10.29.08
Posted in Art, Film, Jacob Canon, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, University of Virginia, VFF at 11:04 am by Jacob Canon
In today’s show, adapted from an article written by John Kelly, we will preview this year’s Virginia Film Festival, hosted by the University of Virginia.
This year’s Virginia Film Festival, hosted by the University of Virginia, will kick off tomorrow, Oct. 30, and will feature some 80 films and 100 guests exploring the fearful and alluring images of immigrants, outsiders and extraterrestrials alike.
One of the highlights will be a special 70th-anniversary rebroadcast of Orson Welles’ classic radio play, “The War of the Worlds, “ tomorrow at 7 p.m. in the McCormick Observatory. And at 10 p.m., the Culbreth Theatre will be screening George Pal’s film classic, “War of the Worlds.” Pal biographer and Charlottesville resident Justin Humphreys will introduce the film.
2008 Virginia Film Festival [6:08m]:
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Richard Herskowitz, the festival’s artistic director said, “Not only is this the perfect way to open our festival this year, it is also a great way to honor one of the more bizarre evenings in Charlottesville’s history. On the night of Oct. 30, 1938, Welles’ ultimate hoax had the whole nation on edge and our city was no exception. Citizens were so nervous, in fact, that the McCormick Observatory had to open its doors just to prove with its telescopes that the skies were not in fact filled with alien spaceships.
The festival will also kick-off with a screening of Lake City at 7:00PM at the Culbreth Theatre. Starring Sissy Spacek, Troy Garity, Rebecca Romijn, and Dave Matthews, Lake City is a film with deep Virginia roots. It captures a slice of small-town Virginia life with underlying layers of Southern gothic tragedy. Lake City is produced by Mark Johnson and co-directed by Perry Moore, who met at the Film Festival in the 90’s and have since partnered on a number of projects, including producing the Narnia series. Moore co-wrote and co-directed the film with his partner, Hunter Hill, and brought on board a third UVa alumnus, leading independent film and talent publicist Weiman Seid, as executive producer.
Glen Williamson, executive producer of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, also represents UVa as producer of Sunshine Cleaning. Based on a script that won the writer, Megan Holley, the Virginia Governor’s Screenwriting Award in 2003, Sunshine Cleaning premiered at Sundance and will be released by Overture Films this winter.
UVa grad, Julie Lynn, producer of 10 Items or Less, starring Morgan Freeman, is the producer of Passengers, an exploration of romance and intrigue under the shadow of death. Passengers is directed by Rodrigo García, the director of Nine Lives, which García presented at the 2007 Virginia Film Festival.
Charlottesville native and producer, Temple Fennell, will be the speaker at the Darden Producers Forum, held at the Darden School starting at 1:20 PM on October 30
Additionally, a free program of films by Charlottesville filmmakers Doug Bari, Elizabeth Howard and Light House students will screen at the Gravity Lounge at 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 2, under the heading “Moviemaking in Charlottesville.”
To address images of human aliens who migrate across national borders, the festival and the UVa Media Studies Department welcomes their first Festival Fellow, Hamid Naficy, a film scholar and John Evans Professor of Communication at Northwestern University. His book, “An Accented Cinema,” explores the themes and styles of filmmakers who live and work away from their country of origin.
Keeping with this theme, the festival will also screen, Koryo Saram – The Unreliable People, a film executive-produced by the recently appointed UVa Dean of Arts & Sciences, Meredith Jung-En Woo. Honored as “Best Documentary” at the 2007 Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, the film tells the harrowing story of Stalin’s massive ethnic cleansing campaign in 1937 of forced deportation of Koreans living in the coastal provinces of Far East Russia to the unsettled steppe country of Central Asia.
Finally, there is one of the most popular events at the Virginia Film Festival, the Adrenaline Film Project. Mentored by filmmaker Jeff Wadlow and producer Beau Bauman, The Adrenaline Film Project welcomes 10 groups of film makers who will create a short film, concept to completion, from Wednesday evening to the showing scheduled for Saturday night, November 1st at 10 PM at the Culbreth Theater.
To learn more details about these films and all of the events at the Virginia Film Festival please visit www.vafilm.com.
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when we will relive the events of this year’s Virginia film festival.
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10.22.08
Posted in Anthropology, Consumer Culture, Jacob Canon, Relationships, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, University of Virginia, ethics, happiness, philosophy, sociology at 11:04 am by Jacob Canon
In today’s show, adapted from an article written by Anne Broomley, Senior Writer, Editor for UVa’s Office of Public Affairs, we look at the University of Virginia’s Kath Weston and the journey that led to her new book, Traveling Light: On the Road with America’s Poor.
