Open for Business: Open Courseware Collections for Web Entrepreneurs - Biz.Edu

If you are considering going into business for yourself and using the Internet as your vehicle, then you will want to ensure you have the best background possible to make your venture a success. With open courseware readily available, there is no reason why you can’t provide the knowledge for yourself that many business students gain from some of the top universities in the world. The following open courseware selections will give you the edge when it comes to knowing about business.

Open for Business: 100+ Open Courseware Collections for Web Entrepreneurs - Biz.Edu

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Houseplans.com

Search 28,773 house plans to find your perfect home


The largest online collection of house plans, making quality home design affordable. Search and explore our house plans. Save favorites. Customize any plan. Budget your home building project with our instant Cost-to-Build Report.

Houseplans.com, The best house plans, home plans and floor plans collections to buy at the best prices

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Sugata Mitra: Can kids teach themselves?

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html

Speaking at LIFT 2007, Sugata Mitra talks about his Hole in the Wall project. Young kids in this project figured out how to use a PC on their own -- and then taught other kids. He asks, what else can children teach themselves?

In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.

In the following years they replicated the experiment in other parts of India, urban and rural, with similar results, challenging some of the key assumptions of formal education. The "Hole in the Wall" project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. Mitra, who's now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK), calls it "minimally invasive education."

Punished By Rewards

There is a time to admire the grace and persuasive power of an influential idea, and there is a time to fear its hold over us. The time to worry is when the idea is so widely shared that we no longer even notice it, when it is so deeply rooted that it feels to us like plain common sense. At the point when objections are not answered anymore because they are no longer even raised, we are not in control: we do not have the idea, it has us.

This book is about an idea that has attained just such a status in our society. The idea is that the best way to get something done is to provide a reward to people when they act the way we want them to. Scholars have debated the meaning and traced the development of the intellectual traditio known as behaviourism. What interests me, though, is the popular (or pop) incarnation of this doctrine, the version that lives in our collective consciousness and affects what we do every day. - Alfie Kohn

BBC NEWS | Technology | Poor earning virtual gaming gold

Nearly 500,000 people in developing nations earn a wage making virtual goods in online games to sell to players, a study has found.

Research by Manchester University shows that the practice, known as gold-farming, is growing rapidly.

The industry, about 80% based in China, employs about 400,000 people who earn £77 per month on average.

Big industry

Professor Richard Heeks, head of the development informatics group at Manchester who wrote the report, said gold farming had become a significant economic sector in many developing nations.

"I initially became aware of gold farming through my own games-playing but assumed it was just a cottage industry," said Professor Richard Heeks from the University of Manchester who wrote the report.

"In a way that is still true. It's just that instead of a few dozen cottages, there turn out to be tens of thousands."

In many online games virtual cash remains rare and many people turn to suppliers such as gold farmers to get money to outfit avatars with better gear, weapons or a mount.

Some gold-farming operations offer other services such as "power levelling" in which they assume control of a player's character and turn it into a high-powered hero far faster than the original owner could manage themselves.

Prof Heeks said very accurate figures for the size of the gold farming sector were hard to come by but his work suggested that in 2008 it employs 400,000 people who earn an average of $145 (£77) per month creating a global market worth about $500m.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Poor earning virtual gaming gold

Blogged with the Flock Browser

2008 Is the Coldest Year of the 21st Century

Thank you for this post. I am no scientist, but I am an undergrad in a dual major in Engineering/Science (mathematics), there are certain things that really trouble me about contemporary climate science. For one, there appears to be an over reliance on climate models based on broad sweeping assumptions, and an extreme exaggeration of the capacity of any given model to produce accurate results. Increasingly, the GW science seems to be violating Poppers fundamental philosophy of scientific hypothesis: The only theory worth considering is that which can be disproven. Or rather, science is not about proving as such, it is about disproving. I want to see the falsifiability of climate change theory thoroughly discussed, but it never is, nobody can challenge the models, nobody is allowed to question the methods, nobody is allowed to offer alternative to the mainstream narrative. Its a dangerous place for science to be. More and more I see GW predictions failing the falsifiability test: hot year? Earth is warming, cold year? Earth is unstable due to warming, flood: GW, everything, everything under the sun is being attributed to GW.

The 'consensus' worries me also, moreso in fact. There is rarely consensus in science, especially when dealing with fundamentally complex, non-linear dynamical systems which are proven to be inherently chaotic. Even when a theory is sound and mature, the most important consideration is that you are making predictions by using a model, an inherently and unavoidably flawed model. It is always, always important to cite assumptions and errors when making predictions with any model. But if you question the validity of current climate modelling, you are branded a heretic, a denier, and the worst of all: a skeptic. As if being a skeptic in science is suddenly the wrong thing to do? What happened?

All scientists are skeptics, a scientist without skepticism is no scientist, he is a fool. Worse still believing that computer models are completely trustworthy is like believing your lego starship enterprise will fly you to the moon.

