is based on sterile oppositional constructs

Reports to the President

A compilation of annual reports for the 1990-1991 academic year, including a report from the President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as reports from the academic and administrative units of the Institute. The reports outline the year's goals, accomplishments, honors and awards, and future plans