In this podcast talked with Carmine Savastano who runs the Neapolis Media Group and is the author of the book Two Princes And A King, about the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassinations. Carmine is also coming out with a new book in February titled Human Time Bomb: The Violence Within Our Nature. You can pre-order this book by going here:

Pre-order Human Time Bomb: The Violence Within Our Nature

Carmines new book came about as part of his research into the origins of violent human behavior. We live in times of discord and cultural mania and his work sheds led on some of the reasons why. This discussion with Carmine also was provoked by his publication of an article he wrote titled Origins of Violence that you can find here with summary and resource links:

https://www.tpaak.com/origins-of-violence

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Podcast: Why Is There So Much Discord? Carmine Savastanos Three Origins Of Violence Provide An Answer Mike Swanson (11/21/2019) -...

George Segals Abraham and Isaac.

Tucked behind the University Chapel, George Segals perennially misunderstood Abraham and Isaac depicts a bearded man brandishing a knife, preparing to slay a college-aged youth bound and on his knees. The pieces poignancy and structural ambiguity invite double-takes and photographs. Among students and campus visitors, it has gained an unfortunate reputation.

To some, its simply that statue.

Oh, that statue? Yeah, I know it, said Benjy Jude 23.

Others take a more critical angle.

It does not look good from this direction, commented a passerby.

And others were less tactful.

Wait, said Nate Moore 22. Are you talking about the blowjob statue?

Despite these colorful interpretations, Segals work is firmly rooted in historical context. The piece was originally intended for Kent State University as a memorial for the infamous Kent State shooting, which occurred there on May 4, 1970. Segal chose the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac to express, in his words, the eternal conflict between adherence to an abstract set of principles versus the love of your own child.

The dynamic of whats happening between the two figures in the Abraham and Isaac is not always obvious, said James Steward, Director of the Princeton University Art Museum. Ive heard a number of interpretations posited, especially viewed from certain angles, which again is why I think in that case in particular it is important to note the context of what the backstory of the narrative happens to be to sort of discredit some of these superficial interpretations.

In Segals own time, his work wasnt without controversy. Kent State rejected the sculpture, questioning both its apparently violent imagery and questionable subject matter. The work was then donated to the University, where Segal taught sculpture from 1968-69. It now stands beneath the University Chapel, where it was first installed in 1974, along with a weathered label and the text of Genesis 22, which relays Abrahams near-sacrifice of his son at Gods command.

I was also a student here, so I used to walk by it all the time, said Moulie Vidas GS 09, a professor of Judaic studies. Its very evocative.

Even to those on whom the pieces historical associations are lost, the sculpture serves as an enigmatic landmark. Many alumni, faculty, and students find the piece provocative for thought, conducive to new interpretations and, yes, a great spot for photos.

Across campus, the subject matter of art installations varies in intelligibility. Take the stern John Witherspoon, who scolds passersby from an alcove high on East Pyne Hall. The Witherspoon statue yields itself more easily to interpretation than the abstract Oval With Points, a favored photo-stop for tourists outside of Morrison Hall. Abraham and Isaac falls somewhere between them.

To some, it raises modern questions about intergenerational divides. Isaac, at the mercy of Abrahams hands, may prove a particularly apt image in the age of ok boomer.

I think some of the contemporary questions that it raises are about obedience versus resistance to authority, which is something we have to think about these days, Vidas said. You can take it to the place of the climate conflict, which is in some sense an intergenerational conflict. Are we sacrificing our Isaacs for industry and capitalism?

Others see a story of forgiveness and compassion expressed in the bronze sculpture, which may assert universal claims about human behavior.

Th[e] story [of Abraham and Isaac], of course, is classically one of forgiveness and compassion, Steward said. So I think it would be fair to suspect perhaps that that was part of the artists messaging.

Others emphasize themes of obedience versus resistance, posing Abraham as the reluctant state punishing his rebellious son, while others are troubled by the works religious resonance.

