National Science and Engineering Week Haiku Challenge

Joanna Rooke writes:

As you know, it's National Science and Engineering Week in seven days time...yey!

We're always talking about outreach and expanding our audiences, but I wanted to do a bit of "inreach" for the Week. Many of you will be planning events and activities but there may be some of you out there in psci-com land who feel a little bit left out - and I don't want that.

To get everyone involved and in the mood, I'm throwing down the gauntlet to create the best National Science and Engineering Week haiku - this could be about the week as a whole, one of the projects, your own event or anything around the general topic. All entries should be sent to nsew@britishscienceassociation.org and the deadline for entries is the first day of NSEW (next Friday 12th March) at 5pm. The winner will get a NSEW t-shirt and the glory of being master haiku creator.

For those who don't know: A haiku is a non-rhymed verse genre. There are 5 syllables in the first sentence, 7 in the second and 5 again in the last sentence

Visit www.nsew.org.uk for inspiration.

My (admittedly feeble) contribution is:

Big Bangs and Small Bugs
Hands on fun in the UK
I love Science Week!

Cambridge Wordfest 2010

Ticket booking is now open for the 2010 Cambridge Wordfest, which will take place from 9-11th April. Further information here.

Colloquim - The Cultural Impact of Darwin and Darwinism in Europe

A one-day Colloquium on the Cultural Impact of Darwin and Darwinism in Europe will be held at Clare Hall, Cambridge, on Friday 12 March 2010, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Organized by the Research Project on the Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe, the Colloquium will consist of a series of 15-minute papers followed by short discussion and builds on the success of last year's Darwin in Europe Colloquium at Christ's College. The event will act as a forum for contributions to a third volume of The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, focusing on Darwin's cultural and literary reception.

The range of topics and speakers include:

• Philip Ajouri (Stuttgart) 'Darwinist Weltanschauung: Literature and Science in Germany'
• Tom Glick (Boston) 'Unamuno's Hair Shirt: The 1909 Darwin Centennial in Valencia'
• Peter Kjaergaard (Cambridge & Aarhus) 'Jacobsen and the First Danish Translation and Literary Response'
• Eduard Kolchinsky (St Petersburg) 'Darwin's Centenaries in Russia: 1909, 1959 and 2009'
• Travis Landry (Kenyon, Ohio) 'Selection in Relation to Sex and the Spanish Literary Imagination'
• Patricia da Silva McNeill (King's, London) and Pedro Fonseca (Coimbra) 'The Portuguese "Generation of the 1870s": Eça de Queiroz in England'
• Donald Rayfield (Queen Mary) 'Darwin and Russian Writers: Chekhov and Mandelstam'
• Daniel Schuemann (Bamberg) 'Darwinism = Hamletism? Sienkiewicz's futile Crusade against Polish Positivism'
• Elinor Shaffer (Cambridge & London) 'Darwin's reception in the literary magazine Revue des Deux Mondes'
• Katalin Straner (Budapest) 'Darwinism and Literary Culture in Late Nineteenth-century Hungary'
• Paul White (Cambridge) 'Darwin's correspondence and sentimental culture'

Registration costs £35 (£30 in advance); £15 for students.
For further details and to register (space is limited) please contact the Project Office: RBAE@fsmail.net <mailto:RBAE@fsmail.net>

The Research Project: The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe
Director: Dr Elinor Shaffer FBA

12B Ridgmount Gardens
London WC1E 7AR
UK
Tel. & fax no. +44 (0)20 7323 6861
http://www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk/RBAE

Cambridge Science Festival 2010

8-21 March 2010 as part of National Science and Engineering Week.

Full programme online at: http://www.cambridgescience.org or please call 01223 766766 to request a hard copy.

Join us for the UK's largest free science festival, exploring subjects from astronomy to zoology, with demonstrations, hands on experiments, talks from leading scientists, and visits to University and partner facilities. Over 170 free events will give families, adults and children of all ages two weeks of hands on science and insight into the University's cutting edge research. Many of the hands on activities, demonstrations and children's lectures will take place on our family fun days on Saturday 13 and 20 March. Many events below are drop in, but do visit the website to check if any you are interested in require pre-booking.