Author Kath Weston, an Anthropology PhD from Stanford University, grew up in a working-class family and attended college with the help of financial aid, took her first bus trip alone when she was 16, and that unforgettable trip showed her that traveling on the bus was much more than just a way to get somewhere.
Before joining the University of Virginia faculty this fall, she spent more than five years crisscrossing the nation on buses, chronicling the lives of Americans who travel via the least expensive mass transportation option. She refers to her new book, Traveling Light: On the Road with America’s Poor, as a journey full of unexpected richness. Her new book describes her fellow passengers’ colorful humanity and tackles issues of class, race and dubious access to America’s opportunities.
On the Road With America's Poor [5:20m]:
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Weston said she wanted her social commentary to reveal “the artistry of living poor”—the ingenuity of getting by in a system that often fails to reckon with the widening material gap between rich and poor.
The book’s introduction says “By riding the buses, I hoped to get at aspects of living poor that have eluded community studies of poverty… The road trip has become its own American art form, yet few have bothered to chronicle what happens when people without money take to the road.”
Along the way, the riders she traveled with might have been struggling, hungry or penniless, but she found they were also helpful, creative and philosophical.
For example, take T. J… Traveling in Flagstaff, Arizona , he was almost arrested because a white woman, who was probably insane, thought he was a witch and started screaming at him in a bus terminal snack bar, bringing the police. They were about to haul off T.J., who was black, but a white trucker from the bus talked them out of it.
The trucker loved the road, he said, but he had to give up his rig to have surgery—that’s why he was riding the bus.
When everyone got back on the bus, a Hispanic man walked back to T.J., handing him a foil-wrapped package of burritos his wife had made. It turned out T.J. had no money to buy food as he rode to Oklahoma, en route to a new job in a meat-processing plant.
Then there is a story of a divorced middle-aged man, who had custody of his daughter during the summer. So he took her on the bus for the only kind of vacation he could afford, to show her another side of America.
Or, the story of a teenage girl, traveling from one city to another, looking for her younger brother, whose mother had taken off with him and then left him someplace. The sister didn’t know much more than that.
Then, there is the soon-to-be all too familiar story of a once-middle-class woman, who fell onto harder times when her now-deceased husband was laid off. She told Weston, she hated taking the bus, and even though it was obvious why, the woman stood up for a non-English-speaking passenger when the bus driver started yelling at him. She also changed seats so a young woman and her toddler could sit next to each other.
With America’s appetite for travel and adventure alive and well, and the shrinking economy looming as a back drop, Weston’s story of kindness and humanity, in spite of hardship may become a more familiar one for millions in this country. And, a tale of humility and grace that may salvage the American ideal, in the face of the difficult times ahead.
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when we will preview the upcoming Virginia Film Festival.
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10.15.08
Posted in Biology at the University of Virginia, Body Clock, Jacob Canon, Nocturnin, Sleep, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, University of Virginia, biology, circadian rhythms, metabolism, nervous system, neurophysiology, physical health, physiology, sensory inputs, stress, visual processing at 11:04 am by Jacob Canon
In today’s show, adapted from an article written by Fariss Samarrai, Senior News Officer for the Office of Public Affairs, we will look at a team of UVa researchers who have discovered a switching mechanism in the eye that plays a key role in regulating the sleep/wake cycles in mammals.
Biologists at the University of Virginia have discovered a switching mechanism in the eye that plays a key role in regulating the sleep/wake cycles in mammals. The new finding demonstrates that light receptor cells in the eye are central to setting the rhythms of the brain’s primary timekeeper, the suprachiasmatic nuclei, which regulates activity and rest cycles. The finding appears in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Susan Doyle, a research scientist at U.Va. and the study’s lead investigator said, “The finding is significant because it changes our understanding of how light input from the eye can affect activity and sleep patterns.”
Eyeing the Biological Clock [4:46m]:
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Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, Doyle conducted her research with colleagues Tomoko Yoshikawa, a visiting scholar from Japan, and UVa undergraduate student Holly Hillson, in the laboratory of Michael Menaker, a leading researcher in the study of circadian rhythms.
Biological clocks are the body’s complex network of internal oscillators that regulate daily activity/rest cycles and other important aspects of physiology, including body temperature, heart rate and food intake.
The investigators did this by both reducing the intensity of light given to normal mice and also creating a mutated line of mice with reduced light sensitivity in their eyes, which rendered them fully active in the day but inactive at night, a complete reversal of the normal activity/rest cycles of mice.
