India’s Answer to M.I.T. Presents 268 Free Online Courses (in English)

in Online Courses, Technology | August 22nd, 2012

Dur­ing the 1940s, when India won its inde­pen­dence from Britain, the lead­ers of the new­ly-formed nation began imag­in­ing the Indi­an Insti­tutes of Tech­nol­o­gy, oth­er­wise known as the IITs. Much like MIT in the US, these schools would cul­ti­vate some of the world’s top sci­en­tists and engi­neers. And they’d make tech­nol­o­gy key to the future of Indi­a’s eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment.

Today, the IITs stand atop the Indi­an edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem and, like their peer insti­tu­tions in the US, they’re mak­ing a point of putting free cours­es on the web. Rather qui­et­ly, they’ve amassed some 268 cours­es, giv­ing any­one with an inter­net con­nec­tion access to 10,000+ video lec­tures. As you might expect, the course line­up skews heav­i­ly toward sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy, the stuff that con­tributes to Indi­a’s indus­tri­al base — Intro­duc­tion to Basic Elec­tron­ics, High Per­for­mance Com­put­er Archi­tec­ture, Space Flight Mechan­ics, Steel Mak­ing, and all of the rest. But they’ve also added a few con­tem­pla­tive cours­es to the mix, cours­es like Con­tem­po­rary Lit­er­a­ture, Quan­tum Physics, the His­to­ry of Eco­nom­ic The­o­ry, and Game The­o­ry and Eco­nom­ics.

You can start rum­mag­ing through the com­plete list of IIT cours­es on YouTube here, or you can access them via this IIT web­site, which gives you the abil­i­ty to down­load videos straight to your com­put­er. Nat­u­ral­ly we’ve added many essen­tial IIT cours­es to our list of Free Online Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties — Har­vard, Yale, Stan­ford, MIT, UC Berke­ley, Oxford, the list goes on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Yale Intro­duces Anoth­er Sev­en Free Online Cours­es, Bring­ing Total to 42

Har­vard Presents Free Cours­es with the Open Learn­ing Ini­tia­tive

MIT Intro­duces Com­plete Cours­es to Open­Course­Ware Project

 

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One Trillion Frames Per Second: The Science of Capturing Light in Motion

in Photography, Technology, TED Talks | August 17th, 2012

Ramesh Raskar joined the MIT Media Lab in 2008, where he heads up the Lab’s Cam­era Cul­ture research group. For some time, the researcher has drawn inspi­ra­tion from anoth­er MIT pro­fes­sor, Harold Edger­ton, a pio­neer of stop-action pho­tog­ra­phy, who famous­ly pho­tographed a bul­let mov­ing through an apple in 1964. Decades lat­er, Raskar and his MIT crew have tak­en pho­tog­ra­phy to a new lev­el, cre­at­ing imag­ing hard­ware and soft­ware that can cap­ture light as it moves. They can visu­al­ize pic­tures as if they were record­ed at a rate of one tril­lion frames per sec­ond. His cut­ting edge work in fem­to-pho­tog­ra­phy is all on dis­play above.

If you want to get deep­er into Raskar’s world, you can check out his free MIT course, Com­pu­ta­tion­al Cam­era and Pho­tog­ra­phy, which is locat­ed in the Com­put­er Science/Artificial Intel­li­gence sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es.

via Roger Ebert

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Kids (and Less Savvy Marketers) Imagine the Internet in 1995

in Business, Technology | August 17th, 2012

In 1995, a group of 5th grade kids in Hele­na, Mon­tana got togeth­er and made a PSA for the Inter­net (above). And, man, were they hip, with their tech­no music and their “by the time I’m in col­lege, the inter­net will be your tele­phone, tele­vi­sion, and work­place.” In the annals of overblown pre­dic­tions and tech­no­log­i­cal hubris, mid-nineties inter­net-fever will go down as the ulti­mate excep­tion. These kids even antic­i­pat­ed the cute cat mania that would infect the inter­net for­ev­er. Of course, none of them could have fore­seen the Twit­ter rev­o­lu­tion, the Face­book decline, rub­bable gifs, or spher­i­cal panoram­ic views of Mars, but that’s just quib­bling.

