Posted on 31st December 2007 by Judy Breck in music
handel, learn, major, minor, music, operas, oratorios, practice, scales
The webpage in this learn node from Connexions offers 5 brief musical excerpts and challenges: Three are in a major key and two in a minor key. Can you tell which is which simply by listening? You can click for the solution. The image posted here is from the same page. It sets out the Three Major Scales. The page is titled Major Keys and Scales and is part of a highly-developed network of learning pages for music.
Making music as well as learning about it can be assisted from online. YourAccompanist.com offers, for example, Melodic Minor Scales which can be used as accompaniment for practicing singing scales. Musicians of every sort are to be found in many contexts and formats, and nurtured online by individuals and organizations both large and small. A fine node that is an Introduction to G.F. Handel is found on the Portland Handel Society Newbies page.
More learn nodes at: learnodes.com
Posted on 29th December 2007 by Judy Breck in art | history | literature
art, artist, catlin, ethnologist, george, george_catlin, hiawatha, history, indian, literature, longfellow, paintings
This learn node from American history begins where the Smithsonian American Art Museum hosts the website where you can:
“Take a virtual journey to meet American Indians of the 1830s with artist, ethnologist, and showman George Catlin. This site compiles paintings, historical documents, and commentary from contemporary experts so you can explore the intersections of two cultures, both in Catlin’s time and today.”
The museum also welcomes visitors to a George Catlin Indian Gallery where 34 of his paintings can be studied individually. As an example of following history and art through the fenceless trail of the open Internet:
- Catlin’s painting of Pipestone Quarry leads us to locate a National Parks Website about that famous Minnesota location.
- The Pipestone County Museum provides very local and detailed memory of the area’s history.
- And the famed poem The Song of Hiawatha by Longfellow echoes in our thoughts:
On the Mountains of the Prairie,
On the great Red Pipe-stone Quarry,
Gitche Manito, the mighty,
He the Master of Life, descending,
On the red crags of the quarry
Stood erect, and called the nations,
Called the tribes of men together.
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Posted on 28th December 2007 by Judy Breck in biology
amacrince, motion, neuron, PLoS, retina, seeing, visual_system, webvision
The first source in this learn node is an article the open access journal Public Library of Science Biology in which researchers explore how at the neural level we may sharpen what we see in the presence of eye movements. The journal’s December 2007 issue’s table of contents features the image shown to the left, with this explanation:
Our eyes are constantly moving, which blurs the image of the world across the retina. Shown here is a neural network model of the visual cortex that removes this motion blur by using neural connections that are matched to the statistics of eye movements. (see Pitkow et al., e331).
To learn more about where seeing occurs, Webvision has a discussion of “Roles of amacrince cells,” which are “cells of the vertebrate retina [which] are interneurons that interact at the second synaptic level of the vertically direct pathways consisting of the photoreceptor-bipolar-ganglion cell chain.” Just to take a peek at how the eye works, or to study in detail, the amacrince page is an excellent open resource created at the John Moran Eye Center, University of Utah: WEBVISION: The Organization of the Retnia and Visual System.
The University of Texas also has some outstanding online materials for learning about motion perception, including this page in a Center for Perceptual Systems. Even for beginning and young students, spending some time with webpages like these introduces basic ideas and tickles the curiosity about vision and the biology from which it arises.
More learn nodes at: learnodes.com
Posted on 4th December 2007 by Judy Breck in biography
american, author, douglass, frederick, history, slave
This learn node connects to a fabulous open network about a great American. The first click is to a node at a great new American museum: the Frederick Douglass page at the new online National Museum of African American History and Culture. Only the online version of this NMAAHC museum is open; the physical museum is under construction in Washington DC. The above image of Douglass by an unidentified photographer is an Ambrotype dated 1856 from the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution of which the NMAAHC museum is a member.
Frederick Douglass materials that are not enslaved by proprietary Internet barriers are plentiful and authoritative online. The University of Rochester Frederick Douglass Project offers letters, images, writings, links and other educational resources and opportunities. The project is the work of the University of Rochester Libraries with the support of Xerox Corporation. The University of Pennsylvania offers online Douglass books. The Library of Congress offers a large depository of Douglass’ papers, openly available to the online visitor. Documenting the American South makes available more documents and more links.
Each of the sources you can click to above will provide paths to click to more and more about Frederick Douglass. The networking among the open online resources for this great and famous man is far richer, more complete and authoritative than any previous resource for the topic. It includes, for example, video clips from Biography.com.
More learn nodes at: learnodes.com
