May 9 .... How to Play Jazz . . . . . . . . . . . . .Barney McClure
There Is No Such Thing As a Mistake (I Was Only Trying Something....) is what Barney McClure entitled his book on improvisational theory. The son of a jazz musician, he recognized long ago that improvisational music, particularly jazz, is a language among the participants. He likes to share what he has learned on the bandstand.
Barney McClure, an accomplished jazz pianist and Hammond B-3 player, has had a great musical career. He learned to arrange in the Army during the sixties and continued in Hollywood for many years. His performances have taken him all over Europe, Japan, Australia, Mexico, Canada and the U.S.

June 18 .... Totems: Myths and History . . . . . . . . . . . . Aldona Jonaitis
Totem poles have captured the imagination of visitors to the Northwest Coast from the time Captain Cook visited British Columbia and Alaska in the late 18th century until today, when tourists flock to the totem poles of Ketchikan, Sitka, and Juneau. What the totem means has changed considerably over the years, in part as a result of the interactions between Native and non-Native people. This talk will describe how the activities of fur traders, tourists, settlers and museums influenced the development of the totem pole.
Dr. Aldona Jonaitis, Director of the UA Museum of the North, is an expert in Northwest Coast Native art. She has published several books including Art of the Northern Tlingit, From the Land of the Totem Poles; Northwest Coast Art at the American Museum of Natural History, and Art of the Northwest Coast. Currently in press is The Northwest Coast Totem Pole: History and Myth, coauthored with Aaron Glass.

July 11 .... Chemical Defenses of Plants . . . . . . . . . . . . Tom Clausen
Boreal woody plants are vulnerable to herbivore pressures during the prolonged dormant season and hence have evolved extraordinary levels of defense. This talk will generalize results and paradigm shifts in the understanding of chemical defense strategies that arose from collaborations between researchers in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Institute of Arctic Biology at UAF.
Professor Thomas Clausen was highlighted in the popular press last year, when the movie Into the Wild was released, because of his work on the alleged poisoning of McCandless. Dr. Clausen is chairman of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UAF. He has over 50 publications in nationally peer-reviewed journals of which most have focused on the chemical basis of plant defense.

August 8 .... Order and Chaos . . . . . . . . . . . . John Gimbel
In the past few years, popular culture’s been somewhat interested in a branch of mathematics sometimes called chaos.  It deals with quirky phenomenon like the butterfly effect and intriguing pictures, such as a representation of the Mandelbrot set.  In this discussion the other half of the story is given; namely, the story of order.  We’ll see that disorder is impossible.  Like it or not, you can always find order, provided you are willing to look (sometimes very hard) for it.
John Gimbel has been Professor of Mathematics at UAF for over twenty years.  His mathematical adventures have taken him across the planet -- as a visiting professor at Charles University, University of Paris and Technical University of Denmark, and as scholar in residence at institutions in Hungary, Italy and England.  As a graduate student, he began a collaboration with the eminent Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös..  They studied ways of breaking objects that seemed incomprehensible into organized and easy to understand pieces.  This talk is an outgrowth of that quest for order in seemingly random and incoherent patterns.