Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies

When an art form thrives for centuries and then begins to vanish, what is at risk? If we think of it as part of the world�s �artistic ecosystem", has it perhaps run its course as a species? Or does it need to be rescued? Would some subtle forfeit bear long-range consequence to the world if it disappeared? This talk and mini-concert focuses on Art Song, the fusion of poetry of 100 languages with music from around the globe. It is the meeting place of verbal and non-verbal communication modalities, a key code to classical music, a synaesthetic experience of poetry, a journal of a composer's interior realm. Despite those fascinating attributes, Art Song as a performance genre is in such erosion that some have labelled it a non-performative "archival art". Since songs must be sung to fulfill their existence, 100,000 art works may become functionally extinct. In researching innovative solutions for its renewal, UBC's Vancouver International Song Institute resides at the flashpoint of controversy between tradition and change. Would it matter if Art Song vanished? Hear some performed by students and alumni of UBC School of Music, and decide for yourself!

Challenge: Article 12 of The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities affirms the rights of persons with disabilities to receive recognition as persons before the law and calls on State Parties to recognize that persons with disabilities enjoy legal capacity on an equal basis with others in all aspects of life and to take appropriate measures to provide access to the support they may require in exercising their legal capacity. Considerations include: 1) the conceptual foundations of moral and legal personhood; 2) the definition and criteria for legal capacity found in ethics and law; 3) implications for law and policy for adult protection, substitute and supported decision-making, health and social care consent, contract and criminal law; and 4) emerging social and legal forms of support and reasonable accommodation that enable people with significant cognitive or psychosocial disabilities to maximize their legal capacity. Dr. Stainton led a Wall Exploratory Workshop to examine from a 'ground up' perspective the issues raised by Article 12.

David R. Olson is University Professor Emeritus of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto. He a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and holds Honorary Doctorates from Gothenberg University (1994) and the University of Saskatchewan (1996). He has published extensively on language, literacy and cognition, including the widely anthologized article "From utterance to text: The bias of language in speech and writing" (Harvard Educational Review, 1977). His book The World on Paper: The conceptual and Cognitive Implication of Writing and Reading (Cambridge, 1994) has been translated into eight languages. He is co-editor with Nancy Torrance of The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy (2009) and The Handbook of Education and Human Development (Blackwell, 1996), coeditor with Michael Cole of Technology, Literacy and the Evolution of Society: Implications of the Work of Jack Goody (Erlbaum, 2006), coeditor with Janet Astington and Paul Harris of Developing Theories of Mind (Cambridge, 1988), co-editor with Janet Astington and Philip Zelazo of Developing Theories of Intention (Erlbarm, 1998), co-editor with Nancy Torrance of Literacy and Orality (Cambridge, 1991), and with Nancy Torrance and Angela Hildyard of Literacy, Language and Learning (Cambridge University Press, 1985). His most recent authored books are Psychological Theory and Educational Reform: How School Remakes Mind And Society (Cambridge, 2003) and Jerome Bruner: The Cognitive Revolution in Educational Theory (Continuum, 2007).

This talk was part of the Wall Distinguished Scholar in Residence Public Talk Series on Practical Wisdom organized by Maxwell Cameron, UBC Political Science, and co-sponsored with Green College.

Computer control has become ubiquitous in our daily lives, from cruise control to autopilots, from anti-lock braking systems to DVD players. Many of modern-life's devices would not be possible if it were not for sophisticated control theory working in conjunction with high performance sensors and actuators. Early and premature attempts at automating drug delivery in the operating room took place as early as 1950. However, it is only in the last decade that the prospects of fully automatic control of drug delivery for anesthesia have become serious. This talk will present some recent efforts toward measuring and controlling the effects of anesthetic drugs automatically, in a system akin to a cruise controller or an autopilot for anesthesiologists. Technical challenges and potential benefits of such a system will also be discussed.

