Give Librivox a Hand

in Audio Books | February 24th, 2010

Per­haps you’re already famil­iar with Lib­rivox. If not, you should be. Lib­rivox pro­vides over 3000 free audio books. The books (all in the pub­lic domain) are record­ed by a pas­sion­ate com­mu­ni­ty of vol­un­teers, and they’re all made freely avail­able to you. (See their cat­a­logue here.) Mil­lions of peo­ple have down­loaded their books. And, as you can imag­ine, the web host­ing costs can run quite high. For the first time in 4+ years, Lib­rivox is look­ing to raise some mon­ey. Please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion, how­ev­er small or large, and sup­port this very worth­while project.  You can find more infor­ma­tion and donate here.

The Deepest Part of the Ocean — To Scale!

in Science | February 24th, 2010

The Mar­i­ana Trench is the deep­est part of the ocean and also the low­est known ele­va­tion on earth, plung­ing down some 36,200 feet. This graph­ic, sent along by Bill and Ian, puts the Trench into per­spec­tive, allow­ing you to see it in scale just how low it goes…

Bernstein Breaks Down Beethoven

in Music, Television | February 23rd, 2010

In the mid-1950s, the Amer­i­can com­pos­er Leonard Bern­stein made sev­er­al appear­ances on Omnibus, a tele­vi­sion show ded­i­cat­ed to cov­er­ing the sci­ences, arts and human­i­ties. Dur­ing his vis­its, Bern­stein walked audi­ences through the art of mak­ing music. Take for exam­ple the clip above where he breaks down the mak­ing of Beethoven’s Fifth Sym­pho­ny. Just how did Beethoven craft it? And what deci­sions did he need to make along the way? What parts to include? And not to include? You can see the pro­gram here. Oth­er episodes focus on the work of Bach, and also the worlds of Jazz, Opera, Amer­i­can Musi­cals, and the con­duc­tor’s craft. Hap­pi­ly, all sev­en of Bern­stein’s appear­ances have been col­lect­ed in a new­ly released DVD col­lec­tion, which you can find on Ama­zon. Hat tip to Mike.

via The New York Times

Kindle Experiment Falls Flat at Princeton

in Amazon Kindle, e-books, Education | February 23rd, 2010

Last fall, Prince­ton launched a small exper­i­ment, replac­ing tra­di­tion­al text­books with the Kin­dle DX, Ama­zon’s large e‑book read­er. Almost from the begin­ning, the 50 stu­dents par­tic­i­pat­ing in the pilot pro­gram expressed dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the devices. Yes­ter­day, a uni­ver­si­ty report offered some more defin­i­tive find­ings. On the upside, stu­dents using the Kin­dle DX end­ed up using far less paper. (Paper con­sump­tion was gen­er­al­ly reduced by 54%.) On the down­side, stu­dents com­plained that the Kin­dle was fun­da­men­tal­ly “ill-suit­ed for class read­ings.” As one stu­dent put it:

I expect­ed it to be a real­ly use­ful tool that would enhance my expe­ri­ence, but it has hin­dered my stud­ies in a lot of dif­fer­ent ways… I wasn’t able to absorb the mate­r­i­al as well as if I had hard copies of the read­ings, and I had to deal with a lot of tech­ni­cal incon­ve­niences just from the design of the Kin­dle.

For more, give the Dai­ly Prince­ton­ian a read.

via @jryoung

MIT LED Helicopters: The Early Smart Pixels

in Science | February 22nd, 2010

Imag­ine a TV dis­play that con­tains mil­lions of “smart pix­els” that can move into dif­fer­ent places and reli­ably cre­ate 3D images? That’s what researchers at an MIT research lab are cur­rent­ly doing. But, in the absence of real smart pix­els, they’re using “remote­ly con­trolled micro-heli­copters that can be chore­o­graphed elec­tron­i­cal­ly to dis­play shapes and images.” (Read more about this in Wired.) The clip above offers a two minute demo of the “Fly­fire” project, show­ing the micro-heli­copters in action…

The Remixable Textbook

in e-books, Education | February 22nd, 2010

This morn­ing, Macmil­lan announced a new kind of text­book — a remix­able elec­tron­ic text­book that will give pro­fes­sors, accord­ing the New York Times, the abil­i­ty “to reor­ga­nize or delete chap­ters; upload course syl­labus­es, notes, videos, pic­tures and graphs; and per­haps most notably, rewrite or delete indi­vid­ual para­graphs, equa­tions or illus­tra­tions.” Essen­tial­ly, Macmil­lan pro­vides the core text, and then pro­fes­sors get to cus­tomize the book to their lik­ing. This remix­ing is a def­i­nite plus. But what’s even bet­ter? This new line of text­book, dubbed Dynam­ic­Books, will reduce costs for stu­dents, bring­ing a book tra­di­tion­al­ly priced at $150 down to a much san­er $47. Per­fect for the lean years. For more details, read this longer piece in Pub­lish­ers Week­ly.

