Stanford Launches YouTube Channel; Oprah Gives Graduation Speech

Today, Stan­ford is offi­cial­ly launch­ing its YouTube chan­nel (get it here). Among the videos, you will find Oprah Win­frey’s com­mence­ment speech (giv­en this week­end) and oth­er grad­u­a­tion speech­es from recent years. From there, you can peruse the larg­er video col­lec­tion. Notably, the chan­nel offers access to some com­plete cours­es, includ­ing Clay Car­son­’s African-Amer­i­can His­to­ry: Mod­ern Free­dom Strug­gle and Leonard Susskind’s two cours­es on mod­ern Physics — Clas­si­cal Mechan­ics and Quan­tum Mechan­ics. (Four more Susskind cours­es trac­ing the arc of mod­ern physics will fol­low.)

The Stan­ford Chan­nel also fea­tures many indi­vid­ual speeches/lectures that cur­rent­ly have a strong bent toward sci­ence and busi­ness. (You’ll like­ly find the human­i­ties and social sci­ences get­ting bet­ter rep­re­sent­ed over time.) One par­tic­u­lar video worth watch­ing is a round­table con­ver­sa­tion called “Anx­ious Times.” Host­ed by Ted Kop­pel, the par­tic­i­pants includ­ed Antho­ny Kennedy (US Supreme Court), William Per­ry (for­mer US Sec­re­tary of Defense), George Shultz (for­mer US Sec­re­tary of State), Jer­ry Yang (CEO, Yahoo!), and John Hen­nessy (Pres­i­dent, Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty), among oth­ers. And they spent a good two hours think­ing about the many threats now con­fronting the world (glob­al flu pan­demics, North Kore­a’s nuclear ambi­tions, threats to civ­il lib­er­ties, etc.), and how we can get beyond them.

You can explore the com­plete Stan­ford YouTube Chan­nel here and dip into oth­er uni­ver­si­ty chan­nels on YouTube here. Mean­while, here’s Oprah in action below.

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Not Sure What to Title This: Just Some Video Goodness

The Sam­sung f480, which is essen­tial­ly an iPhone clone, may not have scored too many points with the tech crit­ics. But its gueril­la mar­ket­ing on YouTube deserves some cred­it. Make a real­ly cre­ative video, sneak in some social com­men­tary, add some prod­uct place­ment at the very end, put it on YouTube, and watch it go viral:

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File This Under “I Don’t Get It”

YouTube is high­light­ing today a video that fea­tures a young girl play­ing Mozart around the world. Hence, the video’s title “Where in Heav­en is Mozart?” Now, the idea is nice. But why is Pachel­bel’s Canon the sound­track for the clip? Is Eine kleine Nacht­musik no longer rec­og­niz­able enough? Kind of sug­gests that we’ve offi­cial­ly achieved Pachel­bel Overkill (if it did­n’t hap­pen long, long ago). Per­haps this explains why you can now find com­ic rants against P’s Canon on YouTube as well.

Find free Clas­si­cal Music pod­casts here.

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Harry Potter Prequel Now Online

The Har­ry Pot­ter pre­quel that JK Rowl­ing wrote for char­i­ty is now avail­able online. To read it, click here, then click “Read our authors’ sto­ries,” and then click JK Rowl­ing.

Relat­ed:

J.K. Rowl­ing Tells Har­vard Grad­u­ates What They Need to Know

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Is the Internet Making Us Stupid?

In case you missed it, a new piece in the Atlantic Month­ly — Is Google Mak­ing Us Stu­pid? — rais­es some ques­tions about whether the inter­net is chang­ing the way we think. Or, to para­phrase, is it tin­ker­ing with our brains, remap­ping the neur­al cir­cuit­ry, repro­gram­ming our mem­o­ry, short­en­ing our con­cen­tra­tion, mak­ing it hard­er to read books and long arti­cles, etc. Anec­dotes con­firm­ing this trend abound. But now there’s new sci­en­tif­ic research that seems to back it up. Have a read.

In the mean­time, if you want some inter­net con­tent that will unques­tion­ably make you smarter, check our list of 225 Free Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties.

via The Wired Cam­pus

What’s Wrong With What We Eat?

Appear­ing at the TED Con­fer­ence, New York Times food writer Mark Bittman sums up “what’s wrong with the way we eat now (too much meat, too few plants; too much fast food, too lit­tle home cook­ing), and why it’s putting the entire plan­et at risk.” As you may notice, some of Bittman’s com­ments echo the think­ing in Michael Pol­lan’s recent work. (The clip has been added to our YouTube playlist.)

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Classic Photographs Remade Lego Style

Take some of the most impor­tant pho­tographs of the 20th cen­tu­ry, then remake them with Legos, and here’s what you get. You get Robert Capa’s 1944 pho­to­graph of the D‑Day inva­sion, look­ing some­thing like this: (see below). The famous Lunch Atop a Sky­scraper pho­to sud­den­ly looks like this. The image of Roger Ban­nis­ter break­ing the four-minute mile becomes that. And Buzz Aldrin walk­ing on the Moon takes on this look. The full col­lec­tion is here. Thanks to Chop­per Bob for the laugh on this one.

via WWdN: In Exile

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Viral Video: The New Way to Market Books

Over the week­end, The Wall Street Jour­nal took a look at an emerg­ing trend in the pub­lish­ing world — using viral videos to pro­mote new books. The strat­e­gy, which has­n’t yet gen­er­at­ed much in the way of sales, is being used to mar­ket books by estab­lished authors (take Jodi Picoult’s 19 Min­utes for exam­ple) and new authors as well. One video not men­tioned in WSJ’s piece is the fair­ly slick clip that pro­motes Toby Barlow’s début nov­el Sharp Teeth. Bar­low, when not writ­ing, is the cre­ative direc­tor of a large adver­tis­ing agency. Hence per­haps the will­ing­ness to take this approach:

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Steve Jobs’ iPhone Spiel in 60 Seconds

Things got a lit­tle nerdgas­mic yes­ter­day when Steve Jobs unveiled the new iPhone at WWDC. Although the pitch last­ed 107 min­utes, the high­lights have been boiled down to a neat 60 sec­onds. In watch­ing the clip, here’s my sim­ple take away: When I bought an iPhone ear­li­er this spring, I appar­ent­ly paid two times too much for some­thing that’s two times too slow. Grazzi Steve.

Relat­ed Con­tent: The Iphone and The 21st Cen­tu­ry Uni­ver­si­ty

Free Download of Cory Doctorow’s Graphic Novels

Quick fyi for Boing­Bo­ing read­ers .… Cory Doc­torow has just released com­ic adap­ta­tions of his award-win­ning sci­ence fic­tion sto­ries — Futur­is­tic Tales of the Here and Now. You can down­load them here for free, or buy the col­lec­tion on Ama­zon.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load free copy of Shake Girl

17 Free and Down­load­able Graph­ic Nov­els


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Best Online Language Tools for Word Nerds

Life­hack­er is run­ning a good piece today that high­lights a series of web-based lan­guage tools for any­one look­ing to fig­ure out a word’s def­i­n­i­tion, trans­la­tion, pro­nun­ci­a­tion, syn­onym, or antonym. Word nerds, this could be your lucky day…

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