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Buddhism and Sexuality
José Cabezón is Professor of Religious Studies and the XIVth Dalai Lama Professor of Tibetan Buddhism and Cultural Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Cabezón edited a collection of essays entitled Buddhism, Sexuality and Gender (1992), one of the first scholarly works in the field. His participation in a 1999 conference hosted by the Institute for […]
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Lakes Beneath Antarctic Ice: Deep, Dark and Mysterious
Where is one of the last places on earth you would expect to find a never-before known lake? Certainly, any of earth’s best-known deserts…the Sahara, Gobi, or Kalahari right? Technically fitting the definition of a desert by standards of precipitation, Antarctica could also be on that well-known list of dry places. But Antarctica has been […]
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In Search of Unique Sounds
“For myself, tone color, texture and ‘unique sounds’ (growls, double buzzes etc.) …can be every bit as musical as harmonic expression can be, and ultimately I hope to meld [them] together hand and hand.” – Stephanie Richards Trumpeter Stephanie Richards has performed and/or recorded with such luminaries as Henry Threadgill, John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Butch […]
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Immersive Languages
It’s a misuse of terms to say that we have a natural language; languages are arbitrary and conventions of peoples by institution. – François Rabelais Constructed languages, or conlangs, are popular features of many science fiction and fantasy tales. Examples include Barsoomian (Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter series), Elvish and Khuzdul (Tolkien’s Lord of the […]
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Neuroscience, Mini Brains, and Your Health
“All the best models are the ones that you can improve in complexity to get closer and closer to the reality.” The idea of a brain in a dish may sound like science fiction to some but scientists are becoming more and more adept at creating cortical organoids in the lab. The organoids are models […]
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Past, Present and Future
For the La Jolla Symphony’s 2018/19 season, Music Director Steven Schick chose the title and theme of “Lineage.” Among other things this word suggests a continuum, an unbroken linkage between past, present and future, and this concept is central to both the season and the “Deep Roots” concert. The past is invoked by Anton Bruckner’s […]
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Dreams That You Dare to Dream
The annual Lytle Scholarship Concerts were inaugurated in 1996 to benefit the Preuss School at UC San Diego, a public college prep charter school for grades 6 through 12. The concerts are specific to a composer (e.g., Chopin, Schubert, Beethoven, Liszt) or to a musical concept or genre (e.g., gospel tunes, tangos, ragtime, Latin jazz). […]
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Recommended for You
We use recommender system all the time. A website will recommend something to you based on what you’ve watched, listened to, bought or who you’ve friended on Facebook. These systems attempt to predict your preferences based on past interactions. The systems range from simple statistical approaches like Amazon’s people who bought X also bought Y […]
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Women in Politics: Looking Toward 2020 and Beyond
Women played a huge role in the 2018 midterms. Women voters flipped districts across the country, and female candidates won a record number of congressional seats. So, what does it mean for American politics as a whole moving forward? Former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, and Goldman School of Public Policy professor Sarah Anzia sat down […]