It real­ly is aston­ish­ing to look back a mere sev­en­teen years at what a prim­i­tive tech­nol­o­gy the inter­net was. Of course it wasn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly evi­dent at the time that the online world would indeed become our “tele­phone, tele­vi­sion, and work­place,” and some naysay­ers, like astronomer and hack­er-catch­er Clif­ford Stoll, called BS on the hype. In a 1995 Newsweek arti­cle titled “The Inter­net? Bah!,” Stoll wrote:

The truth is no online data­base will replace your dai­ly news­pa­per, no CD-ROM can take the place of a com­pe­tent teacher and no com­put­er net­work will change the way gov­ern­ment works.

In 2010, Stoll was forced to retract, com­ment­ing on Boing Boing cov­er­age of his sour­puss skep­ti­cism with:

“Of my many mis­takes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as pub­lic as my 1995 howler.

But who could blame him? This was the age of such clunky Web ser­vices as AOL, which promis­es much in a 95 ad below, but ulti­mate­ly deliv­ered lit­tle.

Not all web adver­tis­ing in 1995 looks so dat­ed and sil­ly. AOL’s com­peti­tor Prodi­gy, which fared even worse, cer­tain­ly had a bet­ter ad agency. Their 95 ad below, fea­tur­ing Bar­ry White, is a romp.

All of this reflec­tion war­rants more wis­dom from a chas­tened Clif­ford Stoll, who in a 2006 TED talk says: “If you real­ly want to know about the future, don’t ask a tech­nol­o­gist, a sci­en­tist, a physi­cist. No! Don’t ask some­body who’s writ­ing code. No, if you want to know what society’s going to be like in 20 years, ask a kinder­garten teacher.”

via Pre­fix

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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“Glitch” Artists Compose with Software Crashes and Corrupted Files

in Music, Technology | August 16th, 2012

A the­o­ry: one of the dri­vers of our cur­rent wave of nostalgia—lo-fi ana­log hiss and pop in music and ready­made vin­tage fil­ters in dig­i­tal photography—is the loss of imper­fec­tion. Increas­ing­ly pow­er­ful tech­nolo­gies ren­der sound and vision too slick­ly pris­tine, glossy, hyper­re­al, and thus imper­son­al and alien. The lat­est episode of PBS Arts’ “Off Book” series (above) fea­tures a trend toward dis­rupt­ing dig­i­tal over­pro­duc­tion by delib­er­ate­ly exploit­ing the weak­ness­es in new tech­nolo­gies. Glitch artists makes use of “nat­u­ral­ly occur­ring” (so to speak) cor­rup­tions of soft­ware, or cre­ate their own cor­rup­tions in a process called “data­bend­ing”—open­ing images as text files, for exam­ple, and adding and/or delet­ing infor­ma­tion from the image.

Unlike punk rock, to which glitch is com­pared by one of the artists above, some glitch art requires a fair­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed under­stand­ing of dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies. For exam­ple, video artist Anton Mari­ni describes how he writes his own soft­ware to pro­duce glitch effects. But since vir­tu­al­ly any­one can access a pc and stan­dard text and image-edit­ing soft­ware, it remains a fair­ly demo­c­ra­t­ic aes­thet­ic, sim­i­lar to the bed­room tech­nolo­gies that enable almost any­one to pro­duce and dis­trib­ute their own musi­cal com­po­si­tions. There are sites offer­ing tuto­ri­als on how to cre­ate your own glitch art and even a Flickr account called Glitch­bot that will auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­ate glitch images for you, like Hip­sta­mat­ic or Insta­gram will con­vert your care­less snap­shots into intrigu­ing vin­tage arti­facts. Sound too easy? Maybe, but so was Duchamp’s uri­nal. Con­text, as always, mat­ters, and whether glitch art is “art” may ulti­mate­ly become a his­tor­i­cal ques­tion. At the moment, glitch images, video and music offer a way to human­ize all-too-inhu­man cor­po­rate prod­ucts and tech­nolo­gies.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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What Makes Paris Look Like Paris? A Creative Use of Google Street View

