Newsletter Volume 7 Issue 7 December 2, 2020 |
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Jim Nagy’s talk was a fascinating display of the power of mathematics to affect so many aspects of our lives. We may not understand the underlying math, but we can certainly appreciate the beauty and elegance of the resulting work. I continue to be very grateful for the work that Don O’Shea puts into rendering the recordings of these talks. He does some amazing magic to make the resulting product as good as it is. The videos of these Lunch Colloquiums are a wonderful treasury of knowledge. I recently looked back at Kip Jensen’s talk on Howard Thurman from April 20 and saw that it had received 1,057 views!
OLLI courses are now virtual, and be sure to note that two of our members are teaching beginning in January (unfortunately at the same time!). OLLI would certainly welcome more of our members as teachers.
I am very grateful to Gretchen Schulz, Ann Hartle, and Marge Crouse for help with editing and proofing.
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Lunch Colloquium - Monday, December 7
Zach Binney
“COVID-19 and Sports: Epidemiological and Ethical Issues”
Please scroll to read more below
Lunch Colloquium - Monday, December 14
George Brown
“We Celebrate the Holidays with the Armchair Traveler”
Please scroll to read more below
Report - Lunch Colloquium - Tuesday, November 17
David Eltis
"www.slavevoyages.org and Slavery in the Atlantic World: IBM Punch Cards to Virtual Reality"
Please scroll to read more below
Report - Lunch Colloquium - Monday, November 23
Jim Nagy
"Mathematics and Imaging"
Please scroll to read more below
OLLI Courses next January
Denise Raynor and Marilynne McKay
Please scroll to read more below
New Members
Sheila Tefft
Please scroll to read more below
Faculty Activities
Sidnery Perkowitz
Please scroll to read more below
Walking the Campus with Dianne
Please scroll to read more below
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Lunch Colloquium, Monday, December 7, 2020 |
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“COVID-19 and Sports: Epidemiological and Ethical Issues”
Zach Binney
Epidemiologist and Assistant Professor of Quantitative Theory and Methods,
Oxford College of Emory University
Zoom Meeting
11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Zach Binney earned his PhD in epidemiology at Emory with a dissertation on NFL injuries, and, given that his research currently sits at the intersection of sports and public health, it is not surprising that he has been much in demand as a knowledgeable commentator on the way the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted sports of all kinds at all levels. He is well qualified to speak about the story we’ve seen unfold for months now as players (and teams) have scrambled to determine when and how it might be safe to return to play—or to continue to play, once returned. The logistical questions have been many. But so have the ethical questions. How much responsibility should colleges and universities bear for keeping their athletes safe? How much professional organizations? And how about responsibility for the safety of those who work with the athletes? And those who might attend an athletic event? Zach will offer an overview of the practical and moral problems the pandemic has brought to the fore in the world of sports and invite us to consider the implications for broader American society of some of the solutions that have been proposed and enacted.
About Zach Binney:
Dr. Zach Binney is an Assistant Professor of Quantitative Theory and Methods at Oxford College of Emory University. He received an MPH in 2013 and a PhD in epidemiology in 2018 both from Emory. Prior to graduate work, he served as an editor for the CNN Radio network followed by three years in Washington, DC as a healthcare consultant. Dr. Binney has also worked in palliative and end-of-life care and collaborated on projects related to infectious diseases. He has consulted for sports organizations (including NFL, MLB, NBA, and NCAA Division I teams), pharmaceutical companies, and media groups on statistical and analytical issues. In 2018 he founded Binney Research, Analytics, and Sports Services where he consults on data science and analytics issues for sports, healthcare, and media clients as well as collaborates with major media organizations to conduct and present high-impact research on television and digital platforms.
Dr. Binney’s current research sits at the intersection of sports and public health, focusing on sports injuries and athlete health. He is the author of numerous publications in journals such as Epidemiology and Neurology. He is a staff writer at Football Outsiders where he tries to communicate accessible lessons about epidemiology and statistics to the public while writing about football.
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Lunch Colloquium, Monday, December 14, 2020 |
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“We Celebrate the Holidays with The Armchair Traveler”
George Brown
Retired President/CEO of Friendship Force International
Zoom Meeting
11:30 am - 1:00 pm
During his more than 25 years with Friendship Force International, George developed and managed cultural exchanges in over 60 countries. Since retiring he continues to pursue his interest in travel by organizing and leading international tours and domestic tours, too. But ever since COVID-19 forced the cancellation of his 2020 tours, he has focused his attention on Armchair Travel as a practical way to keep the pleasures of travel alive, with a series of Zoom presentations to the Senior University of Greater Atlanta and the Central Dekalb Senior Center. His presentation to us of the EUEC will demonstrate how we can all become successful armchair travelers by using our minds and imaginations (and internet connections) to take a tour to anyplace around the globe—and to anywhere in time, as well.
