modern European history
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This lecture deals with Paradise IV, VI and X. At the beginning of Paradise IV, the pilgrim raises two questions to which the remainder of the canto is devoted. The first concerns Piccarda (Paradise III) who was constrained to break her religious vows. The second concerns the arrangement of the souls within the stars. The common thread that emerges from Beatrice's reply is the relationship between intellect and will. Just as Piccarda's fat...more
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In this lecture, Professor Mazzotta examines Paradise XVIII-XIX and XXI-XXII. In Paradise XVIII, Dante enters the Heaven of Jupiter, where the souls of righteous rulers assume the form of an eagle, the emblem of the Roman Empire. The Eagle's outcry against the wickedness of Christian kings leads Dante to probe the boundaries of divine justice by looking beyond the confines of Christian Europe. By contrasting the political with the moral bo...more
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This lecture completes the first half of the semester by analyzing three functional groups in terms of the interaction of localized atomic or pairwise orbitals. Many key properties of biological polypeptides derive from the mixing of such localized orbitals that we associate with "resonance" of the amide group. The acidity of carboxylic acids and the aggregation of methyl lithium into solvated tetramers can be understood in analogous terms...more
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Work by Wöhler and Liebig on benzaldehyde inspired a general theory of organic chemistry focusing on so-called radicals, collections of atoms which appeared to behave as elements and persist unchanged through organic reactions. Liebig's French rival, Dumas, temporarily advocated radicals, but converted to the competing theory of types which could accommodate substitution reactions. These decades teach more about the psychology, sociology, ...more
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This lecture explains what an economic model is, and why it allows for counterfactual reasoning and often yields paradoxical conclusions. Typically, equilibrium is defined as the solution to a system of simultaneous equations. The most important economic model is that of supply and demand in one market, which was understood to some extent by the ancient Greeks and even by Shakespeare. That model accurately fits the experiment from the last...more
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A perennial favorite is the idea of time travel. What would happen if we could go back in time and alter the future a la “Back to the Future”? The great narrative of the history of life has a complexity rife with subplots and twists, many of which we will never uncover. Yet somehow the story of life on Earth began with a prebiotic ooze and ended with the awe-inspiring diversity of life we see today – including us. But like any story, th...more
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Just twenty percent of the members in any group or social system own eighty percent of the assets, indicative that scale indicates a growing concentration of power. The top 2,000 companies employ and influences a million people in the modern world, says author David Rothkopf. With cross-ownership and networking in all circles - business, military, religion, and the Internet among them - a few succeed, but the majority of participants withi...more
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Sheer brainpower, strength in numbers, and good old fashioned networking is how the nature of world influence is established. Skewed and disproportionate, modern power structures that regulate global problems happen only when the elite meet, says author David Rothkopf. And decisions made based on these meetings often do not adequately represent the people or the interests that they are meant to serve.
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Anand Chandrasekaran, Producer of Tapestries of Hope, tells the tale of a small soap maker who realized that the gum they were giving away as a promotional item began to outshine their core product. The company had to make a bold decision to focus on what's selling, rather than what they deemed their core competency, and the rest is entrepreneurial history. Chandrasekaran's lesson is that we should keep ourselves receptive to new ideas and...more
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Neeleman talks about how JetBlue has been able to succeed in a really bad industry. The airline industry has lost more money than it has ever made. In the beginning of human transportation, be it steam ship lines or railroads, there are very few companies who have survived. It has never been good business to move people. It was with that backdrop that Neeleman decided that he wanted to start an airline.
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There is a distinct possibility that humans are currently part way through an evolutionary transition between individuals and groups. The conflict between these two units of selection and levels of organization, between biology and culture, may explain some of the tensions in modern human life. Examples of selfishness and altruism exemplify how these types of selection act on humans.
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Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett Packard (1999-2005), talks about the importance of being able to distill enormous amounts of information. She explains how her experience in taking courses in Medieval History has helped her look at information selectively, a skill she has successfully applied in her corporate life.
