Yale Open Courses: The New Lineup

in Online Courses, Yale | October 16th, 2008

I want­ed to give every­one a heads up that Yale has just released its sec­ond round of “open cours­es.” And I have to say that the line­up looks great. Let me quick­ly list them for you:

• The Amer­i­can Nov­el Since 1945 (Amy Hunger­ford)
• Intro­duc­tion to Greek His­to­ry (Don­ald Kagan)
• Game The­o­ry (Ben Polak)
• Finan­cial Mar­kets (Robert Shiller)
• Mil­ton (John Rogers)
• France Since 1871 (John Mer­ri­man)
• The Civ­il War and Recon­struc­tion Era, 1845–1877 (David Blight)
• Fun­da­men­tals of Physics (Rama­mur­ti Shankar)
• Fron­tiers of Bio­med­ical Engi­neer­ing (W. Mark Saltz­man)

As always, each course fea­tures a syl­labus, read­ing assign­ments, class notes, and quite pol­ished lec­tures. The lec­tures can be down­loaded in one of five for­mats (text, audio, flash video, low band­width quick­time video, and high band­width quick­time video). And quite notably, Yale has designed the cours­es to be plat­form agnos­tic, mean­ing that you should be able to down­load the lec­tures to any com­put­er or mp3 play­er. For more on Yale’s Open Course ini­tia­tive, please vis­it its offi­cial web­site here. And please note that you can also find these cours­es in our larg­er col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es.

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The Geography of US Presidential Elections: Week 1

in Current Affairs | October 15th, 2008

As men­tioned last week, Stan­ford is host­ing a five week course, The Geog­ra­phy of US Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tions, that you can fol­low (for free) in real time. The first video lec­ture is now avail­able on iTunes (down­load here), and you can find it embed­ded below.

The first lec­ture is fast paced, and fea­tures intrigu­ing graph­ics that start to dis­man­tle the wide­ly held belief that the US can be neat­ly divid­ed into red and blue states. I will keep post­ing the lec­tures as the course unfolds. In the mean­time, I’d rec­om­mend vis­it­ing the course web site, and ask­ing the pro­fes­sor, Mar­tin Lewis, any ques­tions you might have.

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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

in Random | October 15th, 2008

Pre­sent­ed cre­ative­ly …

Noam Chomsky vs. William F. Buckley, 1969

in History, Video - Politics/Society | October 14th, 2008

Is there such a thing as the benign use of inter­na­tion­al force? It’s a ques­tion that Noam Chom­sky and William F. Buck­ley, lead­ing thinkers from the left and right, took up in 1969. And, of course, the whole ques­tion of Viet­nam loomed in the back­ground. As you’ll see below (and in Part 2 here) the debate is remark­ably civ­il. And when Buck­ley threat­ens to punch Chom­sky in the face, it’s said much more lov­ing­ly than when he offered to do the same to Gore Vidal in 1968.

As an inter­est­ing aside, when Buck­ley died ear­li­er this year, Chom­sky revis­it­ed the 1969 debate and Buck­ley’s lega­cy and essen­tial­ly saw him look­ing a lot bet­ter than his con­ser­v­a­tive heirs — although I’m not sure that Chom­sky was real­ly pass­ing along a deeply felt com­pli­ment 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!

Paul Krugman’s Nobel Prize in Economics

in Current Affairs, Economics | October 14th, 2008

Paul Krug­man is main­ly known in the States as an econ­o­mist who writes fre­quent­ly for The New York Times. Mean­while, few real­ly know much about his seri­ous aca­d­e­m­ic work. Now that’s he’s been award­ed the Nobel Prize, it’s worth giv­ing you a quick feel for it. Here’s Krug­man giv­ing you the gist in his own words (iTunes — Rss Feed — Stream).

Virtual Tour of the Forbidden City

in History | October 13th, 2008

Thanks to $3 mil­lion dol­lars from IBM and three years of effort, you can now down­load a vir­tu­al tour of Chi­na’s For­bid­den City. Based on gam­ing soft­ware, the project lets you take a three dimen­sion­al tour of the impe­r­i­al palace built dur­ing the mid-Ming Dynasty, start­ing in 1406 (get more info here).

Update: This was orig­i­nal­ly post­ed in 2008. It looks like the vir­tu­al tour has been tak­en offline.

via Metafil­ter

President Tours U.S To Survey Damage Caused By His Presidency

in Comedy | October 12th, 2008

Yeah, okay, I am get­ting off track here with this com­ic bit from The Onion, veer­ing from cul­ture to pol­i­tics. Sor­ry for the detour. I will get back on track tomor­row. Real­ly, I will…

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Saturday Night Live on AIG’s Bottomless Chutzpah

in Comedy | October 12th, 2008

It did­n’t take long for cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca to start brazen­ly shaft­ing the Amer­i­can tax­pay­er again. Just days after the gov­ern­ment spent $85 bil­lion bail­ing out AIG, the com­pa­ny shelled out $440,000 to send its execs to a South­ern Cal­i­for­nia resort. There a good $23,000 was spent on well-deserved spa treat­ments.

The cor­rup­tion has reached points where you just have to laugh (did you know that AIG’s CEO also gets a $5 mil­lion per­for­mance bonus?), and that’s what Sat­ur­day Night Live helps you do. Watch the video below and fast for­ward to the last two and a half min­utes.

PS In the com­ments, one of our read­ers has offered a defense of AIG. Your thoughts? 

YouTube Starts Airing Full-Length TV Shows

in Television | October 11th, 2008

First it was indie movies; now it’s clas­sic TV shows. Thanks to a deal with CBS, you can now watch clas­sic tele­vi­sion shows on YouTube.  Here, you’ll find Bev­er­ly Hills, 90210, Mac­Gyver, and even Star Trek — not exact­ly high-cul­ture, but you can’t win every time.

For more edi­fy­ing series of YouTube videos, see our piece: Intel­li­gent Life at YouTube: 75 Edu­ca­tion­al Video Col­lec­tions.

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Invitation to Stanford’s Course on the US Presidential Elections

in Online Courses, Stanford | October 10th, 2008

Here’s a project that a few col­leagues and I have had some fun devel­op­ing. So it only seems fair that I get the scoop, right?

Start­ing on Octo­ber 15, you can fol­low a time­ly, free course pre­sent­ed by Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty. Led by Mar­tin Lewis, the course will explore the geog­ra­phy of U.S. pres­i­den­tial elec­tions (both past and present), and chal­lenge the sug­ges­tion that we are sim­ply divid­ed into a “Red Amer­i­ca” and “Blue Amer­i­ca.” It’s real­ly much more com­pli­cat­ed than that, as the intro­duc­to­ry video below makes pret­ty clear. (Get the iTunes ver­sion here.)

The course will run five weeks, and it will include a debrief after the Novem­ber elec­tion. A new video (run­ning between 90 and 120 min­utes) will be post­ed every Wednes­day on iTunes and YouTube. And we’ve set up a web site for the course where you’ll be able to inter­act with the pro­fes­sor, and where you can also find a lot more infor­ma­tion, includ­ing a com­plete course descrip­tion and read­ings for the course. Once the course gets start­ed, I will post a reminder. In the mean­time, I want­ed to give you an advanced heads up and hope­ful­ly whet your appetites a bit.

Last­ly, I should men­tion that this course comes out of Stan­ford’s fine Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies pro­gram, and it will be even­tu­al­ly list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free Cours­es.

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