In the mid fourteenth century European population fell by between 40 and 50 per cent. The demographic disaster affected almost all aspects of life in the short term and less obviously but equally emphatically in the long term. Total energy consumption went down with population and the shrinking of settlement meant land went out of cultivation. The retreat of the humans did not mean a straightforward reversion of large tracts of land to some wild state because of the various ways in which people reacted to a world with a much smaller numbers of them. Europeans relied on agriculture as the principal source of energy to sustain their way of life. An effort to calculate energy consumption by Europeans before and after the Black Death indicates the problems of trying to generate reliable data for large populations in the years before there were governments to publish aggregate figures. More important the results, despite considerable potential error, show that the impact on the environment varied and human strategies, dictated by economics, technology, psychology and tastes, mitigated any dramatic changes in the ways people dealt with the natural world around them. The Black Death did in some ways liberate the survivors to explore new ways to use what they could extract from nature.

Alain Berthoz is a leading neurophysiologist and an honorary professor at the prestigious College de France where he holds the Chair of Perception and Action Physiology. Pr. Berthoz studies the neuronal bases of the four main cognitive and motor functions commanding eye movement, locomotion, space-memory strategies and the perception of the emotional expressions and actions of others.

After a first visit at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies in 2009, Pr Berthoz came back to UBC in September 2011 as a Wall Distiguished Returning Professor. In this interview he tells us about the applications of his research in real life. Through the concept of "Simplexity", he also explains how living organisms find solutions to the world complexity; he considers the role of sensitive experience in our society and touches on the Chinese concept of "Wu-Wei". Video courtesy of the French Consulate, Vancouver.

Dr. Gregory is a renowned political geographer whose honours include honorary degrees from one of Europe's youngest (Roskilde) and oldest (Heidelberg) universities, elections to the Royal Society of Canada and the British Academy, the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, and, most recently, the invitation to present the British Academy's Annual Lecture in London in 2012. His distinctions also include a UBC Killam Research Prize, a UBC Killam Teaching Prize, and a UBC Killam Prize for Graduate Mentoring. His former doctoral students, twenty-seven to date, have moved into positions of influence among the world's top universities.

In this talk Dr. Gregory speaks on "The Everywhere War" - wars conducted in the shadows of 9/11 that have much to tell us about the future of violence, security, and everyday life. Many commentators have claimed that the face of war has changed dramatically since 9/11: they talk not just of 'new wars' but, crucially, of 'endless war', 'unending war', and what New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins calls the 'forever war'. All of these descriptions focus on time, which means that they all overlook the importance of the slippery spaces through which war now takes place. One of the characteristics of late modern war is the eventful quality of violence that can, in principle, occur anywhere: a commuter train in Madrid, a house in Gaza City, a poppy field in Helmand, or a street in Ciudad Juarez. I want to show how what I call the everywhere war has changed the very nature of war in the early twenty-first century. The killing space still has a terrible intimacy, but we now live in a world where death can be delivered across vast distances and successive American administrations openly speculate about how to conduct war in countries we are not at war with. All this makes it hard to see where war ends and peace begins. To bring these changes into view, and to think about their implications, I examine three cases in which the global North reaches deep into the global borderlands: the use of drones (UAVs) in Afghanistan-Pakistan by NATO forces and the CIA; the militarization of the US-Mexico border and the prosecution of narco-war; and the emergence of cyber-warfare. Taken together, they have much to tell us about the future of violence, security and everyday life. Recording courtesy of CBC Radio.

Dr. Alain Berthoz is currently Honorary Professor at the Collège de France, Paris, member of the French Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Technologies and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Understanding others� thoughts, desires, and emotions, and accepting a plurality of opinions and feelings is a fundamental basis of social interaction. Empathy and sympathy allow humans to understand each other. Both are essential for developing respect, social norms, moral behavior, and tolerance. One challenge for modern neuroscience is to try to understand the cognitive basis of empathy. This talk examines recent behavioural and brain imaging studies which contribute to this goal. Also included is a "spatial theory of empathy" which distinguishes between sympathy, a cognitive and emotional resonance process, and empathy as a complex dynamic process requiring manipulation of spatial reference frames, perspective changes, and both simulation and inhibition of emotion. The talk will propose that empathy uses brain mechanisms similar to those for spatial memory and navigation. It also discusses how children develop this capacity, the consequences of deficits of the brain mechanisms involved in empathy in the psychiatry, and the potential risks of preventing empathy during development at "critical periods" in children, leading them to make intolerant judgments.

