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This Day in World History - Each evening that weather permitted, Maria (pronounced Mah-RYE-uh) Mitchell mounted the stairs to the roof of her family’s Nantucket home to sweep the sky with a telescope looking for a comet. Mitchell—who had been taught mathematics and astronomy by her father—began the practice in 1836. Eleven years later, on October 1, 1847, her long labors finally paid off. When she saw the comet, she quickly summoned her father, who agreed with her conclusion.

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Congratulations to Melanie Mitchell, who received the 2010 ΦBK Science Book Award for her book Complexity: A Guided Tour! In honor of this, Michelle and Lauren talk with Mitchell about ants, robots, the economy, and more.

Melanie Mitchell is Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University and External Professor and Member of the Science Board at the Santa Fe Institute. Her research interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning and complex systems.

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From the Phi Beta Kappa Society:

Amazing feats of collective intelligence, such as the colony of army ants that link themselves together to cross daunting precipices, are having an unconventional effect on the future of science. The “complexity” of these naturally occurring events cannot be explained by the traditional method of breaking science down into its most basic parts, in this case, the individual army ants. Instead, the study of complex systems, those made up of simple components with limited capacity for communication, provide a much broader illustration of the science of self-organization and adaptation.

In Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford University Press, 2009), Melanie Mitchell draws on her background as a computer scientist and her work with the Santa Fe Institute to study the complex systems that have evolved in nature and how they may contribute to the future of computer programming, specifically with regards to artificial intelligence. Mitchell also looks at the human brain’s ability to create consciousness from a complex network of electrically charged neurons, axons, and dendrites, as well as the immune system’s unique collection of cells, which work together in an effective and efficient way without any central control.

The song featured in this podcast is “In the Middle” from the album Can’t You See by The Ben Daniels Band. Get it here.

Apparently, I've decided this is "true stories about reading" week, so I intend to just roll with that theme and tell you more embarrassing stories involving reading. Today's story finds 16-year old Kelly reading Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell in late June, 1980. (Yeah, you can do the math, or I can tell you straight up that I'm currently 46. I don't know how on earth that happened. But I digress.)

As I've already mentioned, I can get very caught up in reading. VERY caught up. So intensely caught up that if Tara started burning around me, Rhett (or Ashley, or, well, SOMEBODY) would have to scoop me on up and haul me out of there, because I wouldn't notice the hollering or the flames or the smoke as long as my eyes could see the page in front of me. And we've already established that I'm willing to read under really stupid circumstances involving moonlight and slivers of light under the bedroom door, so . . .

I took Gone With the Wind out of the public library, and I started reading it in the evening. I managed to put it down for bedtime, probably at about the point where Scarlett returns to Tara. The next day, I started reading it when I got up. I was done reading the book by about 3:30 in the afternoon (quick reader, remember?)*SPOILER ALERT* Although seriously, this is an old book at this point, so I don't feel bad about talking about it freely. However, just in case you haven't seen it, haven't read it, and still really want to, I thought it fair to warn you to skip the next part.)

I started crying at about 2 in the afternoon, when Scarlett fell down the stairs and miscarried. I started sobbing when Bonnie Blue died after a fall from her horse just after that. And I didn't stop crying until close to 4:30. That's right. I cried continuously while reading for something like an hour and half, and I cried for close to an hour after I put the book down. Because my crazy absorption in a book knows no bounds, apparently.

Gone With the Wind was not the first book to move me to tears, nor was it the last. (Heck - I cried during each of the last five Harry Potter books, and sometimes more than once. And during Guernsey Literary Society. And Looking for Alaska. Too many books to keep listing, really.) But it was the first book that kept me crying after I'd put it down, which is one of the reasons I remember it so clearly. It is also one of the first books to keep me crying for such a long period of time, and if there is such a thing as a "personal best" for crying time, it wins.

Has there been a particular book for you that made you cry and kept you crying for a really long time? And has anyone else stayed in tears after closing the book, or is that just me?

David E. Klein is Associate Chair and Associate Professor, Department of Politics, University of Virginia. Gregory Mitchell is Professor of Law and E. James Kelly, Jr.-Class of 1965 Research Professor, University of Virginia School of Law. Together they edited, The Psychology of Judicial Decision Making, which is part of the American Psychology-Law Society Series. The book maps ways of incorporating key concepts and findings from psychology into the study of judging. Together the essays will foster a better understand how judges make decisions, and open new avenues of inquiry into influences on judicial behavior. In the excerpt below, from the introduction, we learn a little about why combining the study of law and psychology is beneficial.

