Acorns: California's Original Cuisine

It's acorn season. They're falling by the barrel-load into our yards and parks, littering the ground with squirrel food. But Jolie Lonner Egert doesn't see this as a nuisance. She calls acorns the "original California cuisine." And the Fairfax-based ethnobotanist is betting that they'll be the next locavore sensation. "I think in 10 years, you'll be able to walk into any farm-to-table restaurant and order acorn pancakes," she said.

Egert runs Go Wild, an ecological education company that offers classes on foraging and preparing edible wild plants. . .

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/09/27/DDPN1L7GQU.DTL#ixzz1ZS4FvLfv

Human Migration Leading Toward North America

Long, long ago, a bold race of early modern humans left Africa and migrated across vast stretches of southern Asia to Australia - a mass migration of humankind that was followed thousands of years later by a second wave of African migrants who would settle all of Europe and the northern reaches of the Eurasian continent.

This new tale of humanity's movements out of Africa and around the world comes from an international team of geneticists who report they have traced the record of that first migration by sequencing the DNA from a single lock of hair of an unknown Australian Aborigine that had lain for nearly a century in a British museum.

The scientists maintain that instead of one human wave out of Africa, as has been traditionally believed, there must have been two. The first migration across southern Asia established the first Australians, the continent's Aboriginal population; the second migration, much later, saw modern humans, and, for a while, the Neanderthals, spread all across Europe and ultimately Asia.

That earlier migration took place more than 70,000 years ago, according to the geneticists, placing it at least 24,000 years before the second wave of humans that would later populate Europe, Asia and, eventually, America.

A report on this elaborate feat of genetic detective work was published online Thursday in the journal Science Express by a group of nearly 60 scientists led by geneticists Eske Willerslev and Morten Rasmussen of the University of Copenhagen.

The original work determining the sequence of DNA in the aboriginal hair was accomplished by Danish and Chinese scientists at their joint genomics center in Shenzhen, China, and was compared with DNA sequences from 79 individuals from Asia, Europe and Africa. The results were then sent to a group at UC Berkeley's Center for Theoretical Evolutionary Genomics.

[Haggin Museum: The notable mystery here is how they traveled across stretches of ocean since there is no existing evidence of what type of boat might have been used. Or, did they use some other means? This study opens up a new thread of argument which directly affects what anthropologists believe and teach. Scientific Method leads us to believe that there will be argument and counter-argument with no firmly established agreement at this point. And, in a related story from the San Francisco Chronicle, researchers also report that modern humans have inherited immune system traits and other genetic characteristics of the Neanderthal group, which co-existed with modern humans and apparently inter-bred with a the Neanderthals whom most would assume have nothing to do with living human beings today. In fact, it can be argued that many Neanderthal characteristics appear regularly in humans. To read more, see
http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=1579119358443732517

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/09/22/BABJ1L7NSO.DTL#ixzz1YoaVzQOE

Freeway On and Off Ramps to Be Closed Near Haggin Museum

New I-5 surface will be built to last 40 years

By Docent Blog:
. Beginning Sept 19th an on-ramp connecting Pershing Ave. to I-5 to go in the southbound direction will be closed due to freeway upgrading and re-paving. This may inconvenience docents or museum staff who are attempting to use Pershing Ave to enter I-5 to go in the Stockton downtown direction. We should consider our routes carefully.
. Also, on I-5 in the northbound direction, the off-ramp departing from I-5 to travel north on Pershing Ave toward the museum will also be closed. This is the ramp used by people from south-county and south Stockton to exit the freeway toward Haggin Museum on Pershing. The date when these two vital off-ramps for museum patrons, staff and volunteers to be returned to service is as yet unknown.


By The Record

September 19, 2011 12:00 AM

STOCKTON - Not all roads are created equal, and the $122.1 million project to improve Interstate 5 is building a type of surface that is rare in California and expected to last a long time.

Made from concrete reinforced with steel, the new pavement is estimated to last 40 years, according to the California Department of Transportation.

