Open course ware

STEPHEN CARPENTER: I have two activities that I've prepared. So interpretation, this idea of constructing meanings or developing meanings about works of art, or we can think of interpretation as someone is speaking one language and then we take that language and we are able to-- not only do we speak and understand this language, then we can take those ideas and those words and turn them into a different language that someone else speaks. We can have interpretation function in that way as well. So it's about taking ideas from one context into another or one mode of representation in communication into another. But in terms of art and art practice, art criticism and interpretation work together. So this image I think is useful for our purposes here. Imagine that this image was the poster for a movie, full length, feature length movie. And imagine you were responsible for writing the copy-- for writing the text for the voiceover of the movie trailer, but all you had ...

We have to talk about composition of your images but it's very difficult to separate the idea of composition and point of view, background. And even lighting, they all go together. When you adjust your light -- you'll see later -- you're going to get a different kind of shadow and that shadow becomes part of the composition. So, we've attempted to separate them into three categories, but really they are very closely connected and it's something to keep in mind. So let's start with these leaves, these autumn leaves that I put on a light box, which you will see more of when we talk about light. In fact the light box itself is an important compositional element in this image because it's giving us a very strong negative space between the leaves. And, it could be an interesting thing to play around with, using the background as part of your composition. Something to think about. Taking a look at these crystals, which I just randomly placed on a bac...

If you would have been driving through the hills of Tennessee about 40 miles south of Nashville on I-65 in the 1990s, you would have come across a very curious exit called the Saturn Parkway. And if you would've taken that exit and gone a little farther, you would've come across something called the Donald Ephlin Parkway. That was the entrance to the Saturn Corporation, one of the boldest, most innovative, new experiments in labor management relations and organizations of the past 30 years. So let's take a look at what Saturn was all about and, unfortunately, why it failed. Well, Saturn started in the 1980s when a number of innovative labor and management leaders said, we've got to adjust the way in which we work. General Motors came to Donald Ephlin, who was the vice president of the auto workers union, and said, we can't build a small car in the United States competitively. We've got to outsource that work. Don, in his innovative way, said, well,...

PROFESSOR: We have to ask what happens here? This series for h of u doesn't seem to stop. You go a 0, a 2, a 4. Well, it could go on forever. And what would happen if it goes on forever? So if it goes on forever, let's calculate what this aj plus 2 over aj as j goes to infinity. Let's see how the coefficients vary as you go higher and higher up in the polynomial. That should be an interesting thing. So I pass the aj that is on the right side and divide it, and now on the right-hand side there's just this product of factors. And as j goes to infinity, it's much larger than 1 or e, whatever it is, and the 2 and the 1 in the denominator. So this goes like 2j over j squared. And this goes roughly like 2 over j. So as you go higher and higher up, by the time j is a billion, the next term is 2 divided by a billion. And they are decaying, which is good, but they're not decaying fast enough. That's a problem. So let's try to figure out if we know o...

STEPHEN CARPENTER: So we have heard from the introductions and the backgrounds of the people sitting around the table, their numerous interests and numerous starting points or ways to connect to issues of water, of community, of access. And so the range of disciplinary interests I find quite fascinating. And in terms of the work that I've been doing with curriculum, it really speaks to this notion of interdisciplinarity, and some folks use the term transdisciplinarity. But in some ways, when we're interested in key issues, social issues, those disciplines go away. It's about people. It's about something beyond science or beyond art or beyond whatever that discipline might be. So our multiple areas of expertise really come into play quite nicely here. This year, not only do I have the pleasure and the good fortune to be able to visit three times here at MIT as a visiting artist. But I'm also a visiting artist and visiting learner at a local elementary s...

GERALD SCHNEIDER: We have a question from a student at the beginning here asking me to clarify what I meant by fixed action pattern. Do you remember what a fixed action pattern was? We were talking about behavior. We said it was an instinctive movement. Basically, it's an ecological term of-- from zoology. The ecologists in the field of zoology originated this study of inherited behavior patterns, OK? Humans have many of them, and all animals. Their behavior patterns there are pretty similar from one member of the species to the other because the basic pattern is inherited. Brain structures develop under genetic control and form the circuits necessary for these patterns. It would include, in humans, things like crying and smiling and frowning, and looking down when you're a little shy, and things like that. There have been cross-cultural studies of human. There's a very nice book on human ecology by [INAUDIBLE],, if any of you are interested. And there's a...

NORVIN RICHARDS: So we have already talked for a while about various kinds of ambiguity. And today, we're going to talk about ambiguity more. This is, if anything, the best time to talk about ambiguity because we're now actually into semantics. The kinds of ambiguity we were talking about before were kinds of what's sometimes called structural ambiguity-- that is, sentences that had more than one meaning. The way we were talking about it was had more than one meaning because it was possible to draw more than one tree for them. So the sentence that we spend a lot of time talking about was I once shot an elephant in my pajamas, where the whole joke there was that "in my pajamas" could be attached in a couple of different places. It could either modify "the elephant" or it could modify the verb phrase "shot an elephant." And the upshot of that was, well, the pajamas could be on either of you, and yeah-- ambiguity. Similar kinds of am...