CTLT and Friends

This week, Stanford has started to roll out a new course, Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Taught by Leonard Susskind, one of America's leading physics minds, this course is the fourth of a six-part sequence - Modern Physics: The Theoretical Minimum - that traces the development of modern physics, moving from Newton to Black Holes. As the title suggests, this course focuses squarely on the groundbreaking work of Albert Einstein. And, it's undoubtedly a plus that the course was presented in Stanford's Continuing Studies program, which means that it's tailored to smart non-specialists like you. You can watch the first lecture on iTunes here, or YouTube below. The remaining lectures will be rolled out on a weekly basis. If you would like to watch the longer sequence of courses, I have provided a complete list of links here. Enjoy.

Facebook:All Your Stuff is Ours, Even if You Quit...from mashable

Calais is an initiative by Thomson Reuters to connect the world's content by providing automated metadata (let's just call it tagging) services. The Calais service takes your text and uses sophisticated natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to extract the people, organizations, companies, geographies and events hidden within it.

article about the pilot work in AMT class

The Zemanta blogging service helps me reconsider the value of a Flickr account. I established a Flickr account, SCSpaeth, several years ago and added pictures periodically. But I have never made much use of the pictures. While pictures can add to the interest in a blog post, finding images, adding them to the blog and documenting them properly took a lot of effort. So, I only added them when they added enough to compensate for the extra work. The Zemanta service changes the barriers to using more images.

"Scientists know much more about their field than is ever published in peer-reviewed journals. Blogs can be a good medium with which to disseminate this tacit knowledge."

Freedom of speech and the right to assemble are limited in Egypt, which since 1981 has been ruled by Mubarak's National Democratic Party under a permanent state-of-emergency law. An estimated 18,000 Egyptians are imprisoned under the law, which allows the police to arrest people without charges, allows the government to ban political organizations and makes it illegal for more than five people to gather without a license from the government. Newspapers are monitored by the Ministry of Information and generally refrain from directly criticizing Mubarak. And so for young people in Egypt, Facebook, which allows users to speak freely to one another and encourages them to form groups, is irresistible as a platform not only for social interaction but also for dissent.

The "2009 Horizon Report," the latest edition of the annual list of technology trends to watch in education, is compiled based on news reports, research studies, and interviews with experts.

Prof. Stanley Fish ponders the book " "The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities," by Frank Donoghue. Donoghue argues that utilitarianism is all but triumphant in the American university, and that the non-instrumental studies like the Humanities are doomed.

(Listen to an audio version of this essay). I recently heard the author Jonathan Kozol speak about the over-use of standardized tests in schools today. "We're very busy weighing our lambs. That's not the same as fattening them," he said. That made me think of Nelson.

In 2004, autistic savant Tammet reeled off 22,514 digits of pi from memory, setting a European record. How did he achieve such a feat? Is an autistic mind different from others? Yes and no. Tammet explains that the differences between savant and non-savant minds have been exaggerated; his astonishing capacities in memory, math and language are neither due to a cerebral supercomputer nor any genetic quirk, but are rather the results of a highly rich and complex associative form of thinking and imagination. Autistic thought, he argues, is an extreme variation of a kind that we all do, from daydreaming to the use of puns and metaphors.

Four Google executives are facing criminal charges - which might result in jail time - because of an offensive video posted on Google Video in 2006, although none of them had directly handled the video in question.

Teachers are using college-wide blogging tools or free blogging services for different disciplines as a way to address e-portfolios, audience, publishing practices, copyright and plagiarism, authentic writing and writing in a digital age with hypertext.

Kimberly said of this: The focus on activity deals directly with the learning process - one that pushes students to take a more active role - while assessment supplies faculty members with the feedback necessary to diagnose and correct learning problems. Technology allows such active learning processes to be expanded to large courses and, as learning software and databases become better, to use faculty time more effectively. Relates to clickers and skylight learning activities/assessments, in the large class context, as well as the elusive LMS.

Blogs related to scientific topics from Nature.

The goal of this guide is to teach you how to make Google gadgets regardless of your skill level, even if you do not know any coding.

Developer / Debug Tool for Internet Explorer. This doesn't work for IE8. Internet Explorer 8 includes its own developer tool though.

Joshua and others have requested this in the past. I'm throwing it here in Diigo so others can benefit as well. It isn't Firebug by a longshot, but it is much better than nothing at all. I prefer to use this over Microsoft Script Debugger when debugging in IE. As noted though, it doesn't work with IE8. IE does however include its own developer tools. -- Matthew

This awesome little application will walk you through creating windows install CDs that you can tune in hundreds of ways. It makes slipstreaming SPs a piece of cake. You can also preload drivers for targets installs. Making unattended install discs is simple. I've found it quite useful for trimming out all of the $#!+ that you really don't need making for an install of XP that really screams.