It's a concrete road, not asphalt, but that's not what makes it different.

Concrete roads in the state are more commonly built with breaks - called joints - that help keep the surface from cracking as the concrete changes shape. Using reinforcing steel makes this project different.

"It's one, continuous smooth pour," said Martha Dadala, design manager with Rajappan and Meyer, a San Jose engineering company working on the project. "There are no joints, so it is a smooth ride."

http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110919/A_NEWS/109190308

What Works In Homework and the Classroom?

Opinion

The Trouble With Homework

By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL

Published: September 10, 2011

Annie Murphy Paul is the author of “Origins,” who is at work on a new book about the science of learning.

Here are some excerpts from her opinion in the New York Times, Sunday Sept 11.

"In recent years, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and educational psychologists have made a series of remarkable discoveries about how the human brain learns. They have founded a new discipline, known as Mind, Brain and Education, that is devoted to understanding and improving the ways in which children absorb, retain and apply knowledge."

“Spaced repetition” is one example of the kind of evidence-based techniques that researchers have found have a positive impact on learning. Here’s how it works: instead of concentrating the study of information in single blocks, as many homework assignments currently do — reading about, say, the Civil War one evening and Reconstruction the next — learners encounter the same material in briefer sessions spread over a longer period of time. With this approach, students are re-exposed to information about the Civil War and Reconstruction throughout the semester.

It sounds unassuming, but spaced repetition produces impressive results. Eighth-grade history students who relied on a spaced approach to learning had nearly double the retention rate of students who studied the same material in a consolidated unit, reported researchers from the University of California-San Diego in 2007. The reason the method works so well goes back to the brain: when we first acquire memories, they are volatile, subject to change or likely to disappear. Exposing ourselves to information repeatedly over time fixes it more permanently in our minds, by strengthening the representation of the information that is embedded in our neural networks."

"A second learning technique, known as “retrieval practice,” employs a familiar tool — the test — in a new way: not to assess what students know, but to reinforce it. We often conceive of memory as something like a storage tank and a test as a kind of dipstick that measures how much information we’ve put in there. But that’s not actually how the brain works. Every time we pull up a memory, we make it stronger and more lasting, so that testing doesn’t just measure, it changes learning. Simply reading over material to be learned, or even taking notes and making outlines, as many homework assignments require, doesn’t have this effect."

"Another common misconception about how we learn holds that if information feels easy to absorb, we’ve learned it well. In fact, the opposite is true. When we work hard to understand information, we recall it better; the extra effort signals the brain that this knowledge is worth keeping. This phenomenon, known as cognitive disfluency, promotes learning so effectively that psychologists have devised all manner of “desirable difficulties”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/opinion/sunday/quality-homework-a-smart-idea.html?pagewanted=2&sq=Homework&st=Search&scp=1

Art as An Agent of Change: Some Arguments

". . . as Picasso put it, art can be "the lie that makes us realize truth." The artist, as Howard Zinn wrote in "Artists in Time of War" in the wake of 9/11, "thinks, acts, performs music, and writes outside the framework that society has created." In doing so, "the artist is telling us what the world should be like, even if it isn't that way now." Powerful as that can be, Zinn believed that artists could and should go further. Citing Mark Twain, Langston Hughes, Bob Dylan and others, he argued for an art that not only transcends received wisdom and conventional thinking but also actually changes it."

"If art can alter the course of human history, it's a difficult case to prove. Has a symphony ever led to the overthrow of a repressive regime? Can a movie affect an outcome at the ballot box? Do novels make readers more compassionate and generous people? "Socially critical artistic creation," writes Paul von Blum in "The Critical Vision: A History of Social and Political Art in the United States," "has rarely resulted in direct and immediate political change."

"But that's not the standard that art should have to meet. Art doesn't stand on a street corner barking out its message. Its true medium is not paint or notes or words on a page. It speaks to us from and through the deepest wells of human consciousness, the source points of our thoughts and feelings, invoking our moral natures while acknowledging our dark recesses. It demands nothing of us - no direct social action, no contribution to a political party, no picketing on the streets. Instead it summons us, as nothing else does, to see ourselves and the world we share in the broadest possible way, to fully acknowledge our connectedness - to each other, to history and the future, to the beauties and terrors of a flawed and striving world.

