Learn node: Some good news about gorillas and learning primate medicine

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Posted on 25th March 2008 by Judy Breck in biology | environment

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gorillasnare.jpgIn this learn node focusing on mountain gorillas, good news is an important bottom line. The website of the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project reports the good news that the gorillas’ numbers have grown from 248 to over 360 individuals in the Virunga Massif in Rwanda alone. The illustration for this learn node is from the veterinary project, showing one of its patients: Magayane, a 6.5-year-old female mountain gorilla who was found to have a wire snare her left hand. The project team operated successfully to remove the snare and gave her a complete physical exam while she was under the anesthesia.

Anyone across the world can study and learn about Primate Medicine at the OpenCourseware published online by Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine. The course materials are an excellent introduction to non-human primate medicine. The Primate Medicine webpage is also important reading for anyone who has thought about having a monkey as a pet: powerful reasons for not doing so are explained.

The Wildlife Conservation Society provides a Mountain Gorilla webpage describing the status of these great apes, discovered only 100 years ago by western science: “While mountain gorillas remain highly endangered, thier resurgence stands as a powerful example of what committed conservation efforts can accomplish.”

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Learn node: Geometry of musical chords

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Posted on 14th March 2008 by Judy Breck in art | music

chords.jpg” Coooool site. I never thought of music this way…” wrote Brian, a gifted, highly trained musician, when he sent me links that sparked this learn node from the work at Princeton by Dmitri Tymoczko. The illustration to the right is 2 frames from a Tymoczko animation of chords in four-dimensional space.
An article in Science about The Geometry of Musical Chords begins with this abstract:

A musical chord can be represented as a point in a geometrical space called an orbifold. Line segments represent mappings from the notes of one chord to those of another. Composers in a wide range of styles have exploited the non-Euclidean geometry of these spaces, typically by using short line segments between structurally similar chords. Such line segments exist only when chords are nearly symmetrical under translation, reflection, or permutation. Paradigmatically consonant and dissonant chords possess different near-symmetries and suggest different musical uses.

The article is by Dmitri Tymoczko who illustrates ChordGeometries on animations with sounds on his Web pages at Princeton University. He invites you to: “Watch as Chopin moves around in a circle, a Mobius strip, and in four-dimensional space! Or try Deep Purple on a Mobius strip!”

For some background to the topic, an introduction to Form in Music by Catherine Schmidt-Jones is available in Rice University’s Connexions. Anthony Brandt, also in Connexions, gives an overview of Musical Form, with examples from Schumann, Bach, Boulez, and Beethoven.

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Learn node: Ragtime music, Scott Joplin and Sedalia, Missouri

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Posted on 6th March 2008 by Judy Breck in art | history | music

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Here as this learn node begins are links to two of the many superb music modules on Connexions by Catherine Schmidt-Jones:
One is about Ragtime.
The other is about the great Ragtime artist Scott Joplin.

Scott Joplin and Ragtime are booming at The Scott Joplin International Ragtime Foundation, where the biography page about Scott Joplin includes the piano-player illustration shown here. Moving on through this virtual Ragtime online network, an invitation to the annual Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival (every June) takes us to Sedalia, Missouri.
katy.jpg On a visit to Sedalia’s Web site for a look at its music history, it is easy to get sidetracked into its rich railroad history, as this Katy engine image from the Sedalia site recalls. It seems certain Scott Joplin often passed through the now restored Katy Depot — and perhaps there was a piano in the waiting room where ragtime was played in his hey day.

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Learn node: Solder as an amalgam of open online sources

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Posted on 5th March 2008 by Judy Breck in chemistry | engineering | general science | sciences

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The triangle of information shown in this learn node is a phase diagram thermodynamic calculation for solder Bi-Pb-Sn. So who care about something like that? In the advancing complexity of metallurgy, depth of detail is important. This is the explanation of the NIST host of the diagram, whose Web site explains the mission:

The NIST Metallurgy Division is working closely with materials suppliers and users to develop the measurement and standards infrastructure needed in diverse technological areas – from steelmaking to the fabrication of nanostructured multilayers for magnetic recording heads. . . .

solderiron.jpgLearning about solder might seem more likely to involve technique, like that offered in the PDF which contains the illustration of “Tinning the soldering iron” from About Soldering—making Clip Leads—CLK from MIT’s Open Courseware. A sample of third sort of soldering knowledge available online is this popular Soldering Guide, a tutorial supported by Google ads.

Within the open Internet, patterns of related ideas for the subject of solder can be an amalgam from diverse sources.

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Learn node: The African American Great Migration in the early twentieth century

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Posted on 1st March 2008 by Judy Breck in history

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Learn node topic: African American Great Migration. “From 1860-1920, the number of people living in towns of 8000 or more grew from 6 million to 54 million, with immigrants from Europe and rural migrants from the U.S. forming the bulk of newcomers.” We learn this from a Notre Dame African American history lecture on The Migration. A lecture on The Great Migration: Blacks in White America from the University of Wisconsin adds:

Blacks turned to the “Promised Land” of the North in search of jobs and greater racial toleration. However, such basic demands fueled increasing debate over the place of blacks in predominantly white America in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Nebraska Department of Education and Nebraska State Historical Society tell in detail of the period’s corruption and racial violence in Omaha. Along with the image show with this post of soldiers on guard in Omaha, others from the Nebraska article include a photograph of the burning of Will Brown’s body, Omaha, Nebraska, Sept. 28, 1919. The Library of Congress collection in its African-American Mosaic includes Chicago as a destination for the Great Migration. Digital History provides another overview of The Great Migration in the 1920s period and The Jazz Age.

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