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Free Online Computer Science Courses

in | December 23rd, 2009

Get free Com­put­er Sci­ence cours­es online from the world’s lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties. You can down­load these audio & video cours­es straight to your com­put­er or mp3 play­er. For more online cours­es, vis­it our com­plete col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

For a com­plete list of online cours­es, please vis­it our com­plete col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

For a list of online cer­tifi­cate pro­grams, vis­it 200 Online Cer­tifi­cate & Micro­cre­den­tial Pro­grams from Lead­ing Uni­ver­si­ties & Com­pa­nies, which fea­tures pro­grams from our part­ners Cours­era, Udac­i­ty, Future­Learn and edX.

And if you’re inter­est­ed in Online Mini-Mas­ters and Mas­ter’s Degrees pro­grams from uni­ver­si­ties, see our col­lec­tion: Online Degrees & Mini Degrees: Explore Mas­ters, Mini Mas­ters, Bach­e­lors & Mini Bach­e­lors from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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Free Online Biology Courses

in | December 23rd, 2009

Get free Biol­o­gy cours­es from the world’s lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties.  You can down­load these audio & video cours­es straight to your com­put­er or mp3 play­er. For more online cours­es, vis­it our com­plete col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

For a com­plete list of online cours­es, please vis­it our com­plete col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

For a list of online cer­tifi­cate pro­grams, vis­it 200 Online Cer­tifi­cate & Micro­cre­den­tial Pro­grams from Lead­ing Uni­ver­si­ties & Com­pa­nies, which fea­tures pro­grams from our part­ners Cours­era, Udac­i­ty, Future­Learn and edX.

And if you’re inter­est­ed in Online Mini-Mas­ters and Mas­ter’s Degrees pro­grams from uni­ver­si­ties, see our col­lec­tion: Online Degrees & Mini Degrees: Explore Mas­ters, Mini Mas­ters, Bach­e­lors & Mini Bach­e­lors from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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Making Books Free: David Pogue’s Experiment

in e-books | December 22nd, 2009

He’s a tech­nol­o­gy colum­nist for The New York Times, and the author of many pop­u­lar tech­nol­o­gy man­u­als. And today, David Pogue writes about an exper­i­ment he con­duct­ed last year, test­ing the hypoth­e­sis that free e‑books can dri­ve sales of print copies (rather than eat into them). How did it work out? He writes:

My pub­lish­er, O’Reil­ly, decid­ed to try an exper­i­ment, offer­ing one of my Win­dows books for sale as an unpro­tect­ed PDF file. After a year, we could com­pare the results with the pre­vi­ous year’s sales. The results? It was true. The thing was pirat­ed to the skies. It’s all over the Web now, ridicu­lous­ly easy to down­load with­out pay­ing. The crazy thing was, sales of the book did not fall. In fact, sales rose slight­ly dur­ing that year. That’s not a per­fect, all-vari­ables-equal exper­i­ment, of course; any num­ber of fac­tors could explain the results. But for sure, it was­n’t the dis­as­ter I’d feared.

A nice con­clu­sion. But then the next ques­tion. Will free e‑books do any­thing good for e‑books being sold on the Kindle/Nook/Sony Read­er? Still an open ques­tion…

Final­ly, speak­ing of ebooks, we’ve just launched our new col­lec­tion of Free eBooks. It includes over 100 free e‑books, most­ly clas­sics, that you can read on your com­put­er, smart phone (iPhone/Android), or Kin­dle. Please take a look (also read the relat­ed eBook primer) and offer any feed­back you might have.

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The Bohr-Einstein Debates, Reenacted With Dog Puppets

in Physics | December 22nd, 2009

Boing­Bo­ing is run­ning a piece this morn­ing on Chad Orzel’s new book, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. It’s good stuff, and it reminds me that Orzel also recent­ly released a video that re-enacts the famous Bohr-Ein­stein debates, with, yes, dog pup­pets. You can watch above. Or, alter­na­tive­ly, you can get it on YouTube in three parts: here, here and here.

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!

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Experiments in Publishing (Take 1)

in Amazon Kindle, Books, e-books, Literature | December 21st, 2009

Those who read this blog reg­u­lar­ly may remem­ber my past posts (here, here and here) about the Ama­zon Kin­dle and recall that I have mixed feel­ings about it. You’ll also know that I’ve been inter­est­ed in what authors such as J.A. Kon­rath have accom­plished by releas­ing books on the Kin­dle itself. (Heck, some of you even knew about Konrath’s suc­cess­es before I did.—Thanks Kurt.) And now, since recent­ly becom­ing a hap­py Kin­dle own­er myself, I’ve decid­ed it’s time to make an exper­i­ment in this new fold. So let me tell you about it.

Pub­lish­ing Exper­i­ment 1: If we know any­thing for sure about pub­lish­ing right now, it’s that it is chang­ing. Authors, I believe, must become the sci­en­tists run­ning exper­i­ments with new tech­nol­o­gy, new pub­lic­i­ty strate­gies, mar­ket­ing, you name it. There’s just too much mon­ey involved for the big (and some small) press­es to car­ry out the kind of test­ing and idea-try­ing that needs to be done. That leaves us inde­pen­dent authors to try things out on our own.

In that spir­it, I’m releas­ing a col­lec­tion of short sto­ries in the Kin­dle for­mat just after Christ­mas. A Long Way from Dis­ney is offi­cial­ly out now, but I’m “releas­ing it” on Sun­day Dec. 27th, a day I’m call­ing Dis­ney Com­man­do Sun­day! The think­ing here is that by ask­ing peo­ple to all buy the book on a sin­gle day, I can go after the top of Ama­zon’s Kin­dle best­seller chart and gar­ner more atten­tion (sales) there, espe­cial­ly with the after-Xmas new Kin­dle own­ers.

