Swapping Your Way to Enlightenment: A Recession Special

Here’s a handy way to weath­er the reces­sion with your intel­lect and pock­et book intact…

In this very down econ­o­my, you can keep feed­ing your read­ing habit by book swap­ping. Yes, that’s right, book swap­ping. What goes on here is fair­ly straight­for­ward. You give away books that you’ve already read. In exchange, you get books that you want to read. And the cost (aside from ship­ping fees) is zero. Plus you’ll save more than a few trees.

On the web, you’ll find two major online book swap­ping ser­vices. The first is PaperBackSwap.com. The sec­ond is Book­Mooch. You can learn more about each ser­vice (respec­tive­ly) here and here.

John Cheever Story Revived Online

John Cheev­er’s sto­ry “Of Love: A Tes­ti­mo­ny” has­n’t been anthol­o­gized or reprint­ed since it was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in 1943. Now, you can find it online at Fivechapters.com. Through­out the week, Fivechap­ters will roll out the sto­ry in nice dai­ly install­ments, as is their gen­er­al cus­tom.

via LA Times Books

The Art History Web Book

cezanneNow there’s a nice alter­na­tive to the tra­di­tion­al, expen­sive art his­to­ry text­book. The folks at smARThis­to­ry have cre­at­ed a free mul­ti-media web-book that offers a dynam­ic sur­vey of art his­to­ry. The online resource com­bines tra­di­tion­al images with audio and videos, and the beau­ty is that you don’t have to read this web-book in a lin­ear fash­ion. Rather, you can sort through things by time peri­od, style and artist and find the infor­ma­tion that you want. In case you’re won­der­ing about the cred­i­bil­i­ty of this resource, it does­n’t hurt to men­tion that one of its founders, Beth Har­ris, is the Direc­tor of Dig­i­tal Learn­ing at the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art in New York City, and the oth­er, Steven Zuck­er, is Dean of the School of Grad­u­ate Stud­ies at the Fash­ion Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, part of the State Uni­ver­si­ty of New York. Have a look.

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Harper’s Index Now Open

From Harper’s:

In cel­e­bra­tion of its 25th year, the Harper’s Index–12,058 lines span­ning 300 issues–is now open to all for search­ing and brows­ing, with more than one thou­sand linked cat­e­gories. Some start­ing points: Adul­teryChi­naBeerVeg­eta­blesSweets,Amer­i­can MenAmer­i­can WomenCatsDogsFrogsBears, and Pan­das.

Who Believes in Evolution?

evolution

This chart comes from a new Pew Research Cen­ter study that looks at the world­wide accep­tance of evo­lu­tion 150 years after Dar­win’s On the Ori­gin of Species by Means of Nat­ur­al Selec­tion. At least in the Unit­ed States, only a minor­i­ty of the pub­lic believes in evo­lu­tion, large­ly because evan­gel­i­cal protes­tants (a large por­tion of the Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion) resist Dar­win’s think­ing far more strong­ly than oth­er world pop­u­la­tions. (The chart makes that sim­ple fact fair­ly clear.) A piece new­ly pub­lished by the Pew Cen­ter goes on to add:

Recent pub­lic opin­ion polls indi­cate that chal­lenges to Dar­win­ian evo­lu­tion have sub­stan­tial sup­port among the Amer­i­can peo­ple. Accord­ing to an August 2006 sur­vey by the Pew Research Cen­ter’s Forum on Reli­gion & Pub­lic Life and the Pew Research Cen­ter for the Peo­ple & the Press, 63 per­cent of Amer­i­cans believe that humans and oth­er ani­mals have either always exist­ed in their present form or have evolved over time under the guid­ance of a supreme being. Only 26 per­cent say that life evolved sole­ly through process­es such as nat­ur­al selec­tion. A sim­i­lar Pew Research Cen­ter poll, released in August 2005, found that 64 per­cent of Amer­i­cans sup­port teach­ing cre­ation­ism along­side evo­lu­tion in the class­room.

For more infor­ma­tion, see the Pew Cen­ter’s larg­er web col­lec­tion ded­i­cat­ed to the Dar­win debate. Also see a new Gallup poll that puts Amer­i­can belief in evo­lu­tion at 39%.

via The Dai­ly Dish

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The Odds on America’s Collapse

jdiamond1Jared Dia­mond became a house­hold name with his Pulitzer Prize-win­ning book Guns, Germs & Steel (2003). Lat­er, the UCLA geo­g­ra­ph­er climbed the charts again with Col­lapse: How Soci­eties Choose to Fail or Suc­ceed (2005). Now, based on this last book, he’s putting odds on whether the Unit­ed States will sur­vive this cri­sis, and he’s putting them only at 51–49. Not too great. And he goes on to say that our best chance of sur­viv­ing is if Amer­i­ca’s wealthy elite suf­fers far more than it already has. For more, lis­ten here.

via Big Think’s Twit­ter Feed. Get our Twit­ter Feed here.

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Watch Educational Videos Offline with YouTube

It’s anoth­er good day for the open edu­ca­tion move­ment. As part of an exper­i­ment, YouTube has part­nered with a select num­ber of uni­ver­si­ties (Stan­fordUC Berke­leyDuke, and UCLA) to make lec­tures, cours­es and oth­er videos avail­able for free down­load. This gives edu­ca­tors and life­long learn­ers the free­dom to watch edu­ca­tion­al videos offline, when­ev­er and wher­ev­er they want, includ­ing air­planes or class­rooms with lim­it­ed con­nec­tiv­i­ty. The videos (all high-res­o­lu­tion mp4s) can be watched on any com­put­er loaded with Quick­Time and also on many portable devices, includ­ing new­er iPods. When I spoke with the YouTube team today, they flagged anoth­er perk: the videos are being dis­trib­uted under a Cre­ative Com­mons license, which means that you can reuse them under cer­tain non-com­mer­cial con­di­tions.

For some­one who has helped devel­op cours­es appear­ing in Stan­ford’s YouTube col­lec­tion, today’s news was cer­tain­ly wel­come. These cours­es are not cheap to devel­op, and we do it as a pub­lic ser­vice. So we’re always hap­py when we encounter new ways of get­ting the edu­ca­tion­al con­tent to a broad­er audi­ence. This new down­load capa­bil­i­ty does just that. It extends our reach just a lit­tle more, and it’s hard to quib­ble with that.

As a prac­ti­cal note, if you’re won­der­ing how to down­load the YouTube videos men­tioned above, here’s what to do. Find a video from Stan­fordUC Berke­leyDuke, or UCLA, look at the low­er left-hand cor­ner of the video, click the “Down­load this video” link, and you should be good to go.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

  • To quick­ly find intel­li­gent video col­lec­tions appear­ing on YouTube, vis­it this page.

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A Guide to E‑Books (and 100 E‑Text Classics)

A quick fyi: Mark Glaser at PBS’s Medi­aShift has just pub­lished a handy guide to e‑books. It cov­ers the his­to­ry of e‑books, the com­pet­ing e‑book read­ers, the pros and cons of work­ing with e‑books, what Google and Apple are now doing in this space, and more. Good stuff.

Sep­a­rate­ly, I also want­ed to flag a col­lec­tion that fea­tures e‑texts of 100 major lit­er­ary clas­sics. You’ll find it over at universitiesandcolleges.org.

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.