Open Yale Courses

Overview: Open Yale Courses (OYC) provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge via the Internet. The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences.

• Registration is not required.
• No course credit, degree, or certificate is available.

The online courses are designed for a wide range of people around the world, among them self-directed and life-long learners, educators, and high school and college students. The integrated, highly flexible web interface allows users, in effect, to audit Yale undergraduate courses if they wish to. It also gives the user a wide variety of other options for structuring the learning process, for example downloading, redistributing, and remixing course materials.

Each course includes a full set of class lectures produced in high-quality video accompanied by such other course materials as syllabi, suggested readings, and problem sets. The lectures are available as downloadable videos, and an audio-only version is also offered. In addition, searchable transcripts of each lecture are provided.

A Sense of Place Shortlink: http://wp.me/pISTJ-gL

Full Course: http://oyc.yale.edu/courses

Open Yale Courses

Yale University

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Dying Alone: The Social Production of Urban Isolation

Abstract: In July 1995 over 700 Chicago residents, most of them old and impoverished, died in a short but devastating heat wave. As part of a `social autopsy’ of this disaster that goes beyond natural factors to uncover the institutional forces that made the urban environment suddenly so lethal, this article examines the social production and lived experience of everyday urban isolation. Accounts from ethnographic investigations in the affected neighborhoods and of the city agencies entrusted with dealing with the issue are used to highlight four key conditions: (1) the increase in the number and proportion of people living alone, including seniors who outlive or become estranged from their social networks; (2) the fear of crime and the use of social withdrawal and reclusion as survival strategies; (3) the simultaneous degradation and fortification of urban public space, particularly in segregated neighborhoods that have lost major commercial establishments and other attractions that entice people out of their homes; (4) the political dysfunctions stemming from social service programs that treat citizens as consumers in a market for public goods despite a growing population of residents who lack access to the information and network ties necessary for such `smart shopping’ for city support. Together, these conditions create a formula for disaster that the 1995 heat wave actualized for the city of Chicago and might yet recur in other US metropolises.

A Sense of Place shortlink: http://wp.me/pISTJ-gp

Full Text: http://columbiauniversity.net/itc/hs/pubhealth/p6700/readings/klinenberg-dying.pdf

Klinenberg, Eric. Dying Alone: The Social Production of Urban Isolation.
Ethnography. December 2001 vol. 2no. 4 501-531
doi: 10.1177/14661380122231019E

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Materials Libraries as Vehicles for Knowledge Transfer

Abstract: As part of a wider picture of increased funding for interdisciplinary art-science projects, a number of institutions and instruments have arisen in the UK over the last 35 years which aim to facilitate the transfer of knowledge about materials between materials producers and users. In this paper I focus on the development of one kind of institution in particular; the materials library.

The paper examines the perceived need for the development of these institutions; resulting from a paucity of materials education in the arts, a perceived problem of communication between increasingly specialised disciplines and a rapidly increasing number of autonomous and ‘imperfectly characterised’ new materials. The moral imperative behind materials libraries is also discussed. There is a common belief that the ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ use of materials can have positive or detrimental effects on society, and materials libraries are seen to be a way of controlling and ‘bettering’ the development of materials.

This paper also examines the different and competing modes of knowledge transfer employed in materials libraries, and suggests that we might be seeing a shift in the nature of knowledge communication from a predominantly text-based mode of learning to one that emphasises play, experimentation and performance. Finally this paper critically examines the notion that the transfer of knowledge across perceived boundaries between different kinds of knowledge is a kind of panacea for societal problems.

A Sense of Place shortlink: http://wp.me/pISTJ-fC

Full Text: http://www.anthropologymatters.com/index.php?journal=anth_matters&page=article&op=view&path%5B%5D=233&path%5B%5D=413

Wilkes, Sarah. “Materials Libraries as Vehicles for Knowledge Transfer” Anthropology Matters [Online], Volume 13 Number 1 (22 February 2011)

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Names, not social networks, bind us to global cultural and ethnic communities

Precis: Links between hundreds of millions of names belonging to people all around the world have been analysed by geographers from UCL and the University of Auckland. The results reveal how our forenames and surnames are connected in distinct global networks of cultural, ethnic and linguistic communities.

The researchers’ methods could be of use to social scientists and health researchers investigating migration, identity and integration.

A Sense of Place permalink: http://wp.me/pISTJ-dh

Full Text: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0022943

Summary: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1109/11090801-Naming-networks-Mateos

Ethnicity and Population Structures in Personal Naming Networks
Mateos P, Longley PA, O’Sullivan D, 2011 Networks.
PLoS ONE 6(9): e22943.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0022943

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Gender Differences in Human Brain: A Review

Précis :  Why do men and women think differently? Why do they behave differently in stressed situations? Why do women act more emotionally as compared to men? Why do men and women excel at different types of tasks? Why do boys like to play with cars and trucks and superman? These are the common questions which arise commonly in minds.  The human brain is a highly complex organ. Studies of perception, cognition, memory and neural functions have found apparent gender differences.

These differences may be attributed to various genetic, hormonal, and environmental factors and do not reflect any overall superiority advantage to either sex. Both sexes are equal in intelligence, but tend to operate differently. Men and women appear to use different parts of the brain to encode memories, sense emotions, recognize faces, solve certain problems and make decisions. Indeed, when men and women of similar intelligence and aptitude perform equally well, their brains appear to go about it differently, as if nature had separate blueprints.