Philippe Sansonetti is one of Europe’s leading microbiologists. His research mainly focuses on the understanding of several aspects of the pathogenesis of Shigella, a Gram-negative bacterium causing severe diarrhea. This work spans a large set of disciplines in biology and medicine and ranges from molecular genetics, to cell biology, immunology and the development of vaccines against dysentery. He also actively contributes to the development of vaccine candidates against the major shigellae causing dysentery in the developing world.

In this lecture, Professor Sansonetti provides a global view of the nature of the microbes that humans are facing, from the truly symbiotic/mutualistic ones constituting our permanent microbiota to the pathogenic ones that affect our health by causing infections. As usual, nature isn’t black and white, and an increasing grey zone appears between these two well-defined categories that encompasses the so called pathobionts whose functions seem essential in shaping our immune system which has evolved under the schizophrenic constraint of keeping the good, rejecting the bad, and dealing with the ugly… In this complex cross talk may reside the major parameters of the Hygiene Hypothesis.

Philippe Sansonetti is one of Europe's leading microbiologists. His research mainly focuses on the understanding of several aspects of the pathogenesis of Shigella, a Gram-negative bacterium causing severe diarrhea. This work spans a large set of disciplines in biology and medicine and ranges from molecular genetics, to cell biology, immunology and the development of vaccines against dysentery. He also actively contributes to the development of vaccine candidates against the major shigellae causing dysentery in the developing world.

Video interview with Dr. Philippe Sansonetti courtesy of the French Consulate, Vancouver. June 2011

Everyone is generally familiar with clinical trials, but what is actually involved in the translation of a promising biomedical discovery to human application. It is a long, complex multi-phase process where each phase has a particular goal and unique set of demands. It requires a rigor uncommon to science, which may explain why many scientists wish others take over the pursuit. Above all else, it is incredibly expensive, with a single drug requiring hundreds of millions to complete all the requirements for approval as a treatment. In this talk, I will outline some of the tough lessons learned when science enters the business world of human studies.

Leading genomic scientist and sequencer of the human genome, on the construction of the first synthetic cell and the global ocean sampling expedition. Recording courtesy of CBC Radio.

Stem cells hold tremendous promise for both therapeutic and commercial applications. However, theoretical, practical, ethical, and regulatory obstacles hinder the path to these achievements. While we wait, scrupleless individuals whom, operating abroad, are not bound by the same regulatory constraints existing in “western” countries give patients false hopes and thrive on “stem cell tourism.” How long before we see these promises realized? Which applications will come first?

"The Suburbs," by the Montreal-based indie rock band Arcade Fire, was recently awarded Album of the Year in a surprise finish at the 2011 Grammy Awards. The album's words and music are a generation's lament for a childhood overwhelmed by suburban sprawl and the cycles of industrialized consumer economy, and an attempt to define a viable adult identity and future. The music, built in layers, works out ambiguities and ironies, resolving some, and accepting others. The talk will explore how the first two songs (a linked pair) reconfigure familiar features of pop music, symbolically recycling the predictable materials of suburban life, and expressing the sediments of mixed feelings, past and present.

Professor Dehaene is one of Europe's leading cognitive neuroscientists. He uses advanced techniques in functional magnetic resonance imaging, electro-encephalography, interacranial electrodes, and psychological manipulations to study how culture and biology interact in the human brain. His work on the neural bases of reading abilities, mathematical language, bilingualism, and consciousness is internationally known. A prolific, award-winning author, Professor Dehaene is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

Through education we expand the competences of our human brains beyond those initially provided by evolution. This lecture describes how literacy changes the brain.

