Biden Deploys Obama to Campaign, Trump Sends His Children

VOA News

Published on Oct 28, 2020

Days until the November 3 election, both campaigns are making their last push to voters

Trump Thinks ‘Hydrosonic’ is a Type of Missile | NowThis

NowThis News

Published on Oct 28, 2020

Trump thinks ‘hydrosonic’ is a type of missile … but it’s actually a toothbrush…

Better brain health | DW Documentary

DW Documentary

Published on Mar 5, 2020

Chocolate reduces stress. Fish stimulates the brain. Is there any truth to such popular beliefs? The findings of researchers around the world say yes: It appears we really are what we eat.

A study in a British prison found that inmates who took vitamin supplements were less prone to violent behavior. And in Germany, a psychologist at the University of Lübeck has shown that social behavior is influenced by the ingredients consumed at breakfast. But what really happens in the brain when we opt for honey instead of jam, and fish rather than sausage? Scientists around the world are trying to find out. Neuro-nutrition is the name of an interdisciplinary research field that investigates the impact of nutrition on brain health. Experiments on rats and flies offer new insight into the effects of our eating habits. When laboratory rats are fed a diet of junk food, the result is not just obesity. The menu also has a direct influence on their memory performance. The role of the intestinal flora has been known for some time, but scientists are currently discovering other relationships. So-called “brain food” for example: The Mediterranean diet that’s based on vegetables and fish is said to provide the best nutrition for small grey cells. Omega-3 fatty acids, which are found in fish, for example, protect the nerve cells and are indispensable for the development of the brain – because the brain is also what it eats!

OUR FUTURE OUR PLANET: FEATURING MARK RUFFALO (8PM ET)

Bernie Sanders

Streamed live 101 minutes ago

OUR FUTURE OUR PLANET: FEATURING MARK RUFFALO (8PM ET)

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date: Samuel Arbesman

Facts change all the time. Smoking has gone from doctor recommended to deadly. We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe and that the brontosaurus was a real dinosaur. In short, what we know about the world is constantly changing.

Samuel Arbesman shows us how knowledge in most fields evolves systematically and predictably, and how this evolution unfolds in a fascinating way that can have a powerful impact on our lives.

He takes us through a wide variety of fields, including those that change quickly, over the course of a few years, or over the span of centuries.

Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books): David Biggs

When American forces arrived in Vietnam, they found themselves embedded in historic village and frontier spaces already shaped by many past conflicts. American bases and bombing targets followed spatial and political logics influenced by the footprints of past wars in central Vietnam. The militarized landscapes here, like many in the world’s historic conflict zones, continue to shape post-war land-use politics.

Footprints of War traces the long history of conflict-produced spaces in Vietnam, beginning with early modern wars and the French colonial invasion in 1885 and continuing through the collapse of the Saigon government in 1975. The result is a richly textured history of militarized landscapes that reveals the spatial logic of key battles such as the Tet Offensive.

Drawing on extensive archival work and years of interviews and fieldwork in the hills and villages around the city of Hue to illuminate war’s footprints, David Biggs also integrates historical Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data, using aerial, high-altitude, and satellite imagery to render otherwise placeless sites into living, multidimensional spaces. This personal and multilayered approach yields an innovative history of the lasting traces of war in Vietnam and a model for understanding other militarized landscapes.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Presents the history of this area as a form of stratigraphy, excavating layers of sedimented past where multiple military conflicts occurred. . . . A very welcome addition to the growing field of environmental history on Vietnam and on war and environment generally.”―Environmental History

Review

“In this compelling and original book, Biggs innovatively combines environmental and social history to offer a fundamentally new narrative about the impact of war on Vietnamese society in the twentieth century.”―Mark Philip Bradley, University of Chicago

“David Biggs’s second major book on the social and environmental history of modern Vietnam. His nuanced use of Vietnamese-language publications and his extensive interviews with local people are outstanding. He tells a compelling story in fluent, vivid, and even lyrical prose, expressing compassionate insight into both society and ecosystem.”―Richard P. Tucker, University of Michigan

“In this rich and innovative new book, David Biggs considers the spatial dimension of the war in Vietnam through an examination of the densely layered militarized landscapes around Hu. The result is a gem, a fluid, authoritative, compelling work that shows just how deep, complex, and long-lasting were ‘the footprints of war.'”―Fredrik Logevall, author of Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam

About the Author

David Biggs is associate professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta, which won the George Perkins Marsh Prize for the best book in environmental history.

