What Would MLK Say About the USA Today?

in Current Affairs, History, Stanford | January 15th, 2010

What would Mar­tin Luther King Jr. think about Amer­i­ca in 2010? Few would know bet­ter than Clay­borne Car­son, the Stan­ford his­to­ri­an who directs the Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. Research and Edu­ca­tion Insti­tute. In this talk, Car­son describes MLK’s like­ly thoughts about Amer­i­ca dur­ing the Great Reces­sion. King cared deeply about eco­nom­ic jus­tice, and it’s clear that King would­n’t have looked unam­biva­lent­ly upon the inequal­i­ties that the finan­cial melt­down made so glar­ing­ly obvi­ous. Next week, the U.S. will cel­e­brate King’s birth­day and bankers will col­lect their record-set­ting bonus­es …

Note: Clay­borne Car­son is cur­rent­ly hold­ing Open Office Hours on Stan­ford’s Face­book Page. Be sure to vis­it. Also, Pro­fes­sor Car­son has taught an online course that you can freely down­load. It’s called African-Amer­i­can His­to­ry: Mod­ern Free­dom Strug­gle, and you can find it on YouTube and iTunes. It’s also the first course that appears in our col­lec­tion of Free Cours­es.

Vladimir Horowitz Plays Mozart Back in the USSR

in Music | January 13th, 2010

Vladimir Horowitz, one of the great pianists of the 20th cen­tu­ry, left Rus­sia to set­tle in the Unit­ed States in 1939. But, once the Cold War thawed, he famous­ly returned home and played before rapt audi­ences. What we have here, I believe, is Horowitz play­ing Mozart’s Sonata in C Major dur­ing a 1986 recital Moscow. A beau­ti­ful piece. For good mea­sure, I’ve also added Horowitz play­ing Chopin’s 2nd Piano Sonata at the White House. Both clips have been added to our YouTube favorites.

The Neurons That Shaped Civilization

in Science, TED Talks | January 13th, 2010

TED recent­ly took its show to India, and one of the more inter­est­ing pre­sen­ta­tions fea­tured neu­ro­sci­en­tist Vilaya­nur Ramachan­dran (UCSD) explain­ing how mir­ror neu­rons, a recent­ly dis­cov­ered sys­tem in the brain, “allow us to learn com­plex social behav­iors, some of which formed the foun­da­tions of human civ­i­liza­tion,” and also helped us evolve as a species. Good stuff. You can find more TED India Talks here.

Stanford Releases New iPhone App Development Course

in Apple, iPhone, Stanford | January 12th, 2010

Last year, Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty gave iPhone own­ers around the world a boost when it released a free iPhone App Devel­op­ment course (find it on iTunes). Mil­lions have since down­loaded the lec­tures, and many new iPhone apps have been cre­at­ed as a result. (Part­ly thanks to this course, we devel­oped our own Free iPhone App that gives you mobile access to our edu­ca­tion­al media col­lec­tions — free audio books, free uni­ver­si­ty cours­es, free lan­guage lessons, etc. Get our app here.)

This week, Stan­ford has start­ed rolling out a new App Devel­op­ment course (get it in video on iTunes), one adapt­ed to the new iPhone oper­at­ing sys­tem that Apple released last sum­mer. Two lec­tures have been released so far. More will get rolled out on a week­ly basis. Please note, these cours­es also appear in our col­lec­tion of Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es, a sub­set of our larg­er col­lec­tion of Free Cours­es from lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties.

How is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

in Life, Science, Technology | January 11th, 2010

Every year, The Edge.org pos­es a thought-pro­vok­ing ques­tion to 150+ engag­ing thinkers, and the answers nev­er dis­ap­point. This year, they throw out the ques­tion: How is the Inter­net Chang­ing the Way You Think? In this col­lec­tion, you will find answers by George Dyson, Clay Shirky, Tim O’Reil­ly, Maris­sa May­er, Richard Dawkins and many more. Below, I’ve includ­ed an excerpt from Nas­sim Taleb (author of The Black Swan), who has a less san­guine out­look on how the inter­net is chang­ing our world. He writes:

