Physics 10: Physics for Future Presidents. Spring 2006. Professor Richard A. Muller. The most interesting and important topics in physics, stressing conceptual understanding rather than math, with applications to current events. Topics covered may vary and may include energy and conservation, radioactivity, nuclear physics, the Theory of Relativity, lasers, explosions, earthquakes, superconductors, and quantum physics. [courses] [physics10] [spring2006] Credits: lecturer:Richard A. Muller, producer:Educational Technology Services
UC Berkeley Professor Robert Goldman sings a passage from Ramayana’s “Beautiful Book” and recites the English translation.
Robert Goldman was a graduate student spending several years in India in the late 1960s, when, just for fun, he and a friend read the epic Sanskrit poem, the Valmiki Ramayana. Goldman was captivated by the adventures of the Hindu god Vishnu, who comes to earth on a divine mission in the form of the human hero, Rama.
“Think the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Bible in one package, and you might get a sense of it,” says Goldman, recalling the Ramayana’s simultaneously literary and religious stories of love and war, sex and violence, and mundane daily struggles sprinkled with multi-headed monsters and an army of shape-shifting monkeys.
During his original reading of the Valmiki Ramayana, he wished for a more readable English translation of the nearly 3,000-year-old classic, with its 24,000 verses constituting some 50,000 lines mostly in a 32-syllable meter. It seemed a worthy idea, considering that the legend, translated and transformed from Sanskrit into all Indian and Southeast Asian languages, sheds light on an ancient world and still influences Indian art, religion, politics and life today.
Shortly after joining the UC Berkeley faculty in 1971 as an assistant professor of Sanskrit, Goldman says he assembled a group of scholars, divvying up the seven books of the Ramayana among them. The Valmiki Ramayana Translation Project was off and running.
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Robert Reich: Why a Massachusetts Liberal Will Be the Next President (and Other Amazing Prophecies)
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich will offer his predictions about this fall's historic civic exercise. His Distinguished Lecture in Public Policy is provocatively titled "Why a Massachusetts Liberal Will Be the Next President (and Other Amazing Prophesies)".
A professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy, Reich served as labor secretary during the longest economic expansion in U.S. history, involving the creation of 22 million jobs. Before that he served as solicitor general under President Ford and headed the policy-planning staff of the Federal Trade Commission under Jimmy Carter. A...
Since 1984, Colombia has swung from broad reforms and peace overtures towards guerrillas to counter-reform, escalated armed conflict and massive U.S. military aid. These changes have been felt most intensely in rural war zones. Using archival sources and interviews with leftist and social movement activists, elected officials and elites, Carroll analyzes social movement/elite conflict in three war-torn regions producing bananas, coca and oil, explaining both shifting tactics over time and contrasting regional outcomes.
Leah Anne Carroll is an independent scholar with a doctorate in Sociology from UC Berkeley who works with the Office of Undergraduate Research at the university. Her book, Violent Democratization: Social Movements, Elites, and Politics in Colombia's Rural War Zones, 1984-2008 has just been published by the University of Notre Dame Press.