University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) brings together the world’s leading experts in nearly every specialty. We are home to five Nobel laureates who have advanced the understanding of cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, HIV/AIDS, aging and stem cell research. The UCSF Medical Center, UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals, all four of our professional schools — dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy — and many UCSF graduate programs consistently rank among the best in the country, according to the latest surveys by U.S. News & World Report.
The mission of the UC San Francisco (UCSF) Archives and Special Collections is to identify, collect, preserve, and maintain rare and unique materials to support research and teaching in the history of the health sciences and the UCSF. The UCSF Archives were formally established in 1963 when UC President Clark Kerr mandated the creation of both a records management and an archives program in the University. The Archives serve as the official repository for the preservation of selected records, printed and born-digital materials, and realia generated by or about the UCSF, including all four schools, the Graduate Division, and the UCSF Medical Center. The UCSF Web Archive preserves websites in the “ucsf.edu” domain to document the history of the University’s activities and accomplishments. The vast majority of documentation on UCSF’s schools and programs that Archives collected in paper form in the past (e.g. course catalogs, announcements from each school, student publications, etc.) is now presented on the web. In many cases, it is presented exclusively online and no print copy is produced. Since its inception in 2007 this project has been capturing the websites of the University’s administration, schools, the Graduate Division and the UCSF Medical Center, academic departments, administrative units, organized research units, and student organizations. The University Archives, through the Archive-It web archiving service, preserves these documents and makes them available for research and instruction. The University of California, San Francisco is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. It includes top-ranked graduate schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy, a graduate division with nationally renowned programs in basic, biomedical, translational and population sciences, as well as a preeminent biomedical research enterprise and two top-ranked hospitals, UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco. UC San Francisco is the only campus in the 10-campus University of California system that is exclusively focused on the health sciences.
TIMESTAMPS
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20230131153937/https://www.openculture.com/2011/09
Doc Zone, a documentary series produced by CBC Television, is now airing, Meltdown, a four part investigation into the great financial debacle of 2008. Along the way, the CBC’s Terence McKenna takes viewers “behind the headlines and into the backrooms at the highest levels of world governments and banking institutions, revealing the astonishing level of backstabbing and tension behind the scenes as the world came dangerously close to another Great Depression.”
Above, we have posted the first episode called “The Men Who Crashed the World.” The remaining programs can be watched by clicking here and scrolling down the page. Or by heading to Al Jazeera’s English site, which also hosts the four-part series. Thanks to William for sending along this film. It’s now added to the Documentary section of our collection of Free Movies Online.
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One of the most original and distinctive songs Led Zeppelin ever recorded was the exotic, eight-and-a-half minute “Kashmir,” from the 1975 album Physical Graffiti. In this clip from Davis Guggenheim’s film It Might Get Loud(2009), Jimmy Page explains the origins of the song to fellow guitarists Jack White and The Edge. Then Page demonstrates it by picking up an old modified Danelectro 59DC Double Cutaway Standard guitar that he played the song with on some of Led Zeppelin’s tours. (Watch Kashmir live here.)
In 1973, Page had been experimenting with an alternative D modal, or DADGAD, tuning often used on stringed instruments in the Middle East, when he hit upon the hypnotic, rising and falling riff. The song came together over a period of a couple of years. John Bonham added his distinctive, overpowering drums during a two-man recording session with Page at Headley Grange. Singer Robert Plant wrote the lyrics while he and Page were driving through the Sahara Desert in Southern Morocco. (Neither Page nor Plant had ever visited Kashmir, in the Himalayas.) Bassist and keyboard player John Paul Jones added the string and horn arrangements the following year. In a 1995 radio interview with Australian journalist Richard Kingsmill, Plant recalled his experience with “Kashmir”:
It was an amazing piece of music to write to, and an incredible challenge for me. Because of the time signature, the whole deal of the song is…not grandiose, but powerful. It required some kind of epithet, or abstract lyrical setting about the whole idea of life being an adventure and being a series of illuminated moments. But everything is not what you see. It was quite a task, because I couldn’t sing it. It was like the song was bigger than me.
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This is what you’d call efficient. In two minutes, we watch our planet take form. 600 million years of geological history whizzes by in a snap. Then we see what the next 100 million years may have in store for us. If you don’t have the patience to watch 700 million years unfold in 180 seconds (seriously?), then we’ll give you this spoiler: Coastal real estate is not a long-term buy…
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Random? Yes. Handy? Double yes. The ultimate culinary lifehack from SAVEUR magazine’s Executive Food Editor, Todd Coleman…
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In July, the Edge.orgheld its annual “Master Class” in Napa, California and brought together some influential thinkers to talk about “The Science of Human Nature.” The highlights included:
Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman on the marvels and the flaws of intuitive thinking; Harvard mathematical biologist Martin Nowak on the evolution of cooperation; Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the history of violence; UC-Santa Barbara evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides on the architecture of motivation; UC-Santa Barbara neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga on neuroscience and the law; and Princeton religious historian Elaine Pagels on The Book of Revelations.
The Edge.org has now started making videos from the class available online, including, this week, Steven Pinker’s talk on the history of violence. You can watch Pinker’s full 86 minute talk here (sorry, we couldn’t embed it on our site.) Or, if you want the quick gist of Pinker’s thinking, then watch the short clip above. In five minutes, Pinker tells you why violence is steadily trending down, and why some things are actually going right in our momentarily/monetarily troubled world.
Then let’s also add Salvador Dali to the list. In 1958, Wallace tried to demystify “the enigma that is Salvador Dali,” and it didn’t go terribly well. It turns out that surrealist painters give surreal answers to conventional interview questions too. Pretty quickly, Wallace capitulates and says, “I must confess, you lost me halfway through.” Happily for us, the video makes for some good viewing more than 50 years later.
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We’re tackling another big question today with the help of Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson. And the question goes like this: Why has the West created so much prosperity and stability over the past several centuries, when the rest of the world did not? For Ferguson, the “great divergence” can be explained by six big ideas, or what he calls killer apps for the benefit of his technophile TED audience:
1. Competition
2. The Scientific Revolution
3. Property Rights
4. Modern Medicine
5. The Consumer Society
6. Work Ethic
These apps, it turns out, are open source. Anyone can download and use them. And that’s precisely what Asia has done. The great divergence is over (baby blue)…
In 2009, Richard Dawkins invited Lawrence Krauss, an internationally-known theoretical physicist and author of The Physics of Star Trek, to talk about some big enchilada questions. What is our current picture of the universe? When did the universe begin? What came before it? How could something come from nothing? And what will happen to the universe in the future?
Krauss takes us back to the foundational work of Einstein and Hubble, then moves us through important breakthroughs in modern theoretical physics, ones that have helped us unravel some of these big questions. Give Professor Krauss 53 minutes, and he’ll give you the universe … and a few jokes along the way.
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