The Stanford Mini Med School: A Free Course Now Online

in Science, Stanford | January 20th, 2010

Image by King of Hearts, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Start­ing this past fall, Stanford’s School of Med­i­cine and Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies (my day job) teamed up to offer The Stan­ford Mini Med School. Fea­tur­ing more than thir­ty dis­tin­guished fac­ul­ty, sci­en­tists, and physi­cians, this year­long series of cours­es (three in total) offers stu­dents a dynam­ic intro­duc­tion to the world of human biol­o­gy, health and dis­ease, and the ground­break­ing changes tak­ing place in med­ical research and health care. 250 life­long learn­ers (like your­self) attend­ed the first course on Stan­ford’s cam­pus this fall. And you can now access it on iTunes. We’ve post­ed the first two lec­tures (in video), and eight more lec­tures will soon be com­ing online. (Update: You can now find the videos on YouTube too.) Below, I’ve added the course descrip­tion for the fall course, and you can also find it list­ed in the Biol­o­gy Sec­tion of our ever-grow­ing col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es. When the win­ter and spring cours­es arrive, I’ll be sure to give you a heads up.

This Fall, the Stan­ford Mini Med School will get start­ed with a jour­ney inside human biol­o­gy. We will start by famil­iar­iz­ing our­selves with the world of very small things. We will take a close look at DNA, stem cells, and microbes, and see how these and oth­er small play­ers form the build­ing blocks of the human body. This will allow us to under­stand how human organs devel­op (and can also regen­er­ate), how our ner­vous and immune sys­tems work, and how dis­eases can afflict us. From there, the course will move beyond the indi­vid­ual and take a more glob­al view of health. How do pan­demics take shape? How does the envi­ron­ment affect our col­lec­tive health? And how can we final­ly imple­ment a health­care sys­tem that makes sense for our nation? Var­i­ous experts from the Stan­ford School of Med­i­cine will address these and oth­er big pic­ture ques­tions dur­ing the first course in the Stan­ford Mini Med School.

For a descrip­tion of the cur­rent Mini Med School course (which we will even­tu­al­ly post online) please

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Dewey Music: Putting a Friendly Face on Public Domain Music

in Music | January 20th, 2010

As we’ve men­tioned in the past, Archive.org hosts some won­der­ful free, pub­lic domain media. Many of their clas­sic films appear in our col­lec­tion of Free Online Movies. And they also pro­vide access to lots of free pub­lic domain music (includ­ing a large Grate­ful Dead con­cert archive). Thanks to a new site, Dewey Music, you can now sort through this exten­sive music cat­a­logue with greater ease and find the free gems faster. Dewey Music was cre­at­ed by six indus­tri­ous col­lege stu­dents, and we thank them.

via Boing­Bo­ing

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Jaron Lanier Makes “Open Culture” a Buzzword

in Web/Tech | January 19th, 2010

Last week, Jaron Lanier, the father of vir­tu­al real­i­ty, pub­lished his new book (You Are Not a Gad­get) and an accom­pa­ny­ing op-ed in The Wall Street Jour­nal. The WSJ piece begins:

All too many of today’s Inter­net buzz­words— includ­ing “Web 2.0,” “Open Cul­ture,” “Free Soft­ware” and the “Long Tail”—are terms for a new kind of col­lec­tivism that has come to dom­i­nate the way many peo­ple par­tic­i­pate in the online world. The idea of a world where every­body has a say and nobody goes unheard is deeply appeal­ing. But what if all of the voic­es that are pil­ing on end up drown­ing one anoth­er out?

Lanier goes on to make the case against Web 2.0. Using “crowd­sourc­ing” to build free prod­ucts (think Wikipedia), Web 2.0 ends up pro­duc­ing infe­ri­or con­tent and soft­ware code. It slows down inno­va­tion. It destroys intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty and the finan­cial struc­ture that incen­tivizes cre­ative indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions. And final­ly it dis­em­pow­ers the indi­vid­ual, the real source of inno­va­tion. (Lanier says, “I don’t want our young peo­ple aggre­gat­ed, even by a benev­o­lent social-net­work­ing site. I want them to devel­op as fierce indi­vid­u­als, and to earn their liv­ing doing exact­ly that.”) If you think this sounds like Ayn Rand phi­los­o­phy (see vin­tage clip) graft­ed onto tech talk, you’re prob­a­bly right. And from here, you can decide whether you want to buy the book or not.

