Thursday, February 14th, 2019

Time	Event
9:00a	Women’s Hidden Contributions to Modern Genetics Get Revealed by New Study: No Longer Will They Be Buried in the Footnotes It’s too easy, when our historical knowledge is limited, to mistake effects for causes, to fall for just-so stories that naturalize and perpetuate inequality. Many of us may have only recently learned, for example, that the moon landing would not have been possible without mathematician Katherine Johnson and her Hidden Figures colleagues, or that the Hubble telescope would not have been possible without astronomer Nancy G. Roman (now immortalized in LEGO). Prior to this knowledge, we might have been led to believe that women had little to do with humankind’s first leaps into outer space, to the surface of the moon, and beyond. Cornell University historian of science Margaret Rossiter has called this phenomenon “the Matilda effect,” after an 1893 essay by suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage. Rossiter spent years trying to counter the dominant narratives that leave out women in science with a multi-volume scholarly history. Counter-narratives like hers now appear regularly online. And popular media like the book, then film, Hidden Figures have inspired other academics to drill into the history of their fields, find the women who have been ignored, and try to understand the how and why. When Brown University’s Emilia Huerta-Sánchez and San Francisco State University’s Rori Rohlfs saw Hidden Figures, they decided to research their specialization, theoretical population genetics. It may not be as glamorous as space travel, and their research may not become a Hollywood film or LEGO set, but the results they unearthed are revelatory and important. During the 1970s, for example, “a pivotal time for the field of population genetics,” notes Ed Yong at The Atlantic, the two researchers and their team of undergraduates found that “women accounted for 59 percent of acknowledged programmers, but just 7 percent of actual authors.” Those women were scientists doing “crucial work,” writes Yong. One programmer, Margaret Wu, created a statistical tool still regularly used to calculate optimal genetic diversity. Her model appeared in a 1975 paper and is now known as the Watterson estimator, after the “one and only" named author, G.A. Watterson. "The paper has been cited 3,400 times.” Today, “if a scientist did all the programming for a study, she would expect to be listed as an author.” But the practice only began to change in the 1980s, when “programming began changing from a ‘pink collar’ job, done largely by low-paid women, to the male-dominated profession it remains today.” The marginalization of female programmers during some of the field’s most productive years—their relegation to literal footnotes in history—has created the impression, as Huerta- Sánchez, Rohlfs, and their co-authors write, that “this research was conducted by a relatively small number of independent individual scientists nearly all of whom were men.” See a summary of the authors' findings in the video above. To obtain their results, they combed through every issue of the journal Theoretical Population Biology—nearly 900 papers—then pulled out “every name in the acknowledgments, worked out whether they did any programming, and deduced their genders where possible.” The study, published in the latest issue of Genetics does not comprehensively survey the entire field, nor does it definitively show that every programmer who contributed to a paper did so substantively enough to warrant authorship. But it does not need to do these things. The disparities between named authors and marginally acknowledged scientific laborers in a major journal in the field calls for an explanation beyond selection bias or chance. The explanation of systemic bias not only has the benefit of being well-supported by a huge aggregate of data across the sciences, but it also presents us with a situation that can be changed when the problems are widely seen and acknowledged. The study's results "dispel the misconception that women weren't participating in science," the researchers point out in their video, and they suggest that a significant number of women in genetics weren't given the credit they deserved. Huerta- Sánchez and Rohlfs walk their talk. The undergraduate researchers who worked on "Illuminating Women's Hidden Contribution to Historical Theoretical Population Genetics" are all named as authors in the paper, so that their contributions to writing a new history of their field can be recognized. via The Atlantic Related Content: “The Matilda Effect”: How Pioneering Women Scientists Have Been Denied Recognition and Written Out of Science History The Encyclopedia of Women Philosophers: A New Web Site Presents the Contributions of Women Philosophers, from Ancient to Modern Henrietta Lacks Gets Immortalized in a Portrait: It’s Now on Display at the National Portrait Gallery Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Women’s Hidden Contributions to Modern Genetics Get Revealed by New Study: No Longer Will They Be Buried in the Footnotes is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)
