This American Life Demystifies the Housing/Credit Crisis

in Current Affairs, Most Popular | May 15th, 2008

There’s been no short­age of arti­cles try­ing to explain the ongo­ing hous­ing and mort­gage cri­sis. But none does a more clear and enter­tain­ing job than this recent episode of This Amer­i­can Life, “The Giant Pool of Mon­ey” (iTunes — Feed — MP3). Step by step, the show traces how we got into this mess. Along the way, you’ll dis­cov­er how 70 tril­lion dol­lars of glob­al mon­ey need­ed to get parked some­where, and it found the US hous­ing mar­ket. As the mon­ey poured in, the Amer­i­can invest­ment com­mu­ni­ty cranked out as many mort­gages as it could. And when there were no more qual­i­fied home buy­ers left, the banks start­ed low­er­ing lend­ing stan­dards until there were none left. In the end, even dead peo­ple were get­ting mort­gages (sad­ly, a true sto­ry). Give the pod­cast a lis­ten. The whole deba­cle gets pieced togeth­er in a way that you’ve prob­a­bly nev­er heard before.

For more details, look here.

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Burning Issues Inside the Arab World

in Current Affairs | May 14th, 2008

There’s noth­ing like a good debate to reveal the issues that mat­ter most to a soci­ety. And that’s what The Doha Debates have to offer — a good, nuanced look at the hottest issues in the Arab and Islam­ic worlds. The debates, which have been held in Qatar over the past three years, fol­low the for­mat used in the famous Oxford Union debates. And they’ve been aired over the BBC and have picked up a siz­able inter­na­tion­al fol­low­ing. (You can down­load the debates in video or via pod­cast from this page.) The speak­ers gen­er­al­ly include “aca­d­e­mics, politi­cians, reli­gious fig­ures, gov­ern­ment offi­cials, pol­i­cy experts and jour­nal­ists” and some of the recent top­ics debat­ed include the fol­low­ing (thanks Kirsten for the heads up on this):

• Is the Sun­ni-Shia con­flict dam­ag­ing Islam’s rep­u­ta­tion as a reli­gion of peace?
• Do the Pales­tini­ans risk becom­ing their own worst ene­my?
• Is the face veil a bar­ri­er to inte­gra­tion in the West?
• Should the Pales­tini­ans give up their full right of return?

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Steve Jobs: Wisdom for the New Graduate

in Uncategorized | May 12th, 2008

I like re-post­ing this from time to time, espe­cial­ly around com­mence­ment time: Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Com­put­er, deliv­ered this speech at Stan­ford’s com­mence­ment cer­e­mo­ny in June 2005, offer­ing some sim­ple guide­lines for liv­ing a mean­ing­ful life. Some­what iron­i­cal­ly, Jobs nev­er grad­u­at­ed from col­lege. But no mat­ter, there’s lots of good think­ing here, and the speech is well worth a lis­ten. We’ve post­ed the video below (and it’s added to our YouTube playlist), but you could also catch it on iTunes: video here, or audio here.

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Can a Novel Be Written Wikipedia Style? The Results Are In.

in Books | May 11th, 2008

The wis­dom of crowds con­cept works for writ­ing soft­ware. (Think open source.) But does it work for writ­ing nov­els? That’s what Pen­guin and De Mon­fort Uni­ver­si­ty (in the UK) want­ed to fig­ure out when they launched an exper­i­ment in Feb­ru­ary 2007 called “A Mil­lion Lit­tle Pen­guins.” Over the course of five weeks, rough­ly 1500 writ­ers draft­ed a col­lab­o­ra­tive nov­el using wiki soft­ware (the same one used by Wikipedia), and you can now view the com­plet­ed man­u­script here. So far the reviews are not over­whelm­ing. Accord­ing to one observ­er, “it’s inco­her­ent. You might get some­thing sim­i­lar if you took a stack of super­mar­ket check­out line pot­boil­ers and some Mad Libs and threw them in a blender.” And then there’s this pithy ver­dict by the snarky blog, Gawk­er: “The text itself is ter­ri­ble.” Ouch. But maybe some­one who is less reflex­ive­ly dis­mis­sive will have a dif­fer­ent view, though I would­n’t bet on it. Have a read here. Also see De Mont­fort’s post mortem of the project here.

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Shark Surfing: File Under Novel Ways to Spend Your Weekend

in Random | May 9th, 2008

Just when you’ve thought that you’ve seen it all … Fake or real? I am guess­ing it’s the lat­ter.