Sex differences in the brain may play a role in learning processes, language development, and progression of neurologically based diseases. Sex differences need to be considered in studying brain structure and function and may raise the possibility of sex-specific treatments for neurological diseases. In this article it is reviewed that how does the brain of a male look and function differently from a female’s brain, and what accounts for these differences?

A Sense of Place permalink: http://wp.me/pISTJ-cp

Full Text: http://www.benthamscience.com/open/toanatj/articles/V002/37TOANATJ.pdf

Zeenat F. Zaid

Gender Differences in Human Brain: A Review

The Open Anatomy Journal, 2010, 2, 37-5

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UFO-Abduction Narratives and the Technology of Tradition

Overview:  This article examines UFO-abduction narratives posted to online discussion fora, and argues that these narratives reflect millennial anxieties over an anticipated hyper-technological future figured as “alien”… The UFO-abduction narrative is a particularly apt subject for such a study, and a legend of particular interest at this time, in that it confronts one of the central concerns of our age: humanity’s transformation through its engagement with technology…The aliens in UFO-abduction narratives, with their high-tech devices that allow them to intrude into the most intimate realms of human life (the interior of the home, the interior of the body, the “recesses of the mind”) aptly represent this vision of a hyper-technological future…To be abducted is to be overwhelmed by technology. Aliens almost never use bodily force to capture human beings, but rather rely on special devices beyond human ken to render humans helpless.

A Sense of Place permalink: http://wp.me/pISTJ-ch

Full Text: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~caforum/volume9/vol9_article4.html

UFO-Abduction Narratives and the Technology of Tradition  
Kimberly Ball
Cultural Analysis, Volume 9, 2010

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Colonization of Australia and Its Adjacent Islands and the Evolution of Modern Cognition

Precis:  The first colonization of the  Greater Australian continent, known as Sahul, indicated that humans had modern cognitive ability. Such modern human abilities probably emerged earlier in Africa. I will argue that the only way we can identify what constitutes modern human behavior is to look at the record in Australia—the first place colonized only by modern humans. I place this argument within recent theorizing about cognitive evolution.

A Sense of Place permalink:  http://wp.me/pISTJ-c9

Full Text:  http://www.jstor.org/stable/full/10.1086/650694

Iain Davidson

The Colonization of Australia and Its Adjacent Islands and the Evolution of Modern Cognition 

Current Anthropology

Vol. 51, No. S1, Working Memory: Beyond Language and Symbolism (June 2010), pp. S177-S189

Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research

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Surveillance Cues Enhance Moral Condemnation

Abstract: Humans pay close attention to the reputational consequences of their actions.
Recent experiments indicate that even very subtle cues that one is being observed can affect cooperative behaviors. Expressing our opinions about the morality of certain acts is a key means of advertising our cooperative dispositions. Here, we investigated how subtle cues of being watched would affect moral judgment.

A Sense of Place permalink:  http://wp.me/pISTJ-c2

Full Text: http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/EP09193199.pdf

Surveillance Cues Enhance Moral Condemnation

Pierrick Bourrat, Nicolas Baumar, Ryan McKay

Evolutionary Psychology 2011. 9(2): 193-199

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Canadian Infanticide Legislation, 1948 and 1955: Reflections on the Medicalization/Autopoiesis Debate

Precis:  This article provides a sociological analysis of the discursive interpretations of the criminal law mitigation frameworks underpinning infanticide law in England and Canada. The passage of infanticide legislation by the Canadian Parliament in 1948 and 1955 is described. The account is contrasted with Tony Ward’s analysis of the passage of English legislation in 1922 and 1938. The Canadian legislation of 1948 was based on the English Infanticide Act of 1922.

Ward claims that his account shows that, despite obvious appearances and the views of socio-legal commentators writing during the 1980s and ’90s, infanticide law is not an example of the medicalization of women’s deviance but, if anything, more closely exemplifies law as an autopoietic system of communication which “enslaves” medical concepts, adapting them for its own strictly legal purposes. We argue that, while Ward’s critique of the medicalization interpretation of infanticide law is broadly apposite, autopoiesis theory provides an overwrought alternative. This is especially true for the Canadian legislation.

A Sense of Place Permalink:  http://wp.me/pISTJ-a1

Full Text:  http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/CJS/article/view/839/2368

Canadian Infanticide Legislation, 1948 and 1955: Reflections on the Medicalization/Autopoiesis Debate

Kirsten Kathleen Kramar, William Dean Watson

Canadian Journal of Sociology, Vol 33, No 2 (2008)

 

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Rejection of Health Care Treatment: Russian Study

Abstract:  The rejection of professional medical care (except for acute cases demanding urgent or specific treatment).. has become common in contemporary Russia.  Although the statistics for major life-threatening conditions (cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes) show a decrease in their treatment, high mortality levels from the same conditions are observed.. The lowest number of consultations with medical professionals is observed in the adult working population, although this has been the population group with the highest mortality rates since the mid-1990s ..Clearly, this dangerous trend deserves to be analyzed and explained in greater depth.

A Sense of Place permalink:  http://wp.me/pISTJ-99

Full Text:  http://www.sras.org/rejecting_professional_medicine_in_contemporary_russia

Rejecting Professional Medicine in Contemporary Russia

Polina Aronson

Vestnik

Issue 6, Sumer 2007

 

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