Pte Retell Lecture

                Most Repeated Retell Lecture 2021 

 1. Superman

Today we’re going to recount heroic tales of superhuman feats of strength, when in the face of disaster, some people are said to have summoned up incredible physical power to lift a car off of an accident victim, move giant rocks, or like Big John of song, single-handedly hold up a collapsing beam to let the other miners escape. Are such stories true? There are many anecdotes supporting the idea, but we’re going to take a fact-based look at whether or not it truly is possible for an adrenalin-charged person to temporarily gain massive strength. In proper terminology, such a temporary boost of physical power would be called hysterical strength. The stories are almost always in the form of one person lifting a car off of another. In one case in Colorado in 1995, a police officer arrived at a single-car accident where a Chevy Chevette ended up on top of a baby girl and sank into the mud. The officer lifted the car and the mother pulled the girl out. In 2009, a man in Kansas lifted a Mercury sedan off of a six-year-old girl who had been trapped underneath when it backed out on top of her. In 1960, a Florida mom lifted a Chevy Impala so that a neighbor could pull out her son, who had become trapped when he was working on the car and his jack collapsed. There’s even the case where the MD 500D helicopter from Magnum, P.I. crashed in 1988, pinning the pilot under shallow water; and his burly friend (nicknamed Tiny) ran over and lifted the one-ton helicopter enough for the pilot to be pulled out. And, of course, the list goes on, and on, and on. In each of these cases, some aspect of leverage or buoyancy probably played some role in reducing the magnitude of the feat to something more believable. And even lifting many cars by several inches still leaves most of its weight supported by the suspension springs. But our purpose today is not to "debunk" any of the specific stories. The majority of them are anecdotal, and interestingly not repeatable; in many cases, the person who summoned the super strength later tried it again only to find that they couldn’t do it. Basically, what we have is a respectably large body of anecdotal evidence that suggests that in times of crisis, danger, or fear, some people have the ability to temporarily exercise superhuman strength.

2. Earth and Mars

This lecture compares the conditions on the earth and Mars, as well as the habitability of Mars. There are some similarities such as polar caps, atmospheres and water climate. But Mars and the earth also have lots of difference. Even the most inhabitable areas on the earth are way different from those on Mars. The lecture also describes different forms of water (hydrology) on the surface and underground of the earth and Mars.

3. Early robot

This is a kind of object that you're probably all familiar with when you had the term robot, but I'm gonna show you the very, very first robots. These were the very first robots. They were characters in a play in the 1920s called Rossum's Universal Robots and they, the play was written by Czech writer called Karel Capek. And basically, these robots, you know, people tend to think of robots as kind of cute cuddly toys or, you know, Hollywood depictions kind of devoid of politics. But the first robots were actually created and imagined in a time of absolute political turmoil. You just had the First World War, you know, it finished had a devastating impact across Europe and so people will kind and people are kind of reflecting on what does it mean to be human, what makes us human, those kinds of question. And this kind of context is what inspired Capek to kind of write this play. And interestingly, these robots being human, they are actually in the play assembled on a production line, a bit like the Ford manufacturing production line. So even though they are human, they are assembled and these robots are designed to labor, and that is their primary purpose in society.

4. Linguistic training

I think with our linguistic training we also get all this invisible training to be authorities, to be the people who know. It is part of that process that you come out as a world authority on your chosen subject. But when we move into working with communities, we have to recognise that the communities have to be the authority in their language. Actually, a woman in the class I'm teaching at Sydney at the moment, a career woman, expressed this very nicely, although she was talking about something else, she was distinguishing expertise from authority. And certainly linguists because of our training we do have expertise in certain very narrow areas of language, but we don't have the authority over what to do with that knowledge or what to do with other knowledge that the community produces. I guess for me the bottom line is languages are lost because of the dominance of one people over another. That's not rocket science, it's not hard to work that out. But then what that means is if in working with language revival we continue to hold the authority, we actually haven't done anything towards undoing how languages are lost in the first place, so in a sense the languages are still lost if the authority is still lost.

5. America’s economic size 

In terms of the size of economy, the US economy is more than the total amount of China, Japan UK and Germany. In terms of the industrial output, US output is $2.8 trillion, but it only equals to the sum of China and Japan.

6. Survey 

Let’s say if I'm asking which source do you often use to get information. Newspaper? Radio? And the survey shows 62% of the people chose internet. You might be thinking I am going to say, how important the internet is, or how quickly it has changed the world for a few years. But what if I tell you this survey is conducted on the website global and mail.com? Our answer will be different. Because the people who did this survey on a website must be frequent users of internet. This sample is a biased sample. So we have to pay attention to how a survey is conducted. what’s the most common way that you get access to information?

7. Cloud formation

Every cloud drops particles and the key question is what actually forms cloud. Sea xxx and sea salt are effective elements to form clouds. When going inland, different sources form clouds more effectively than others. Cloud is an important player for climate change, reflecting lights back to space, to keep things much cooler. When more pollution is put into clouds, it has impact on water patterns and precipitation. 

