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

Visual Thinking Guides

The Value of Visual Thinking in Social Business

View more documents from David Armano.

Science Podcast of the Day

THE DISCOVERY OF RADIATION;

Today the word ‘radiation’ conjures up pictures of destruction. But in physics, it simply describes the emission, transmission and absorption of energy. And the discovery of how radiation works has allowed us to identify new chemical elements, treat cancer and work out what the stars are made of.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, physicists from Thomas Young through Michael Faraday to Henri Becquerel made discovery after discovery, gradually piecing together a radically new picture of reality. They explored the light beyond the visible spectrum, connected electricity and magnetism - and eventually showed that heat, light, radio and mysterious new phenomena like 'X-rays' were all forms of 'electromagnetic wave'.

In the early twentieth century, with the discovery of radioactivity, scientists like Max Planck and Ernest Rutherford completed the picture of the 'electromagnetic spectrum'. This was a cumulative achievement that transformed our vision of the physical world – and what we could do in it.

Further Reading;

Al-Khalili, Jim, Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed (Phoenix, 2004)

Al-Khalili, Jim, and Bizony, Piers, Atom (Icon, 2008)

James, Frank (ed.), The Correspondence of Michael Faraday (Institute of Engineering and Technology, 2009)

Close, Frank, Antimatter (Oxford University Press, 2009)

Marion, Jerry B. and Heald, Mark A., Classical Electromagnetic Radiation (Thomson Learning; 3rd Revised edition 1994)

Maxwell, James Clerk, A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism Vol 1 & 2 (Oxford Classic Texts in the Physical Sciences, 1998)

Lützen, Jesper, Mechanistic Images in Geometric Form: Heinrich Hertz's 'Principles of Mechanics' (Oxford University Press, 2005)

Borrowing Brilliance

BORROWING BRILLIANCE: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others by David Kord Murray

Where did Dave borrow the idea for this website from?
First he went to the sites of some of his favorite authors. He looked at the Heath brothers site www.madetostick.com and got some ideas for overall structure and layout. He looked at Laura Reis’s site and how she effectively used video’s to present herself and her ideas at www.ries.com. He liked the way the authors of Freakonomics made their site look very similar to their book, so he borrowed ideas from www.freakonomics.com, too. Then he went to the site www.hulu.com which is a new site that shows streaming television and movies and borrowed how they present these videos to the user. These and other things were combined and put together by his designer, Chris LaValle at www.dacapoco.com.

The King of Vodka

The King of Vodka: The Story of Pyotr Smirnov & the Upheaval of an Empire

Random Course

Aircraft Systems Engineering

Economic History blog of the Day

Economic History Blog

History of Finance- a great series of lectures

Links to streaming videos of edited versions of interviews with Harry Markowitz, William Sharpe, Paul Samuelson, Robert Merton, Myron Scholes and Jack Treynor are posted below.

From American Finance Association.

Myron Scholes assorted

Four Paths of Investment



Related;
History of Finance

The Leadership Secrets of Genghis Khan

Dread!

Dread: How Fear and Fantasy have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to the Avian Flu
by Philip Alcabes

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Philip Alcabes
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis First 100 Days

Uranium

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Tom Zoellner
comedycentral.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

Uranium by Tom Zoellner;

Uranium’s history is a geological ugly duckling tale. Aside from occasional use as a dye, the ore was most often seen as trash — its German name, Pechblende, meant “bad-luck rock,” Zoellner says — and silver miners who found the greasy gray uranium dirt just left it in piles nearby. It was only with Marie and Pierre Curie’s discovery of radium in uranium ore that people started to take notice — the Curies, after all, touted their find as a cure for cancer. Experiments on radium led in 1932 to the discovery of the neutron, which the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard grasped might be able to set off catastrophically powerful chain reactions. The rest, more or less, is history.

Which is a bit of a problem for Zoellner. The genre of pop microhistory into which his book fits — “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World,” “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World,” and “Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World” — is predicated on the idea that these are not things people normally understand to be world-changing. Nuclear weapons, however, are not in this category. As a result, large portions of the story Zoellner tells have been explored in more depth in other popular accounts.

Perhaps to address this, Zoellner intersperses the history with descriptions of his own globe-trotting, from the Congo to Mongolia, from the American West to Eastern Europe to Australia. He pokes around in old mines and tours a uranium refining plant. He calls at the offices of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, and the World Nuclear Association, in London. He interviews the Yemeni minister of electricity, is almost kidnapped on the way to a mine in Niger and knocks back Chechen grappa with border guards responsible for keeping black-market uranium from being smuggled from Russia into Georgia.

Conference of the Day

Second Look at the Great Depression and New Deal, (audio and video available)

Recommended;
A Second Look at the Great Depression and New Deal, Session Four: Keynote - Why a Second Look Matters (Lucas)