Over the years, psychologists have devoted uncountable hours  to learning how human beings make judgments and decisions.  Legal scholars and political scientists have expended immeasurable intellectual energy trying to understand why those particular human beings who sit on courts act as they do in presiding over and deciding cases.  It might seem obvious that fertile intellectual ground lies at the intersection of these disciplines, and certainly some scholars have seen it this way.  As far back as 1930, Jerome Frank drew on contemporary psychology to explain judging in his Law and the Modern Mind. And yet, nearly eighty years on, the area under active cultivation is quite small.  To be sure, psychological concepts crop up in studies of judicial behavior from time to time, but it would be difficult to name a score of published studies that have relied extensively on current ideas and evidence in psychology to generate major theoretical propositions about judging.  This is party because students of judicial behavior traditionally have not engaged deeply with scholarship in psychology, but only partly; it is also the case that psychologists have tended not to focus on the kinds of questions that would be most helpful for understanding what professional judges do….

The study of judicial decision making has indisputably made great strides in recent years, through the labors of hundreds of scholars from political science, law, economics, and other disciplines.  Nevertheless, one could argue that there remains a lack of both depth and breadth to our understanding of what judges do. Even where scholars can make consensual and successful predictions of a judge’s behavior – for example, that Justice J will vote for the conservative position in case C – they will often disagree sharply about exactly what happens in the judge’s mind to generate the predicted result.  (Does Justice J vote conservatively in a conscious effort to further his policy preferences, in an unconscious effort to do so despite a sincere desire to be guided by legal texts, or as a result of a method of interpretation that is independent of his ideology?)  And as soon as we move beyond ideology, we enter areas where good predictions are much harder to come by.  How will a judge’s decision on a motion, verdict, or appeal be affected by precedents, the presence of an amicus curiae brief or oral argument by the defendant’s attorney, the preferences and arguments of other panelists on a collegial court, the opinions of the local bar, the presentations of expert witn

By Justin Hargett, Associate Publicist

Musicologists often reserve their scholarly studies for the likes of Bach and Stravinsky, but in his latest book, Lloyd Whitesell has comprehensively tackled the most avant-garde of pop songwriters, Joni Mitchell. Excerpted below, from his book The Music of Joni Mitchell, is an analysis of the harmonic palette of one her most famous songs, “Both Sides Now,” along with a live performance of the song from 1970.

“Both Sides Now” (Clouds) is one of Mitchell’s most celebrated songs, though her own dejected performance bears little resemblance to the Judy Collins cover version from 1967 which first made it a hit. The harmonies are almost pure major and tend toward the monochrome (I, IV, V). By now we can appreciate how incredibly limited such a palette is in the context of Mitchell’s style. She exploits redundancy for expressive purpose: the repetitive treading of the same harmonic paths captures an appropriately world-weary tone. Yet, with this monochromatic spectrum, Mitchell is careful to create textural variety and sculpt a precise lyrical shape with its own highs and lows.

The tonic pedal (F#) is rarely relinquished…Only twice does E# lead directly up to the tonic, in the vocal line at the end of phrases 1 and 3 (eg., “ice cream castles in the air”). These parallel moments stand out for several reasons. The voice, within a verse of generally drooping contours, rises a full octave span. At the same time, the guitar bursts past the F# which has capped its range until now. Not least, the vocal cadence with its leading tone and clear unconstrained dominant momentarily revokes the tyranny of the pedal. This elated gesture first corresponds with the high spirits at the outset of each verse of the poem. But then the something goes awry: the second half of each verse repeats the gesture of elation, but the words are no longer joyous. The poet now views her former joy with a jaded eye. The same music is used for both takes, the buoyant and the disillusioned…

Mitchell is treating tonality perversely in this song, using cadential movement as a downer and using a surfeit of tonal center as a symbol of tedium and disenchantment. To get the full effect of this virtuosic achievement, one need only compare Mitchell’s version to the Judy Collins cover, in which the astringent, landlocked tonal nuances are swept away in a sugary barrage of primary colors.

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