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Choosing what you want to learn begins with a question; how do you want your life to be different?

Create fully animated comics online with Kerpoof. Choose from a library of scenes and characters, add animation, movement, as well as music and speech bubbles to bring a story idea to life. Extremely intuitive menu bar and helpful video tutorials make this tool quite useful. A key feature is a Teacher Account that allows teachers to register students and create classes where students can collaborate on creations

oondoo is another tool to create comics quickly. You can opt for a free

“I think speech recognition is really going to upend the current [computer] interface.

“We’re at a transition point where voice and natural-language understanding are suddenly at the forefront,

Jim Glass, a senior research scientist at MIT who has been working on speech interfaces since the 1980s, says today’s smart phones pack as much processing power as the laboratory machines he worked with in the ’90s. Smart phones also have high-bandwidth data connections to the cloud, where servers can do the heavy lifting involved with both voice recognition and understanding spoken queries. “The combination of more data and more computing power means you can do things today that you just couldn’t do before,” says Glass. “You can use more sophisticated statistical models.”

Another North African mathematician, al-Hassar, about the same time developed the modern way of writing fractions, with a bar separating the top from the bottom, like 1/2 or 2/7. Al-Hassar also wrote textbooks in Arabic about how to add whole numbers and fractions, how to calculate square roots and cube roots, and prime numbers

By 3000 BC, people in Egypt were using hieroglyphs to write down very large numbers.

Tax season is upon us, with most Americans putting together the materials they need to file their returns, gathering receipts, and searching for other tax deductions to maximize the amount they get back from the federal government.

If the IRS begins to suspect that a tax return isn't entirely truthful, the filer might be in for an audit.

Only about 1.1 percent of people who file a 1040 [the most common tax return] for the 2010 tax year were audited ... [or] about 1.5 million," says Rozbruch. "However, the audit rate is 12.5 percent for people earning $1 million or more in 2010.