On a per­son­al note, I find it amus­ing that “Open Cul­ture” qual­i­fied as an “Inter­net buzz­word,” accord­ing to Lanier. As you can imag­ine, I track the use of the expres­sion fair­ly close­ly, and quite frankly, it did­n’t reg­is­ter on any radar until Lanier’s piece came out (and we got a simul­ta­ne­ous men­tion in AARP’s mag­a­zine). All you have to do is look at this Google Trends chart. It maps the usage of “open cul­ture,” and you can see how it goes from nowhere to ver­ti­cal in 2010, right when Lanier’s op-ed gets pub­lished. So what can I say to Jaron Lanier, but thanks (in a thanks, but no thanks kind of way) and may you sell a mil­lion copies of You Are Not a Gad­get…

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Understanding Financial Markets

in Business, Current Affairs, Online Courses, Yale | January 19th, 2010

Robert Shiller, who pre­dict­ed the stock mar­ket crash ear­li­er this decade and the burst­ing of the hous­ing bub­ble in 2008, has a unique under­stand­ing of the finan­cial mar­kets and behav­ioral eco­nom­ics. In this free course pro­vid­ed by Yale Uni­ver­si­ty, Shiller demys­ti­fies the finan­cial mar­kets and explains “the the­o­ry of finance and its rela­tion to the his­to­ry, the strengths and imper­fec­tions of such insti­tu­tions as bank­ing, insur­ance, secu­ri­ties, futures, and oth­er deriv­a­tives mar­kets, and the future of these insti­tu­tions over the next cen­tu­ry.” It’s a course for our shaky finan­cial times. The first lec­ture appears above, and the full course can be accessed on YouTube, iTunes and Yale’s web site. The course is also list­ed in our meta col­lec­tion of Free Cours­es and our tar­get­ed selec­tion of Free Eco­nom­ics Cours­es.

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Peter Singer on Greed & Wall Street Excesses

in Business, Current Affairs, Economics | January 18th, 2010

Peter Singer, an Aus­tralian-born philoso­pher who teach­es at Prince­ton, cre­at­ed the ani­mal rights move­ment back in the 1970s, and, more recent­ly, launched a cam­paign to end world pover­ty. One can’t con­tem­plate pover­ty with­out also con­sid­er­ing greed, and that brings us to the clip above. Inter­viewed in 2009, Singer sug­gests that greed dri­ves us bio­log­i­cal­ly (as does social col­lab­o­ra­tion for­tu­nate­ly). Greed helps us sur­vive and inno­vate. But there is also a point where it becomes point­less and patho­log­i­cal, and that’s what we have wit­nessed in the finan­cial world. Greed brought us Bernie Mad­off. But it has also brought us (my infer­ences) bankers who cre­ate a cat­a­stro­phe one year and take record bonus­es the next. And it has brought us to the point where  our coun­try has dan­ger­ous­ly slipped off of its demo­c­ra­t­ic moor­ings. Lloyd Blank­fein, this clip is for you. Thanks Ted for send­ing this one along.

Look­ing for free phi­los­o­phy cours­es? Vis­it the Phi­los­o­phy sec­tion of our Free Course col­lec­tion.

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Voltaire & the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755

in Life, Religion | January 18th, 2010

The lines below are tak­en from Voltaire’s “Poème sur le désas­tre de Lis­bonne,” writ­ten in response to the Lis­bon earth­quake of 1755. Then, as now, there’s a lit­tle wis­dom here for those (hint: Pat Robert­son) inclined to infer moral supe­ri­or­i­ty from the suf­fer­ing of oth­ers.

What crime, what sin, had those young hearts con­ceived
That lie, bleed­ing and torn, on moth­er’s breast?
Did fall­en Lis­bon deep­er drink of vice
Than Lon­don, Paris, or sun­lit Madrid?
In these men dance; at Lis­bon yawns the abyss.
Tran­quil spec­ta­tors of your broth­ers’ wreck,
Unmoved by this repel­lent dance of death,
Who calm­ly seek the rea­son of such storms,
Let them but lash your own secu­ri­ty;
Your tears will min­gle freely with the flood.

Note: Pat Robert­son’s con­tro­ver­sial remarks con­tained one basic his­tor­i­cal fact, and it was wrong. He assert­ed that the Haitians brought dis­as­ter upon them­selves when they broke free from “Napoleon III.” Robert­son got the wrong guy here. It was­n’t Napoleon Lite (1808–1873). It was Napoleon Bona­parte (1769–1821) who coopt­ed the French Rev­o­lu­tion 50 years ear­li­er and tried to impose his will on Haiti. But, what­ev­er…

via The Sun Times

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I Have a Dream

in History | January 18th, 2010

For MLK’s birth­day, we bring back the full “I Have a Dream” speech, deliv­ered at The Lin­coln Memo­r­i­al on August 28, 1963. Sev­en­teen elo­quent and brave min­utes that changed the world and made it a bet­ter place.

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Rod Serling: Where Do Ideas Come From? (1972)

in Literature, Television | January 18th, 2010

Rod Ser­ling, the Amer­i­can screen­writer & tele­vi­sion pro­duc­er best known for The Twi­light Zone, field­ed ques­tions from stu­dents about the whole art of writ­ing for tele­vi­sion. In the clip above, he gives a rather dra­mat­ic response to the ques­tion, “Where do ideas come from?” (They come from the Earth… They’re in the air. And, to put them on paper, you bleed!) If you keep watch­ing, the con­ver­sa­tion with Ser­ling con­tin­ues for a good while. This con­tri­bu­tion was sent to us by Elan, who dates the clip to around 1972. You can always write us and sug­gest a link here.

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.