Friday, October 28, 2011

Spartan Gold: Sam was a right-brain thinker and more

Despite his engineering background, Sam was an intuitive right brain thinker while Remi, a Boston College trained anthropologist/historian, was firmly grounded in logical left brain thinking.
According to Wikipedia:
The idea that the two hemispheres of the brain may learn differently has virtually no grounding in neuroscience research. The idea has arisen from the knowledge that some cognitive skills appear to be differentially localised to a specific hemisphere (e.g. language functions are typically supported by left hemisphere brain regions in healthy right handed people). However, massive amount of fibre connections link the two hemispheres of the brain in neurologically healthy individuals. Every cognitive skill that has been investigated using neuroimaging to date employs a network of brain regions which are spread across both cerebral hemispheres, including language and reading, and thus no evidence exists for any type of learning that is specific to one side of the brain.

Boston College
Boston College (BC) is a private Jesuit research university located in the village of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, USA. The main campus is bisected by the border between the cities of Boston and Newton. It has 9,200 full-time undergraduates and 4,000 graduate students. Its name reflects its early history as a liberal arts college and preparatory school in Boston's South End. It is a member of the 568 Group and the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. Its main campus is a historic district and features some of the earliest examples of collegiate gothic architecture in North America.

Boston College offers bachelor's degrees, master's degrees, and doctoral degrees through its nine schools and colleges. Boston College is currently ranked 31 in the National Universities ranking by U.S. News & World Report.

Boston College is categorized as an RU/H: Research Universities (high research activity) in the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.


it also led to vigorous debates, ranging in topic from what had started the English Reformation to ...
The English Reformation was the series of events in 16th-century England by which the Church of England broke away from the authority of the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church.

These events were, in part, associated with the wider process of the European Protestant Reformation, a religious and political movement which affected the practice of Christianity across most of Europe during this period. Many factors contributed to the process: the decline of feudalism and the rise of nationalism, the rise of the common law, the invention of the printing press and increased circulation of the Bible, the transmission of new knowledge and ideas among scholars and the upper and middle classes. However, the various phases of the English Reformation, which also covered Wales and Ireland, were largely driven by changes in government policy, to which public opinion gradually accommodated itself.

Based on Henry VIII's desire for an annulment of his marriage, the English Reformation was at the outset more of a political affair than a theological dispute. The reality of political differences between Rome and England allowed growing theological disputes to come to the fore.[1] Immediately before the break with Rome, it was the Pope and general councils of the church that decided doctrine. Church law was governed by the code of canon law with final jurisdiction in Rome. Church taxes were paid straight to Rome and it was the Pope who had the final say over the appointment of bishops. The split from Rome made the English monarch the Supreme Governor of the English church by "Royal Supremacy", thereby making the Church of England the established church of the nation. Doctrinal and legal disputes now rested with the monarch, and the papacy was deprived of revenue and the final say on the appointment of bishops.

The structure and theology of the church was a matter of fierce dispute for generations. These disputes were finally ended by a coup d'état (the "Glorious Revolution") in 1688, from which emerged a church polity with an established church and a number of non-conformist churches whose members at first suffered various civil disabilities which were only removed over time, as did the substantial minority who remained Roman Catholic in England, whose church organization remained illegal until the 19th century.


...to how to best play Vivaldi's concerto Summer.
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi (4 March 1678 – 28 July 1741), nicknamed il Prete Rosso ("The Red Priest") because of his red hair, was an Italian Baroque composer, priest, and virtuoso violinist, born in Venice. Vivaldi is recognized as one of the greatest Baroque composers, and his influence during his lifetime was widespread over Europe. Vivaldi is known mainly for composing instrumental concertos, especially for the violin, as well as sacred choral works and over 40 operas. His best known work is a series of violin concertos known as The Four Seasons.

Many of his compositions were written for the female music ensemble of the Ospedale della Pietà, a home for abandoned children where Vivaldi worked from 1703 to 1715 and from 1723 to 1740. Vivaldi also had some success with stagings of his operas in Venice, Mantua and Vienna. After meeting the Emperor Charles VI, Vivaldi moved to Vienna hoping for preferment. The Emperor died soon after Vivaldi's arrival, and the composer died a pauper, without a steady source of income.

Though Vivaldi's music was well received during his lifetime, it later declined in popularity until its vigorous revival in the first half of the 20th century. Today, Vivaldi ranks among the most popular and widely recorded Baroque composers.

A concerto is a composition for an orchestra and one or more soloists. The classical concerto usually consisted of several movements, and often a cadenza (an elaborate flourish or showy solo passage, sometimes improvised, introduced near the end of an aria or a movement of a concerto.).

The Four Seasons (Italian: Le quattro stagioni) is a set of four violin concertos by Antonio Vivaldi. Composed in 1723, The Four Seasons is Vivaldi's best-known work, and is among the most popular pieces of Baroque music. The texture of each concerto is varied, each resembling its respective season. For example, "Winter" is peppered with silvery pizzicato notes from the high strings, calling to mind icy rain, whereas "Summer" evokes a thunderstorm in its final movement, which is why the movement is often dubbed "Storm."

The concertos were first published in 1725 as part of a set of twelve concerti, Vivaldi's Op. 8, entitled Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione (The Contest between Harmony and Invention). The first four concertos were designated Le quattro stagioni, each being named after a season. Each one is in three movements, with a slow movement between two faster ones. At the time of writing The Four Seasons, the modern solo form of the concerto had not yet been defined (typically a solo instrument and accompanying orchestra). Vivaldi's original arrangement for solo violin with string quartet and basso continuo helped to define the form.

"I've found, my dear, a vintage Master padlock, circa 1970."
Master Lock Company LLC was formed in 1921 by locksmith-inventor Harry Soref, and is headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

In 1969, the company was purchased by American Brands from Soref's heirs. American Brands was later renamed to Fortune Brands, which then split on October 3, 2011 to create the Fortune Brands Home & Security company.

Iconic Ad
In 1973, Master Lock ran a Super Bowl ad where one of their locks survived being shot by a sharpshooter, thereby proving its durability, thus the slogan "Tough Under Fire". Master Lock would continue running similar ads during future Super Bowls, spending almost their entire annual marketing budget on the single commercial. Later, Master would incorporate the image into a one second long blipvert commercial in 1998.

Offshoring and re-shoring
In 1999, Fortune Brands began to abandon most operations in its Milwaukee Master Lock factory, and moved most of its manufacturing jobs to offshore plants in China and Mexico, putting an estimated 1,300 American workers (represented by the United Auto Workers) out of work. In 2011, it was announced that 36 jobs making combination locks were being returned from China to the heavily-automated Milwaukee plant, which would now employ 379 workers. It would continue to contract with three Chinese factories, twenty Chinese suppliers, and to operate its maquiladora near the Arizona border, where low-cost Mexican workers do non-automated, labor-intensive work, such as assembling made-in-Milwaukee components

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