(PS This has noth­ing to do with things cul­tur­al.)

via The Dai­ly Dish

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Wikipedia Goes Commercial

in Media | May 7th, 2008

The Ger­man pub­lish­er Ber­tels­mann announced that it will pub­lish annu­al­ly a 1,000 page edi­tion of Wikipedia start­ing next Sep­tem­ber. To be called “The One-Vol­ume Wikipedia Ency­clo­pe­dia,” it will sell for 19.95 euros (or rough­ly $32 U.S.) and fea­ture some of the most pop­u­lar arti­cles from the Ger­man ver­sion of Wikipedia. One euro per copy will go back to Wiki­me­dia, which runs Wikipedia. But noth­ing, as Read­writeweb notes, will go to the writ­ers who actu­al­ly cre­ate the ency­clo­pe­dia entries.

Because Wikipedia is pub­lished under a free license, its con­tent can be freely used and com­mer­cial­ized. And that’s pre­cise­ly what Ber­tels­mann plans to do. In Wikipedia, Ber­tels­mann has found a moth­er­lode of free con­tent it. It can then mon­e­tize that con­tent, keep most of the prof­its (a pub­lish­er’s dream), and kick 5% back to Wiki­me­dia, most like­ly as a way to under­cut the crit­ics. It’s all per­haps legal. But does it feel a bit unseem­ly? Just a touch. Or maybe you dis­agree?

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Video Lectures for the Science Mind

in Science | May 6th, 2008

We talk a good deal here about free uni­ver­si­ty cours­es and lec­tures, and most­ly we end up talk­ing about the human­i­ties. But here’s a good excuse to talk about the sci­ences, and par­tic­u­lar­ly about com­put­er sci­ence. A project start­ed in Slove­nia, Videolectures.net pro­vides “free and open access of high qual­i­ty video lec­tures pre­sent­ed by dis­tin­guished schol­ars and sci­en­tists at the most impor­tant and promi­nent events…” Among the most pop­u­lar lec­tures, you’ll find lec­tures along these lines: Fuzzy Log­ic, Where the Social Web Meets the Seman­tic Web, and an Inter­view with Tim Bern­ers Lee. But, you’ll also stum­ble upon a few non-sci­en­tif­ic talks giv­en by some well known names. Take for exam­ple Noam Chom­sky (Force, law and the prospects of sur­vival) and Umber­to Eco (On The His­to­ry of Ugli­ness).

For more uni­ver­si­ty con­tent, vis­it our Uni­ver­si­ty Pod­cast Col­lec­tion and our list of Free Online Cours­es, which includes a good deal of sci­en­tif­ic con­tent. Also see our Sci­ence Pod­cast Col­lec­tion.

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Junot Diaz, New Pulitzer Prize Winner, Speaks @ Google

in Books | May 5th, 2008

Last week, Junot Diaz land­ed the Pulitzer Prize for fic­tion with his debut nov­el, The Brief Won­drous Life of Oscar Wao. The book, which Diaz took 11 years to write, also won the Nation­al Book Crit­ics Cir­cle Award for best nov­el of 2007. Below, we have Diaz speak­ing last year about his prize win­ning book at Google. (Get more Google author talks here.) You can also catch his inter­view on NPR’s Fresh air (iTunes — Feed — Stream here).

How Wikis (and Other Stuff) Work in Plain English

in Uncategorized | May 4th, 2008

This video gives you the quick gist of how wikis work, and it’s part of a larg­er series of videos on YouTube — called The Com­mon­craft Show — that explain the inner-work­ings of var­i­ous tech items. Recent videos delve into the mechan­ics of Twit­ter, RSS Feeds, social net­work­ing, and online pho­to shar­ing. We’ve added the video below to our YouTube playlist and the Com­mon­craft series to our larg­er col­lec­tion called 60 Signs of Intel­li­gent Life on YouTube. For oth­er good videos that demys­ti­fy things tech­ni­cal, you may want to check out this and this.

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This American Life on TV: Season II Starts Sunday

in Television | May 4th, 2008

A quick fyi: Sea­son 2 of the tele­vi­sion ver­sion of This Amer­i­can Life starts tonight at 10 pm on Show­time, and we’ve post­ed below the brief trail­er for the new show. Mean­while, the radio ver­sion remains the most down­loaded pod­cast on iTunes ( iTunes — Feed — Web Site). It has been that way for a long time. And you can always find it in our Ideas and Cul­ture Pod­cast Col­lec­tion.