8. Underwater detectors 

Underwater remote detector called Antares is a camera installed under the water for fish monitoring. It is a remote technology system. Researchers can monitor fishes on their computers in universities. The camera can detect surrounding environments and fish. This help find out what they eat and what they don’t eat. They can stop feeding them if necessary in some situation to save time and labor.

9. Dimensions

Dimensions can be defined as the number of space or variables used to describe events. One dimension refers to one variable, which means longitude. Two dimensions contain two variables: namely, longitude plus latitude. Three dimensions contains 3 variables: longitude, latitude and attitude. Four dimensions include the above-mentioned variables and time. We can use these dimensions to represent every event; however, we seldom use 4 dimensions.

10. Happiness 

As Joanne pointed out, only one country, tiny between China and little Bhutan, wedged the Gross National India, has adopted central index of Happiness as the government policy, and actually has a good deal of success in education and in health and in economic growth and in environmental preservation. They have a rather sophisticated way of measuring the effects of different policies on people's happiness. They are the only country to go that far. But you are now beginning to get other countries interested enough to do kind of white paper policy analyses of happiness research—what effects would it have if we used it more for public policy? You are beginning to get countries like Australia, France, Great Britain, that are considering publishing regular statistics on happiness. So it is beginning to become a subject of greater interest for policymakers and legislators in different advanced countries.

11. Edmund Wilson

And I want to say that Wilson who died over 30 years ago, began his career before modern lit was taught and analyzed in the universities , as he said at one time and I think a piece about Christian golfs Gauss's I called him Gauss as my father in his generation at Princeton a year or two after Wilson called him . When Wilson was studying there that the latest daring writers to get into the curriculum were widths of the 90s and maybe Gauss had his reputation as a bohemian romantic because he had known Oscar in Paris, but there was no modern lit Wilson came then from a different world and he became the focal point of a broad mainstream American culture that thought that modern literature and wanted modern literature to be able to be read and appreciated by ordinary people, they were not modernists in an abstract sense and certainly some of them like TS Eliot and Faulkner were too difficult for some of their writings to be read by ordinary people, but this was a world before the division between the brows or between a lead or whatever had established itself as part of our consciousness.

12. Absolute zero

Absolute zero is the point at which the fundamental particles of nature have minimal vibrational motion. Absolute zero, theoretically, is not achievable and does not exist. But scientists are putting a lot of efforts in designing experiments trying to achieve or create absolute zero. The reason they do so is not for a predetermined end. They are not focusing on the goal of the experiment. The fun in these experiments is to find and prove whether something you don’t know does exist or not. And this is the beauty of science that scientists fall in love with. 

13. Climate change

Climate change, some adverse effects of climate changes to agricultural productions. Some lands are unsuitable for growing crops. There will be millions of people facing hunger in Africa in the future. Climate change will result in less production and less food. It is difficult for developing countries to deal with climate change due to their financial status and other issues. There are many people living in hunger especially in Africa. The climate change has devastating effects on world economy. The tropical areas on earth are dry and hot, and are originally not suitable for food production. The change of the climate leads to extreme weather conditions such as flood and hurricane, which exacerbates the food production. As a result, it leads to a continuous decline in food supply annually around 10-17%. And this trend is perceived to be continue in the future by 2070. The regions suffering the most will be some African countries. 

14. Mega cities

Mega cities' impact Global population has increased by 4 folds, from 1.5 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000. While resource consumption has increased more significantly by 16 folds over the century. Due to urbanization, cities, which only account for 2% of the land, have 50% of the total population and consume 75% of the resources. People not only use every resource but also produce tons of wastes.

15. Welsh Language

This busy little town is named after sir David's first cousin. It's also a Welsh language stronghold. According to the 2001 census results seventy percent of the town's population could speak Welsh but even here the language may not be completely safe. The Welsh language board expects last year's census results to show a fall in the number of Welsh speakers living in its northern and western heartlands. One of the main reasons for that the board says is migration. Many Welsh speakers are choosing to leave the country. At the same time only a small percentage of those moving in can speak the language or choose to learn it. Historically, over the past 1788 Wales people have continually left in order to find better better standard of pay maybe in quality of employment and the things have change was probably is that them there is a larger amount of English people now who have found Wales of the last 20-25 years particularly this corner of Wales and regarded is a desirable place to come and live and as opposed to many areas in England and cheaper as well. 

16. Robot

It’s hard to make a robot complete a task that seems extremely simple for a human. For example it is very easy for us to see a person but it’s very hard for a robot. A robot has a camera on it to capture pixels, and then the robot will transform the pixels into an image, which is not as easy as it sounds like. it is not easy to design a robot to do tasks that are simple to humans. 

17. Small languages

Small languages are dying out due to globalization and urbanization. Global languages such as English has taken place of many small languages. People have been moving to urban areas where is hard for small languages to survive. Some small languages can now only survive in some remote, isolated islands. 

Most Repeated Retell lecture
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