Video Friday: Robotically Tuned Wine Glasses

"Quartet" by Jeff Lieberman and Dan Paluska from Ethan Zuckerman on Vimeo.

"Quartet" by Jeff Lieberman and Dan Paluska at the Ars Electronica Center. This award-winning piece includes a set of robotically controlled tuned wine glasses and a 42-key "ballistic marimba". To play? Enter a theme at quartet.cc and let the computers and robots in Linz perform and send you a video.

When he's not creating futuristic music structures, Jeff Lieberman is hosting Discovery Channel's Time Warp, pursuing a doctorate at MIT's Media Lab, playing in the band Gloobic, and traveling to your school, non-profit or organization for an upcoming program! To learn more about Jeff Lieberman, please visit JodiSolomonSpeakers/JeffLieberman.

Margaret is Climbing Trees ALL Weekend!

Margaret Lowman, the "grandmother of canopy research," is co-chairing the 5th International Canopy Conference in Bangalore India for October 25 - 31 .

An entire weekend dedicated to climbing trees!

Well, Lowman and her colleagues will also be highlighing the relevance of canopy research with respect to important global challenges, especially climate change, sustainability and conservation.

To learn more about Canopy Conference 2009, click here.

To learn more about Margaret Lowman, visit JodiSolomonSpeakers/MargaretLowman.

Video Monday:ICYIZERE:hope

We know, we know. It's Monday, not Video Friday. But this trailer is too good not to share!

Award winning documentary filmmaker Patrick Mureithi, a Kenyan native, traveled to Rwanda to film a gathering of 10 survivors and 10 perpetrators of the 1994 genocide.

ICYIZERE:hope is a documentary about the experiences of the participants, as they are taught about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and go through a series of group exercises to help build trust. The film also explores how the media was used to incite fear, hatred and, ultimately, genocide, as it is the filmmaker’s belief that just as media can and has been used to divide and destroy, so can it be used to unite and to heal.

To learn more about Patrick Mureithi, please visit JodiSolomonSpeaker/PatrickMureithi.

Video Friday: "In Conflict"

Yvonne Latty is the author of "In Conflict: Iraq War Veterans Speak Out on Duty, Loss and the Fight to Stay Alive," which was released in 2006.

"In Conflict" was turned into a theater piece that premiered at Temple University in 2008, received rave reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and was awarded The Fringe First Award. In Conflict was also at the heart of Connecticut high school play that, after being banned by the school principal, became an international story and was then performed in several off-Broadway Theatres.

Watch the trailer below or click here to learn more about In Conflict. To learn more about the profound work of Yvonne Latty, visit JodiSolomonSpeakers/YvonneLatty.

Jodi: Scuba Diving

Jodi Solomon, our fearless leader, scuba diving in Bermuda. To learn more about Jodi and why she founded her progressive speakers bureau, click here.

On Location: Arn Chorn Pond

Our friend Arn Chorn Pond recently visited the University of Michigan (and this extremely old carillon) to give a profoundly moving speech about the Cambodian genocide and his path to becoming a human rights leader.

Click here to learn more about Arn Chorn Pond's inspirational story.

[ Photo by Ken Fischer, President of Michigan's University Musical Society: Arn Chorn Pond visiting the University of Michigan's University Musical Society. ]

Ban pythons: Snakes pose a real threat

Check out the Miami Herald piece below about creating a plan for invasive pythons in SW Florida. Margaret Lowman, speaker and the "grandmother of canopy research" is responsible for creating this plan.

"As a Senate hearing so aptly pointed out last week, the United States needs to take control of the exotic species that have invaded every region of the country. The pest du jour at the hearing was the Burmese python, which Sen. Bill Nelson wants banned from importing and pet store inventories.

In truth there are hundreds of invasive creatures threatening our native species -- everything from the zebra snails that plug up power-plant intake pipes in the Great Lakes to the glassy-winged sharpshooter, a bacteria-carrying insect that has caused nearly $40 million in losses in California's wine country.

In all, say scientists with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, non-native species -- plant and animal -- cost the country $100 billion a year.

Nelson is right: The pythons should be banned. They threaten not just other animals but also humans. Unfurling a 17-foot-long skin of a snake caught in Everglades National Park, Sen. Nelson more than made his point about their danger.

A tragic reminder of just how dangerous: the pet python that escaped its terrarium and strangled 2-year-old Shaiunna Hare in Sumter County this month.

The pythons, which often start out here as pets that are freed or escape captivity, have proliferated in Everglades park. Biologists estimate that 150,000 of them now inhabit it. That's a very scary number. And in case you think it's an limited issue, think again. The problem isn't limited to the Everglades.