The poet Wilfred Owen said that "all a poet can do today is warn." At one level, that's a concession of how limited and ineffectual art is. At another, it's a call to act - to listen and attend as closely as possible, to hear and see as fully as we can." -from an essay by freelance writer, Steven Winn.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/18/PK7F1KM95L.DTL&ao=2#ixzz1XfA9b5oL

Edgar Degas Appreciated

IN 1903, when ballet had been a prolific subject of Edgar Degas for over 30 years, an American collector, Louisine Havemeyer, asked him, “Why, monsieur, do you always do ballet dancers?” His quick reply was, “Because, madame, it is all that is left us of the combined movements of the Greeks.

The Dance Class” (around 1873) — part of “Degas's Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint,” a show coming to the Phillips Collection in Washington — operates on several levels.

This already said much: in ballet he had found a modern source of classicism. Yet Degas’s body of work shows that he had found far more. His views of dance — in oil, sculpture, pastel, gouache, lithographs and other mediums — include those who aren’t dancing, those who can’t dance well yet, those who once danced but can do so no longer, and a great many of those who can but happen not to be doing so just now.

We need not argue about whether Degas (1834-1917) surpasses Matisse — some of Degas’s late paintings may well point the way to Matisse’s bold Modernist masterpiece “La Danse” — or Picasso, who designed ballets and drew dancers. But certainly no great artist has ever returned to the mechanics and sociology of the professional dancer’s art more often than Degas or has understood them so well. And no artist has ever depicted ballet more truthfully — or more variously.

This fall brings the opportunity to home in on his ballet work with two different exhibitions. At the Phillips Collection in Washington “Degas’s Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint” (Oct. 1 to Jan. 8) concentrates on the backstage life to which Degas had access. Centering on one late painting, “Dancers at the Barre” (around 1900), and showing his treatments of ballet as successive variations on certain themes, the exhibition emphasizes his process: the work that this painter of workers put into his art.

At the Royal Academy of Arts in London “Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement” (Sept. 17 to Dec. 11) focuses on his relentless scrutiny of the human body in motion, not only in his painting, prints and sculpture but in the context of the photography of the late 19th century (including some images by Degas himself) and early film technology (in which he was keenly interested).

To read more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/arts/dance/degass-ballet-at-the-phillips-collection-and-royal-academy.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Edgar%20Degas&st=cse

He Was Afraid of the Telephone

Alfred Kroeber, Professor Anthropology & Ishi

1911

SF Chronicle on Sept. 6: In return for his first lessons in civilization, giving his own language and the customs of his people, Ishi, lone survivor of the Southern Yahi Indian who once roamed the forests of Tehama County, is a guest at the anthropological department of the Affiliated Colleges. Professors A.L. Kroeber and T.T. Waterman, who brought him from Oroville, where he was being kept in jail for his own safety, are tutoring him. "He is without doubt the most uncontaminated aboriginal in the known world today," said Kroeber. "Even in the interior of Africa or Australia, it is doubtful if such a specimen of man could be found." The last of his people has vanished. He alone is left of the Yahi. Civilization is luring to Ishi. Until Monday he has never worn the garb of the white man. Skins of animals have been his covering when he desired warmth. At other times he preferred to roam the forests as God made him. Yesterday when photographers wished him garbed in his original costume, he refused indicating in sign language that he liked the overalls, shirt and especially the necktie, which had been given him. He is a mere child so far as knowledge of this world is concerned. A tin whistle interests him more than a locomotive. A plate of window glass is to him a strange thing. The telephone he is afraid of. He imagines it something uncanny. He seems willing to eat anything given for food and has learned to use a spoon. {sbox}

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/09/01/PKC51KLBTH.DTL#ixzz1XBugdXjT