Nobel Prize Winners on YouTube

in Video - Politics/Society | December 10th, 2007

YouTube gets smarter one painful­ly small step at a time. First cours­es from Berke­ley; next videos of Nobel Prize win­ners.  More com­ing?

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Coppola is Back

in Film | December 9th, 2007

Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la, the direc­tor who brought us The God­fa­ther and Apoc­a­lypse Now, has released his first film in a decade. Based on a novel­la by Mircea Eli­ade, a Roman­ian thinker prin­ci­pal­ly known for his work on the his­to­ry of reli­gion, “Youth With­out Youth” fea­tures Tim Roth play­ing the role of Dominic Matei, an elder­ly lin­guis­tics pro­fes­sor, who gets struck by light­ning and finds his youth strange­ly restored. To pub­li­cize the film, Cop­po­la has been doing a fair amount of press in New York. (The film is pre­mier­ing there.) Here, you can lis­ten to the inter­view he gave on WNY­C’s Leonard Lopate Show (iTunes — Feed — Web Site). We’ve also post­ed below a video out­take from the inter­view. Final­ly, this Q&A ses­sion in The New York Post may also be of inter­est.

Relat­ed Posts:

• The God­fa­ther With­out Bran­do?: It Almost Hap­pened
• Land­mark Moments in Film: Apoc­a­lypse Now

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The 53 Places to Go in 2008

in Uncategorized | December 9th, 2007

Cour­tesy of The New York Times.

Know of any pod­casts or videos that we should fea­ture on Open Cul­ture? Email us your tips.

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JFK in 1960, Romney in 2007 — Religion in America

in Religion, Video - Politics/Society | December 6th, 2007

Mitt Rom­ney, a Mor­mon, looked yes­ter­day to set aside lin­ger­ing con­cerns about his reli­gion in a high­ly pub­li­cized speech. Imme­di­ate­ly, the speech revived mem­o­ries of John F. Kennedy’s attempt, dur­ing the 1960 cam­paign, to ease con­cerns about his Catholi­cism. We’ve post­ed both speech­es below. The sim­i­lar­i­ties are there. But the dif­fer­ences are more pro­found. I’ll resist the temp­ta­tion to point them out. You can watch the clips and draw your own con­clu­sions.

John F. Kennedy — 1960

Mitt Rom­ney — 2007

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Agatha Christie Radio Mysteries

in Audio Books, Media | December 5th, 2007

Pod­cast­ing is a new form of media dis­tri­b­u­tion that’s done a good job of reviv­ing old forms of media, par­tic­u­lar­ly old radio shows. In the past, we’ve point­ed you to sev­er­al old radio broad­casts, includ­ing Orson Welles’ famous 1938 radio dra­ma that led many Amer­i­cans to hun­ker down in base­ments, des­per­ate­ly hop­ing to avoid an unfold­ing mar­t­ian inva­sion. Today, we’re high­light­ing a vin­tage radio col­lec­tion (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) that fea­tures drama­ti­za­tions of mys­ter­ies writ­ten by Agatha Christie, the ‘Queen of Crime.’ Here, at your leisure, you can lis­ten to the adven­tures of Her­cule Poirot, the fic­tion­al Bel­gian detec­tive who appeared through­out much of her writ­ing. To be pre­cise, he fig­ured into 33 of her nov­els, and 54 of her short sto­ries. Right now, you can access 27 indi­vid­ual record­ings of Christie’s work, and there’s seem­ing­ly more to come.

In the mean­time, if you’re look­ing for more old time media, I’d encour­age you to vis­it this pro­duc­er’s larg­er col­lec­tion of pod­casts on iTunes. Among oth­er things, you’ll find revived pro­duc­tions of Abbott & Costel­lo, Jack Ben­ny, Flash Gor­don and more.

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Favorite Books of the Year

in Books | December 5th, 2007

The rou­tine is always the same here in the Bay Area. Wake up, get in the car, lis­ten to Forum on KQED. Today, the host Michael Kras­ny invit­ed lis­ten­ers to call in and pick the best books of the year, or those they plan to give as gifts this hol­i­day sea­son. To get some good reading/gift tips, you can lis­ten here (iTunes — Feed — MP3) or sim­ply read the print­ed list here. (Forum can be found in our col­lec­tion of Ideas & Cul­ture Pod­casts.)

Also, in case you missed them, you may want to review these recent selec­tions by The New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2007 and The 10 Best Books of 2007.

