The Open v. Closed Culture Smackdown

in Media, Web/Tech | January 30th, 2010

Nina Paley and Jaron Lanier are fac­ing off in a friend­ly, pub­lic radio smack­down, debat­ing the pros and cons of open/free cul­ture. (Lis­ten to the audio below). As a quick refresh­er, Nina Paley got a good amount of press last year when she cre­at­ed Sita Sings the Blues, a prize-win­ning ani­mat­ed film, and then released it to the pub­lic under a Cre­ative Com­mons license. Jaron Lanier, mean­while, is often called the “father of vir­tu­al­i­ty,” and his new book, You Are Not a Gad­get, takes a fair­ly hard­line stance against Web 2.0 and the free/open cul­ture move­ment it engen­dered. And now the debate record­ed by WNYC in NYC:

NOTE: You can find Sita Sings the Blues (and 125 oth­er films) in our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.

Lessig on Political Corruption in America

in Current Affairs, Law, Politics | January 25th, 2010

Pub­lic con­fi­dence in the U.S. House and Sen­ate is at an all-time low, and, after last week’s Supreme Court deci­sion, it’s bound to sink even low­er. On Jan­u­ary 19th (the day before the deci­sion), Har­vard law pro­fes­sor Lawrence Lessig returned to Stan­ford and high­light­ed the degree to which “insti­tu­tion­al cor­rup­tion” — in the form of lob­by­ists and cor­po­rate influ­ence — per­vades Con­gress, dic­tates leg­is­la­tion, and brings large sums of mon­ey to cam­paigns and, yes, even rep­re­sen­ta­tives’ per­son­al bank accounts. (Rough­ly 50% of U.S. Sen­a­tors become lob­by­ists, work­ing for indus­tries they once assist­ed polit­i­cal­ly, and earn sub­stan­tial incomes.) The talk, accom­pa­nied by a rapid fire Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion, runs a sol­id hour and details var­i­ous instances in which lob­by­ists have shaped unfath­omably bad leg­is­la­tion. Hap­pi­ly, the talk also ends with Lessig out­lin­ing pos­si­ble solu­tions. Pol­i­cy changes can offer some answers. But, a lot of it comes down to this: get­ting the pas­sive priv­i­leged to rein in a cor­rupt­ed elite.

Note: To see Lessig’s imme­di­ate response to the SCOTUS deci­sion, look here.

Introduction to New Testament History and Literature: A Free Yale Course

in Religion, Yale | January 24th, 2010

Taught by Yale pro­fes­sor Dale B. Mar­tin, this course offers an intro­duc­tion to New Tes­ta­ment His­to­ry and Lit­er­a­ture, and cov­ers the fol­low­ing ground:

This course pro­vides a his­tor­i­cal study of the ori­gins of Chris­tian­i­ty by ana­lyz­ing the lit­er­a­ture of the ear­li­est Chris­t­ian move­ments in his­tor­i­cal con­text, con­cen­trat­ing on the New Tes­ta­ment. Although the­o­log­i­cal themes will occu­py much of our atten­tion, the course does not attempt a the­o­log­i­cal appro­pri­a­tion of the New Tes­ta­ment as scrip­ture. Rather, the impor­tance of the New Tes­ta­ment and oth­er ear­ly Chris­t­ian doc­u­ments as ancient lit­er­a­ture and as sources for his­tor­i­cal study will be empha­sized. A cen­tral orga­niz­ing theme of the course will focus on the dif­fer­ences with­in ear­ly Chris­tian­i­ty (-ies).

You can watch the 26 lec­tures from the course above, or find them on YouTube and iTunes. To get more infor­ma­tion on the course, includ­ing the syl­labus, vis­it this Yale web­site.

Intro­duc­tion to New Tes­ta­ment His­to­ry and Lit­er­a­ture will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties. There you can find a spe­cial­ized list of Free Online Reli­gion Cours­es.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Test Your Awareness

in Life | January 22nd, 2010

So how did you do?

Thanks Scott for the tip on that one.

Jared Diamond Explains Haiti’s Enduring Poverty

in Current Affairs, History | January 21st, 2010

Jared Dia­mond, the Pulitzer Prize-win­ning author of Guns, Germs & Steel (and Col­lapse: How Soci­eties Choose to Fail or Suc­ceed), offers some time­ly thoughts on why Haiti, once a fair­ly pros­per­ous coun­try, has sunk into endur­ing pover­ty — a con­di­tion not com­par­a­tive­ly shared by its neigh­bor on the same island, the Domini­can Repub­lic. Accord­ing to Dia­mond, Haiti’s envi­ron­men­tal con­di­tions offer a par­tial expla­na­tion. But you will also find clues in the coun­try’s lan­guage, and in the lega­cy of slav­ery that has shaped Haiti’s eco­nom­ic rela­tion­ship with Europe and the US. This inter­view — quite a good one — aired this morn­ing in San Fran­cis­co. You can lis­ten to it below, or access it via MP3,  iTunes or RSS Feed.

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

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

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…

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.

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