See our young and grow­ing col­lec­tion of Free Text­books.

Classical Bits

in Music | February 21st, 2010

A few resources for clas­si­cal music lovers. They come rec­om­mend­ed by Robert B, one of our faith­ful read­ers.

• ArsAntiguaPresents.com offers a series of free audio pro­grams of music from the Renais­sance, Baroque, and Clas­si­cal eras, all per­formed on peri­od instru­ments. This mon­th’s edi­tion focus­es on Mozart’s Salzburg Sym­phonies. You can start lis­ten­ing via mp3 right here.
• Art of the States fea­tures work by Amer­i­can com­posers that can be oth­er­wise hard to find. To get a quick taste, you can start lis­ten­ing to works by John Cage right here.
• Final­ly, the Petruc­ci Music Library is the largest and most active site ded­i­cat­ed to offer­ing free, down­load­able clas­si­cal music scores. Want the com­plete score for Bach’s Bran­den­burg Con­cer­tos? You can start here.

Google Lit Trips

in Google, Literature | February 19th, 2010

For three years, Eng­lish teacher Jerome Burg has been using Google Earth to teach lit­er­a­ture. Each “Lit Trip” involves map­ping the move­ments of char­ac­ters over a plot’s time­line and pro­vid­ing excerpts, pic­tures, and links at each loca­tion. I found a lit trip for one of my favorite nov­els, Cor­mac McCarthy’s Blood Merid­i­an, which involves a lot of move­ment across the old West. McCarthy him­self is said to have spent years trac­ing these paths and study­ing loca­tions in prepa­ra­tion for writ­ing the nov­el. You’ll find a com­plete list of lit trips here, includ­ing such clas­sics as Mac­beth, Por­trait of the Artist as a Young Man, and The Odyssey. It’s dif­fi­cult to get a sense of the fan­tas­tic effect of visu­al­ly unpack­ing a plot with­out down­load­ing a lit trip and try­ing it with­in Google Earth (down­load here). But here’s a video of a lit trip for Make Way for Duck­lings by Robert McCloskey. It will give you a quick taste of the lit trip expe­ri­ence:

Final­ly, you can find a two-part video intro­duc­tion to Lit Trips by Kate Reavey, a pro­fes­sor at Penin­su­la Col­lege, here and here.

Wes Alwan lives in Boston, Mass­a­chu­setts, where he works as a writer and researcher and attends the Insti­tute for the Study of Psy­cho­analy­sis and Cul­ture. He also par­tic­i­pates in The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life, a pod­cast con­sist­ing of infor­mal dis­cus­sions about philo­soph­i­cal texts by three phi­los­o­phy grad­u­ate school dropouts.

The Stanford Mini Med School: Visit the Web Site

in Science, Stanford | February 18th, 2010

Back in Jan­u­ary, we gave you a heads up about a new course avail­able online: The Stan­ford Mini Med School. Now it’s time for a quick update: the Stan­ford School of Med­i­cine has launched a hand­some web site that con­ve­nient­ly cen­tral­izes the video lec­tures in one place. 10 lec­tures (from the Fall term) now appear. Even­tu­al­ly, anoth­er 20 lec­tures will get post­ed. You can start watch­ing here.

For more cours­es, vis­it this big list of Free Online Cours­es from top uni­ver­si­ties.

Bill Gates on Energy: Innovating to Zero!

in Current Affairs, Science, TED Talks | February 18th, 2010

The major TED con­fer­ence wrapped up late last week. And now the videos start to roll out. Above Bill Gates (to quote TED) “unveils his vision for the world’s ener­gy future, describ­ing the need for mir­a­cles to avoid plan­e­tary cat­a­stro­phe and explain­ing why he’s back­ing a dra­mat­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent type of nuclear reac­tor. The nec­es­sary goal? Zero car­bon emis­sions glob­al­ly by 2050.”