TeacherTECH: Earthquake Teaching Tools
The next program in our new series TeacherTECH, from the San Diego Supercomputer Center airs Wednesday March 24 and features the irrepressible Debi Kilb, Science Director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Visualization Center. Debi’s specialties are the underlying physics of earthquakes, and getting other people really enthused about it. She’s going to show you many readily accessible sources on the internet where you can find a wide range of information on seismic activity, both in the past and as it happens. And don’t miss physics guru Phil Blanco’s TeacherTECH presentation on Newton’s Laws and Gravity on March 31. Visit UCSDTV’s TeacherTECH page for other programs in the series, and more resources and information from the presenters.
In keeping with the theme of seismicity, Debi’s TeacherTECH presentation is followed by Building It Better, a chronicle of the most massive outdoor real-time seismic test ever conducted. You’ll get an inside view of the western hemisphere’s largest shake-table at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering’s Englekirk Structural Engineering Center. The shake table is the only of its kind in North America, and you’ll see the amazing ingenuity and technology that is required to conduct a test of this scale.
Cecil Lytle was raised the last in a family of ten children in New York City. Music became his life at an early age. Lytle studied at the Julliard School of Music while in high school, enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio and continued graduate studies in Music at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
2011 is the occasion of the 200th birthday of one of the most enigmatic and influential artists of the 19th century, Franz Liszt (1811-1886). Love and hated throughout most of his life, Liszt knew, shaped, and supported every emerging arts and political movement of his era. By the age of nine, young Franz Liszt was praised about across Europe as the second Mozart. However, not content with the fleeting fame of the prodigy, he sequestered himself to develop upon the foundational training he received from the greatest piano pedagogue in Europe. Carl Czerny. During a long ten-year pilgrimage across Europe, he developed what he called a “transcendental technique’ for playing the piano. Consequently, he composed and performed a piano music that reinvented conventional pianism as well as the physical and kinetic relation of the body to the piano. In his compositions and performances, no longer would music be simply two dimensional (melody and accompaniment) but enhanced to incorporate 3 or 4 dimensions of activity at the piano. His celebrated Paganini Etudes (1851) and Transcendental Etudes (1852) soon became the mainstay of the piano repertoire and altered the way other composed music for the piano.
century. Chopin commented that, “I should like to rob him of his way of rendering my own Etudes.” Indeed, through his worldwide tours, Liszt made Chopin and his music a household name. Clara Schumann spoke often of his extraordinary capabilities as a pianist; although she and her famous husband, Robert, along with Johannes Brahms, also criticized his compositions as shallow and showy. Liszt and his cohorts thought of themselves as providing the, Music of the Future.” This rivalry immediately spilled into the press and, even today, divides opinion in the concert halls, and in the major conservatories of Europe and the United States. 
During the period he was Kapellmeister Extraordinaire at Weimar (1849-1858), Liszt championed the new music and composers of the day, especially Richard Wagner and his controversial operas. Their relationship began in Paris in the 1830s and continued until their deaths in the 1880s. Liszt’s surviving daughter, Cosima (1844-1930), was the source of both immense joy and heartbreak to him. In 1857, Cosima had married his most celebrated student, Hans von Bülow (1830-1894), bore him two children before beginning and adulterous relationship with Richard Wagner who depended almost entirely on support from her famous father. Their ménage à trios was the worse kept secret in Europe and part of the amazing history of “Mad King” Ludwig, opera, and Franz Liszt. Surviving well into the 20th century, Cosima Liszt maintained Bayreuth as a monument to Wagner and participated in the rise of anti-semitism of the Nazi Party in Germany. 
borderland region between Austria and Hungary, Liszt declared himself “Hungarian” at an earlier age, although his mother-tongue was German, not Hungarian. By age 11, he was recognized as the greatest prodigy since Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and had moved to Paris with his family to pursue fame and fortune as a concert artist. He did not return to Hungary until thirty years later. He was the first artist to make world tours and at the age of 35 discontinued the life of the concert artist to devote himself to conducting the avant garde music of the day.