As the Kent State tragedys 50th anniversary approaches this May, the question of where the sculpture resides has become more pressing.

[Abraham and Isaac] stands today, as it has for some 40 years, in exile on the campus of Princeton University, wrote Werner Lange, a professor at Kent State from 1975-94, in a column for a Cleveland news site in 2018. As we approach the 50th anniversary of this watershed moment in modern U.S. history, it is high time that this thought-provoking work of art be brought home from its foolishly imposed exile.

While the homecoming of Abraham and Isaac remains uncertain, it is the statues mysterious aura that serves as its greatest appeal. Provocative both then and now, Abraham and Isaac elicits stronger reactions, ranging from shock to curiosity to discomfort, than many other pieces of campus art.

[Campus art] is meant to interrupt the way that any one of us occupies and moves through space, said Mitra Abbaspour, the Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University Art Museum. It can have many diverse intentions or ambitions after that to offer a space of contemplation, to provoke thought, to dwarf us as physical bodies, to cause us to feel our own mortality or fragility, to make us feel monumental, to give us a sense of, in fact, strength.

On a college campus, pieces such as Abraham and Isaac possess the ability to spark engaging conversations about everything, ranging from resistance and forgiveness to the politics of fellatio and the climate crisis, and to serve as a means of stirring thought within the community.

... Perhaps [public art] can become, again, fodder for conversation, Steward said. Presumably, we are here as part of an academic community because we want to have those conversations, and because we are absolutely happy to invite the public into that conversation too.

The art museum plans to update the interpretative resources that accompany all campus art, including by providing more context and information about pieces such as Abraham and Isaac. Until then, visitors will be left to intuit the pieces meaning for themselves.

Abraham and Isaac continues to stand in solitude, adjacent to the corner of William and Washington, inviting pedestrians to stop and ponder on their way up the steps to Firestone Plaza.

Originally posted here:
Art in the bubble: 'Abraham and Isaac' - The Daily Princetonian

The latest eco-friendly alternative to plastic comes from an unexpected source: trees.

Inventors of the material, Woodly, say its made from cellulose.

Harvested from trees grown in sustainably-managed forests in Finland.

Jaakko Kaminen is the CEO.

(SOUNDBITE) (English) CEO OF WOODLY, JAAKKO KAMINEN, SAYING:

"Woodly is an entirely new type of plastic. It is carbon neutral, wood based, nevertheless it's transparent and it can be used in various types of applications."

The process transforms wood into pearl-like granules.

That can then be made into a clear, plastic film for use in packaging.

It's designed to be recyclable - though its not biodegradable.

But Woodly say the energy recovered from the products...

yields 70% less fossil-based carbon dioxide than burning traditional plastics.

(SOUNDBITE) (English) CEO OF WOODLY, JAAKKO KAMINEN, SAYING:

"In our opinion there are two problems related to plastic packaging. The number one is a human problem, the misuse of plastics, called littering. And the second problem is related to the material itself and that is about climate change and CO2 emissions. The first problem will be solved by changing the human behavior and the second problem is solved by redesigning plastics and we are solving the second problem."

In the initial stages, the plastic will contain 40 to 60% bio-based content.

And together with packing manufacturer Wipak,

the company aims to have its plastic film products in store by the end of 2019.

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The eco-friendly plastic that grows on trees - Yahoo News UK

Through early adulthood, exposure to new experienceslike learning to drive a car or memorizing information for an examtriggers change in the human brain, re-wiring neural pathways to imprint memories and modify behavior. Similar to humans, the behavior of Florida carpenter ants is not set in stonetheir roles, whether it is protecting the colony or foraging for food, are determined by signals from the physical and social environment early in their life. But questions remain about how long they are vulnerable to epigenetic changes and what pathways govern social behavior in ants.