in Google, Technology | August 14th, 2012

You know the archi­tec­ture of Paris when you see it. But what makes Parisian archi­tec­ture dis­tinc­tive? What visu­al ele­ments come togeth­er to pro­duce a par­tic­u­lar urban land­scape? Five schol­ars from Carnegie Mel­lon and the École nor­male supérieure are try­ing to give pre­cise answers to those ques­tions. And they’re tak­ing a nov­el approach. They’re run­ning a large repos­i­to­ry of geo­t­agged imagery from Google Street View through a pro­pri­etary algo­rithm and then iden­ti­fy­ing the dis­tinc­tive archi­tec­tur­al ele­ments for each locale — the street signs, win­dows, bal­conies that make a city unique. Their exper­i­ment (all summed up in a short abstract here) cov­ers Paris, Lon­don, Prague, Barcelona, Milan, New York, Boston, Philadel­phia, San Fran­cis­co, San Paulo, Mex­i­co City, and Tokyo.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google “Art Project” Brings Great Paint­ings & Muse­ums to You

Google Street View Opens Up a Look at Shackleton’s Antarc­tic

Tour the Ama­zon with Google Street View; No Pass­port Need­ed

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Serial Entrepreneur Damon Horowitz Says “Quit Your Tech Job and Get a Ph.D. in the Humanities”

in Education, Google, Philosophy, Technology | August 7th, 2012

Damon Horowitz, a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor and “ser­i­al entre­pre­neur,” recent­ly joined Google as an In-House Philosopher/Director of Engi­neer­ing. Pri­or to his work at Google, Horowitz co-found­ed Aard­vark, Per­spec­ta, and a num­ber of oth­er tech com­pa­nies. In this talk at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty’s 2011 Bib­lioTech con­fer­ence on “Human Expe­ri­ence,”  Horowitz explains why he left a high­ly-paid tech career, in which he sought the keys to arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, to pur­sue a Ph.D. in Phi­los­o­phy at Stan­ford (the text of the talk is avail­able here).

Horowitz offers fel­low techies a for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge, but a worth­while one. In say­ing so, I must con­fess a bias: As a stu­dent and teacher of the human­i­ties, I have watched with some dis­may as the cul­ture becomes increas­ing­ly dom­i­nat­ed by tech­ni­cians who often ignore or dis­miss press­ing philo­soph­i­cal and eth­i­cal prob­lems in their quest to build a bet­ter world. It is grat­i­fy­ing to hear from some­one who rec­og­nized this issue by (tem­porar­i­ly) giv­ing up what he admits was a great deal of pow­er and soci­etal priv­i­lege and head­ed back to the class­room.

Horowitz describes his intel­lec­tu­al jour­ney from “tech­nol­o­gist” to philoso­pher with pas­sion and can­dor, and con­cludes that as a result of his aca­d­e­m­ic inquiry, he “no longer looks for machines to solve all of our prob­lems for us,” and no longer assumes that he knows what’s best for his users. This kind of humil­i­ty and intel­lec­tu­al flex­i­bil­i­ty is, ide­al­ly, the out­come of a high­er degree in the human­i­ties, and Horowitz uses his own tri­als to make a case for bet­ter crit­i­cal think­ing, for a “human­is­tic per­spec­tive,” in the tech sec­tor and else­where. For exam­ples, see Horow­itz’s TED talks on a “moral oper­at­ing sys­tem” and “phi­los­o­phy in prison.” Com­pli­cat­ing Google’s well-known, unof­fi­cial slo­gan “don’t be evil,” Horowitz, draw­ing on Han­nah Arendt, believes that most of the evil in the world comes not from bad inten­tions but from “not think­ing.”

In a relat­ed Stan­ford talk (above) from the same sem­i­nar, Maris­sa May­er, for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent of Con­sumer Prod­ucts at Google, dis­cuss­es how she incor­po­rat­ed the human­i­ties into prod­uct inno­va­tion at Google. The first female engi­neer at Google (and its youngest exec­u­tive at the time of this talk), she has made head­lines recent­ly, becom­ing the new CEO of Yahoo.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Illus­trat­ed Guide to a Ph.D.