I used to think that the prob­lem of infor­ma­tion is that it turns homo sapi­ensinto fools — we gain dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly in con­fi­dence, par­tic­u­lar­ly in domains where infor­ma­tion is wrapped in a high degree of noise (say, epi­demi­ol­o­gy, genet­ics, eco­nom­ics, etc.). So we end up think­ing that we know more than we do, which, in eco­nom­ic life, caus­es fool­ish risk tak­ing. When I start­ed trad­ing, I went on a news diet and I saw things with more clar­i­ty. I also saw how peo­ple built too many the­o­ries based on ster­ile news, the fooled by ran­dom­ness effect. But things are a lot worse. Now I think that, in addi­tion, the sup­ply and spread of infor­ma­tion turns the world into Extrem­is­tan (a world I describe as one in which ran­dom vari­ables are dom­i­nat­ed by extremes, with Black Swans play­ing a large role in them). The Inter­net, by spread­ing infor­ma­tion, caus­es an increase in inter­de­pen­dence, the exac­er­ba­tion of fads (best­sellers like Har­ry Pot­ter and runs on the banks become plan­e­tary). Such world is more “com­plex”, more moody, much less pre­dictable.

So con­sid­er the explo­sive sit­u­a­tion: more infor­ma­tion (par­tic­u­lar­ly thanks to the Inter­net) caus­es more con­fi­dence and illu­sions of knowl­edge while degrad­ing pre­dictabil­i­ty.

You can find Tale­b’s full answer here, and the entire col­lec­tion of thoughts here. If you want to tell us how the inter­net has changed the world for you, please add your thoughts to the com­ments sec­tion below.

Experiments in Publishing: Kindle Rush Results

in Amazon Kindle, Books, Business, e-books | January 11th, 2010

Click here to lis­ten to this post as audio. (Right-click to down­load.)

As some of you already know, back on Decem­ber 27th, I released a sam­ple of my first short sto­ry col­lec­tion A Long Way from Dis­ney on Amazon’s Kin­dle store and used social media strate­gies to mar­ket it. I did this for var­i­ous rea­sons, but main­ly because, as I’ve said here on OC before, I believe authors need to take on the role of sci­en­tists and exper­i­ment with what’s pos­si­ble in today’s pub­lish­ing world. (If you’re inter­est­ed in how I pub­li­cized this, see my recent posts at AuthorBootCamp.com.)

From a sci­en­tif­ic point of view, the exper­i­ment was a great suc­cess. I learned a great deal, which I’ll dis­cuss below. I sold a lot of books (at $.99 each)–around 350 in the first week–and I got my name and sto­ries in front of a lot of new peo­ple. I also heard from a num­ber of them who read the book right away and real­ly loved it! For you authors out there, I hope you can relate: Get­ting pos­i­tive feed­back on your work from total strangers is about the best feed­back there is.

[For those of you keep­ing score at home, those sales put $260 into Amazon’s pock­et and $140 into mine. Not too shab­by, I think, but also not the split an author might hope for.]

Okay, with­out any fur­ther delay: Here are the Results (what I’ve learned) from Exper­i­ment 1:

1)   Timing can be essen­tial. I posi­tioned myself to hit the Kin­dle store just after Xmas, think­ing that with many new­ly gift­ed Kin­dles out there, a lot more Kin­dle ebooks would be sell­ing and that I could cash in on this rush. I was cor­rect in this pre­dic­tion (Ama­zon sold more ebooks than paper copies over Christ­mas), but what I didn’t pre­dict was how much hard­er this made it to reach the Top 100 Kin­dle best­seller list, a goal I had set for myself. I want­ed to hit the Top 100 because it would give the book addi­tion­al expo­sure and stim­u­late more buy­ing from new­bie Kin­dle own­ers look­ing for quick, cheap con­tent. (more…)

Modern Physics: A Free 6‑Course Introduction by Stanford’s Leonard Susskind

in Physics, Science | January 9th, 2010

For the past two years, Stan­ford has been rolling out a series of cours­es (col­lec­tive­ly called Mod­ern Physics: The The­o­ret­i­cal Min­i­mum) that gives you a base­line knowl­edge for think­ing intel­li­gent­ly about mod­ern physics. The sequence, which moves from Isaac New­ton, to Albert Einstein’s work on the gen­er­al and spe­cial the­o­ries of rel­a­tiv­i­ty, to black holes and string the­o­ry, comes out of Stanford’s Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies pro­gram. And the cours­es are all taught by Leonard Susskind, an impor­tant physi­cist who has engaged in a long run­ning “Black Hole War” with Stephen Hawk­ing. The final course, Sta­tis­ti­cal Mechan­ics, has now been post­ed on YouTube. The rest of the cours­es can be accessed imme­di­ate­ly below. (The cours­es also appear in our list of Free Online Physics Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.) Six cours­es. Rough­ly 120 hours of con­tent. A com­pre­hen­sive tour of mod­ern physics. All in video. All free. Beat that.

