College classes free, for anyone

If you'd like to attend college classes over the Internet at a wide variety of prestigious colleges, consider visiting Academic Earth. According to the about page,

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.
The participating universities include Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, and Yale. I just finished watching an informative lecture on "The Origins of the Financial Mess." I'm wondering what I'm going to view next. Maybe I'll watch some more of Shelly Kagan's 26-part series on the topic of "Death."

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A new 9/11 Curriculum?

The Associated Press is reporting that there is a new curriculum debuting in 7 states this year with the goal of teaching middle-school and high-school students about the September 11th, 2001 attacks. Developed by the September 11th Education Trust, the curriculum will focus on 7 areas "designed to help students reflect on the impact and legacy of September 11, 2001". Sample units include:

  • Understanding 9/11 as history
  • Debating the government's role during disasters
  • Discussing the nature of heroism
  • Evaluating foreign policy vis-à-vis national security
The Associated Press quotes former mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani:
"This is one of the critical subjects on which young people should develop some ideas and thoughts. They're going to have to live with this for quite some time," he said. "It gives young people a framework in which to think about Sept. 11, all that it meant and all that it means to the present."
I'm not quite sure what he means when he says that "They're going to have to live with this for quite some time." Does he mean the threat of terrorism? Does he mean the consequences of our reaction to 9/11?

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Nature video shows that turtles are full fledged animals

I once saw this activity at the turtle exhibit at the local zoo, and it didn't take a biologist to tell me that I was not misinterpreting what I was seeing. These turtles seem incredibly almost-human, even though they didn't smoke cigarettes afterward. Captured here in living color close-up, I'm posting this video as an animals-in the-wild education video: Watching this reminded me of watching David Attenborough "Trials of Life" series with my then four-year old daughter. One of these exquisitely filmed Attenborough videos, which was on the topic of animal reproduction, included more explicit animal sex videos than I could ever had imagined, including elephant sex. At first I wondered whether I should be letting the video keep running. While I was contemplating my options, my daughter looked up and asked, "Daddy, what are those elephants doing?" I found myself saying, "Those are elephants having sex." I didn't offer any further explanation and my daughter didn't request one. We quietly watched the entire video and now, 7 years later, my daughter doesn't seem to be emotionally damaged from having seen the episode. Oh, and according to doctors polled by the U.K. Guardian, having sex before going to bed is the second-best way to have a good night's sleep. The winning solution was for couples to sleep in separate beds.

Continue ReadingNature video shows that turtles are full fledged animals

Longitudinal study tells us what makes people happy

What makes people happy? On quite a few occasions, I've posted at DI with regard to ideas that I learned through reading various books and articles (a search for "happiness" in the DI search box will give you dozens of articles). What does that reveal about me, I wonder? Today, I had the pleasure of reading an extraordinarily thoughtful article on this same topic: "What Makes Us Happy?" by Joshua Wolf Shenk appears in the June 2009 edition of The Atlantic. You'll find an abridged edition of the article here. Shenk's article is anchored by the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest running longitudinally study of mental and physical well-being in history. It was begun in 1937 in order to study "well-adjusted Harvard sophomores (all male), and it has followed its subject for more than 70 years." The study was originally known as "The Grant Study," in that it was originally funded by W.T. Grant. Despite all odds, the study has survived to this day--many of the subjects are now in their upper 80's. Along the way, the study was supplemented with a separate study launched in 1937 dedicated to studying juvenile delinquents in inner-city Boston (run by criminologists Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck). You'll enjoy Joshua Shenk's work on many levels. He writes with precision, providing you with a deep understanding of the featured longitudinal studies. You will also enjoy his seemingly effortless ability to spin engaging stories (there are dozens of stories within his article) and his exceptional skill at crafting highly readable prose. I'm writing this post as a dare, then. Go forth and read Shenk's article and I guarantee that you will be thoroughly enriched and appreciative. The Atlantic also provided a video interview of George Vaillant, now 74, who since 1967 has dedicated his career to running and analyzing the Grant Study. As you'll see from Shenk's article, Vaillant is an exceptional storyteller himself. The Atlantic article, then, might remind you of one of those Russian dolls, and that is a storyteller telling the story of another storyteller who tell stories of hundreds of other storytellers. For more than 40 years, Vaillant has not only gathered reams of technical data, but he has poured his energy into interviewing the subjects and their families and melding all of that data into compellingly detailed vignettes of the subjects. Telling stories is not ultimately what the study was supposed to be about, of course, and Vaillant also tells us what those stories mean for the rest of us. Truly, what makes people happy? Vaillant offers answers that you will be tempted to immediately apply to your own situation. Vaillant has a lot to say about "adaptations," how people respond to the challenges they face in life. As a Shenk explains,

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Quote time

I love to collect quotes. Such a high ratio of thought-provocation per word! I'd even bet that there is a the seed for a novel in most well-honed quotes. I collect these from many sources, though more than a few of the following were presented to me by The Quotations Page, which I use as my homepage. Some of these quotes have made the rounds (the oldies-but-goodies), though I'd bet that you'll find more than a few that you've never seen before. Enjoy. In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

Johann von Neumann (1903 - 1957)

Doing a thing well is often a waste of time.

Robert Byrne

It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.

Tom Stoppard (1937 - ), Jumpers (1972) act 1

The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along.

Douglas Adams , Last Chance to See

“It is not acceptable to have a religion where the alternative to faith is punishment — that’s how you train dogs, not develop people.”

Deng Ming-Dao

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

Oscar Wilde

A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.

George Wald (1906 - )

Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.

H. H. Williams

Continue ReadingQuote time