Professor Dehaene is one of Europe's leading cognitive neuroscientists. He uses advanced techniques in functional magnetic resonance imaging, electro-encephalography, interacranial electrodes, and psychological manipulations to study how culture and biology interact in the human brain. His work on the neural bases of reading abilities, mathematical language, bilingualism, and consciousness is internationally known. A prolific, award-winning author, Professor Dehaene is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

Everybody knows about subliminal images. In the laboratory, we can easily flash visual stimuli so quickly, and in such close temporal proximity to other masking stimuli, that they cannot be consciously perceived. My colleagues and I are using behavioral measurements and images of brain activity to probe the depth of processing of subliminal words and digits in the human brain. The results indicate that subliminal stimuli receive considerable cortical processing. Many stages of reading can unfold without consciousness: visual word recognition, invariance for font and case, semantic access, categorization according to instructions, and even motor preparation all operate non-consciously. The brain is also able to accumulate evidence from several subliminal stimuli presented serially or in parallel. The question then arises: Does non-conscious processing exhibit any limits? Recent experiments suggest that conscious access is needed for some high-level supervisory operations, including the flexible and rational control of our decisions and the chaining of several steps within a non-routine mental algorithm.

Professor Dehaene is one of Europe's leading cognitive neuroscientists. He uses advanced techniques in functional magnetic resonance imaging, electro-encephalography, interacranial electrodes, and psychological manipulations to study how culture and biology interact in the human brain. His work on the neural bases of reading abilities, mathematical language, bilingualism, and consciousness is internationally known. A prolific, award-winning author, Professor Dehaene is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

A video interview with Dr. Dehaene courtesy of the Consulat général de France à Vancouver during his visit to the Wall Institute in April 2011.

Jerrilynn Dodds is Dean of Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. In addition to being a lecturer and consultant at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and known as an author and prize-winning documentary filmmaker, she has previously been Distinguished Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the City University of New York. She has also curated numerous museum exhibitions. Her work centers on issues of artistic interchange, and how groups form their identities through art and architecture.

In the Balkan wars of the early 1990s, the destruction of architecture became a tool of successive campaigns of cultural genocide, meant to help erase one or more of the multiple groups who inhabited contested territories. This lecture will explore the architecture of Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim populations of Bosnia, both in historical encounters, and in the devastating wars of the 1990s.

Polymeric fibrous materials are the fundamental building blocks of living systems. From the 1.5 nm double helix strand of DNA molecules, including cytoskeleton filaments with diameters around 30 nm; to sensory cells such as hair cells and rod cells of the eyes, nanoscale fibers form the extracellular matrices for tissues and organs. Based upon these blueprints laid out by nature, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the availability of nanoscale (less than 100 nm diameter) fibers made of polymers having adjustable electronic, biological and mechanical properties will not only enable novel biotechnology, neuroscience, microelectronics, and nanoscience research, but also open new opportunities for numerous applications related to health, energy, and environment. After a brief introduction to nanofibre technology the exciting research and commercial opportunities of nanofibre technology will be illustrated through examples of the growing nanofibre-related research activities at UBC.

Waterscapes explores the potential of using seas, ocean basins, and river networks as frameworks of historical analysis, highlighting the central role of trans-oceanic relationships and exchanges in the shaping of world regions and identities. They deal with transnational migration along major waterways, globalization, and cultural hybridity, and explore the contemporary and historical meaning of waterscapes in the context of large-scale migrations in/to China and Canada.

“We must go beyond textbooks, and travel and explore and tell the world of the glories of our journey” – John Hope Franklin. This over arching title will allow reflection on three elements: The time spent with an outstanding group of international Fellows at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (STIAS), which afforded unique opportunities for dialogue and collaborative research. One such collaboration evaluated a Canadian model for school-based health promotion employed in rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa, and the impact this program is having on child health and social behaviors. And another initiative begun to explore how to help new parents acquire knowledge and skills that promote early childhood development; in Canada this now involves UBC researchers and the application of new technologies to make evidence from current research more accessible.