Highlights for adults include:

• The Price of Extinction: what losing biodiversity costs, with William Kendall, chief executive of Green & Blacks chocolate, Bill Adams, Hazell Thompson and more, 10 March
• Muza Gondwe, showing African science heroes film, 11 March
• David Spiegelhalter, on the public understanding of risk, 12 March
• Simon Wessely, researcher on military health, gulf war syndrome, PTSD, speaking on 'From the Blitz to Bin Laden: responses to adversity', 15 March
• Ehsan Masood, author of Science and Islam, speaking 17 March
• Discover the science of humour with psychologist Richard Wiseman on 18 March as he describes his year-long search for the world's funniest joke
• Jason Rentfrow, social psychologist involved in BBC Big Personality Test, speaking 19 March
• Join specialist science guides on the Daring Diversity walking tour to discover why Newton poked a needle in his eye and why Darwin's nickname was 'Gas'

Highlights for families include:

• Hands on activities in Colourful Creatures at the Museum of Zoology
• Learn what happens when lasers and jam doughnuts collide with Dr Evil
• Discover the world of waves, gases and chemistry with The Naked Scientists as they detonate bombs, electrocute vegetables, and turn air into a liquid!

Ian McEwan - The Use of Poetry

In the New Yorker here.

Square Rounds

38 Plays: 38 Days

What

Starting on the 1st of March, we intend to read each of Shakespeare’s 38 plays in 38 days*.
We would love your company. You are warmly invited to join us in this reading challenge.
Even if you don’t have time for quite so much reading, feel free to invent your own Shakespeare challenge. Your moral support, Shakespeare knowledge or idle thoughts would be invaluable.
* Plus a bonus day for Edward III.

When

1 March – 7 April 2010
8 April 2010 is a bonus day reserved for Edward III

Where

We are an online collective.
The blog is updated daily.
Our Facebook group is here.
The forum is here.

Why

I’ve always wanted to read all of Shakespeare’s plays. Somehow, I’ve managed to get through my life so far without having done so. Starting on the 1st of March, I intend to rectify this sorry state of affairs.
After participating in NaNoWriMo and ScriptFrenzy in 2009, I realised two things. First, I enjoy wild, crazy, nigh-impossible challenges. Second, working toward a goal alongside other people is a great source of motivation.
We’re not going for great scholarly insight or serious, critical readings. The point of this madcap adventure is to have fun and get through a first reading of the plays.

If you feel inclined to join us in reading an awful lot of Shakespeare awfully quickly, we’d love your company!

Contact Ingrid Jendrzejewski for more information.

CFP - Poetries and sciences in the 21st century

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (www.isr-journal.org)
This is to invite proposals for contributions to a themed issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews on the topic of "Poetries and sciences in the 21st Century", to be published as volume 37, number 2, June 2012.

Reference here to the present century is meant to imply that the relationship between poetry and science is historically contingent and that our current views of it are informed and challenged by those of the past. The intended aim of this issue, then, is not so much to say or even to sketch what we believe to be true as to question our views by considering where they come from, both in the present and in the past, and to speculate on what is to be done.

As a point of departure, consider the literary critic I. A. Richards' Poetries and Sciences, a work whose writing and revisions span the middle half of the 20th Century. In his book, which bears the marks of considerable struggle and disagreement, Richards asked what poetry could be in a world deeply and broadly
affected by technoscience. The revolution it has brought about, he argued, is "too drastic to be met by any such half-measures" as promotion of wonder in the marvels of nature (1970: 52-3). What could wonder be but an attitude of ignorance when these marvels have or are assumed to have lawlike explanation? Science has neutralized nature, he argued, and so deprived poetry of its original well-spring, "the Magical View of the world" (1970: 50). What could a poet say to those for whom making sense ultimately requires the radically plain style of scientific reasoning? His solution was to cut the language of imagination free from the language of belief, hence from epistemological certainty, implying our philosophical freedom to explore possible worlds.

Consider also the psychologist Jerome Bruner's essay "Possible Castles", in his Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986). Here Bruner argues that philosophical questioning of science (by Thomas Kuhn et al.) has reawakened the ancient, even tired question of the "two cultures" by revealing science itself to be historically contingent. In response to this reawakening he gives us two opposed trajectories for the sciences and the humanities. Both originate in curiosity and speculation about the world, but the one moves steadily away from ambiguity while the other moves toward increasing "the alternativeness of human possibility" (Bruner 1986: 53). He concludes his essay by quoting Aristotle on the poet's function: "to describe not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen" (Poetics II.9). What matters to the poet, Bruner says, is verisimilitude to conceivable human experience. The poet's job, we might say, is to expand what is conceivable by finding the right words, whereas the scientist's is to extend what is explicable by equally
audacious but differently directed acts of imagination.