At a recent meeting with Sarasota County commissioners, Meg Lowman, the director of environmental initiatives at New College of Florida in Sarasota, warned that pythons were making inroads in the Myakka River watershed.

In the past year, four were sighted in southern Sarasota County, three just off River Road. Using the biologists' rule of thumb for wild things, you can figure on 10 pythons for every one you see. So it's safe to assume the local Myakka region is now home to 40.

Pythons also reproduce quickly, so Lowman figured we might have a population of more than 2,300 by 2012. And the problem just compounds after that, as we've seen only too well with the growing population of black spiny-tailed iguanas, Nile monitor lizards and wild boar. The iguanas, especially, have proven to be a huge, costly problem for Charlotte and Lee counties on Gasparilla Island.

Nelson's bill to ban the snakes has run into opposition from hobbyists, breeders and the pet trade. Their argument -- that the majority of imported pythons don't pose a threat -- rings hollow. It only took two mating pythons to begin a major snake infestation in the Everglades, and the four in the Myakka River Watershed may pose a similar threat here soon.

The price of eradication may be high for all of us in the future, and it will never end until the source is cut off."

Un-Safe Cosmetics

Treehugger recently posted a wonderful article: 5 Ugly Truths You May Not Know About the Beauty Industry featuring our friend Stacy Malkan, who shared some of the startling facts about the beauty industry. We've listed a few below, but please visit Treehugger for the complete article.

• Did you know . . . many companies that donate to breast-cancer research still use carcinogens in their products?

• Did you know . . . many personal-care products contain toxic chemicals not listed on labels?

• And did you know . . . not one of the mainstream beauty giants has signed the Compact for Safe Cosmetics pledge?

And my favorite piece? Many of the major cosmetics firms have developed their own "green" product lines. "The Origins brand by Estée Lauder, for example, brags that it is free of a long list of hazardous chemicals," says Malkan. "So if Estée Lauder has already figured out how to make products without the harmful chemicals, why do they continue to use those chemicals in all their other product lines?"

To learn more about Stacy Malkan and her organization The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, please visit JodiSolomonSpeakers/StacyMalkan.

Sneak Peek: "Enlightened Sexism"

Here's a sneak peek at Susan Douglas' new book "Enlightened Sexism"

Starting with Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place and Ally McBeal in the 1990s and ending with Gossip Girl, Grey’s Anatomy and the 2008 presidential race, Enlightened Sexism chronicles the widening gap between the images of women in the mass media and the everyday lives of girls and women in the United States.

And it argues that in the face of stalled progress for full gender equality in the U.S., the mass media have, inadvertently or not, sought to seduce women and girls with pop culture fantasies that true female power has been achieved or that it comes from being bust, thin and beautiful.

Combining extensive research, hours of viewing, and a humorous, at times sardonic tone, the book argues that girls and women have come to be pulled between two warring trends in the media: embedded feminism, which takes the achievements of the women’s movement for granted and represents women in positions of power, and enlightened sexism, which resurrects retrograde stereotypes of girls and women as bimbos, shopaholics, and obsessed primarily with men and babies.

Embedded feminism, which has produced countless images of women as DAs, police investigators, judges, police chiefs, surgeons and doctors, lawyers, forensic scientists, and television news anchors, pundits and reporters, ironically over-represents women’s career achievements, as most women remain employed as secretaries, nurses, elementary school teachers and hairdressers.

Enlightened sexism assumes that full equality for women and girls has been achieved and insists that, as a result, sexist depictions are fine, even fun, because they don’t matter anymore.

So both embedded feminism and enlightened sexism, despite their diametrically opposed agendas, advance the notion that feminism is now utterly irrelevant because all has been won for women.

Enlightened Sexism debunks this illusion and lays out how—from The Bachelor, Extreme Makeover, and Cosmo to Sex and the City and the sexist coverage of Hillary Clinton’s campaign—we got here. It also shows how these very different fantasies are targeted to older and younger women, mothers and daughters, and thus pit us against each other.

And it urges us to rip the veil off these fantasies, expose the gap between image and reality, and refuse to allow media illusions to insist that feminist politics are no longer relevant or needed.

COMING OUT MARCH 1, 2010

Video Friday: Edith Widder AND Neil deGrasse Tyson!

Yup, you read that right. It's a special Video Friday with a NOVA Science Now clip that combines to of our favorite science speakers: Neil deGrasse Tyson and Edith Widder.

Follow the link below to learn more about Edith Widder's work as a biologist and explorer who has engineered new ways to spy on a menagerie of bizarre ocean organisms that use light to lure prey, mate and more.

YES! I want to watch NOVA Science Now with Tyson and Widder!