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Upcoming Meetings and Topics
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Next Meeting
The Evolution of Human Behavior
Speaker:
Dr. Kevin McGraw
July 27th, 2008 9:00 am
Location: HomeTown Buffet, 1312 N. Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale |
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Dr. Kevin McGraw is Assistant professor of Evolutionary and Systems Biology at ASU School of Life Sciences. Dr. McGraw holds an M.S. from Auburn Univ., and a Ph.D. from Cornell. In addition, he has done post doctoral studies at U.C.-Davis.
Dr. McGraw is the author and co-author of numerous books, articles and papers. He was awarded the 2005 Outstanding New Investigator Award by the American Ornithologists' Union. His contributions come in the field of avian visual communication and coloration, and he is credited with pioneering a new approach to the study of ornamental traits. By taking an integrative approach that combines concepts and techniques from evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, behavioral endocrinology, avian nutrition, and immunoecology, he has helped to solve questions about why and how birds assume the colors they do. He is a world authority on the carotenoid pigments of skin and feathers and other sources of color. By addressing how colors are synthesized, influenced by access to dietary components, and affected by health, condition, and heritage, he has greatly advanced our understanding of how avian ornaments develop and evolve.
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The Origins of Religion - Imagine That!
Speaker:
Jerry Walp
August 10th, 2008 9:00 am
Location: HomeTown Buffet, 1312 N. Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale |
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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 will be 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.
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Break, Blow, Burn, by Camille Paglia
Event:
Book Club
August 17th, 2008 1:30 pm
Location: Mesa Library, Main Branch, 64 East 1st Street |
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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.
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Home Solar Power Installation
Speaker:
Clark Jones
August 24th, 2008 9:00 am
Location: HomeTown Buffet, 1312 N. Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale |
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Last year, one of our most popular talks was on Solar Energy. Come to the meeting on August 24th and learn how you can go green by going solar! Clark Jones will show pictures and graphs and discuss some of the practical issues of a real solar electric systemg, which will be 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
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Images of Mars and Interplanetary Science
Speaker:
Richard Leis Jr.
September 07th, 2008 9:00 am
Location: HomeTown Buffet, 1312 N. Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale |
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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 will do a PowerPoint presentation with slides of views of Mars and other planets in our solar system!
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The Periodic Table, by Primo Levi
Event:
Book Club
September 14th, 2008 1:30 pm
Location: Mesa Library, Main Branch, 64 East 1st Street |
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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.
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School Vouchers: Will Your Tax Dollars Support Religious Education?
Speaker:
Dr. David Berliner
September 21st, 2008 9:00 am
Location: HomeTown Buffet, 1312 N. Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale |
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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.
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What's in the IPCC Report on Global Warming
Speaker:
Dr. John Sadowsky
October 05th, 2008 9:00 am
Location: HomeTown Buffet, 1312 N. Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale |
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Our member, John Sadowsky, 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).
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Book TBA
Event:
Book Club
October 12th, 2008 1:30 pm
Location: Mesa Library, Main Branch, 64 East 1st Street |
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Book TBA; 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).
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Current Socio-Political Changes in Latin America
Speaker:
Dr. David Foster
October 19th, 2008 9:00 am
Location: HomeTown Buffet, 1312 N. Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale |
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David William Foster is Regents Professor of Spanish and Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University. He holds a BA in Spanish, as well as an MA in Spanish and Romance Linguistics and a PhD in Romance Languages and Literature, all from the Univ. of Washington.
Dr. Foster's research interests focus on urban culture in Latin America, with emphasis on issues of gender construction and sexual identity. He specializes in Argentina and has written extensively on Argentine narrative and theater. His most recent publications include: Culture and Customs of Argentina (1998), A Funny Dirty Little War/no habrás más penas ni olvido (1998), Buenos Aires: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production (1998) and Contemporary Argentina Cinema (1992).
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November 02nd, 2008 9:00 am To Be Announced
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Book TBA
Event:
Book Club
November 16th, 2008 1:30 pm
Location: Mesa Library, Main Branch, 64 East 1st Street |
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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);
Book TBA
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Religion and Secularism, Empahsizing the Recent Turkish Conference
Speaker:
Dr. John Carlson
November 23rd, 2008 9:00 am
Location: HomeTown Buffet, 1312 N. Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale |
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John Carlson joined the religious studies faculty at ASU in 2005 after completing his Ph.D. in ethics from The University of Chicago Divinity School. There. he was also a founding member of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, serving as the project coordinator for the University of Chicago office (2000-2003). He has received graduate fellowships from Pew Charitable Trusts (2001), the Bradley Foundation (2003-04), and the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame (2004-05). Professor Carlson is coeditor of, and contributor to, two books: The Sacred and the Sovereign: Religion and International Politics and Religion and the Death Penalty: A Call for Reckoning. He is also series editor (with Jean Bethke Elshtain) of the Eerdmans Religion, Ethics, and Public Life Series. Since arriving at ASU, he has published (or has forthcoming) articles from several journals including "Religion and Human Rights," "Journal of Religious Ethics," and "Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics." Currently, he is working on a monograph entitled "Human Nature, Limited Justice, and the Ordering of Relations in Political Ethics," a political-theological examination of how views of human nature and the divine shape our political understandings of justice. He is also co-editing a volume on religion, violence, and America. Professor Carlson serves as co-principal investigator of two research projects funded by the Ford Foundation: Public Religion, the Secular, and Democracy and Teaching and Talking about Religion in Public for which he is also project coordinator.
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December 07th, 2008 9:00 am To Be Announced
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Annual Auction and Solstice/Human Light Party!
Moderator:
Susan Sackett
December 21st, 2008 9:00 am
Location: HomeTown Buffet, 1312 N. Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale |
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Our Annual Solstice Party and Fund-raising Auction is always a great event. We will also celebrate the Humanist holiday of HumanLight. We'll inaugurate our new board members and give out the annual Helen Goldsmith Awards to our most deserving volunteers!
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