Edison and St. Cyril: Seeking Common Ground. Presentation at Honorary Degree Award Ceremony

Rector Biolchev, Dean Mitev, and distinguished guests: I have been trying hard in recent months to avoid listening to pompous pronouncements about a new millennium. My instincts as a scientist and as a mathematician tell me that this view of the passage of time is relative. After all, this is year 1420 in the Islamic calendar, thus placing us in the 15th century, while the Jewish calendar notes that the year is 5760 which is in the 58th century, not the 21st

Educating Mathematics and Science Students in Urban USA and Sub-Saharan Africa - Lessons Learned and Future Challenges

This essay focuses on the challenges of implementing effective mathematics and science programs in in secondary schools in urban America and Sub-Saharan Africa. A successful approach for meeting these challenges is considered which has first been introduced by the New Jersey Center for Teaching and Learning. This approach is based on maximizing the connections between mathematics and science, on developing an open-source software containing the entire curriculum and loading it into a SMART board computer. Integral to the methodology used is the presentation of questions with multiple choice answers. The technology implemented enables students to see the distribution of their answers (without seeing the correct one), and the teacher engages them in discussion and debates about the merits of various answers. The success of the educating-the-educators model supported by the implementation of the SMART system in both urban America and in The Gambia provides a model that can be replicated in diverse settings, and thus should be of interest to the world community of mathematics and science educators. ACM Computing Classification System (1998): K.3.1

Stopping the Killing and/or Stopping Human Rights Violations

The relationship between promoting human rights and stopping wars can be perplexing. The 19th century origins of the Geneva Convention and the International Commissions of the Red Cross (ICRC) are warnings about the moral danger, ambiguities, or tensions of bringing war within the arena of human rights considerations. Human rights and war can be a toxic cocktail. One should not want to make war more likely or legitimate or deadly by seeming to say that the killing machine on one side or the other is acting humanely, as if that makes war okay. War is hell

Recursos artísticos: adaptaciones y reconstrucciones dramáticas

There is an obvious relation between the imitation and adaptation of literary works. The focus of the essay is the adaptation of early Spanish modern works —including Don Quijote and plays by Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Juan Ruiz de Alarcón— and Miguel de Unamuno’s Niebla into dramatic texts in English. Adaptation becomes a method of reading, analysis, and interpretation, as well as a form of communication among authors.Existe una relación íntima entre la imitación y la adaptación de textos literarios. El enfoque de este ensayo es la adaptación de obras españolas premodernas —entre ellos, Don Quijote y varias comedias de Cervantes, Lope de Vega y Juan Ruiz de Alarcón— y Niebla, de Miguel de Unamuno, en textos dramáticos en inglés. La adaptación se convierte en un método de lectura, análisis e interpretación, tanto como una forma de comunicaciones entre los diversos autores

Scientists Promoting Human Rights

Scientists have long been involved with work to protect fundamental human rights. The activities of the Federation of American Scientists to expose the health impact of nuclear testing in the atmosphere is typical. In the Soviet Union , many of the leading human rights activists, starting with the great Andrei Sakharov , were scientists. The same is true in China where a major intellectual force inspiring China\u27s 1989 democracy movement was Fang Lizhi , an astrophysicist. Often their contribution to military security even gives them a little bit of protection

Human Rights or Inhuman Wrongs

The project of promoting universally recognized human rights, that is, the commitments of the U.N. General Assembly-ratified Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), is in danger. Military and political intervention, including economic sanctions, to stop genocide and ethnic and other political mass murder is under attack. Apparently the lessons of Hitler’s holocaust, the Turkish genocide of Armenians, Pol Pot’s slaughter of innocents, and the loss of life in Rwanda are being rethought and un-taught. So-called peace is now preferred over prevention. The dead may have died in vain

Education as Liberation?

Scholars have long speculated about education’s political impacts, variously arguing that it promotes modern or pro-democratic attitudes; that it instills acceptance of existing authority; and that it empowers the disadvantaged to challenge authority. To avoid endogeneity bias, if schooling requires some willingness to accept authority, we assess the political and social impacts of a randomized girls’ merit scholarship incentive program in Kenya that raised test scores and secondary schooling. We find little evidence for modernization theory. Consistent with the empowerment view, young women in program schools were less likely to accept domestic violence. Moreover, the program increased objective political knowledge, and reduced acceptance of political authority. However, this rejection of the status quo did not translate into greater perceived political efficacy, community participation, or voting intentions. Instead, the perceived legitimacy of political violence increased. Reverse causality may help account for the view that education instills greater acceptance of authority.