The creation of artificial intelligence (AI) - of machines that think, feel, and communicate like humans do - is one of the great dreams of humankind, and a quest that has been hotly pursued over the last fifty years. Popularised by science fiction novels, films, and a host of colourful characters, visions of AI have become part of mainstream culture. But is AI really possible? And if so, how will it shape our future? While Dr. Hoos cannot provide conclusive or exhaustive answers to these questions, he will attempt to shed some light on what is possible today and speculate on where this may lead us in the future.

Professor Benjamin Perrin, author of Invisible Chains: Canada's Underground World of Human Trafficking, shares the compelling story behind researching underground criminal activity in Canada and the multi-faceted public engagement, media and advocacy campaign based on this research for this three-year project. The role of public universities in addressing emerging social challenges is an important theme that is explored through the case study under discussion.

Dan Edelstein is an Associate Professor of French at Stanford University. His first book, "The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution" (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) won the 2009 Oscar Kenshur Book Prize. He co-directs the "Mapping the Republic of Letters" project, which uses visualization software to represent the circulation of letters, people, and ideas in the early-modern period.

Scholars tend to study the history of natural right using very traditional methods: great men wrote canonical books which were read by other great men who wrote more canonical books, until finally the French revolutionaries declared the rights of man and of the citizen. But recent works on natural right contest this historiographical approach, and challenge us to rethink the way we write the history of natural right. What if the real question was not one of intellectual lineage, but of cultural acceptance? What made natural right theory a political language that was adopted by a wide range of actors -- and not just employed by the famous philosophers?

Contemporary democratic theory is modeled primarily on membership combined with empowered voice. An alternative to voice, however, is exit: when they have choices, dissatisfied members may choose to leave a collectivity rather than voice their dissatisfactions. But because the concept of exit is often viewed as appropriate only for economic markets, its democratic potentials have not been theorized. The costs to democratic norms are extensive: contemporary theorists implicitly work with a monopoly-based view of organizational power, tacitly approving relationships of domination owing to the formal�though often ineffective�presence of voice-based mechanisms. Contemporary democratic theory should be re-thought to include exit-based empowerments as among its most fundamental features.

The emerging energy crisis requires new materials to be found for energy harvesting, generation and storage. Nanomaterials will play a major role in new developments in this important research field in solar energy harvesting and photovoltaic devices (solar cells), power generation and storage, and in gas storage and fuel cells. Transformational technologies will be enabled by the use of nanomaterials as electrodes in batteries, in organic solar cells and as electrodes in fuel cells. Dr. Wolf recently led a Wall Exploratory Workshop to address these issues.

Steven Meyer teaches intellectual history at Washington University in St. Louis and is the author of Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science (2001). Among current projects he is completing Robust Empiricisms: Jamesian Modernism between the Disciplines, 1878 to the Present.

In Wandering Significance (2006), Mark Wilson develops a dissenting "pre-pragmatist," post-Quinean stance with regard to the classical picture of concepts provided by Bertrand Russell in response to late-nineteenth-century crises in classical mechanics and applied mathematics. Although Wilson portrays William James as a "fully fledged" pragmatist, accounts by Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour strikingly characterize James in a manner that deserves to be called pre-pragmatist as well. Wilson's historical reconstruction of the crises also makes it possible, perhaps for the first time, to appreciate the motivation they provided for Alfred North Whitehead to move toward what James called a "process philosophy" and toward the more robust empiricism he shares with James and Wilson.

David Hume (1711-1776), the most influential philosopher to have written in the English language, maintained that happiness was the goal of all human activity. �For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modelled.� Hume was also one of the first to analyze and assimilate the rise of commerce and trade, and recognized that the pursuit of luxuries, while a source of happiness, could drive humans onto the wrong developmental path. The significant increase in wealth in Western Europe tended to deplete the stock of non-pecuniary goods, such as friendship, and induce an increase in military expenditures and thus government debt. As would John Maynard Keynes two centuries hence, Hume admired the wealth-creating effects of the capitalist system while deploring its dehumanizing and destabilizing tendencies. This talk outlines Hume�s vision for human prosperity and the pursuit of happiness, both individual and collective.

