We got together to view the Bill Maher documentary, Religulous. After the film, we enjoyed dinner at Lucille's Barbeque restaurant while we discussed the movie.

Our member, John Sadowsky, was our guest speaker. John is a communications systems engineer. He holds a Ph.D. and has studied both engineering and mathematics. He was a professor at Purdue and ASU for nearly 15 years, and is currently a staff engineer at General Dynamics. He is also the political chair for the Sierra Club Palo Verde Group (greater Phoenix area).

DAVID C. BERLINER is Regents Professor of Education at Arizona State University. He has taught at the Universities of Arizona and Massachusetts, at Teachers College and Stanford University, as well as at universities in Australia, The Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland. Dr. Berliner is a member of the National Academy of Education, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a past president of both the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Division of Educational Psychology of the American Psychological Association (APA). He is the recipient of awards for distinguished contributions from APA, AERA, and the National Education Association (NEA). He is co-author (with B. J. Biddle) of the best seller The manufactured crisis, co-author (with Ursula Casanova) of Putting research to work, and co-author (with N. L. Gage) of the textbook Educational psychology, now in its 6th edition. He is co-editor of the first Handbook of educational psychology and the books Talks to teachers, and Perspectives on instructional time. His newest book, Collateral damage (with Sharon Nichols) is about the corruption of professional educators through high-stakes testing. Professor Berliner has also authored more than 200 published articles, technical reports, and book chapters.

The HSGP Book Club meets at the Mesa Library, Main Branch, 64 East 1st Street (East of Country Club Way at the intersection of N. Centennial Way -- N.W. corner)

From Amazon.com:

Writer Primo Levi (1919-1987), an Italian Jew, did not come to the wide attention of the English-reading audience until the last years of his life. A survivor of the Holocaust and imprisonment in Auschwitz, Levi is considered to be one of the century's most compelling voices, and The Periodic Table is his most famous book. Springboarding from his training as a chemist, Levi uses the elements as metaphors to create a cycle of linked, somewhat autobiographical tales, including stories of the Piedmontese Jewish community he came from, and of his response to the Holocaust.

Richard Leis, Jr. is Operations Specialist for the HiRISE Operations Center at University of Arizona in Tucson. He is also an HSGP member. In his work he focuses on downlink activities, such as downloading and processing images, leading image validation efforts, testing operations software, managing documents, writing Perl scripts, and participating in public outreach events. He is also involved in the Transhumanism movement.

Richard gave an outstanding PowerPoint presentation with slides of views of Mars and other planets in our solar system.

Clark Jones showed pictures and graphs and discussed some of the practical issues of a real solar electric system, which was of interest to all. To learn more about this fascinating field, read his report to the IEEE Computer Society: http://www.hsgp.org/Clarks_Solar_Power_CS.pdf

The HSGP Book Club meets at the Mesa Library, Main Branch, 64 East 1st Street (East of Country Club Way at the intersection of N. Centennial Way -- N.W. corner)

From Publishers Weekly:

The still-vocal critic of Sexual Personae, a book that drew on poetry and painting for its de-deconstructions of gender, checks in with an anthology of 43 poems, along with her own close readings of them. Her introduction offers a jumble of justifications for undertaking such a project (though she is "unsure whether the West's chaotic personalism can prevail against the totalizing creeds that menace it," she hopes it will), but the readings themselves reveal Paglia's fascination with poetry, which she likens "to addiction or to the euphoria of being in love." The book's first half presents canonical work that Paglia has found "most successful in the classroom" (Shakespeare, Blake, Dickinson, etc.). The second features mostly canonical modernist and confessional work (Stevens, Williams, Toomer, Roethke and Plath), with a few more recent pieces. Clocking in mostly at two to four pages, Paglia's readings sound a lot like classroom preambles to discussion—offering background, lingering over provocative lines, venturing provisional interpretations. Some of what she says comes off as grandiose (Roethke's " 'Cuttings' is a regrounding of modern English poetry in lost agrarian universals"), some as boilerplate, some as inspired. Though hit-and-miss, Paglia's picks and appraisals provide the requisite spark for jump-starting returns to poetry.

Jerry Walp and his wife, Judy, are members of the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix. Jerry was born and raised in Ohio and attended a small midwest technical school, graduating with a degree in Industrial Engineering. He spent the next 27 years working for a company in Colorado. Now retired, he has written five books, including Dominance and Delusion: Why We Do the Things We Do (written under the name M. A. Curtis -- and available in our library!). According to Jerry, Dominance and Delusion offers a new and controversial theory with respect to human behavior. It is a analysis of the human animal from an engineering standpoint. The book lays out the reasons why he believes we behave the way we do. His presentation was based upon the revolutionary ideas in his book.

The Walps are both retired. Judy is a volunteer with the American Red Cross and Jerry is a gardener, growing fruits and vegetables for the food bank. They have one son and two grandchildren.