The Ph.D. Grind: Philip J. Guo’s Free Mem­oir Offers An Insider’s Look at Doc­tor­al Study

Free Online Busi­ness Cours­es

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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The Life and Times of Nelson Mandela Retold with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

in History, Media, Technology | July 18th, 2012

Back in March, we told you about the launch of The Nel­son Man­dela Dig­i­tal Archive, which makes avail­able thou­sands of papers belong­ing to the man who gal­va­nized the anti-apartheid move­ment in South Africa, before even­tu­al­ly becom­ing the leader of the nation. Part­ly fund­ed by Google, the archive lets you revis­it impor­tant moments in Man­de­la’s life — his Ear­ly Life, his Prison Years, and his Pres­i­den­tial Years.

That Dig­i­tal Archive offers one way to tell Man­de­la’s sto­ry. Now here’s anoth­er. The cre­ators of the web site Man­dela Sto­ry launched a short video yes­ter­day that looks at Man­de­la’s life through the lens of social media. And it’s meant to raise a seri­ous ques­tion: “Would Man­dela have spent 27 years in cap­tiv­i­ty if he (and oth­ers) had access to the same tech­nol­o­gy, social media plat­forms and tools as we do today?”

It’s short and cer­tain­ly cre­ative. And if it speaks to you, you should check out Rembrandt’s Face­book Time­line, a clip cre­at­ed by The Rijksmu­se­um that imag­ines the social life of the great Dutch painter.

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and now Google Plus and share intel­li­gent media with your friends! They’ll thank you for it.

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Google Street View Opens Up a Look at Shackleton’s Antarctic

in Google, History, Technology | July 18th, 2012

The dis­cov­ery of the South Pole is a sto­ry whose hero seems to change with every telling. Some­times it’s Robert Scott, some­times Nor­we­gian Roald Amund­sen, and, most recent­ly, Scott’s pro­tégé, Sir Ernest Shack­le­ton. All three—and geol­o­gist Sir Dou­glas Mawson—are essen­tial char­ac­ters in a series of ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry expe­di­tions to a for­bid­ding ter­ri­to­ry near­ly inac­ces­si­ble to the aver­age human being. Now, Google has opened up the Antarc­tic for every­one to explore from the safe­ty of padded office chairs, com­fy couch­es, and cof­fee-shop seat­ing. Google Street View was launched in May 2007 and has since expand­ed its scope to give the aver­age user visu­al access to some fair­ly remote and exot­ic loca­tions. Google’s World Won­ders Project pro­vides aston­ish­ing views of an ancient Zen Tem­ple in Kyoto and the coasts of Dorset and East Devon in Eng­land, among many oth­er stun­ning sites. Most recent­ly, Google Street View has made avail­able 360-degree views of the wood­en huts used by Robert Scott and Ernest Shack­le­ton a cen­tu­ry ago dur­ing their Antarc­tic expe­di­tions. (Start your tour here.)

Both Scot­t’s and Shack­le­ton’s huts have been pre­served intact as his­tor­i­cal sites by New Zealand’s Antarc­tic Her­itage Trust. The explor­ers’ tools and sup­plies, in their orig­i­nal arrange­ment, are on full dis­play in detailed panoram­ic images of the huts’ interiors—a depar­ture from the typ­i­cal exte­ri­or per­spec­tives of Street View. Also view­able in the Antarc­tic series of views is the Cape Royds Adelie Pen­guin Rook­ery, the world’s south­ern­most pen­guin colony and home to many thou­sands of Adelie pen­guins. Like all Street View images, includ­ing the Scott and Shack­le­ton huts, the Rook­ery views are static—images of bygone moments frozen in time—but they are no less breath­tak­ing for it.

The image below shows the inte­ri­or of Shackleton’s hut and all of its belong­ings.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tour the Ama­zon with Google Street View; No Pass­port Need­ed

Google Art Project Expands, Bring­ing 30,000 Works of Art from 151 Muse­ums to the Web

Josh Jones is cur­rent­ly a doc­tor­al stu­dent in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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