Much closer to our time, enter into the debate physicist Robert B. Laughlin's declaration that as much in physics as in biology we have come out of the reductionism which defined science throughout the 20th Century (2005: 208) - and so created Richards' dilemma - into an Age of Emergence. If so, then the question to be rescued from the muddle of "two cultures" is truly vigorous and contemporary. Let us say that, to quote theoretical biologist Robert Rosen, we foreswear the crippling mental habit "of looking only downward toward subsystems, and never upward and outward" (2000: 2), which renders us unable to see emergent organizational principles, of poetry or of life itself. What then might poetry and science have to do with each other? What might that preeminent expression of technoscience, computing, have to say about poetry, and how might it go about the saying? How might our most adventurous theories of poetic discourse inform a computing that works "upward and outward" from its object of study?

Practical matters
All contributions will be peer-reviewed. Articles may contain black-and-white illustrations (for which authors should seek any necessary permissions). Articles should have a maximum length of 6000 words. For details about format see www.maney.co.uk/journals/notes/isr.

Schedule 
July 2011: declare intention to contribute (title & abstract)

September 2011: submit first version

January 2012: reviewers' comments & decision returned to authors

March 2012: final version due to the publisher

June 2012: issue published as ISR 37.2

Please address all enquiries to the Editor.

Willard McCarty, Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

BSLS small grants 2010

Applications are invited for BSLS small grants of up to £150 to advance and/or promote the study of literature and science. Examples of things for which the awards might be used are conferences, panels on literature and science, expenses for visiting speakers, seminar series and debates.

 Applicants should be members of BSLS and should apply by making a case, in up to 300 words, for how the award will contribute to the development of literature and science; a brief costing should be appended to the end of the application.

 The application should be e-mailed, as a Word attachment, to the BSLS Treasurer (daniel.cordle@ntu.ac.uk) by 22 March 2010. Applications will be considered by the BSLS Executive Committee and a total of up to £300 will be awarded; no correspondence will be entered into about the decisions of the Committee.
 
International members of BSLS are welcome to apply for the awards, but should note that they will be distributed in the form of bank cheques made out in pounds sterling. Serving members of the BSLS Executive Committee are not eligible to apply for the awards

Postgraduate Studentships - Translating Cultures: Literature, Music and the Arts in a World Context

The College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Aberdeen is offering funding for postgraduate students interested in pursuing research on the topic of ‘Translating Cultures: Literature, Music and the Arts in a World Context ’, a four-year interdisciplinary project that sets out to explore how the arts matter in an age of globalization. Through a series of case studies that take up the theme of ‘translating cultures’ from a variety of perspectives and with regard to different geopolitical constellations, this project seeks to illuminate the ways in which the arts play a significant role in contemporary societies. We invite applications from students from a wide range of humanities and social science disciplines, including those interested in pursuing practice-based PhDs in Music, and Film and Visual Culture. Candidates interested in joining the project who do not yet have a masters degree, can apply for funding to take one of our research preparation masters: the MLitt in Comparative Literature or the MLitt in Visual Culture .

This project draws on existing research strengths at the University of Aberdeen, such as Francophone studies, which has been singled out by successive RAE sub-panels as truly distinctive and ground-breaking. ‘Translating Cultures’ forges links between this research focus and strengths in other areas, such as Latin American Studies, Visual Culture, Cultural Sociology and Electroacoustic Music.

The supervisory team is drawn from a number of disciplines, including Anthropology, Film and Visual Culture, French, German, Hispanic Studies, History, History of Art, Music, Museum Studies and Sociology. Possible research titles and topics may include the following:

- Minor Cinema and Art;
- The Politics of Landscape (Film and Photography);
- Investigating Art as Thought in the Literature, Film and Music of the Haitian, Antillean and West African traditions;
- Writing (in) the Museum: Constructing Knowledge Through Text;
- The Role of the Art Institute in Oil Cities;
- The City as a Space of Experiment;
- The Laboratory as a Creative and Critical Site in Contemporary Art;
- Cinema and the Construction of the Critical Spectator;
- Performing Self and Community;
- Spaces for Creation / Spaces for Performance: A Study in Electroacoustic Music;
- Thinking the Archive;
- Developing a New Concept of the Working-Class Aesthetic.

For further information, see http://www.abdn.ac.uk/cass/graduate/funding/research/translating-cultures