About George Brown:
George Brown has traveled the world since he was seven when his family moved to Asia as Presbyterian missionaries. He attended high school in Kobe, Japan. His BA is from Davidson College, and his PhD in International Relations is from the University of Virginia. Following service in the US Army, George was Assistant Professor of Political Science at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, before moving to Atlanta in 1978. In Atlanta he served as Executive Director of Villa International and the Georgia Council for International Visitors and also as Director of Agnes Scott College’s Global Awareness Program. Most of his career, however, was spent with Friendship Force, the international citizen exchange organization with people-to-people programs in more than 60 countries. George spent 23 years on the Friendship Force staff including nine as its President/CEO before retiring in 2013. In retirement, George continues his love of travel by planning and leading domestic and international travel adventures for lifelong learners. He is also a regular instructor with the Senior University of Greater Atlanta and the Central Dekalb Senior Center. George is married to Jill Harris Brown, retired Fernbank Elementary School art teacher. Between them, George and Jill have four grown children and four grandchildren. George and Jill have established strong roots in the Emory/Druid Hills community: All four children and one grandson graduated from Druid Hills High School, with two granddaughters there now.
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Lunch Colloquium Report - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 |
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"www.slavevoyages.org and Slavery in the Atlantic World:
IBM Punch Cards to Virtual Reality"
David Eltis
Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History Emeritus
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Not long ago, basic questions about the Atlantic slave trade – where in Africa did the slaves come from, where in the New World did they go, and how many unfortunate souls were caught up in this miserable business – were entirely unanswerable. But in the 1970s, David Eltis, now Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History Emeritus, and a few other young scholars began researching extant records of slave voyages, which stretched from the 15th century to 1866. Records were plentiful but scattered across several continents in scores of archives, and written in many languages. In 1992, David persuaded others working in this area to organize and expand their efforts, and with the help of major British and U.S. funding, the team managed to gather data on more than 27,000 slave voyages and construct a database published as a CD-ROM: “The Transatlantic Slave Trade” (1999). Because of their heroic labors then (and since), we can now answer these questions and many more with great precision.
On Tuesday, November 17, David returned to Emory (virtually) from his home-since-retirement in Vancouver, Canada, to talk with us about this monumental project--its history and its continued evolution--and to show us some of its tricks.
The number of voyages recorded has now grown to nearly 36,000, a very large fraction of the estimated total of 40,000 slave voyages. Entries for each ship include as many as 243 variables, including the ship’s name, national origin, port of debarkation, port of arrival, cargo, mortality, prices of slaves, and much more. The project has been able to establish the number of enslaved Africans shipped to the New World as 12.5 million. (Only 4% of these individuals came to the United States.) By 2008, the early CD-ROM had transitioned to an online database: www.slavevoyages.com (2008), a free, open access website maintained by Emory. And by 2011, David and his co-editors had produced a related database focused on the slave passengers: www.African-origins.org.
For our mesmerized emeriti audience, David demonstrated some of the website’s tricks. One amazing visual allows you to choose a year and then watch the voyages (color coded by nationality) cross the Atlantic from a specific port in Africa to a specific port in the New World. Users can call up all of the available information for a particular ship and see the sources that the compilers employed. The database also answers questions that users pose. A few years ago, I asked how many slaves arrived in the port of Havana in the decade of the 1790s. Finding the answer took only a moment.
After his retirement from Emory in 2012, David continued to augment and refine the project and also to take it in ambitious new directions. With the help of a major grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, he and his team are continuing to extend the focus from a “ship-based record to a people-based record.” That is, the project is seeking to add every knowable fact about all the individuals who were involved in the slave trade – enslaved persons, captains, crew, ship owners, buyers, and others. The expanded project will also include data on the intra-American slave trade, a vastly important but little studied aspect of New World slavery. Information on more than 11,000 voyages has been collected so far. This addition will be particularly important for our understanding of North American slavery because the majority of enslaved persons who arrived here came from the Caribbean, not directly from Africa.
The compilers are also beginning to map the ultimate home of most of the transported Africans – New World plantations. Long before cotton was king, plantations employed slave labor to produce unimaginable amounts of sugar (but rarely enough to satisfy European consumers). The map of plantations in Jamaica is largely complete. Finally, the project is collecting the original names of the Africans who were on the slave ships. This is possible because the British, as part of their effort to suppress the slave trade in the early 19th C., established courts to deal with captured slave ships. Officials collected the African names of the enslaved, and David’s team is using those names to discover the origins of victims who were marched from inland on that continent to the ports. Thus far, 90,000 names are known.
