First the Grip, Ready Position, Footwork, and then the Strokes

Badminton Tip of the Day;

The most important skill to learn for beginners is the grip. This is the fundamental to stroke selection and the direction/trajectory of the shuttlecock. After the grip, the ready position. After that is the basic footwork to 4 corners and the return to the centre base. Lastly is the strokes.

But the technical skill of badminton takes years to learn. There are many scenarios, shot selection, guile, movements and most important maintaining dynamic balance, to be able to retrieve any shots quickly.

via blog Badminton Research

ACCA and CIMA on You Tube

Richard Clarke Academy Belfast

I like the use of Mind Maps in the videos.

Artist of the Day - Norman Rockwell, the Buddhist Painter !

Norman Rockwell;

“To me the most important part of Rockwell’s work is that it illustrates compassion and caring about other people,” the filmmaker George Lucas, who lives in Marin County, Calif., said recently. “You could almost say he was a Buddhist painter.”

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Badminton tips by Prospeed Cheong Weng Kwai

Effective Collaboration with Google Wave

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We have competition!

The most popular educator on YouTube does not have a Ph.D. He has never taught at a college or university. And he delivers all of his lectures from a bedroom closet.

This upstart is Salman Khan, a 33-year-old who quit his job as a financial analyst to spend more time making homemade lecture videos in his home studio. His unusual teaching materials started as a way to tutor his faraway cousins, but his lectures have grown into an online phenomenon—and a kind of protest against what he sees as a flawed educational system.

"My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me," he told me recently.

-College 2.0: A Self-Appointed Teacher Runs a One-Man 'Academy' on YouTube

I envy the Accountants

An interesting source of free accounting resources- Open Tuition;

Our site was officially launched on 12 February 2008. At the moment we feature free materials for ACCA, AAT and also free Accountancy tutorials for Non-Accountants.

OpenTuition.com is dedicated to providing all accountancy students throughout the world with the resources they need to study for the major accountancy qualifications, completely free of charge. Providing high quality study materials, believing that your success is our success!

The Great Brain Race

How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World

The Charms of Mathematics and Assorted

Random OCW course- The World of Mathematics, Tokyo University

Open Courseware Seach

OCW Search- Economics

Mathematics

Physics

Statistics

Business Idea of the Day

very, very rich people stay in reasonably small spaces on luxury yachts, and very, very rich people travel in extremely small spaces on Learjets

-Cool Minimalist Hotels

William Farr- the inventor of medical statistics?

In 1858, a British epidemiologist named William Farr set out to study what he called the “conjugal condition” of the people of France. He divided the adult population into three distinct categories: the “married,” consisting of husbands and wives; the “celibate,” defined as the bachelors and spinsters who had never married; and finally the “widowed,” those who had experienced the death of a spouse. Using birth, death and marriage records, Farr analyzed the relative mortality rates of the three groups at various ages. The work, a groundbreaking study that helped establish the field of medical statistics, showed that the unmarried died from disease “in undue proportion” to their married counterparts. And the widowed, Farr found, fared worst of all.

Farr’s was among the first scholarly works to suggest that there is a health advantage to marriage and to identify marital loss as a significant risk factor for poor health. Married people, the data seemed to show, lived longer, healthier lives. “Marriage is a healthy estate,” Farr concluded. “The single individual is more likely to be wrecked on his voyage than the lives joined together in matrimony.”

While Farr’s own study is no longer relevant to the social realities of today’s world — his three categories exclude couples living together, gay couples and the divorced, for instance — his overarching finding about the health benefits of marriage seems to have stood the test of time. Critics, of course, have rightly cautioned about the risk of conflating correlation with causation. (Better health among the married sometimes simply reflects the fact that healthy people are more likely to get married in the first place.) But in the 150 years since Farr’s work, scientists have continued to document the “marriage advantage”: the fact that married people, on average, appear to be healthier and live longer than unmarried people.

via NYT

The following bit about him was also interesting;

There was a major outbreak of cholera in London in 1849 which killed around 15000 people. Early industrialisation had made London the most populous city in the World at the time, and the River Thames was heavily polluted with untreated sewage. Farr subscribed to the conventional theory that cholera was carried by polluted air rather than water - the miasmic theory.