There is a critical knowledge gap in biology that needs to be addressed: cytoplasmic nanospace biophysics. Some examples of critical cellular processes occurring in nanospaces are excitation-contraction coupling in muscles, cell division, proliferation, intracellular trafficking, the stabilization and control of multiprotein complexes such as cellulose synthases, focal adhesion turnover in cell migration, calcium homeostasis and intracellular signaling. While the traditional deterministic view of these processes is inaccurate, it dominates hypothesis generation in the research community as well as both graduate and undergraduate education. It is therefore necessary to develop appropriate probabilistic models that can be quantitatively analysed to guide future research into both healthy and diseased states, and to provide more accurate visualization tools necessary for research and education. Dr. Moore recently led a Wall Exploratory Workshop to address these issues: www.nanospace.pwias.ubc.ca

The recent financial crisis witnessed the first "runs" on banks in more than 75 years. The collapse of financial institutions placed people's homes, pensions and economic security at risk. The crisis itself was the result of multiple factors, including inappropriate risk taking and inappropriate compensation incentives. Arguably, corporate governance of banks and other financial institutions differs from the governance of corporations because of prudential regulation and the different nature of stakeholders with investments at risk. A highly contested question is the extent to which there ought to be new regulatory oversight of bank governance, or whether there is a need for a more nuanced model of interactive governance. Our collective interest as depositors, investors, and mortgage holders in the effective governance of banks necessitates a new understanding of the incentive effects of various strategies.

Ever been annoyed by a dialogue box that pops up trying to be helpful, but asks something stupid instead? Sometimes a computer system has information that would be helpful to its user; at other times, the system may need information that only its user has. Too often, computer systems control an interaction, forcing their users to accommodate them. Harvard computer scientist and Radcliffe Institute Dean Barbara J. Grosz will describe research that aims to shift the burden of adaptation from human to computer, so that computers respect our needs and adapt to us rather than the other way around.

The microbiota (normal flora) is comprised of many microbes living in and on our bodies. Only recently have we begun to appreciate the impact of these organisms on our health and disease, impacting on obesity, bowel diseases, type I diabetes, immune development, etc. In developed countries, we have gone to great lengths to minimize our exposure to microbes, both pathogenic and harmless. The Hygiene Hypothesis suggests that perhaps we have gone too far, as hominids have evolved in a sea of microbes and actually need exposure early in life to microbes to minimize allergic diseases, including asthma. Recent work in our lab has begun to explore the role of the microbiota in experimental asthma and infectious diarrhea. We are finding that the microbiota play central roles in these diseases. Recent results in this area will be discussed, as will their implications in our quest to minimize our exposure to microbes.

The Canadian philosopher Ralston Saul declared in his recent acclaimed book, A Fair Country, that Canada is a Mètis nation that should embrace its mixed aboriginal and settler ancestry. Although the sentiment may be admirable, the reality is quite different. Canada’s Mètis people and communities have struggled for their rights through armed conflicts in 1869-70 and in 1885 and thereafter through political activism. A breakthrough was achieved in 1982, when Section 35 of Canada’s new Constitutional Act recognized Mètis as Aboriginal people and protected their existing Aboriginal rights. It would, however, be left to the courts to determine: Who is Mètis? Where do the Mètis live? What cultural practices are distinctly Mètis? Since 1982, these questions have been asked and argued in Canadian courts as Mètis press for legal recognition of their constitutionally protected, but undefined, Aboriginal rights. Along the way, trial and appeal courts have become the arbiters of Canadian Mètis identity and culture. The rising tide of litigation has reinvigorated historical research to both address the courts’ evolving notions of Mètis rights and influence those conceptualizations. Litigation-oriented research, in turn, challenges the existing scholarship on Mètis history. I will discuss this interactive process from the perspective of my involvement as an ethnohistorical geographer who was an expert witness in R. v. Powley (2003) concerning the Mètis of Sault Ste Marie, Ontario. It was the first Mètis rights case to reach the Supreme Court of Canada after 1982. I will also discuss cases in Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan after Powley