The Basement 414 team is interested in doing some educational activities in addition to the music and art that goes on in the venue. I submitted the following draft abstracts.
The Making of the Internet and World-Wide Web
Today, we take the Internet and World-Wide Web for granted as if has been around forever. The Internet was created in the 1980’s and the World-Wide-Web was created in the 1990’s. Even though it is hard to imagine life today without these technologies, in a way, both were almost accidents of history and it actually took a bit of luck for these technologies to find their way out of research labs and into general use across society. In this talk we take a particular look at the moments where creative and visionary people made decisions which helped shape the Internet and World-Wide web. We also look into the reasons why the Internet and World-Wide-Web might never happen happened. The talk also includes a number of short video interviews with some of the innovators of the Internet and World-Wide Web.
Open Content, Open Software, and Creative Commons
Everything that you create such as art, music, and software is covered by Intellectual Property laws. In order to protect creative works, the laws are very conservative and greatly limit any reuse of the works unless the creators of the work indicate their intentions with respect to reuse of their works. In this lecture we look at the various licenses from the Creative Commons, Apache Foundation, and Free Software Foundation. These licenses make it possible for the creators to easily indicate their intentions with respect to their works and lay the foundation for people to legally make use of each other’s materials to create new works and do so in a legal and respectful manner. This lecture will include video interviews of the founder of the Apache Software Foundation and Free Software Foundation.
Dating, Game Theory, and the Nash Equilibrium
Game Theory is a branch of Economics that explains how people interact and make choices in competitive and cooperative situations. Game Theory can explain who dances with whom in a bar and why people find themselves in bad situations with no way to get out of the situation. We can use Game Theory to analyze games and find if there is a sure way to win and if it is possible to predict your opponents’s behavior to your advantage. This lecture will cover the “Nash Equilibrium” which is one of the foundations of Game Theory and won the Nobel prize in Economics in 1994 and was featured in the 2002 movie, “A Beautiful Mind”. We will explain game theory and the Nash Equilibrium by looking at scenes from “A Beautiful Mind”. There are no pre-requisites for this lecture and there is no math in this lecture.
Bio:
Dr. Charles Severance is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. He teaches courses on the Internet, technology, and programming at the University of Michigan. His research area is in novel ways of using technology to enhance teaching and learning. Dr. Severance was the co-host of a television program called Internet:TCI which was distributed nationally by TCI Cable Television during the mid-1990’s. Dr. Severance also was a guest on the call-in program on WKAR-AM for many years talking about Internet and Technology. Dr. Severance has a B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. from Michigan State University.