Here are our two recommended non-fiction DVDs for this week!
(Click on the photos to request the DVDs)
The Art of Critical Decision Making:
Description: Whether simple or complex, private or public, decisions are an essential part of your life. Not only do decisions affect your own life for good or ill, they can also affect the lives of your friends, your family, and your community. Indeed, the ability to make wise, educated decisions is essential to living a successful and fulfilled life.
Making a good decision and avoiding a horrible one is not a chance act. It’s a skill—one that can be learned, honed, and perfected. Mastering the art of critical decision making is the key to improving your life at home, at work, or in your community. When you understand the necessary components of a smart decision, you can examine mistakes you might have made in the past and sidestep potential mistakes in the future. And when you know the underlying psychological, social, and emotional components that influence decision making—whether they are your own decisions or the decisions of others—you can make sounder choices that produce better results.
Now you can learn to approach the critical decisions in your life with a more seasoned, educated eye with The Art of Critical Decision Making, a fascinating 24-lecture course that explores how individuals, groups, and organizations make effective decisions and offers you tips and techniques to enhance the effectiveness of your own decision making. Taught by award-winning Professor Michael A. Roberto of Bryant University—a scholar of leadership, managerial decision making, and business strategy—this dynamic course is an engaging and practical guide to one of the most fundamental activities in your life.
Dewey Decimal Number: DVD 658.403 ART
Memory and the Human Lifespan:
Description: What if your memory suddenly vanished? What if you could no longer summon up any recollections of your mother’s embrace, a best friend’s confidences, or the moment you first met your spouse? What if you couldn’t even remember yourself—not your name, your school, where you worked, or even the face of the total stranger staring back at you from the mirror?
If all of these memories were gone, would “self” even have a meaning?
The truth is that while you may think of human memory as a capacity—a way to call up important facts or episodes from your past—it is much, much more.
Your various memory systems, in fact, provide the continuity of consciousness that allows the concept of “you” to make sense, creating the ongoing narrative that makes your life truly yours. Without those systems and the overall experience of memory they make possible, you would have no context for the most crucial decisions of your life. You would have to make—without the benefit of experience and knowledge—the decisions that determine not only your quality of life, but your very survival. And your ability to learn, or even to form the personality that makes you unique, would similarly be set adrift.
In Memory and the Human Lifespan, Professor Steve Joordens of the University of Toronto Scarborough, who has been repeatedly honored as both teacher and researcher, leads you on a startling voyage into the human mind, explaining not only how the various aspects of your memory operate, but the impact memory has on your daily experience of life.
His 24 riveting lectures carefully explain
the different kinds of systems that come together to make memory possible;
how those systems work together to build and access memories of specific events, solve problems, learn basic tasks like brushing your teeth, or acquire the skills to play a musical instrument;
the kinds of memory deficits that result when various parts of the brain are damaged or deteriorate;
how memory shapes not only your experience of the past but also of the present, as well as your expectations of the future;
how your memory systems develop throughout your life; and much more.
Moreover, by understanding how the brain organizes and encodes information, you can better harness its extraordinary powers to fine-tune how it works for you and use this information to help reshape your very experience of being alive.
Dewey Decimal Number: DVD 153.12 MEM
Understanding Modern Electronics:
Description: In the last 100 years, the world has undergone a tremendous revolution made possible by advances in modern electronics. Electronic devices—which manipulate electrons or their associated fields in fundamental ways to produce a useful effect—have provided us with ubiquitous, massive computational power; allow us to communicate nearly instantly with loved ones across the globe; can flawlessly record, safeguard, and display information; and provide us with tremendously precise control of manufacturing devices and medical instruments. They are fundamental to our global economy, improve our lives immeasurably, and underlie virtually every aspect of modern life. Yet very few of us have any idea of how electronic devices actually work.
In fact, these increasingly complex devices, which seem nearly magical to us, operate on a few basic principles that are both fascinating and easy to understand. Now, in Understanding Modern Electronics, award-winning Professor of Physics Richard Wolfson provides a working explanation of the principles that govern electronic circuits, then shows these principles in action with devices you use every day. In 24 clear and easily accessible lectures, Professor Wolfson combines his academic expertise, including many years of teaching electronics at Middlebury College, and his lifelong avocation as an electronics hobbyist to examine how these remarkable devices work, bypassing much of the higher mathematics without sacrificing functional and theoretical understanding. Whether you’re an aspiring engineer, an enthusiastic tinkerer, or simply intellectually curious, this course will demystify the behavior and inner circuitry of electronic devices and inspire you to see technology in a whole new light.
Dewey Decimal Number: DVD 537.5 UND
Note: Just an FYI for browsers, we now have a solid selection of Great Courses DVDs thus they are now housed in their own separate section. Ask the staff for details!
Have a great weekend!
Linda, SSCL
Enough people have commented to me that they had no idea the library offers this service, and that it’s very valuable to them, that I realize we have to get the word out more. It’s true I might eventually be inundated with appointment requests, but this service has been available a few years already, and we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Tech & Book Talk at SSCL 