The researchers discovered that they could reverse the “temporal niche” of mice—meaning that the animals’ activity phase could be switched from their normal nocturnality, or night activity, to being diurnal, or day active.
Doyle said, “This suggests that we have discovered an additional mechanism for regulating nocturnity and diurnity that is located in the light input pathways of the eye. The significance of this research for humans is that it could ultimately lead to new treatments for sleep disorders, perhaps even eye drops that would target neural pathways to the brain’s central timekeeper.”
An estimated one in six people in the United States suffer from sleep disorders, including insomnia and excessive sleepiness. And as the U.S. population ages, a growing number of people are developing visual impairments that can result in sleep disorders.
Besides sleep disorders, research in this field may eventually help treat the negative effects of shift work, aging and jet lag. Doyle said, “Currently, one in 28 Americans age 40 and over suffer from blindness or low vision, and this number is estimated to double in the next 15 years. Our discovery of the switching mechanism in the eye has direct relevance with respect to the eventual development of therapies to treat circadian and sleep disorders in the visually impaired.”
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when we look at the University of Virginia’s Kath Weston and the journey that led to her new book, Traveling Light: On the Road with America’s Poor.
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10.06.08
Posted in Boson, Hadron Collider, Higgs, Jacob Canon, Physics, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, University of Virginia, technology at 11:04 am by Jacob Canon
In today’s show, adapted from an article written by Fariss Samarrai, Senior News Officer for the Office of Public Affairs, we will discuss the work of Brad Cox, professor of physics and a principal investigator with the University of Virginia’s High Energy Physics Group and his teams involvement with the new Large Hadron Collider near Geneva Switzerland.
In a recent show we discussed UVa researcher team’s attempt to verify or refute the existence of the Higgs Boson. On September 10, 2008, an international team of scientists circulated the first beam of protons at nearly the speed of light around the 17-mile Large Hadron Collider on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. The $3.2 billion LHC, under construction for 15 years, is now the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.
Large Hadron Collider [4:48m]:
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Brad Cox, professor of physics and a principal investigator with the University of Virginia’s High Energy Physics Group said, “Soon we may shed light on dark matter and many other mysteries of the universe, such as the Higgs particle, which we believe gives mass to every other particle in nature.” Physicists have been trying to find it for more than three decades, and Cox has been involved with the planning and instrument design for the LHC since its inception in 1993.
Cox likens the LHC to the first use of microscopes, with the right tools, things that are there but not visible may suddenly be revealed. The researchers are looking for physical evidence of supersymmetric particles, (possibly the mysterious “dark matter” that may make up 80 percent of the universe), extra dimensions beyond space-time-gravity, and micro-black holes.
Beginning with a series of tests over the past few weeks, scientists have begun sending opposing beams of protons around the accelerator, causing extreme high-energy collisions that shatter protons and produce new particles. This, in effect, replicates the conditions of the infant universe, the time before particles formed into atoms and molecules, and before elements coalesced to make the stars and planets.
The basic structure of matter evolved from the first seconds after the Big Bang, the explosion of energy that is believed to have created the universe. A better understanding of the basic makings of everything could provide insight into how the universe took shape.
Using a huge international computer grid, UVa physicists and colleagues at dozens of institutions worldwide will gain access to massive amounts of data. The collider produces 1 billion “interactions” per second. Cox said, “The electromagnetic particle detectors in the collider must sort through all these interactions and find the one event in 10 trillion that has new physics.”
In spite of equipment failure that shut down the collider on September 19th, the basic knowledge that will be gained from the LHC experiments likely will result in new technologies such as superconductivity links for power grids, advanced forms of software, and currently “unimagined” breakthroughs.
Cox went on to say, “We will see great theories of physics affirmed, and others refuted. The LHC will help us unravel the next layer of the onion of nature by moving us to the next frontier of our understanding of matter and energy. We are essentially looking for the grand unified theory of everything, and now we have the technology to do the science.”
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when we will we will look at a team of UVa researchers who have discovered a switching mechanism in the eye that plays a key role in regulating the sleep/wake cycles in mammals.
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10.01.08
Posted in Cognitive Science, Education, Gender Bias, Jacob Canon, Politics, Psychology, Racism, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, University of Virginia, elections, ethics, history at 11:04 am by Jacob Canon
In today’s show, we share comments and reflections from the UVa Faculty Roundtable concerning Race and Gender in Politics.