I am not a denier, but I am certainly skeptical. I am certainly open to hypotheses, theories, models and all manner of explanations for given data sets, observations etc. But I am deeply troubled by the way discussion and debate about something as highly chaotic and poorly understood as the climate is shut down so vigorously these days. Worse still, the politicians and economists are on board. I can't help but be just a tad aware that politicians will leap on any populist position and economists are always hungry for new derivatives markets.

2008 Is the Coldest Year of the 21st Century

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Disinformation - Slashdot | Anti-Net Neutrality Astroturfer Exposed

"Ever wonder about all those groups claiming Google had a 'search monopoly' (as if there are no other search engines), or worse, coming out against Net Neutrality? CNet has a story about a shady DC lobbying group called LawMedia Group, being paid by Microsoft and Comcast, that is behind many of these attacks. That said, it's a mystery why they weren't able to pay more authoritative groups than the American Corn Growers Association or the League of Rural Voters to weigh in on technical matters. As a computer geek from corn country, I wouldn't solicit their opinion on tractor repair, let alone Internet policy."



It has long been understood that disinformation is a powerful weapon. That's why the US Army has Pysop. [wikipedia.org] Yes, propaganda that is disguised as a grassroots movement or the work of independent experts is disinformation, not advertising. Part of taking in information (like a product review or political statement) is accounting for the source of that information, ie you will consider the words of someone you respect more than words of someone you regard as a fool. So misrepresenting the source of information is a form of disinformation, and disinformation is weapon, weapons are used to control and destroy. Why are corporations allowed to control and destroy things like legislative process and public political awareness? Sure it's subtle damage, but over time it has done much harm to our society.

Slashdot | Anti-Net Neutrality Astroturfer Exposed


Also see Ron Suskind - Way of the World - he talks about how WMD letter is created by US Govt.

Also see http://idlinginc.blogspot.com/2008/04/behind-tv-analysts-pentagons-hidden.html

Surprising Things That Affect Memory

By regularly gorging on the white bread that's complimentary at restaurants, you're spiking your insulin. You may also be causing the insulin-degrading enzyme that exists in the brain to work overtime removing insulin, rather than getting rid of beta-amyloid proteins, the toxic protein that produces Alzheimer's disease. Carbohydrates are to the brain what cigarettes are to the lungs, Fortanasce says.

Research published in the latest issue of the journal Neurology also shows that eating fish may help prevent memory loss and stroke in healthy, older adults. The study looked at the brain scans of more than 2,300 people age 65 and older. It found that those who ate broiled or baked tuna and other fish high in omega-3 fatty acids (salmon, mackerel, anchovies) three or more times per week had a nearly 26% lower risk that the silent brain lesions would be linked to dementia and stroke.

The wrong dietary choices can have a significantly adverse impact. Consider a study out of Loughborough and Oxford Universities last month, funded by the Alzheimer's Research Trust, concerning the high consumption of soy foods, such as tofu.

Of 700 elderly Indonesians, those who ate tofu at least once a day had an increased risk of dementia or memory loss, particularly if they were over age 65. Researchers believe the link might be due to soy products' phytoestrogens, which may offer some neural benefits to the middle-aged and young but could harm those over 65.

Surprising Things That Affect Memory - Forbes.com

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Performance Reviews

These are actual quotes taken from job performance reviews

1. I would not allow this employee to breed.
2. This associate is really not so much of a has-been, but more definitely a won't be.
3. Works well when under constant supervision and cornered like a rat in a trap.
4. When she opens her mouth, it seems it is only to change whichever foot was previously there.
5. He would be out of his depth in a parking lot puddle.
6. This young lady has delusions of adequacy.
7. He sets low personal standards and then consistently fails to achieve them.
8. This employee is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot.
9. This employee should go far and the sooner he starts, the better.
10. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
11. Got into the gene pool when the lifeguard wasn't watching.
12. A room temperature IQ.
13. Got a full 6-pack, but lacks the plastic thingy to hold it together.
14. A gross ignoramus - 144 times worse than an ordinary ignoramus.
15. A photographic memory but with the lens cover glued on.
16. A prime candidate for natural deselection.
17. Bright as Alaska in December.
18. One-celled organisms outscore him in IQ tests.
19. Donated his brain to science before he was done using it.
20. Fell out of the family tree.
21. Gates are down, lights are flashing, but the train isn't coming.
22. Has two brains: one is lost; the other is out looking for it.
23. He's so dense, light bends around him.
24. If brains were taxed, she'd get a refund.
25. If he were any more stupid, he'd have to be watered twice a week.
26. If you give him a penny for his thoughts, you'll get change.
27. If you stand close enough to him, you can hear the ocean.
28. It's hard to believe he beat out 1,000,000 other sperm.
29. One neuron short of a synapse.
30. Some drink from the fountain of knowledge, he only gargled.
31. Takes him an hour and a half to watch 60 Minutes.
32. Wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
33. Since my last report, this employee has reached rock bottom and has started to dig.
34. His men would follow him anywhere, but only out of morbid curiosity.