12:00p	Hear Neil Gaiman Read Aloud 15 of His Own Works, and Works by 6 Other Great Writers: From The Graveyard Book & Coraline, to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven & Dickens’ A Christmas Carol Neil Gaiman is a storyteller. That title encompasses quite a few pursuits, most of which seemingly involve writing — writing novels, writing radio dramas, writing comic books — but he also occasionally tells stories the old-fashioned way: speaking aloud, and to an audience of rapt listeners. Traditionally, such storytelling happened in a circle around the campfire, but as a storyteller of the 21st century — albeit a master of timeless techniques who uses those techniques to deal with timeless themes — Gaiman can tell stories to the entire world. Today we've gathered all of Gaiman's streamable readings, both video and audio, in one place. Nearly every type of text at which he has tried his hand appears in this collection, from novels (The Graveyard Book) to novellas (Coraline) to poetry ("Instructions," above) to manifestos ("Making Good Art"). Suitable as his voice and delivery are to his own work, Gaiman's live storytelling talent also extends to the works of others, as you'll find out if you listen to the selections on the second list below. The material varies widely, from nonsense or near-nonsense poetry like Dr. Seuss' Green Eggs and Ham and Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" to the work of his friend Ursula K. Le Guin to a classic like Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," whose Gothic atmosphere will no doubt appeal to Gaiman's fans. And Gaiman certainly has his fair share of fans. If you already count yourself in that group, you'll need little convincing to do a binge-listen of his readings here. But if you aren't yet familiar with Gaiman's work in all its various forms, you might consider using these pieces of video and audio as an entryway into his narrative world, with its emotional chiaroscuro, it modern-day mythology, and its unflagging sense of humor. There's plenty of Neil Gaiman out there to read, of course, but with his style of storytelling, sometimes he must simply be heard — if not around an actual campfire, then on that largest campfire ever created, the internet. These texts will be added to our list, 900 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. His own work "Click-Clack the Rattle Bag" - Free Video Coraline - Free Video "Harlequin Valentine" - Free Audio at Last.FM “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” – Free MP3 “Instructions” - Free Video “Orange” (read live) – Free Video “Other People” (read live) – Free Video "Making Good Art" - Free Video "The Day the Saucers Came" - Free Video "The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury" - Free Audio The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains - Free Audio The Graveyard Book (a novel read live with illustrations) – Free Video The Wolves in the Walls - Free Video "Witch Work" - Free Video "A Study in Emerald” – Free iTunes Works by others A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens - Free Audio Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss - Free Video "Democracy" by Leonard Cohen - Free Video "How It Seems to Me," a Poem by Ursula K Le Guin - Free Video "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll - Free Video "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe - Free Video  Related Content: 18 Stories & Novels by Neil Gaiman Online: Free Texts & Readings by Neil Himself Neil Gaiman Reads His Manifesto on Making Art: Features the 10 Things He Wish He Knew As a Young Artist Where Do Great Ideas Come From? Neil Gaiman Explains Neil Gaiman Teaches the Art of Storytelling in His New Online Course Amanda Palmer Animates & Narrates Husband Neil Gaiman’s Unconscious Musings Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Hear Neil Gaiman Read Aloud 15 of His Own Works, and Works by 6 Other Great Writers: From The Graveyard Book & Coraline, to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven & Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)
3:00p	10 Tips on How to Write a Great Screenplay from Billy Wilder: Pearls of Wisdom from the Director of Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, Double Indemnity & More Image via Wikimedia Commons There's an old story -- Orson Welles called it "the greatest Hollywood one-liner ever made" -- that when someone attending the 1958 funeral of Harry Cohn, the fearsome president of Columbia Pictures, asked how it was possible that such a huge crowd would show up for Cohn's funeral, Billy Wilder quipped: "Well, give the people what they want." The story is almost certainly apocryphal. The line may have been spoken by someone else, at a different Hollywood mogul's funeral. But the fact that it is so often attributed to Wilder says something about his reputation as a man with a razor-sharp wit and a firm grasp of the imperatives of popular movie-making. In films like Sunset Boulevard, Some Like it Hot, Double Indemnity and Sabrina, Wilder used his formidable craft as a director to tell stories in a clear and efficient way. It was an ethic he picked up as a screenwriter. Wilder was born in Austria-Hungary and moved as a young man to Germany, where he worked as a newspaper reporter. In the late 1920s he began writing screenplays for the German film industry, but he fled the country soon after Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933. Wilder made his way to Hollywood, where he continued to write screenplays. He co-wrote a number of successful films in the 30s, including Ninotchka, Hold Back the Dawn and Ball of Fire. In the early 