This project has transformed New World slave studies. David and his collaborators have themselves published four volumes, including the ATLAS OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE (Yale, 2010), which won the R.R. Hawkins Award for the outstanding scholarly work in all disciplines of arts and sciences. Many other volumes rooted in this database have revolutionized our understanding of slave acculturation, community formation, and the evolution of African American identities. Indeed, as Henry Louis Gates, Harvard Professor and host of “Finding Your Roots” on PBS, has said, no one has benefited more from the project than African Americans. It has revolutionized genealogical study of descendants of African slaves all over the Americas.
The intellectual reach of the slave trade project is almost limitless. We understand the national histories of Britain and Spain better now that we know in broad terms that Britain transported most of the slaves to the New World and Spain bought them. We know that the slave trade was ubiquitous; every port big enough to mount international trade (some 200 in the New World) participated. We know that as many slave voyages originated in the New World as in Europe, which means that the old notion of a “triangular slave trade” between Europe, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere is seriously incomplete. Most importantly, perhaps, we know the economies of modern Europe, North America, and South America rest solidly on the plantation system that the Atlantic slave trade made possible.
During the Q & A that followed David’s talk, Kristin Mann, also a retired Professor in History, explained that the work that she is doing on the slave trade, work that has evolved from David’s work, is focused on the trade between Africa and Brazil. Sometime this coming spring, she’ll be speaking to us about the Yoruba diaspora that still powerfully connects West Africa, Brazil, and other parts of the Atlantic world.
The large audience that gathered for this Lunch Colloquium via Zoom thoroughly enjoyed David’s stimulating and very important presentation. And we look forward to hearing from Kristin later on.
--Jim Roark
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Lunch Colloquium Report -- Monday, November 23, 2020 |
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"Mathematics and Imaging"
Jim Nagy
Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor and Chair,
Department of Mathematics, Emory University
On November 23, we were treated to a fascinating talk by Jim Nagy, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor and Chair of Mathematics. His talk, titled “Mathematics and Imaging,” covered a wide range of imaging problems and indicated the kind of data needed to solve these problems and, in very general terms, the computations and structures needed for handling this data.
The talk was filled with real life examples, and his slides have hyperlinks to videos demonstrating many of the basic ideas. Prof. Nagy is happy to share his slides upon request (jnagy@emory.edu).
The next time your favorite TV CSI investigators clean up a picture from the one and only image they have, know you are now watching fantasy instead of realistic crime drama. Jim Nagy showed us how multiple slightly different copies of the image are needed in order to perform such de-blurring operations.
The key is in how we view the pixels of an image. An image is made up of a lot of pixels (think of them as small boxes in an array). The more pixels available, the higher the resolution of the image and hence the better the quality of the image produced. Viewing the pixels as numbers representing colors, intensity, and possibly more, allows us to manipulate this array of numbers, change the numbers somewhat, and in the process change and clarify the image.
Typical problems thus addressed are turning low resolution images to higher resolution images, blur removal, which is especially important in removal of blur caused by motion in medical images, x-ray reconstruction, and more.
And the role of mathematics in all this? The problem of changing low resolution images to higher resolution is attacked by building systems of equations. For example, suppose you had a group of just three pixels and you wanted to go to six pixels (thus more resolution). Think of the three pixels as being the numbers b1, b2, b3 and the six pixels you wish to construct as y1, ... , y6. Then thinking of b1 = .5y1 + .5y2, b2 = .5y3 + .5y4, etc. builds one set of equations. But you need more as there are infinitely many solutions to this simple set of equations. Here is where more images are needed. Say c1, c2, c3 is a second image. Now you get another set of equations c1 = .5y1 + .5y2, c2 = .5y3 + .5y4, c3 = .5y5 + .5y6. Do this type of thing for each of the many low resolution images, and you solve the resulting system to find the values for the ys and hence, the high resolution image. This requires a lot of computation power, but it can be done. The challenge is in estimating the relative positions of the low resolution images, which really determines the exact form of the equations involved.
Professor Nagy also discussed space imaging using ground-based telescopes. The atmosphere distorts the incoming optical wavefront. If the atmosphere is relatively smooth (think of it as a fairly smooth piece of paper), the distortion can be handled using standard mathematical interpolation techniques. But if the atmosphere is highly disturbed (like a crumpled piece of paper), then the peaks and valleys make interpolation impossible. The problems created are then much harder to handle, and you need far more points of information in order to proceed. There are technical mathematical models for dealing with this problem. They include functions describing the shape of the telescope aperture, another describing the wavefront, and more. Sensors measure the incoming wavefront, in terms of slopes at the grid points of measurement. Here, overlapping grids allow construction of finer grids (with more points of information) and thus produce better images.