Now, a team led by researchers in thePerelman School of Medicine discovered that a protein called CoREST, a neural repressor that is also found in humans, plays a central role in determining the social behavior of ants. The results, published inMolecular Cell, also revealed that worker ants called Majors, known as brawny soldiers that protect colonies, can be reprogrammed to perform the foraging rolegenerally reserved for their sisters, the Minor antsup to five days after they emerge as an adult ant. However, the reprogramming is ineffective at the 10-day mark, revealing how narrow the window of epigenetic plasticity is in ants.

How behavior becomes established in humans is deeply fascinatingwe know its quite plastic especially during childhood and early adolescencehowever, of course, we cannot study or manipulate this experimentally, saysthe studys senior authorShelley Berger, the Daniel S. Och University Professor in the departments of Cell and Developmental Biology and Biology, and director of the Penn Epigenetics Institute. Ants, with their complex societies and behavior, and similar plasticity, provide a wonderful laboratory model to understand the underlying mechanisms and pathways."

Read more at Penn Medicine News.

Excerpt from:
Reprogramming ant 'soldiers' - Penn: Office of University Communications

Malkia Klabu (Queen Club) is a loyalty program designed with and for young women (like this one from Shinyanga, who is on our Youth Advisory Board) to address multiple structural and psychological barriers to accessing sensitive health products. (Photo by Lauren Hunter)

As the school term ends in Tanzania, 18-year old Neema is looking forward to spending time with her boyfriend back home, though she worries he has been unfaithful while apart. She feels anxious whenever her mother gossips about the bad girls who were expelled from school for getting pregnant and who shamed their families. The stakes are high. Shed like to reconnect with her boyfriend in hopes of being together long-term, but also avoid pregnancy and protect herself from HIV. To feel safe and confident about her boyfriends intentions, she wants him to get tested for HIV. Neema feels the stirrings of independence and wants to take charge by seeking health services on her own, but she must tread carefully to avoid suspicion amongst her family and community.

At first glance, Neema should be able to easily get what she needs. She regularly visits drug shops that sell condoms and oral contraception while running errands. Yet she cant get her hands on these products, learn about them, or trust that theyll allow her to better control her future. Why? Shes surrounded by adults in her life who closely monitor and police her behavioradults who, despite their best intentions, enforce social norms that censure contraceptive use through fear and misinformation. Whether feeling ashamed to ask for something behind the counter, getting quizzed about why she needs sensitive products, or being denied outright because shes wearing a school uniform, the shops arent designed with Neemas explicit and subtler needs in mind. This represents a missed opportunity to sell a product that could prevent yet another teenage pregnancy, school dropout, and descent into cyclical poverty.

This isnt unusual. Many public health innovations lack pathways to reach vulnerable customer bases, even with significant last-mile efforts. Polio vaccine teams, for example, often cant reach the most physically and politically isolated communities harboring polio transmission. Business-as-usual is unlikely to solve such market failures. Even efforts to innovate for the base of the pyramid typically focus on lower-cost alternatives or improving distribution; they rarely address the larger contextual forces that keep products out of reach for customers like Neema. Previously, weve written about how patient-centered approaches can help overcome behavioral gaps in the last mile, but the challenge facing Neema exceeds what innovators can optimize with a patient focus alone. She has the desire, intention, and access (at face value) to get what she needs, but the distribution system, as designed, doesnt allow her to act.

So how can social innovators account for these challenges when rolling out health products like HIV self-test kits or self-administered injectable contraception? We recommend building on our previous model of combining design thinking and behavioral science to not only design services for the core user, but also identify and creatively address broader barriers and cultural norms that would otherwise block uptake among vulnerable groups.

Typical product diffusion starts with early adopters, slowly shifts to the broader population, and finally lands with more-vulnerable customers, as marketers learn more about them over time. For goods that drive significant social impact, we have a moral imperative to accelerate this process, and design thinking offers a practical way forward. Design thinking is a creative, empathetic innovation process that draws on ethnographic methods, and relies on rapid prototyping and real-world testing of potential solutions. The approach can help unpack ambiguous opportunity areas, revealing unmet needs among vulnerable customers that innovators might otherwise overlook.

