Liberal arts
Liberal arts is the term given to contemporary programmes of education which include areas of study across the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and the arts. It has its origins in Ancient Greece and began with a "desire for a universal understanding". Simply put liberal arts education aimed at holistic education. This can be simplified even further to an education born out of the development of number and language. It developed throughout classical antiquity but began with Pythagoras and his interest in all things mathematical. Pythagoras learnt a lot from the Ancient Egyptians and eventually after hundreds of years and various contributions this knowledge became the four specialisms (Quadrivium) of astronomy, arithmetic, geometry and music. Language became more and more important in human affairs and by 4th century Athens it was paramount to how the city state (polis) was governed. Therefore education also began to include instruction in how to speak well. Again over hundreds of years and with numerous contributions this became formalised as the three language arts (Trivium) of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric.
Liberal arts became formalised in the middle ages drawing on its origins in Ancient Greek and Roman culture. Perhaps the most famous image of the Liberal Arts is plate 11, "Philosophy and the Liberal Arts" from the "Garden of Delights ()" which was created by a group of women in the 12th century. In the image [right] you can see the seven liberal arts arranged around the Queen Philosophy who sits above Socrates and Plato. "Their encyclopedia compiled ideas drawn from philosophy, theology, literature, music, arts, and sciences and was intended as a teaching tool for women of the abbey who focused on Liberal Arts Education."
Being holistic, liberal arts education aimed at bringing the theoretical and practical together. As Dante put it, so "that the theoretical intellect by extension becomes practical, its goal then being doing and making". It was intended to be a mental and practical education which by the time of the Renaissance realised a .
Historically it was an education reserved only for the elite, and students were predominantly young gentlemen from wealthy families deemed respectable and important. Today, in the USA liberal arts education is still restricted to "elites" who can afford to pay significant fees to attend exclusive liberal arts colleges. Across Europe liberal arts education is now far more affordable with some Universities explicitly stating that it can now "be enjoyed by everyone."
The four liberal arts were taught in two groups: the "trivium" and the "quadrivium" :
During the Middle Ages, the liberal arts were central to university education. The "quadrivium" followed the preparatory work of the "trivium".
The area and range of the liberal arts evolved in time. Originally, most of the teaching, and all of the text-books, would have been in Latin, the language the students would have learnt at school before they came to college. In the beginning the courses were aimed at educating the elite in the classical works. Eventually, the meaning of "liberal arts" got extended to include both humanities and science. But even today, practical activities as agriculture, business, engineering, pedagogy or pharmacy are excluded from the liberal arts. The liberal professions include only professions which require education at university, mainly law and medicine.
The trivium (Latin for "three ways"), included the literary disciplines:
The quadrivium (Latin for "four ways"), included the disciplines connected with mathematics. They were:
Liberal arts colleges are a modern re-interpretation of the old idea. Mostly in the United States, these colleges concentrate on good teaching, and are closer to the Oxford & Cambridge type of tuition than most universities. They are mostly or entirely fee-paying institutions, and so continue to offer an elite education to students from prosperous families or gifted students through significant financial aid. The courses are mostly or entirely undergraduate courses.
Brain damage
Brain damage is damage to the brain from either illnesses or injuries. Brain cells are damaged, which often affects one's brain in a way that stops the brain from thinking or reacting the same way as it did before the brain was damaged.
Physical damage to the brain is called traumatic brain injury (TBI). It has occurred since ancient times, and old medical records exist.
Head injuries and their effects were known in ancient times.
Ancient Mesopotamians knew of head injury and some of its effects, including seizures, paralysis, and loss of sight, hearing or speech. The Edwin Smith Papyrus, written around 1650–1550 BC, describes various head injuries and symptoms and classifies them based on their presentation and tractability. Ancient Greek physicians including Hippocrates understood the brain to be the center of thought, probably due to their experience with head trauma.
Perhaps the first reported case of personality change after brain injury is that of Phineas Gage. He survived an accident in 1848 when a large iron rod was driven through his head, destroying at least his left frontal lobe.
He recovered with no apparent sensory, movement, or big cognitive damage. However, his behaviour so altered that friends described him as "no longer being Gage". This suggested that the damaged areas are involved in "higher functions" such as personality. Many cases of personality change after brain injury have been reported since.
In the 1970s, awareness of TBI as a public health problem grew. A great deal of progress has been made since then in brain trauma research, such as the discovery of primary and secondary brain injury. The 1990s saw the development and dissemination of standardized guidelines for treatment of TBI, with protocols for a range of issues such as drugs and management of intracranial pressure. Research since the early 1990s has improved TBI survival. That decade was called the "Decade of the Brain" for advances made in brain research.
Assembly language
An assembly language is a programming language that can be used to directly tell the computer what to do. An assembly language is almost exactly like the machine code that a computer can understand, except that it uses words in place of numbers. A computer cannot really understand an assembly program directly. However, it can easily change the program into machine code by replacing the words of the program with the numbers that they stand for. A program that does that is called an assembler.
Programs written in assembly language are usually made of "instructions", which are small tasks that the computer performs when it is running the program. They are called instructions because the programmer uses them to instruct the computer what to do. The part of the computer that follows the instructions is the processor.
The assembly language of a computer is a low-level language, which means that it can only be used to do the simple tasks that a computer can understand directly. In order to perform more complex tasks, one must tell the computer each of the simple tasks that are part of the complex task. For example, a computer does not understand how to print a sentence on its screen. Instead, a program written in assembly must tell it how to do all of the small steps that are involved in printing the sentence.
Such an assembly program would be composed of many, many instructions, that together do something that seems very simple and basic to a human. This makes it hard for humans to read an assembly program. In contrast, a high-level programming language may have a single instruction such as PRINT ""Hello, world!"" that will tell the computer to perform all of the small tasks for you.