As a result of studying this outbreak, the physician John Snow proposed what is now known to be the actual mechanism for transmission - that people were infected by swallowing something and that it multiplied in the intestines.

There was another epidemic in 1853, and Farr gathered statistical evidence to try to support the miasmic theory. He demonstrated statistically that cholera was spread by polluted air by showing that the likelihood of dying of the disease was linked to the height that the victims lived above the River Thames. He interpreted this as support for the miasmic theory - the air at lower altitudes being dirtier. However he also obtained details of where different water companies drew their water, and generated statistics on the number of deaths per water company. He discovered that people supplied with water from two companies in particular- the Southwark & Vauxhall and the Lambeth water companies - which drew their water directly from the Thames were particularly likely to suffer. Although he did not agree with Snow's waterborne theory, he gave him a great deal of help in collecting data to support it; in particular by providing the addresses of people who had died.

There was a further epidemic in 1866, by which time Snow had died. Farr had by now come around to believe Snow's explanation. He produced a monograph which showed that mortality was extremely high for people who drew their water from the Old Ford Reservoir in East London.

We recommend the The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

Jiggling Atoms and more from Richard Feynman

Games and Education

What will interactive electronic media mean for personal identity and society over the next hundred years?

Maths Podcast of the Day

In his book The Mathematician's Apology (1941), the Cambridge mathematician GH Hardy expressed his reverence for pure maths, and celebrated its uselessness in the real world. Yet one of the branches of pure mathematics in which Hardy excelled was number theory, and it was this field which played a major role in the work of his younger colleague, Alan Turing, as he worked first to crack Nazi codes at Bletchley Park and then on one of the first computers.

Melvyn Bragg and guests explore the many surprising and completely unintended uses to which mathematical discoveries have been put.

Download the podcast

Link of the Day

UCTV on Nobel Laureates

Have your tail over the dashboard

From a Way with Words

The Myths of Innovation

Scott Berkun

Beating MIT OpenCourseWare- an interesting idea

Then, two years ago, Magliozzi started up a side project called Finalsclub.org. The site bills itself as “the premier Web portal for interactive education,” allowing Harvard students to join online study groups and read annotated versions of the Great Books. But its most notable characteristic is that it pays Harvard students to post their lecture notes online.

The website’s name was borrowed from the school’s Final Clubs - insular all-male social clubs reputed to keep old lecture notes on file to help their less diligent members cram for exams. And just like the Final Clubs’ files, the site serves as a crutch for students who haven’t bothered to attend class or take their own notes.

Magliozzi, however, insists that there’s a higher purpose. He is taking the substance of Harvard courses, information previously sequestered within the ivory tower, and offering it free to anyone with an Internet connection.

“I’m a big believer that educational resources should be free, or as free as possible, and in a sense I would like to do it not only at Harvard but at every top institution in the world,” he says.

Finalsclub is not the first website to offer elite university course notes, for free, to a wider audience - other universities, most prominently MIT, have set up so-called open courseware sites of their own, and the largest dwarf Finalsclub’s offerings. Nor is the site the first to publish student lecture notes: A mini-industry of lecture note vendors has long existed around the campuses of large state universities, and it has migrated online in recent years.

But in combining the two - by relying on students, rather than professors, for material and then posting it for free - Finalsclub, along with a few larger sites like GradeGuru and StudyBlue, raise issues of their own. Because the site does not charge, the material Finalsclub posts is widely available, and, unlike with open courseware programs like MIT’s, Harvard has little say in the process.

-Does anyone own what universities teach?

Link of the Day

The Learning Network- NYT