In our own work to design girl-friendly drug shops, where young women can get sexual and reproductive health products and counsel, we interviewed and shadowed girls in their homes, communities, and during shopping trips to learn about their hopes, aspirations, and whats holding them backbarriers they often wont express with traditional research methods. At the same time, through story-based interviews and observations with drug shop owners and employees, we learned about their motivations and business practices, and how they serve different customers. By empathizing with both groups lived experiencesthe foundation of design thinkingwe quickly identified which aspects of community health services should be adapted to fit within each populations unique needs, and solicited their feedback on low-fidelity prototypes before investing in the final solution.

A drug shop owner receives self-test kits from researcher Moza Albert Chitela, co-packaged with specialized referral information to youth-friendly health facilities. Feedback from shop owners and employees informed low-fidelity program prototypes before investment in the final solution. (Photo by Lauren Hunter)

We found that young women often visit drug shops, usually at the behest of their parents. Although contraception (and at some point soon, HIV self-test kits) are ubiquitous in these corner shops, young women with enough nerve to ask for a sensitive product are often hassled by shopkeepers who are willing to forego a sale, despite pressures to maintain profits, to reinforce social norms. From these insights, we conceived of a home delivery program for young women to discreetly get contraception and HIV self-tests at their doorstep. While this idea solved the gatekeeping problem, it failed to excite young women when prototyped and did nothing to help the most vulnerable girlsthose without phones. Further, because we observed that shopping is often a quick, purpose-driven chore that leaves little room to explore new products, a delivery service would lack marketing touchpoints to grow demand. This low-stakes learning allowed us to quickly change course.

Feedback from girls and shopkeepers led us to home in on a loyalty program designed to address multiple structural and psychological barriers: sparking delight in otherwise mundane shopping by awarding prizes from mystery boxes stocked with desirable items, and printing coded symbols for sensitive products on the back of cards to which girls can point instead of having to ask aloud. Shopkeepers were excited about the program because it fit into their workflows, gave them implicit permission to provide sensitive products to young women through the buy-in of their professional association and coalition of participating shops, and could ultimately increase their bottom line.

Rather than accepting the status quo or campaigning for widespread cultural change, design thinking allowed us to create an immediate, actionable solution to circumvent harmful norms in ways that fold into girls and shopkeepers organic behavior. While we still support efforts to shift harmful mindsets, using design thinking can create more immediate market change and allow girls to access health products that improve their lives right away.

While design thinking unlocks creative ideas and allows teams to progressively narrow in on a solution set, many aspects of product or service design are still based on well-informed guesswork. Design teams dont typically pull in rigorously validated, external evidence (rather viewing themselves as charting new territory), and instead draw on real-world feedback from prototyping to help de-risk solutions. Yet its often impossible to prototype every aspect of a solution, and this creates risk. The stakes are especially high when the focus is on vulnerable customers like young women, who have less power or agency than a typical customer. Mitigating these risks is necessary if the ultimate go-to-market strategy is intended to account for the needs of all customers and those who influence their choices.

Researchers Agatha Mnyippembe and Kassim Hassan combine design thinking with behavioral science to design for the core user and creatively address barriers to the uptake of HIV self-testing and contraceptives among young women. (Photo by Lauren Hunter)

Incorporating the evidence-based tools and principles of behavioral science into insights and solutions generated through the design thinking process minimizes these risks by increasing the likelihood that the end-to-end experience will succeed, ultimately bolstering impact. Behavioral science is rooted in well-established theories of human behavior, characterized by behavioral biases and heuristics (like valuing the present more than the future). Its best known for identifying the impact nudges have on improving the uptake, efficacy, or acceptability of an existing product or service. Many are familiar with the classic examples of how opt-out policies can increase organ donations or how automating enrollment into 401(k) plans can increase retirement savings.