Last Thursday, the Miller Center of Public Affairs hosted the UVa Faculty Round Table on Race and Gender in Politics. Sponsored by the University of Virginia’s Arts & Sciences Magazine, the forum was moderated by Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. The panel included UVa faculty members, Paul Freedman, Brian Nosek, Lynn Sanders, Vesla Weaver and Nick Winter.
Moderator, Douglas Blackmon called this point in time “an extraordinary moment in American history and American discourse,” while Associate Politics Professor Paul Freedman referred to this time as “Christmas” for political scientists because of the multicultural base of the presidential candidates.
Reflections on Race and Gender in Politics Forum [7:30m]:
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Freedman said the implicit message in political advertising is the important element of political ads. An example of this was a 2006 Republican ad run in Tennessee, concerning Democrat, Harold Ford, Jr. Freedman said, the ad included “a white woman who claimed to have had met Harold at the Playboy Party and she suggested that he call her, the ad concluded with the text on the screen, Harold Ford…’he’s just not right.’ And many people suggested that the implicit message was, ‘he’s just not white.’” Freedman added this year’s election has seen less of these types of messages.
Associate Politics Professor Lynn Sanders, spoke to the question, “will Obama lose this election due to race.” Referring to a recent Stanford AP poll and the subsequent media spin that Obama will lose the election by six to fifteen percent simply because he is black, Sanders said, “I think that it is really, really interesting how tied we are to that kind of pessimism. There is an alternative framework that we could be focusing on, which is… that we’re living in a time when we have accomplished such a feat that we can have these different kinds of candidates.” Referring to the Bradley/Wilder effect - when voters tell pollsters they are undecided or likely to vote for a black candidate, yet, on Election Day, they vote for the white candidate - Sanders said this effect has lessened over the past forty to fifty years and the reverse was observed in the 2006 Tennessee race between Ford and the Republican candidate.
Assistant Politics Professor Nick Winter spoke about the book he is working on, “The Secret History of Gender.” Winter said, looking at data from the last three decades, the Democratic party is associated with stereotypically feminine traits such as being “… compassionate, generous, egalitarian, and so forth and conversely they like the republican party for relatively stereotypically masculine characteristics, it’s efficient, supports the work ethic…” Yet, when it comes to Presidential candidates, he said the electorate tends to feel “… that our ideas about what it makes a good leader are themselves very associated with ideas about men and masculinity.”
Associate Professor of Psychology Brian Nosek’s data suggests that some political choices we make are influenced by “implicit” feelings toward blacks, women or the aged without us even realizing it. Nosek said of people who participate in his online surveys, “… 80% of white Americans who come on and try this task have a stronger association of black with bad, than white with bad, suggesting that they have associations in their minds that are quite distinct from the egalitarian values that they tend to express. Likewise with gender, it’s harder to associate female with leader or female with career than males, even if they will explicitly say, ‘no, I’m egalitarian minded… we don’t necessarily know that these things are happening.”
Mr. Blackmon observed that the research of the panelist had led to potentially opposed ideas of how much race and gender effect the election process.
Answering this question, Assistant Politics Professor Vesla Weaver satirically noted, that this may be the first time that professor Sanders and she had been considered the “racial optimist in a room.” She went on to say, “I’m certainly not saying that there aren’t negative racial attributions that happen. I do think we need to question how much the Bradley Effect has been overstated, how much the negative aspect of race is the thing that makes headlines, and what effect that has on perceptions, on people, on raising sensitivities, on looking for it.” Professor Sanders added that it was interesting “…the way conservative and optimistic, and liberal and pessimistic, are associated. And this is a real consistent theme in this year’s election.” She said that none of the panelist felt that bigotry and racism were no longer issues, yet much had changed in the short time since the 1960’s.
The goals of the panel to open public discussion on these issues were summarized by Professor Weaver’s salient comments concerning what would occur if the topic of race and gender were not brought to the public’s attention. Weaver said, the danger is not only, not having this type of public discourse, but that “it opens up space for a powerful counter narrative to develop on November 5th. And that is the counter narrative that, for blacks, for young voters, for anyone that was mobilized… and saw this as the first time their constituency was being spoken to, the counter narrative would be, if not now, then when.” She added, “it opens up a rift in that powerful American dream logic. It opens a rift in the notion that this is an egalitarian society. That we can move forward together… And so if we don’t have that very public conversation now about race, the public conversation that going to get had when we look in the mirror on November 5th is going to be a conversation that is going to be uglier.”
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when we will discuss the work of Brad Cox, professor of physics and a principal investigator with the University of Virginia’s High Energy Physics Group and his involvement with the new Large Hadron Collider in Geneva Switzerland.
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