critical point analysis
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Whether you're running a for-profit or non-profit enterprise, the price point is crucial - and cheaper is not always better. The less people pay, the less value that's attributed, discovered Christine Benninger, President of the Humane Society Silicon Valley, and her organization decided to raise the prices of animal adoption four-fold in the hopes that clients would feel they're getting a better product, and that they'd be more likely to...more
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In this lecture, Professor Paul Fry examines trends in African-American criticism through the lens of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Toni Morrison. A brief history of African-American literature and criticism is undertaken, and the relationship of both to feminist theory is explicated. The problems in cultural and identity studies of essentialism, "the identity queue," expropriation, and biology are surveyed, with particular attention paid to ...more
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Revolutions occur when a critical mass of people come together to make specific demands upon their government. They invariably involve an increase in popular involvement in the political process. One of the central questions concerning 1848, a year in which almost every major European nation faced a revolutionary upsurge, is why England did not have its own revolution despite the existence of social tensions. Two principal reasons account ...more
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Hawkins is working on his third start-up. Besides starting Palm and Handspring, Hawkins also followed his passion for theoretical neuroscience, the study of how certain parts of the brain work from an information theory point of view. He started a non-profit research institute called the Redwood NeuroScience Institute. Through this experience, he learned that starting a non-profit is just like starting a business.
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How big is the problem? And how large is the opportunity to solve it? Mir Imran, parallel entrepreneur and CEO of InCube Labs, says that 90 percent of business concept development is simply understanding what's wrong with the status quo. One needn't start out as an expert, says Imran, but the savvy entrepreneur needs to know how to perform deeply probing research.
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This class is an introduction to the evolutionary analysis of human emotions, how they work, why they exist, and what they communicate. In particular, this lecture discusses three interesting case studies, that of happiness (e.g., smiling), fear and the emotions we feel towards our relatives. Finally, this lecture ends with a brief discussion of babies' emotional responses to their caregivers.
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In this first lecture, Professor Paul Fry explores the course's title in three parts. The relationship between theory and philosophy, the question of what literature is and does, and what constitutes an introduction are interrogated. The professor then situates the emergence of literary theory in the history of modern criticism and, through an analysis of major thinkers such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, provides antecedents for twentieth...more
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According to Musk, some causes of the high costs in space exploration are: The energy to launch a rocket into space is very high, all the calculations have to be right and this is very expensive given the low launch rate. His final analysis is that rockets should be a lot cheaper and presently there are a lot of inefficiencies.
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The Art of Illustration: Millais, the Pre-Raphaelites and the Idyllic School
Gresham College / Art & Architecture
The final and 'most indispensable' founding principle of the Pre-Raphaelites was: "to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues". Derided by the establishment (including Charles Dickens) for producing art which was ugly and backward, the work of John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt have since come to take its place as perhaps the most important point of British art in the 19th Century. This lecture lo...more
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In this lecture, Professor Paul Fry takes on Knapp and Michaels's influential article, "Against Theory." The historical context of the piece is given and key aspects of the theorists' critical orientations, specifically their neo-pragmatism, are defined. A lengthy discussion of the relationships between, on the one hand, intention and meaning and, on the other hand, language and speech follows with reference to Saussure, deconstruction, an...more
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In this lecture on psychoanalytic criticism, Professor Paul Fry explores the work of Jacques Lacan. Lacan's interest in Freud and distaste for post-Freudian "ego psychologists" are briefly mentioned, and his clinical work on "the mirror stage" is discussed in depth. The relationship in Lacanian thought, between metaphor and metonymy is explored through the image of the point de capiton. The correlation between language and the unconscious,...more
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Imagine that interstellar trade is possible at speeds close to the speed of light. It must incorporate the insights of Einstein's special theory of relativity, which teaches us that clocks on board a spaceship moving at high velocity will ensure time at different rates relative to clocks at the point of departure. This means that time travel into the future is possible. Which time-keeping should we use? What would happen to economics if ti...more