On its own, however, behavioral science offers little structure to identify and clarify ambiguous barriers and opportunities, or to create solutions that address them. In our work with drug shops, behavioral science helped us shape and evaluate elements of different options, such as the default choices and incentives embedded within them. But it did not provide practical guidance on choosing between them, such as investing more in the home delivery concept or the loyalty card program. Rather, we used our design thinking insights to find our way to the most promising solution space. When coupled with design thinking, behavioral science becomes a tool to de-risk an innovative concept for maximum possible impact.

Combining insights from design thinking and behavioral science

Mapping design-thinking insights to evidence-based behavioral principles can reveal strengths and weaknesses in service design. This worked well in our past work to drive HIV treatment adherence using patient-centered approaches, and weve continued to employ this approach to broader, market-blocking norms. In Tanzania, we mapped our insights against common biases from behavioral science and the corresponding nudges to address them (see chart). This revealed that the loyalty program worked within girls reality, but added emotional appeal and fun to their routine trips drug shops. It also leveraged multiple strategies from behavioral science, including commitments (planning to complete an action), incentives (rewards for being a repeat customer), and social ties (a feeling of belonging as a program member). By using nudges to mitigate risk on the smaller aspects of behavior changefor example, encouraging repeat visits to the shop with positive reinforcement, and reducing the gap between intentions and actions via commitment deviceswe could focus on the bigger, structural bets of introducing the product experience to the drug shop channel, such as breaking down gatekeeper norms and building trust between shop owners and young women. During a soft launch of our loyalty program, we found that more young women bought and reported using contraceptive and HIV testing products. We have since implemented a randomized experiment in four wards in Tanzania to more precisely measure its impact.

When we use design thinking and behavioral science in tandem, our products and services can have much broader reach and faster adoption among groups who can benefit the most. In this way, girls like Neema can take control of their futures and thrive within communities, markets, and systems designed with them in mind.

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Marrying Empathy and Science to Spread Impact - Stanford Social Innovation Review

I've made no secret of how impressed I've been by Dance at Illinois' performances this season. I've explored dance film and its additional narrative capacities, enjoyed bold student work, as well as re-conceived classics and powerful new work by faculty. Each experience has challenged previously held notions about what contemporary dance is, and what it isn't; blurring the boundaries between performance art and dance, creating conversations about the significant and often painful challenges facing us today. This brings us to Tere O'Connor Dance: Long Run, which will make it's long-awaited Krannert Center for the Performing Arts premiere this Thursday.

The buzz on Long Runhas been big and for good reason. It is an extremely significant and timely work from a choreographer whose impressive rsum also happens to include Center for Advanced Studies Professor of Dance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and artistic director of the Tere O'Connor Dance.

He has created over 45 works for his company and toured them throughout the United States, Europe, South America, and Canada. He has created numerous commissioned works for other dance companies, including the Lyon Opera Ballet and the White Oak Dance Project, and solo works for Mikhail Baryshnikov and Jean Butler. In 2014, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. O'Connor received a 2013 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, is a 2009 United States Artist Rockefeller Fellow, and is a 1993 Guggenheim Fellow and has received numerous other grants and awards. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New England Foundation for the Arts/National Dance Project, The MAP Fund, and many other organizations. He has received three New York Dance and Performance ("Bessie") Awards. An articulate and provocative educator, O'Connor has taught at festivals and universities around the globe for 25 years. He is in residence at the university for the spring semester each year and in New York or on tour for the remainder of the year. He is an active participant in the New York dance community, mentoring young artists, teaching, writing, and volunteering in various capacities. His most recent work, BLEED, premiered at Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival in December 2013 and toured throughout the United States through spring 2015. O'Connor will premiere a new work for 12 dancers at the Kitchen in New York City in December 2015.