One of the big problems in medical imaging is motion blur. Putting someone in an MRI for 20 - 30 minutes or more and expecting no movement is not reasonable. A further complication is that of 3D images which greatly increase the amount of data to be processed, and hence the computation time. But these applications cannot wait for weeks of computation to produce the final image. The answer is to take images from somewhat different positions, creating the overlapping images needed to resolve the issues.
In breast imaging, the images are taken as the x-ray position moves in a small arc above the patient. These pass through the breast and are detected on a plate below that sends the signals on to form the image. These slightly overlapping images allow the construction of the final image. Here, the angles from which images are taken are known in advance and using the techniques we have seen, allows the creation of the needed final image.
In summary, using imaging software like Photoshop may not require a deep knowledge of mathematics. But understanding how the software works and developing new methods does require knowledge of mathematics, computer science, and physics. Thus, interdisciplinary applications are essential to this type of research. And in doing this type of research, Professor Nagy and his students not only work with Emory doctors and professors, but also with other researchers from around the world. Those present at this Zoom Colloquium much appreciated his willingness to explain how their efforts in this impactful field do play a role in so many of our lives.
--Ron Gould
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Two of our members are teaching classes at OLLI in the term beginning January 4. Because the Emory OLLI courses are on Zoom, you don’t even have to live in the metro Atlanta area to take them.
Denise Raynor is teaching “Race or Caste? Parts I and II”
and
Marilynne McKay is teaching “HISTORY vs HERITAGE: Origins and Messages of Confederate Memorials”
Unfortunately these two courses are being taught at the same time (!) so you can’t take both. However, there are many other OLLI courses being taught beginning January 4, as well. The complete schedule and information on registration can be seen by clicking here.
This is Marilynne’s first time teaching her course and we are pleased to announce that she is being awarded an EUEC-OLLI Fellowship!
If you are interested in teaching an OLLI course or offering a lecture, you are welcome to contact Denise Raynor at braynor@emory.edu for additional details.
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New members are the lifeblood of any organization.
Please make a special effort to welcome them to EUEC!
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Sheila L. Tefft, MSc, Senior Lecturer Emerita of English
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Professor Tefft received her MSc from The London School of Economics and Political Science in 1977. She was appointed to the Emory faculty in 1999 and served as director of the Journalism Program 2000-2009. Her research focuses on science writing about health and climate change, composition, and multimedia journalism, and she has taught writing in Journalism, the Institute of Liberal Arts Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, and the English Department Writing Program. She has co-led Emory student delegations to the United Nations climate negotiations. Professor Tefft was a reporter, editor, and foreign correspondent for almost 25 years. She received a Crystal Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Laura Jones Hardman Award for Excellence in Service, and a Faculty Achievement Award for Outstanding Service to International Programming and Study Abroad from the Institute of Comparative and International Studies. She is the recipient of two Fulbright fellowships.
From Professor Tefft: English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley said, "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." Salute to journalists for holding officials accountable and ensuring we have facts and verified information during these critical times.
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Sidney Perkowitz
Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus of Physics
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Sidney writes: The lone upside of the pandemic is that it has increased my time for writing. I’ve just signed a book contract for a second collection of my published articles and essays. Here are three of them about current issues and news:
Where might the US be if it heeded her discovery of global warming’s source?
Why facial recognition has led to false arrests.
What this year’s Nobel-winning discovery of the black hole at our galaxy’s center reveals.
(The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics honored only the fourth woman to win the award,
Andrea Ghez at UCLA.)
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Walking the Campus with Dianne |
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Did anyone recognize the Emory Recycle Center during our last walk? As I mentioned before, it is a bit off the beaten path, but once you find it, you realize it's probably one of the most important hidden gems on campus. The Recycle Center is located at 868 Peavine Creek Drive, a bit further down the road from the Campus Life Pavilion we visited not too long ago. Anyone in the general Emory community can take glass, newspapers and more, to be recycled -- the drop-off is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
It's surprising to see how much recyclable trash is generated on and around campus, and I am amazed at how much is actually recycled in our community. For more information, take a look at the Emory Recycles/Facilities Management website by clicking here.
In 2019, Emory received the Outstanding Institutional Recycling Program award during the Georgia Recycling Coalition’s annual conference. You can read more about that by clicking here.
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For our next walk, let's take a look at the official mascot of Emory -- the eagle. This particular eagle is made of bronze and greets everyone at the entrance of a prominent place where faculty, staff, and students may congregate at one time or another. |
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Where Will You Find This on the Emory Campus? |
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Emory University Emeritus College
The Luce Center
825 Houston Mill Road NE #206
Atlanta, GA 30329
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