Another MOOC

Pensamiento Científico 

by Carlos Gershenson

I have enrolled in a new free on-line Coursera offering, Pensamiento Científico.  It doesn't start officially until February 3rd, but the first week's lectures are already available, and I have completed all but one.  The Spanish vocabulary and the content are well within my grasp.  The presenter speaks quite rapidly but clearly, and his delivery is just enough of a challenge to be useful.  The very brief quizzes at the end of each lecture are useful to comprehension, and they can be repeated as often as necessary to maintain a perfect score.  Succeeding lectures may get beyond my comfort zone in terms of language and content, but I feel the course has already been well worthwhile in terms of coming to grips with the spoken language.

It seems to me that on-line courses like Pensamiento Científico would be a great addition to the offerings at Albuquerque's Cervantes Institute.  The resource is cost-free for students, and can be easily accessed in accordance with varying schedules.  The Institute could add useful value through the formation of discussion groups at the Albuquerque location, and I would think no one would object to a small fee for the use of the facility.  I will try to propose this idea Thursday when I will be at the Hispanic Cultural Center to attend a lecture by Martha Heard on her recently published book, Salir del Silencio, Voces de Càlig 1900-1938.

Advancing Rearward:
The course I am presently taking, as well as hundreds more offered by Coursera, is presently unavailable to anyone in Syria, Sudan, Iran and Cuba due to a ban on such online contact by the U.S. State Department.  It seems like quite a stretch to imagine that a basic course in scientific thought would seriously threaten U.S. security.  Given the disastrous PR associated with the wikileaks and Snowden revelations, it would seem that there would be considerable pressure to lift the current ban on access to free on-line educational resources for residents of black-listed countries.  In fact, another big course provider, edX, has been able to negotiate exemptions from the ban for students in Cuba and Iran.  So, maybe Coursera will get its legal act together and help eliminate this national embarrassment in the near future.

historia de una foto

1.  Cuenta la historia de esta fotografia en 200 palabras:

Había visto antes la foto, pero no le presté mucha atención.  Mi impresión inicial era que representaba una escena del Carnaval, quizás un hombre en disfraz de pirata.  Al mirar más detenidamente la foto me di cuenta de que era una foto sacada durante una protesta política en forma de teatro callejero.  En el fondo hay una línea de policías con los escudos levantados. Las letras grabadas en los escudos identifican la unidad y la ciudad: Polícia Militar do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (PMERJ). La figura de enfrente, desafiante y amenazadora, probablemente representa un guerrillero de la rebelión de Canudos en el fin del siglo XIX, descrito primero  por Euclides da Cunha, y después en forma novelística por Mario Vargas Llosa.  

Hice una copia de la foto con mi escáner fotográfico, y la cargué al buscador de imágenes de Google.  Resultó que la imagen apareció muchas veces en la red, y que era una foto hecha por el fotoperiodista japonés, Yasuyoshi Chiba, de la Agence France-Presse.  El fotógrafo estaba sacando fotos de una manifestación de protesta grande en Rio de Janeiro relacionado a las políticas económicas del gobierno Brasileño, incluyendo recortes a la educación y gastos de millones relacionados a la visita del Papa.

Al caer la noche, subía el nivel de la violencia.  Con su cámara, el periodista documentó la pelea entre manifestantes y policías, durante la cual alguien arrojó una bomba de fuego, quemando un policía.  Inmediatamente después de sacar aquella foto, el periodista fue agredido por un policía quien le dio un golpe fuerte en la cabeza con el bastón, causando una herida sangrante.  Se llevaron el fotógrafo al hospital, pero no sufrió graves lesiones.  El periodista hizo una denuncia de las acciones del policía después, apoyada por el testigo de varias fotos de la agresión sacados por asistentes a la manifestación y documentado mediante Twitter.

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This was my response to an assignment in the Spanish course I am taking at the National Hispanic Cultural Center under the able guidance of Fernando Gimeno Hermoso.  The most significant thing I learned from this exercise was the awesome ease with which one may find specific images on the web through Google's image search engine.

Life's Clutter

While my interest in photography with old cameras has taken up much of my time over the past ten years, I haven't been able to resist looking into other subjects, a few of which are illustrated here.

My longest-running hobby is actually reading novels, mostly by Spanish and Latin American writers.  I never had patience for English and American literature, and always felt fiction something of a waste of time.  Reading in Spanish always seemed less self-indulgent as I could tell myself I was also building some language proficiency.

I'm not quite half-way through 2666 by Roberto Bolaño.  The endless digressions and philosophizing get a bit tiresome, but he was an accomplished storyteller, and I'm working at withholding judgment on the book until I'm done with it.  The story has a lot in common with the trilogy by Stieg Larsson, though the swede's style was more nimble.

Another writer with a lot in common with those two is Mario Vargas Llosa.  I've read most of his novels, including most recently La tía Julia y el escribidor and La guerra del fin del mundo. Vargas Llosa is often slow in starting his stories; I was about eighty pages into La guerra before I felt I knew where the plot was headed.  The peruano's strength is in developing interesting characters, something that has been helped along considerably by his having lived with a succession of interesting women.

In the past few years I've been reading more non-English-speaking writers in Spanish translation.  I enjoyed the exotic stories told by Orhan Pamuk, and reading him in Spanish seems appropriate as Turkish and Spanish have some grammatical similarity in their use of a familiar tense.

Bolaño's novel is probably going to last me a couple more weeks at the rate I'm going.  After that, I'm hoping to read a bit of Tolstoy, possibly Anna Karenina.  I started to read it on line, but digesting a novel with my desktop is tiresome.  If anyone out there has a dog-eared copy of the Spanish edition, I would be happy to pay a reasonable price for it.