Who volunteers to swallow the first expderimental compound? Dr. Altman lists 7 thruisms: everything standard was once experimental;what is experimental today will be standard tomorrow;federal law reqires human experimental trails before drugs can be marketed;humans have suffered in past experiments;the 20th cent had more advances than any other era;our health is due to this accrued knowledge;and in all these experiments someone was first to volunteer.
APS President Greenhouse gives an impromptu talk on the truth journalism. Do we have good journalism? This talk turned into the first episode of the APS Podcast Great Talks.; Podcast: https://www.amphilsoc.org/museum/exhibitions/great-talks-american-philosophical-society/life-journalist
How to predict earthquakes? Most scientists are very skeptical that we will every be able to accuratly predict large earthquakes. Not a single large earthquake has been predicted for California.
Marcello Canuto talks about the use of LIDAR (a method for measuring distances by illuminating the target with laser light and measuring the reflection with a sensor) is helping us learn about early lowland Maya cutlure.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson discusses the presidential election of 2016 and how Russian "trolls" and "hackers" exploited social media to effect the results.; Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. Vol. 163, No. 2 (June 2019)
Richard A. F. Penrose Lecture; Dr. Sen's lecture explores the meaning of identity and how it can lead to both positive and negative interactions;i.e. people helping neighbors in a crisis vs. an Us vs. Them idology during the very same crisis
Sylvia Nasar talks about the grand prusuit of economic thinkers to overcome adversity, an experiment that started in the 19th century and continues today.
Richard S. Dunn Symposium; The loss of the 13 colonies marked the largest loss in British history. Jasanoff describes how the 60,000 loyalist civilians left and what happened to them.; Further reading: http://opac.amphilsoc.org/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=227171
Dr. Hankins re-evaluates the political thought of the Italian humanists between the time of Petrarch in the mid-14th century and Machiavelli in the early 16th.
Talbott was the chief curator of the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary. Her talk focuses on how the curating team collected and organized such a massive undertaking.
