See the main meeting page for location and time.
Speaker: Gene Kritsky
Date: Sept. 10
Dr. Kritsky took a year sabbatical and was able to examine the Darwin archives in great detail. He will reveal Charles Darwin to a level never publicly known before.
Oct. 8
Either the most important movie ever produced or New Age bunkum, Marlee Matlin takes us on a journey of science and spirituality in a mind-bending trip down the rabbit hole. We will watch the first hour of the movie and discuss it.
Nov. 12
John Ventre will tell us about the history of the Cincinnati Observatory, one of the oldest professional observatories in the United States. A donation of $2 per person is kindly requested. Bring the family, this should be lots of fun.
Speaker: Anil Menon, Professor, Department of Molecular Genetics,
University of Cincinnati
Dec. 10
As a geneticist who is interested in behavioral and psychological evolution in populations, I have been struggling with ways to approach the question of "population fate" - what differentiates populations in a set of outcome measurements (overall quality of life, longevity, perceived actualization etc.). So, what I hope to discuss is a work in progress, some ideas that I (among may others!) have been working on.....
Studies based on the Genome Project clearly show that humans have a certain amount of variation in their DNA (polymorphism). It turns out that the variation in DNA between any two randomly chosen individuals is about 1 million basepairs (the unit of DNA) out of a total genome of 3 billion basepairs. When different ethnicities are studied, the data show that the inter-individual variation far exceeds the inter-ethnic variation. So, for example, two randomly chosen people will have about 1 million differences between them regardless of their ethnicity. The number of ethnic specific variations is only about 1000 (0.001% of the total variation).
Curiously, studies in cultural anthropology show the opposite phenomenon in measures of social variation. In short, inter-individual social variation is very low compared to inter-cultural (read inter-ethnic) variation. An American is more like another American (regardless of ethnicity) than he/she is like a Swede and so on.
How does this happen? How does culture trump genes? What are the "rate limiting" or "tipping point" factors?
Are there others that I have missed? ....and of course there are combinations of the above. Are there historical dichotomies? e.g. did the same factors cause the rise AND fall of the Roman empire or did the population and environment change sufficiently that the old rules no longer worked?
Location: February 11, 10:00 AM at the Pleasant Ridge Branch of the Cincinnati Public Library, 6233 Montgomery Rd. in Pleasant Ridge (just down from the Dubliner).
William B. Jensen
Department of Chemistry
University of Cincinnati
One of the perennial problems for both skeptics and philosophers of science is the question of how to distinquish true science from pseudoscience - a problem made all the more difficult by the fact that much late 20th century work on the philosophy and history of science has tended to blur the distinction between science and nonscience. The speaker will review some of the criteria that have been used in the past, with particular emphasis on the recent work of the Canadian philosopher Mario Bunge, as well as his own conclusions based on a recently completed manuscript dealing with the history of chemistry.
Location: March 11, 10:00 AM at the Pleasant Ridge Branch of the Cincinnati Public Library, 6233 Montgomery Rd. in Pleasant Ridge (just down from the Dubliner).
March's ART meeting will include a presentation by Dr. Kirk Little, a regular attendant at our science book club meetings, and a Clinical Psychologist practicing in Northern Kentucky. Kirk will discuss the not so new, but vastly underappreciated practice known as Neurofeedback. The first part of the discussion will be both historical and theoretical, covering basic definitions and descriptions of the 35 year history of NFB. With NFB, people are self-trained to use real time information about the state of the cortex to change biological and psychological states on demand. Correlates between brain states (Delta, theta, beta, etc.) and cognitive-affective experiences (attention, mood, memory) will be discussed.
The second half of the discussion will include a live demonstration (with an audience volunteer) of Biofeedback using Hemoencephalography, or HEG. This will be done with special attention given to the Brain's frontal lobes, which are implicated in multiple "pathological" conditions. These include such varried conditions as Autism, AD/HD, Dementia, Depression, OCD, and many others.
John F. Robbins, CEM
Location: Molly Malone's (formerly the Dubliner), Montgomery and Ridge in
Pleasant Ridge
Most of our energy problems boil down to our using too much of what's running out, becoming continually more expensive and causing growing amounts of pollution and environmental degradation. A few generations back, when common fuels were wood, coal and kerosene, consumers would have gathered or bought adequate fuel quantities in advance of their needing it. Today, most consumers don't participate much or any in the collection or generation of their energies. They are sometimes surprised to get a bill for last month's use. They commonly don't understand where their energies came from or directly experience the negative environmental consequences associated with them. Because of the traditionally low cost of natural gas and how electricity is often priced less for higher purchase volumes, most consumers have not learned to limit their energy use, from how much conditioned space they live and work in to how many energy-consuming applications they want to how many miles they drive or ask others to drive for them.
Solar is one popular consumer-friendly alternate energy source which is available in many different forms, including daylighting, space heating, water heating, cooking, drying and electricity generation. Since this region is periodically cloudy, especially during winter, relying on just realtime solar without storage usually doesn't work. So whether generating solar electricity, or solar heating air or water, or just daylighting, all require some kind of backup energy source. This can be the utility companies. Or it can be onsite storage, like batteries holding solar electricity, an insulated tank of solar-heated water, or thermal storage mass in a well-insulated passive solar house. Or it can be a combination of the two.
Because solar hardware is fairly expensive and most homeowners aren't accustomed to buying their own power sources, users must learn how to apply aggressive energy efficiency and limit their consumption to reduce the first-costs and improve the performance of the solar systems they want to rely on. This same approach could and should be applied to conventional energy utilities and their customers. Reducing energy use is always the best way to minimize generation, storage costs and associated pollution. If widespread aggressive reductions in energy use occurred, we could avoid building new powerplants as well as shutdown a few older ones. Aggressive use and demand reductions also dramatically reduce the costs of converting to solar or any other alternative power source. The most powerful factor preventing more widespread convertions to solar and other renewable energies is energy guzzling and waste.
John F. Robbins will present a slideshow and speak about how to implement energy efficiency and solar to cut energy use and pollution demand. He's an energy consultant and designer of super-efficient homes for over 22 years. He's made hundreds of presentations over the last 20 years, even been written about and had his articles published in magazines like HOMEPOWER and SOLAR TODAY. He's the adult-ed solar instructor at Great Oaks, the residential chair in the SW Ohio Chapter of the Assn. of Energy Engineers and a long-time leader in the SW Ohio Alternate Energy Assn. John not only consults and designs energy reduction strategies for his clients, but also for his own household and business. He used lots of insulation, windows, caulk and solar in his White Oak home during the 80s and 90s to cut his heating costs in half. In a NKY home since 1997, he's wrestled his household's annual utility energy bill down from almost $200 during peak months to under $800 for all of 2005. Solar electricity and batteries supply all power all his office equipment since late 2001. He drives a 43 mpg car since 1992, having lowered his gasoline consumption to under 200 gallons per year in 2005. For more information, check out his website.
Copyright 1992-2005, The Association for Rational Thought