Olé - Chugiak Eagle River Chamber of Commerce Wants Your Thoughts On Closing The UAA Campus There.

Today was the second Friday with my three Olé classes.  As I wrote last week, I'm taking a class on Brain Neurons, one on Photojournalism, and one on the Origins Of English. The Secret Life of Neurons These were the learning objectives in the Brain class.  If you click on the picture it will enlarge and focus better. An easy to share part of the class is this video from the "2 Minute Neuroscience" series on Youtube. This was one of two we saw today: The meaning of intelligence came up today after looked at a chart that showed the ratio of brain weight to body size of many different animals.  It seems one of the dolphins is higher in this than humans.  (Whales have heavier brains, but the ratio to body weight is lower.)  She mentioned that the brain of a certain moth has one part that is highly developed and researchers discovered this was the part of the brain that helped the moth evade bats.  That isn't what I would call 'intelligence' since the moth is not thinking about that, just some part of the brain automatically does it.  Prof. Hannah even said (after class) that the moth can get better at evading bats (at least the ones that don't get eaten first.)  My prior understanding of intelligence was going beyond what the body does automatically.  But as I thought about the different kinds of intelligence Gardiner discusses, some are more like the moth's ability.  Say someone with high interpersonal intelligence.  Perhaps someone's brain is really good at face recognition and interpreting body language, so the person can 'intuitively' know how another person is feeling.  But that person may not know they are better at this than others.  She may assume everyone has this ability.  And she can get better and better at this with more experience.  Is that different from the moth's ability to avoid being caught by a bat?  And  Gardner calls that one type of intelligence.    Perhaps it's the vocabulary that is lacking.  Or is this an ability and when one becomes conscious of it and consciously uses it we can call it intelligence.  I still have to think more about this. Professor Hannah also passed around models of six or seven different animal brains and we were supposed to figure out which was which.  We didn't do too well, but in our defense, we really needed to have them all in front of us at once.  I only ever saw two as they were passed around. Photojournalism The guest lecturer in the Photojournalism class was Scott Jensen, a 22 Emmy award winner who was born at Providence Hospital and eventually went outside and worked in television and has returned to Alaska working with the ADN and KTVA television in Anchorage. Erik Hill, who is the teacher, offered us some links to some of the photojournalism awards that have come out recently. World Press Photo Awards - The winning picture is at the top of the page.  "Crying Girl on the Border" by  Photographer John Moore.  It just eats at me.  Maybe because I've just been with my grandkids and saw the two year old, toward the end of the day start to cry for her mom (who was out of town for work which was why we were there.) Origin of English, On the surface this sounds incredibly dry but it keeps me riveted.  Trying to convey things we covered - like alphabets and  pronunciation of Old and Middle English, well I don't think I can do that.   But here's another video.  This one from the Open University.  But, unfortunately I can't figure out how to embed it here, so you have to go to the link.  It's History of English In Ten Minutes.  The link takes you to the first of ten tracks.  This one on Anglo-Saxon.  Well worth it and shorter than the Neuroscience video. But I can give you some of our homework, which is to find a video of someone reciting the beginning of Canterbury Tales.  Here's what I found with someone reading the old English words, but the modern English translation is there too. And tonight, when I got home, there was an email from Olé with a link to a survey that the Chugiak/Eagle River Chamber of Commerce has about the closing of UAA's Chugiak/Eagle River campus.  Olé offered classes there in the past. Here is my response to question 8. 8. Do you have any suggestions, ideas or options for continuing a UAA campus here in Chugiak Eagle River? Get rid of our governor. Then get Chugiak/Eagle River voters to elect people who strongly support the university and a budget that will keep it thriving (along with other important public services that Alaskans expect.) 157 characters left.

If anyone wants to fill out the survey,  here's the link.  After all, Eagle River and Chugiak went for Dunleavy last November and they regularly send very red reps and senators to Juneau.  Did they think they'd get spared?