Sometimes, it can seem like a grand challenge just to get out of bed in the morning. But the world presents us with an almost overwhelming array of grand challenges made all the more urgent because of the dizzying rate of change in technology and society in general: how to stay out of war and manage resources on an already overcrowded planet; how to deliver medical care and reliable information in a babel of contexts and cultures; how to adapt traditional models of entertainment and communication to thrive in this new world?
For our February 7th Categorically Not!, we will explore grand challenges in journalism, cinema and engineering. Geneva Overholser, director of USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism, Pulitzer Prize winner and former ombudsman for the Washington Post will talk about the challenges of trying to figure out how journalism—so essential to democracy—is going to survive when its economic underpinnings are collapsing and its traditional forms are being disrupted by new technologies. This perilous moment for journalism, she will explain, is in fact full of promise.
Just as journalism tries to make sense of life, so does “that bastard child” of literature, the screenplay. USC cinema school professor Georgia Jeffries—who has written and produced films for HBO, Showtime, USA and Lifetime and been honored with numerous awards—will discuss the challenge writers face in balancing integrity and relevance in a time of extraordinary change in the marketplace. The screenplay explores every facet of human relationships, including gender, race, class, religion, age and youth. It is a demanding canvas, she says, but one with infinite possibility.
Scientists also face challenges in making sense of information—a specialty of Carl Kesselman, Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Co-Director of USC’s Center for Health Informatics. His research focuses on grid computing, a technology for creating multi-institutional collaborations and virtual communities that require sharing of data, knowledge and computational infrastructure. The technology aids everything from large physics experiments to limiting damage (and improving responses) to Earthquakes as well as collecting and integrating biomedical data to improve accessibility.
Grand Challenges
Space and Time. The bedrocks of our personal, physical, and social universes. Well, actually, not. As Einstein discovered, space and time are elastic, secondary effects of the invariant nature of the speed of light; and unlike the speed of light, our perceptions of space and time depend on our frame of reference. Discomforting, yes, but also instructive: For one thing, the truths we think we know are frequently illusions; larger, more fundamental, truths lie beneath. Also: things we think are simple, separate and unrelated turn out to be complex, connected, interdependent.
For our March 7th Categorically Not, we explore the role of space and time in economic meltdown, the remaking of journalism, and, of course, art
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Former CFO of Microsoft and past Chairman of the Nasdaq Stock market, Mike Brown is an evangelist for incorporating insights from modern physics and biology to the field of economics. He’ll explain how economics may be understood as the dynamics attending the projection of real process in space-time, touching on quantum and thermodynamic implications of this hypothesis to paint a common sense picture of sustainable economics. Traditional economists in attendance should be expected to argue strenuously that this is entirely irrelevant. Part of the fun will be judging this for yourself.
Marc Cooper, director of Annenberg Digital News at USC, argues that much of the agonizing over shrinking space and accelerating time in New Media will be outweighed by a democratization of publishing. Author of three non-fiction books, he’s roamed the world writing on politics, culture, war and revolution for almost four decades. Formerly translator for former Chilean President Salvador Allende, he was a senior editor at the Huffington Post and has written for publications ranging from The New Yorker to Rolling Stone. He’s currently contributing editor at The Nation.
Donna Sternberg, artistic director of Donna Sternberg & Dancers, interprets scientific themes through dance in collaboration other artists. Donna has received wide recognition for the 70 plus dances she has choreographed. Working with digital media artist Michael Masucci, she will present an excerpt from her work "Quantum Entanglement," exploring a phenomenon Einstein described as “spooky action at a distance,” from both a scientific and human perspective. A full-length performance of the piece marks the company’s 25th Anniversary on May 1st.