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Learning Foreign Languages the Mango Way

in English Language, Language Lessons | December 4th, 2007

What’s an easy way to learn a new lan­guage at no cost, when­ev­er and wher­ev­er you want? One is to take advan­tage of our exten­sive col­lec­tion of Free For­eign Lan­guage Lessons. Anoth­er is to check out Man­go Lan­guages, a web site that offers free online lan­guage cours­es that will teach you the basics in French, Ger­man, Eng­lish, Ital­ian, Span­ish, Man­darin Chi­nese, Japan­ese and more.

We’d usu­al­ly out­line the pros and cons of learn­ing lan­guages the Man­go Way. But there’s no rea­son to rein­vent the wheel. So we’re direct­ing your atten­tion to Jon Gor­don, the host of Future Tense, whose recent broad­cast took a short look at Man­go’s offer­ing. You can lis­ten to it here (MP3 — RealAu­dio — Feed) and read some more here. You can also access Future Tense on iTunes.

NOTE: To get start­ed with Man­go Lan­guages, you will need to reg­is­ter with the web­site.

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The 20 Best iPod Utilities

in Podcasts, Web/Tech | December 4th, 2007

Life­hack­er has assem­bled a great list that will help you max­i­mize the use of your iPod. Here, they point you to free soft­ware that will let you 1) rip a DVD to your iPod, 2) copy music and videos to and from your iPod, and also from and to any com­put­er, 3) load videos (and par­tic­u­lar­ly YouTube videos) to you iPod, 4) put Wikipedia on your iPod, 5) free your­self from using iTunes, 6) back­up your iPod, etc.

Check out the full list here and learn to make your iPod a bet­ter learning/entertainment tool.

PS: A very sim­i­lar list of iPod tips was pub­lished a few days ago over at Pachecus.com, and they were kind of enough to include a link to one of our old fea­tures. Have a look here too.

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James Joyce’s Dubliners: Four Stories

in Audio Books, Literature | December 2nd, 2007

Back in June, we high­light­ed the release of James Joyce’s Ulysses in free audio­book for­mat. Ulysses stands as Joyce’s most impor­tant work, and for some, it’s most the impor­tant work pub­lished in the Eng­lish lan­guage dur­ing the entire 20th cen­tu­ry. Despite Ulysses’ enor­mous stature, many read­ers still turn to Dublin­ers, a col­lec­tion of 15 short sto­ries that Joyce pub­lished in 1914, part­ly because it’s con­sid­ered his most acces­si­ble writ­ing. Over at Lib­rivox, you can find sev­er­al key sto­ries from this col­lec­tion — name­ly, The Sis­ters (mp3), Ara­by (mp3), Eve­line (mp3), and The Dead (mp3 in zip file). The Dead is the longest and last sto­ry in the col­lec­tion, and it’s a Christ­mas sto­ry, some say the “great­est of all Christ­mas sto­ries,” which makes it par­tic­u­lar­ly time­ly to men­tion here.

It’s worth not­ing that you can down­load the com­plete etext of Dublin­ers at Project Guten­berg or on Google Book Search. (The lat­ter ver­sion is clean­er.) And, if you can suf­fer through it, Guten­berg also offers a free audio ver­sion of Joyce’s text, which is read by a com­put­er, not a real per­son.

Last­ly, be sure to spend some time perus­ing Lib­rivox’s entire col­lec­tion of free audio­books. It’s the best on the web.

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MIT & Google for High School Students

in Google, Math, MIT | December 2nd, 2007

Here’s a quick fyi on two ini­tia­tives announced for high school stu­dents this past week:

For six years, MIT’s Open­Course­Ware ini­tia­tive has done a great job bring­ing free edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to adult learn­ers world­wide. (More on the ini­tia­tive here.) Now, it has launched a sec­tion of its web­site devot­ed to high school stu­dents and teach­ers. Here, you’ll find a series of “MIT intro­duc­to­ry cours­es” with­in 11 major areas of study (e.g. Engi­neer­ing, For­eign Lan­guages, Math, etc.). Plus, you can access infor­ma­tion that sup­ple­ments AP Biol­o­gy, Physics and Cal­cu­lus cours­es. This is a trove of mate­r­i­al that the ambi­tious stu­dent will cer­tain­ly want to explore.

Next, Google announced its first open source con­test for pre-uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents. Called the “Google High­ly Open Par­tic­i­pa­tion Con­test” (a bit of a mouth­ful), it’s intend­ed to “help intro­duce sec­ondary school and high school stu­dents to open source soft­ware devel­op­ment and to encour­age young peo­ple through oppor­tu­ni­ties in the fields of sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, engi­neer­ing, and math.” For more infor­ma­tion you can click here and here.

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