randomosity

The History of Health and Medicine Seminar series welcomed Luz Maria Hernández-Sáenz today, who presented the lively story of Dona Maria Tiburcia Reynantes. Her paper “Between Medicine and Magic: the Story of an 18th century Mexican healer,” explored the rather fascinating case of a travelling healer in eighteenth century Mexico who combined magic and medicine with religiously ordained healing practice. In the case of Tiburcia, Dr. Hernández-Sáenz, utilized Inquisition records to explore the tale of a women who claimed to be able to cure illness, reunite the divorced and to even resuscitate the dead.
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The 2007-2008 Wilson series of lectures in Canadian History kicked off at McMaster University today. John Weaver, the acting Wilson Chair in Canadian History, has attracted an exciting list of speakers for the coming year. Lou Pauly spoke on ’Globalization, Political Authority and the Prevention of Systemic Financial Crises.’ He followed Angela Graham who, less than 24 hours prior to her doctoral defense, provided an engaging look at Canadian Foreign Policy towards the People’s Republic China between the Second World War and recognition in 1970.

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I attended a lively and effervescent talk by Marianne P. Fedunkiw at the History of health and Medicine Unit. Dr. Fedunkiw presented her work with the diary/scrapbook of Dr. Dorothea Maude, a rather atypical English medical doctor during the early twentieth century. Dr. Maude was active in the Balkan Wars of 1912-14 and then during the First World War in this same area. The talk today was on the topic of the challenges that arise from using diaries as a historical source.

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Jim Pickworth pointed me to Hans Rosling’s series of TED talks. Clearly I have been sleeping and missed pointers to these in the past. Hans Rosling is an amazingly dynamic and fluid presenter who has embarked on a mission of data liberation. His talks have seemingly inspired the UN to release public health data that had been kept a guarded secret. Armed with this data he has created a wonderful flash based data animation tool called GapMinder. The tool is fun to play with if only purely from a visualization perspective. That he has provided UN worldwide data on matters such as infant mortality, carbon emissions and wealth, allows a layperson such as myself to explore the relationship between these variables for individual countries.

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I attended a wildly animated, wonderfully amusing and thought provoking keynote talk by David Weinberger entitled ’The Business of the Miscellaneous’ at the Annual General Meeting of the CIRA this afternoon. Weinberger claims that society has solved the threat posed by information overload by creating more information. Additionally, he claims, the blurring of the line between the metadata and the actual data has further eroded the authority of the traditional media and given a newfound credibility to sources such as Wikipedia. A credibility that he asserts that comes from trust built on transparency.
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