• Hardcover : 288 pages
• ISBN-10 : 0295743867
• ISBN-13 : 978-0295743868
• Product Dimensions : 6.3 x 1.1 x 9.1 inches
• Publisher : University of Washington Press; Illustrated Edition (October 9, 2018)

Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories: Jarai and Other Lives in the Cambodian Highlands (Culture, Place, and Nature): Jonathan Padwe, K. Sivaramakrishnan

In the hill country of northeast Cambodia, just a few kilometers from the Vietnam border, sits the village of Tang Kadon. This community of hill rice farmers of the Jarai ethnic minority group survived aerial bombardment and the American invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, only to find themselves relocated to the “killing fields” of the Khmer Rouge regime. Now back in their homeland, they have reestablished agriculture, seed by seed.

Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories tells the story of violence and dispossession in the highlands from the perspective of the land itself. Weaving rich ethnography with the history of the Jarai and their treatment at the hands of outsiders, Jonathan Padwe narrates the highlanders’ successful efforts to rebuild their complex, highly diverse agricultural system after a decades-long interruption.

Focusing on the ecological dimensions of social change and dispossession from the precolonial slave trade to the present moment of land grabs along a rapidly transforming resource frontier, Padwe shows how the past lives on in the land. An engrossing treatment of timely issues in anthropology and political ecology, this book will also appeal to readers in environmental studies, geography, and Southeast Asian studies.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Building from sustained fieldwork, Padwe not only vividly depicts Jarai social life but also teaches us how to read forested landscapes, natural surroundings, and social life on the margins of the nation-state.”―Erik Harms, author of Luxury and Rubble: Civility and Dispossession in the New Saigon

“A wonderful, original and timely intervention in Southeast Asian studies and studies of the land/habitat/histories of place and of border regions. It will find a place on academic, specialist, public, and student bookshelves alike.”―Penny Edwards, author of Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation (1860–1945)

Book Description

Reclamation and renewal following war and genocide

About the Author

Jonathan Padwe is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

• Paperback : 280 pages
• ISBN-10 : 0295746904
• Product Dimensions : 6 x 0.8 x 8.9 inches
• ISBN-13 : 978-0295746906
• Publisher : University of Washington Press (April 15, 2020)

Bomb Children: Life in the Former Battlefields of Laos: Leah Zani

Half a century after the CIA’s Secret War in Laos—the largest bombing campaign in history—explosive remnants of war continue to be part of people’s everyday lives. In Bomb Children Leah Zani offers a perceptive analysis of the long-term, often subtle, and unintended effects of massive air warfare. Zani traces the sociocultural impact of cluster submunitions—known in Laos as “bomb children”—through stories of explosives clearance technicians and others living and working in these old air strike zones. Zani presents her ethnography alongside poetry written in the field, crafting a startlingly beautiful analysis of state terror, authoritarian revival, rapid development, and ecological contamination. In so doing, she proposes that postwar zones are their own cultural and area studies, offering new ways to understand the parallel relationship between ongoing war violence and postwar revival.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Bomb Children is a riveting and reflexive account of war remains, military waste, and ‘development’ in contemporary Laos. As a document it bears/bares the hazardous conditions of its making, poised on the edge of blasts in the margins of safety zones that are never safe, in the collision and convergence between social ecologies riddled with minefields, and between remains and (economic) revival. Tacking between these ‘paired conceptual frames’ and a set of parallelisms that collapse war and peace and life and death, Bomb Children labors in an ethnographic mode that eschews the pornography of detailing mutilated bodies and instead looks to the war damages that are not over and that remain viscerally present in the everyday of people’s lives.”

The Lancet Commission on global mental health and sustainable development

Executive Summary

A decade on from the 2007 Lancet Series on global mental health, which sought to transform the way policy makers thought about global health, a Lancet Commission aims to seize the opportunity offered by the Sustainable Development Goals to consider future directions for global mental health. The Commission proposes that the global mental agenda should be expanded from a focus on reducing the treatment gap to improving the mental health of whole populations and reducing the global burden of mental disorders by addressing gaps in prevention and quality of care. The Commission outlines a blueprint for action to promote mental wellbeing, prevent mental health problems, and enable recovery from mental disorders.

…(read more).

Introduction to 3D Modeling and Scanning, Fall 2020 Digital Scholarship Workshop

Boston College Libraries
Oct 1, 2020

In this workshop, participants will be introduced to the basics of how to create a 3D dimensional model using a camera or their phone. In the first part of the seminar, we will look at examples of 3D models from a variety of contexts and the best practices for scanning or taking photographs for the creation of 3D models. In the second part, we look at processing the models in Agisoft Metashape, and some basics of 3D scanning with your phone. Questions or interested in processing your 3D models in the O’Neill Digital Studio? Email me at naglak