During these cold dark days of early winter, the presence of someone like O'Connor in our midst burns bright. O'Connor, who splits his time between CU and New York, is an important creative conduit, a through line between the pulse of the New York dance world, and the performing arts laboratory that Dance at Illinois and Krannert Center for the Performing Arts provide.

His contributions to the dance world are rivaled only by those to his students and dancers.

"I think of Tere OConnor as the poet laureate of dance. He has been a passionate advocate for the syntax, rhythms and structural elements of dance to speak on their own terms, separate from the logic of theater, narratives or musical forms. The intensely beautiful kinetic images in his rigorously constructed dances provide the viewer with a moment to reflect on lifes mysteries."Jan Erkert, Head of the Department of Dance

O'Connor approaches choreography through a rare combination of lenses that yield richly layered conversations in movement about human behavior, social constructs, memory, and time. The Tere O'Connor Dance website describes it here.

Tere OConnors choreography finds its logic outclasses the realm of translation, operating in a sub-linguistic area of expression. He views dance as a system with its own properties; an abstract documentary form that doesnt search to depict. The lenses of western culture, spoken language or dance history, often used to interpret dance, are subsumed into layers of the work and decentralized. In addition to a great love of movement and a deep commitment to choreographic craft and design, more philosophical urges animate the work. From his earliest efforts, the complex entanglement of passing time, metaphor, constant change, tangential thought, and memory have ignited an exploration into the nature of consciousness for OConnor. Choreography is a process of observation which includes multiple, disparate elements that float in and out of synchronicity. Engaging in dance as a life style constitutes a move away from the narrow social constructs weve created to standardize human behavior.

Martha Sherman's 2017 review of Long Run for Dancelog.nyc review suggested that it may be O'Connor's best work yet. "Rich and spare at the same time....The cascade of dance never lost its connection, but pushed and pulled so that each trio, duet, and solo had its unique form and character, and the whole, yes, was genuinely greater than the sum of its parts."

Finally, we turn to O'Connor himself, who both choreographed and composed Long Run, in his own words.

I have been making dances for 38 years, and I long ago ceded any desire for the expression of specific ideas in my work, since a blend of inference, essence, quality, reference, and affect seem to bring us to the edge of meaning in dance. I allowed myself to lean into the ambiguous contours and endless associative pathways of the choreographic mind to shape my work. The result has been works whose structures are disobedient and play with time in fragmentary ways. Dance can enliven our experience of time passing. Many forms do this, like novels and film, yet at the most fundamental level, these forms search for a shared understanding for their viewers. Some look for this result in dance as well, but my journey led me down a different pathway. I became interested in the ways that events float outside of narrative sequencing, left to churn in an inexact cloud of memories and present desires. In Long Run, I tried to incorporate the haplessness of sequencing in our lives to create a structure of accidental contrasts. A narrative seems to appear, but it is one etched out of chance and could begin or end at any moment. I created the musical score for this work to further shape its structure of difference and attempt to reign in the inherent unruliness of this type of creative procedure.

Tere O'Connor Dance: Long Run promises the best of what Dance at Illinois and KCPA offer: an evening of awe, inspiration, boundary-pushing innovations in the performing arts, and thought-provoking engagement with our world,

Tere O'Connor Dance: Long RunKrannert Center for the Performing ArtsColwell Playhouse500 S Goodwin Ave., UrbanaNovember 21st, 7:30 p.m.Get tickets online

Learn more about Tere O'Connor Dance on their website

Photo from KCPA website

Long Run is co-commissioned by Live Arts Bard at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College through a Choreographic Fellowship with lead support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and NYU Skirball. This presentation of Long Run is made possible by The New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and The Cultural Development Fund. Additional funding is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts Art Works Grant, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Marta Heflin Foundation, the Harkness Foundation, and the research fund from University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. The development of Long Run was made possible in part by the National Center for Choreography at The University of Akron.

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The importance of Tere O'Connor Dance: Long Run and why you won't want to miss it this Thursday : Arts - Smile Politely - Champaign-Urbana's Online...