Mod­ern Physics: The The­o­ret­i­cal Min­i­mum

• Clas­si­cal Mechan­ics — YouTube
• Quan­tum Mechan­ics — YouTube
• Spe­cial Rel­a­tiv­i­ty — YouTube
• Ein­stein’s Gen­er­al The­o­ry of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty — YouTube
• Cos­mol­o­gy — YouTube
• Sta­tis­ti­cal Mechan­ics — YouTube

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics, The Most Pop­u­lar Physics Book Ever Writ­ten, Is Now Com­plete­ly Online

What Made Richard Feyn­man One of the Most Admired Edu­ca­tors in the World

‘The Char­ac­ter of Phys­i­cal Law’: Richard Feynman’s Leg­endary Course Pre­sent­ed at Cor­nell, 1964

The Kurosawa Digital Archive

in Film | January 7th, 2010

Our col­lec­tion of Free Online Movies is the gift that keeps on giv­ing. It led us unex­pect­ed­ly to dis­cov­er the wealth of World War II pro­pa­gan­da films made by some of Amer­i­ca’s great­est direc­tors. It also turned up (among oth­er things) the Kuro­sawa Dig­i­tal Archive. Opened last year by Kyoto’s Ryukoku Uni­ver­si­ty, the archive hon­ors Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, Japan’s cel­e­brat­ed film­mak­er who brought us The Sev­en Samu­rai, Rashomon, Ikiru, etc. and won an Oscar for Life­time Achieve­ment in 1989. What will you find here? A good 20,000 items. Screen­plays, man­u­scripts, pho­tos, sketch­es, news­pa­per clip­pings, notes, etc. You won’t find a larg­er Kuro­sawa col­lec­tion on the web. The one down­side is that you’ll need to read Japan­ese to take full advan­tage of the archive. But even if you have no Japan­ese under your belt, you can still surf the site, click on ran­dom links, and expe­ri­ence a good deal of what the archive offers.

Hot Action: Comet Gets Eaten by the Sun

in Science | January 5th, 2010

Two days ago, NASA’s Solar and Helio­scop­ic Obser­va­to­ry (SOHO) cap­tured a comet doing its best Icarus imi­ta­tion. You can see the comet’s mis­step at the end of the clip above. You can also find still shots over at the Dai­ly Mail.

Michael Sandel: Our Bodies in the Marketplace

in Philosophy | January 4th, 2010

Last year, Michael Sandel made a splash when he put online his pop­u­lar Har­vard phi­los­o­phy course, Jus­tice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? Over the past 30 years, more than 14,000 Har­vard stu­dents have tak­en his course. And now you can access the course online at no cost. (Details here.) In recent days, Sandel has sur­faced one again, this time on Phi­los­o­phy Bites (iTunes — Feed — Web Site), a British pod­cast that fea­tures top philoso­phers being inter­viewed on bite-sized top­ics. In this con­ver­sa­tion (lis­ten here or below), Sandel and Nigel War­bur­ton tack­le some big ques­tions: What are the lim­its of free mar­ket think­ing, espe­cial­ly when it comes to what we can do with our bod­ies in the mar­ket­place? Can we sell blood con­sen­su­al­ly? Per­haps. But what about sell­ing our kid­neys on the open mar­ket? Or “rent­ing wombs”? (There are whole vil­lages in India where women act as “paid sur­ro­gates” for West­ern cou­ples.) Or what about con­sen­su­al pros­ti­tu­tion? Or engag­ing, how­ev­er will­ing­ly, in degrad­ing forms of wage labor? Are these inher­ent free­doms, as some free market/libertarian thinkers might hold? Or do these acts vio­late our col­lec­tive sense of the “good life”? And do they dimin­ish our free­doms in some kind of larg­er sense? The con­ver­sa­tion gets more heat­ed (in a good way) as it goes along. Give it some time, hang with it, and see what you think. For more phi­los­o­phy, see our col­lec­tion of Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es.