The following request is from a UAA student doing a research project. Please participate if you can: Dear fellow UAA student, My name is Bryan Arnold. I am a journalism and public communications student here at UAA. I am conducting a study for my JPC research class and am inviting you to participate in a short survey about the use of social media by UAA students to follow the 2012 U.S. presidential elections. If you do decide to participate, you will answer a short 10-15 minute survey. The survey is completely confidential and voluntary. You can choose whether or not you want to be in the study. Students who decide to participate will be eligible to win a $25 Amazon gift card. If you would like to participate, please follow the link at the bottom of the page. If you have any questions about the survey, please feel free to contact my professor, Dr. Joy Chavez Mapaye or me. Our contact information is below. Survey link: http://uaa.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_2mnF47shJcMY62h Sincerely, Bryan Arnold Email – barnold10@uaa.alaska.edu Phone – (907) 947-0229 Joy Chavez Mapaye, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Journalism and Public Communications Email – jcmapaye@uaa.alaska.edu Phone – (907) 786-4195

The quiz question for my Intro to Philosophy sections today Thursday November 1 concerned an imaginary dilemma (based on a real case). The situation is that you are coming home from work in traffic on a dark night in Detroit (some students are familiar with the place where this happened) and the traffic is so bad everyone is just sitting in their cars stuck three lanes across. There is a beautiful young woman in the car next to you. Behind her is a car with three ugly guys who are upset with her. They get out of their car and start pounding on her car trying to get at her. You are convinced that if they can get the car open they will kill her. 1st question: what is your moral obligation - to interfere or not? 2nd question: what do you imagine you might really do in such a situation? (In the real case no one helped her and she ran for her life, jumping off a bridge to get away from them and she drowned in the river.) For my Truth Beauty Goodness class the question was, did you think Steven Pinker's argument was persuasive? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ramBFRt1Uzk

For Intro to Humanities II Monday evening October 29 the question was what is your favorite waltz? The quiz question for my Intro to Philosophy classes on October 30 was: Prove that you were here today.

Quiz question for my two Intro to Philosophy classes on Thursday is the old favorite: if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it does it make a sound? For my Truth Beauty and Goodness class the question was: What do you consider the most beautiful building in Anchorage? In Alaska? That you have ever seen?

The quiz question for my two Intro to Philosophy classes on Tuesday was: Do you think this is the best of all possible worlds? (We watched the video by Brian Greene on TED where he basically argued the same point as my interpretation of Leibniz' view.) In Truth Beauty Goodness after looking at how several examples of prose create feelings of sadness and happiness, hilarity, and joy, I asked the question what is the saddest you have ever been? Tough question I know. But is this all done through language?

How do different language games (a la Wittgenstein) interact with each other? For example, while we think of various models of the universe as all "true" to the extent that they are accurate, and they enable prediction - especially about future events - the most difficult sort of predictions to make of course, and further that each model is coherent we run up against the difficulty of seeing how they can all be true at the same time. In short, they really are true. But at the same time it is easily apparent that they are in radical conflict. The heliocentric model, the geocentric model, the vacu-centric model, Einstein's Light Cone model, Brian Greene's Frozen River model (from "The Fabric of the Cosmos") and my favorite http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82p-DYgGFjI or if you like really great music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6jBK1ZV-qs&feature=related which look at the Sun's motion through the Galaxy as the frame for the model. I am sure there are many other models that are also true that I am not even thinking about or that have been dreamed about yet. But notice even in the presentations on the Galactic model - great music and all - they make a serious mistake in thinking we have been lied to all these years since the preferred model is true and so all the others must be false! But actually, we do say each model is true and the worst mistake is thinking one model is true and the others false. Following Hegel we can see that the Truth is the Whole - which I interpret to mean our models are never the whole thing we are trying to describe in nature. Rather, we are thinking abstractly in order to think at all and conceptual models are tools that enable us to accomplish the "work" that the tools are designed to enable us to do, but mislead us if we think that is all there is to the phenomena as it is in its entirety - or as it is "in itself". So how do we relate these various complex systems, or models, to one another in a way that it is easy to see how they remain coherent in themselves without interfering with the coherence of each other? How do we see that each is true without thinking other models must be false?

The TBG quiz concerned our favorite poem. I played several performances - Sylvia Plath reading "Daddy", Fiona Shaw doing "The Wasteland", and Billy Collins doing "The Revenant" as well as "For What Binds Us" by Jane Hirshfield http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQb5g5CISn4 - so the question could be taken as which of these did you like best or do you have another that is more your favorite. In general a point of this evening was discussing the relationship between music and poetry, the music in poetry as well as our normal speaking voices, and the connection between music and emotion in the brain. I also read a few selections from "This is Your Brain on Music" by Daniel Levitin http://daniellevitin.com/publicpage/books/this-is-your-brain-on-music/