Park Jiwon’s Short Stories:
How a Yangban Uncovered the World of Ordinary People
Date: Tuesday, January 17, 2012 – 7:30pm – 9:00pm
Lecturer: Emanuel Pastreich (Kyung Hee University)
Venue: Second-floor Residents’ Lounge, Somerset Palace
Admission: 5,000 won (non-member); free for members
As part of my work on the website “Daejeon Compass” I took numerous photographs of Daejeon to show just how beautiful a city it is. Here are a few selections for those who might be interested in this remarkable place. We miss is already after less than a year in Seoul.
November 18, 2010
Nano-Art and Bio-literature
We have worked with a variety of institutes on the question of “convergence” –a term so broad that it is sometimes unnerving. It so happens that I am meeting the Director of Convergence at KRISS tonight to discuss this topic. Much discussion of convergence in terms of the coming together of computers and communication devices (ICT) and also convergence between new fields: IT-bio & nano-bio. But Korea has conceived of “convergence” as applying to larger themes such as the marriage of technology and art and the new for potential spaces for expression thus generated. This last theme seemed secondary to me at first, but in fact, I have come to see it as perhaps the core for “technology convergence” in our age.
At first I thought about the whole matter of technology-art convergence humorously. I asked friends facetiously whether we would soon have “bio-literature” or “nano-painting.” It took me a while to comprehend the essential issue.
Art and literature allow us to conceive of what is happening to our world at the nano level and the macro level. How cells divide and how global networks evolve that span the world. In fact, the use of art, enhanced by the next generation of animation technology, is the best hope we have to help average people (which includes most policy makers) to understand how technology is changing our reality. Similarly, literature, the inspiring and entertaining description of our world, will give us the tools to comprehend what otherwise seems like an invisible process by which Moore’s Law is remaking our world. First one must be able to conceive of the process and then one can make informed decisions.
Alex Lee of Woosong University sent me today this link from the New York Times about the effort to animate the micro-nano level. It is just the start of a new field, but one that may eventually lead us to have clear images and special relations we can assign to processes that previously were wrapped in a mystery appropriate to the high priests of alchemy.
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/11/15/science/1248069334032/the-animators-of-life.html
The Inner Life of a Cell
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz4lFeqJPdU
Colin Allen just posted an article entitled
on the New York Times Opinionator page. The article offers offers some interesting insights into the moral authority of machines both past and present.
Korea IT Times
Thursday, January 5th, 2012
Red Alert: Korean Language Instruction in the United States
When I started studying Korean language at Harvard University, there were about 30 students in the class the first day. Twenty-two of them were Korean Americans and eight were non-Koreans. Within two weeks I was the only non-Korean in the room. The instructors of the class were Korean graduate students with no real training in how to teach Korean to non-natives. When the Korean Americans in the class were able to make simple
Here is a fun interview from KBS Good Morning Pops aimed at Korean youth studying English.
The December issue of Jung Ang Monthly Magazine (월간중앙) featured an extended article on our recent webinar with Professor Noam Chomsky of MIT. Here is a copy of the Korean text. The video and English version will be forthcoming.
The Asia Institute Seminar
December 29, 2011
Interview with Haun Saussy
University Professor of Comparative Literature
University of Chicago
Professor Haun Saussy is a leading scholar of Chinese and comparative literature, has been named University Professor of Comparative Literature in the Division of the Humanities and the College at the University of Chicago. One of the few figures with a deep understanding of both the Western classical and Eastern tradition, who has advanced arguments for a new global approach to comparative literature. Professor Saussy is the 17th person ever to hold the title of University Professor at University of Chicago, an honor given to distinguished scholars.
Saussy’s first book, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (Stanford University Press, 1993), discussed the tradition of commentary that has grown up around the early Chinese poetry collection Shijing. His most recent book is Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), an account of the ways of knowing and describing specific to China scholarship.
In this article in Kukmin Ilbo Newspaper (January 2, 2012) I describe the shortcomings of Korean language education in the United States and make a few concrete suggestions. An English language version of this article is forthcoming.
국민일보
2012년 01월 02일
“적색경보, 미국 내 한국어교육”
“좋은 한국어 교재 만드는 건 작은 투자지만 미래의 한국 전문가 만드는 첩경이다”
하버드대학에서 한국어 수업을 들을 때 이야기다. 첫날 30명이 왔다. 이 중 22명이 한국계 미국인이고 한국계가 아닌 학생은 8명이었다. 그런데 2주일도 지나지 않아 한국계 아닌 수강생은 나 혼자만 남게 됐다. 강사들은 대부분 한국계 대학원생들이었다.
The Japan Times for January 1, 2011 offered this article on a cesium scanning store with the title “The New Normal?”
The implications are striking, if perhaps a bit overblown. Imagine what it would be to have long-term scanning for cesium, and possibly other isotopes, in Japan as part of the quotidian landscape?