I’ve priced the col­lec­tion low ($.99) because I’m more inter­est­ed in how many copies of the book I can get out there than in how much mon­ey I can make off of sales. For those who’ll be count­ing, the $.99 price point will give me 35 cents and Ama­zon a hefty 64 cents per book sold. They’ll win out regard­less, but it’s their sand­box and I want to play.

You can buy this Kin­dle book on any com­put­er once you’ve estab­lished a Kin­dle read­er preference/Kindle account. You have three choic­es here. You can do this with:

1) An actu­al Kin­dle. 2) An iPhone run­ning the Kin­dle App (down­load) or 3) Any PC run­ning the new Ama­zon Kin­dle soft­ware for PC (down­load here).

You can­not buy the Kin­dle book for any­one else, and no one can buy more than one copy. It’s cer­tain­ly an inter­est­ing set of rules, isn’t it? Well, this is what Ama­zon has set up. If you’d like to aid this exper­i­ment, please for­ward this blog post to oth­er authors, read­ers, Kin­dle own­ers, and exper­i­menters in the pub­lish­ing field. It should be inter­est­ing to see what this can gen­er­ate with a min­i­mum of pub­lic­i­ty and zero bud­get.

If you’d like to sam­ple any of the short sto­ries from this col­lec­tion, you can hear any/all of them free online at my web­site and find out more about the Kin­dle exper­i­ment here. I hope you’ll choose to come along and help make some waves with this idea. I do think that the more suc­cess­es inde­pen­dent authors have with this new means of get­ting things done, the bet­ter it will be for all of pub­lish­ing. Per­haps that’ll be our next debate.

I’ll be back lat­er this week with a few sto­ries from the col­lec­tion and then again next Sun­day for the big sales kick­off! See you…

Seth Har­wood pod­casts his ideas on the pub­lish­ing indus­try and his fic­tion for free at sethharwood.com. He will be teach­ing an online course (The Essen­tial Art: Mak­ing Movies in Your Read­er’s Mind) with Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies start­ing in Jan­u­ary. His first nov­el, JACK WAKES UP, is in stores now.

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Our Known Universe in Six Minutes

in Science | December 18th, 2009

The Amer­i­can Muse­um of Nat­ur­al His­to­ry gives you the whole enchi­la­da in six min­utes. The film, mov­ing from Plan­et Earth to the Big Bang, is part of an exhi­bi­tion, Visions of the Cos­mos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolv­ing Uni­verse, appear­ing at the Rubin Muse­um of Art in Man­hat­tan through May 2010. If you’re in New York, con­sid­er vis­it­ing the Hay­den Plan­e­tar­i­um and get­ting the full expe­ri­ence. Learn more about how to vis­it here.

Thanks @infoman

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Disruptive Technology: Student Brings Typewriter to Class

in Comedy, Web/Tech | December 17th, 2009

A lit­tle case of dis­rup­tive tech­nol­o­gy in Com­put­er Sci­ence 1301 at Geor­gia Tech…

via Andrew Baron

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Orhan Pamuk Reads Vladimir Nabokov

in Audio Books, Literature | December 14th, 2009

nabokov quiz

Image by Giuseppe Pino, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

If you don’t already know about it, The New York­er Fic­tion Pod­cast (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) fea­tures authors read­ing the works of oth­er major authors. One of the lat­est and great­est exam­ples: Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 win­ner of the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture, read­ing from Vladimir Nabokov’s “My Russ­ian Edu­ca­tion” (MP3 — iTunes — RSS Feed).

With­in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books, we have sev­er­al oth­er good reads from this series, includ­ing Paul Ther­oux read­ing Borges, Jef­frey Eugenides read­ing Harold Brod­key, Richard Ford read­ing John Cheev­er, and T. Cor­aghes­san Boyle read­ing Tobias Wolff.

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!

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Classic French Films Online (for the UK)

in Film | December 14th, 2009

frenchfilmsA quick item for UK read­ers. (Did you know that we get more vis­i­tors from Lon­don than any oth­er city each day?) Start­ing Tues­day, theauteurs.com will be fea­tur­ing clas­sic French films from the 1960s. Each day brings a new film, and the vir­tu­al film fes­ti­val includes Truf­faut’s Les qua­tre cents coups, Alain Resnais’ Hiroshi­ma, Mon Amour, Godard­’s Mas­culin féminin: 15 faits pré­cis and anoth­er Truf­faut film, Jules et Jim. Sev­en days, sev­en free films, all sub­ti­tled. Get the full sched­ule here. For those out­side the UK, you can find some con­so­la­tion in our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online. It now fea­tures over 130 films direct­ed by Kuro­sawa, Hitch­cock, Capra, Cop­po­la, Scors­ese, Taran­ti­no, and oth­ers, plus 35 sites where you can watch free movies online. If we’re miss­ing any­thing good, please let us know.

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Paul Samuelson: How I Became an Economist

in Economics | December 14th, 2009

Paul Samuel­son, Amer­i­ca’s first Nobel lau­re­ate in eco­nom­ics, died this week­end at age 94. In 2003, Samuel­son wrote a short essay called How I Became an Econ­o­mist.  What caught my eye is the last line: “Always, I have been over­paid to do what has been pure fun.” We should all be lucky enough to achieve that.

To give you a bet­ter feel for Samuel­son’s con­tri­bu­tions to eco­nom­ics, I have includ­ed an NPR inter­view with Paul Krug­man, anoth­er Amer­i­can recip­i­ent of the Nobel Prize in eco­nom­ics. You can lis­ten below.

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