40s he got his first chance to direct a Hollywood movie, and a long string of hits followed. In 1960 he won three Academy Awards for producing, writing and directing The Apartment. Wilder was 90 years old when the young director Cameron Crowe approached him in 1996 about playing a small role in Jerry Maguire. Wilder said no, but the two men formed a friendship. Over the next several years they talked extensively about filmmaking, and in 1999 Crowe published Conversations with Wilder. One of the book's highlights is a list of ten screenwriting tips by Wilder. "I know a lot of people that have already Xeroxed that list and put it by their typewriter," Crowe said in a 1999 NPR interview. "And, you know, there's no better film school really than listening to what Billy Wilder says." Here are Wilder's ten rules of good filmmaking: 1: The audience is fickle. 2: Grab 'em by the throat and never let 'em go. 3: Develop a clean line of action for your leading character. 4: Know where you're going. 5: The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer. 6: If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act. 7: A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They'll love you forever. 8: In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they're seeing. 9: The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie. 10: The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then -- that's it. Don't hang around. Note: Readers might also be interested in Wilder's 1996 Paris Review interview. It's called The Art of of Screenwriting. An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in August 2013. Related Content:  Ingmar Bergman Names the 11 Films He Liked Above All Others (1994) Tarkovsky’s Advice to Young Filmmakers: Sacrifice Yourself for Cinema Watch Raymond Chandler’s Long-Unnoticed Cameo in Double Indemnity Fritz Lang Tells the Riveting Story of the Day He Met Joseph Goebbels and Then High-Tailed It Out of Germany   10 Tips on How to Write a Great Screenplay from Billy Wilder: Pearls of Wisdom from the Director of Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, Double Indemnity & More is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)
5:34p	A Six-Hour Time-Stretched Version of Brian Eno’s Music For Airports: Meditate, Relax, Study Writing in his 1995 diary about his seminal ambient album Music for Airports, Eno remembered his initial thoughts going into it: “I want to make a kind of music that prepares you for dying--that doesn’t get all bright and cheerful and pretend you’re not a little apprehensive, but which makes you say to yourself, ‘Actually, it’s not that big a deal if I die.’” Created in 1978 from seconds-long tape loops from a much longer improv session with musicians including Robert Wyatt, Music for Airports started the idea of slow, mediative music that abandoned typical major and minor scales, brought in melodic ambiguity, and began the exploration of sounds that were designed to exist somewhere in the background, beyond the scope of full attention. For those who think 50 minutes is too short and those piano notes too recognizable, may we suggest this 6-hour, time-stretched version of the album, created by YouTube user “Slow Motion TV.” The tonal field is the same, but now the notes are no attack, all decay. It’s granular as hell, but you could imagine the whole piece unspooling unnoticed in a terminal while a flight is delayed for the third time. (Maybe that’s when the acceptance of death happens, when you’ve given up on ever getting home?) Unlike Music for Films, which featured several tracks Eno had given to filmmakers like Derek Jarman, it took some time for Music for Airports to be realized in its intended location: being piped in at a terminal at La Guardia, New York, sometime in the 1980s. And that was just a one-time thing. The album seemed destined for personal use only, but then in 1997 the modern ensemble Bang on a Can played it live, translating the randomness of out of sync tape loops into music notation. Over the years they’ve performed it at airports in Brussels, Holland and Liverpool, and in 2015 the group brought it to Terminal 2 of San Diego International. Writing for KCET, Alex Zaragoza reported that “crying babies, echoes of rolling suitcases and boarding passes serving as tickets to the concert failed to remind anyone that they were, indeed, at one of the busiest airports in the country. Even the telltale announcements were there: Airport security is everyone's responsibility. Do not leave bags unattended.” And then in 2018, London City Airport played the original album in a day-long long loop for the album’s 40th anniversary. As site-specific multi-media art builds popularity in the 21st century with increasingly cheaper and smaller technology, we might hope to hear ambient drones, and not classic rock or pop, in more and more landscapes. Related Content: Brian Eno’s Advice for Those Who Want to Do Their Best Creative Work: Don’t Get a Job Behold the Original Deck of Oblique Strategies Cards, Handwritten by Brian Eno Himself Brian Eno Explains the Loss of Humanity in Modern Music Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW's Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here. A Six-Hour Time-Stretched Version of Brian Eno’s Music For Airports: Meditate, Relax, Study is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)

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