The Ultimate Guide to Using Open Courseware: 70+ Apps, Search Engines and Resources for Free Learning

Bharthruhari Subhashitalu

thiviri isumuna thailambu theeya vachchu
dhavili mrugathrushna lO neeru thraga vachchu
thirigi kundheti kommu sandhimpa vachchu
chEri mUrkhula mansu ranjimparAdu

Granite Countertops A Health Threat ?

If you have granite countertops in your home, you might consider testing them for the amounts of radon gas they give off, experts say, due to the potential that those amounts are above levels considered safe.
 
But marble manufacturers say flat-out that, "Radiation in granite is not dangerous."

Radon is "a cancer-causing natural radioactive gas that you can’t see, smell or taste," the Environmental Protection Agency explains on its website. "Its presence in your home can pose a danger to your family’s health. Radon is the leading cause of lung cancer among non-smokers. Radon is the second-leading cause of lung cancer in America, and claims about 20,000 lives annually."

Granite Countertops A Health Threat ? | Chitramala - Movies

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Seth's Blog: I need to build a house, what kind of hammer should I buy?

what kind of hammer should I buy?

If you want to do something worth doing, you'll need two things: passion and architecture. The tools will take care of themselves. (Knowledge of tools matters, of course, but it pales in comparison to the other two.)

Sure, picking the wrong tools will really cripple your launch. Picking the wrong software (or the wrong hammer) is a hassle. But nothing great gets built just because you have the right tools.

My approach is to make an assertion about tools early in the process, and then move on to a solid draft of the good stuff. "Given: that we can make a computer do what xyz.com makes it do. Or, given: we can make a piece of titanium do what Frank Gehry makes it do." Then, go design something, imagine it, spec it, flesh it out and fall in love with it. Now you can ask Jimmy Wales what sort of software to use.

Seth's Blog: I need to build a house, what kind of hammer should I buy?

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Brown Alumni Magazine - It's Not Time Yet

“He put his arm around my shoulders, and we went for a little walk, and he said, ‘Randy, it’s such a shame that people perceive you as so arrogant. Because it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish in life.’ What a great way to tell you you’re a jerk,” Pausch marveled.


Then he returned to Carnegie Mellon, where he and his team developed Alice, free 3-D software designed to reverse the shrinking numbers of computer science majors and graduate students by teaching middle school and high school students how to create programs. They recently persuaded the game company Electronic Arts to let them use the Sims 2 characters. Reasoning that younger children, especially girls, would be more attracted to creating programs that told stories, one of his graduate students created a version of Alice based on narratives.

Brown Alumni Magazine - It's Not Time Yet


While he recently became a household name with The Last Lecture, he was a longtime proponent of gaming as a vehicle for computer science education. His work at CMU, and partnerships with Disney and Electronic Arts, helped legitimize gaming and play in the university, and brought the university into the video game industry. Even before The Last Lecture anyone who had the chance to study with him or just chat with him for a few minutes knew they were talking with a man with a passion for play, technology and life, and a lifelong sense of wonder we can all emulate. Three cheers for Randy Pausch!

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=625987&cid=24336169

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Can we learn from errors? What if we're running a nuclear power plant?

There appears to be what I call a 'cognitive loop' involved in the act of (code) creation: idea -> design -> implement -> test -> idea. That is, testing a creation that reveals errors feeds back into refining the idea and therefore the subsequent steps in the repeat loop. But the process is limited by available cognitive resources and the time it takes to complete one circuit of the loop - needing too many cognitive resources or if the loop time is longer than short term memory limits significantly interferes with the ability to notice and learn from the mistakes.

Traditional waterfall models of software development have shown a serious problem in that their cognitive loop is corporate not personal, and its duration is the product cycle, so the process is incredibly sensitive to correctness in requirements and specification. And unless the project is one of automating existing well-known processes (banking, chemical plant, etc) it is fundamentally impossible to actually know in advance what the requirements or specifications really are. Plus, on a personal note, my whole reason for being in this field is the joy of exploration, of doing what by definition has not been done before, of continuous learning OTJ.

Which brings me back to the small stuff: the everyday experience of a programmer. How to balance how much code to write before syntax checking, test harness runs, operational test. These decisions are modulated by the cost of doing each part. And this cost is implicit in amongst other things the tool set available. The traditional model is edit - compile - test - edit. Which can be quite a long loop - long enough to get a cup of coffee during the compile step (maybe). I have found that (for me) an exploratory model is much more productive - continuous course correction, continuously running and demo-able code, small increments. The biggest factor has been developing a programming environment that eliminated the compile step - suddenly the cognitive loop is closed at the edit stage and course-corrected motion towards the final product becomes more like swimming than run-wait-fear jerky progress. And the environment proved also to be accessible to non-programmers; our marketing VP said "I like VNOS because it makes me feel smart", and he wrote himself a weekly alarm applet that played an mp3 at happy hour on Fridays.

Summing up: the shorter the cognitive loop the better the learning, the surer the corrections; a lesson is learned only if the mistake is visible both as what is wrong with the result and why it went wrong and how to fix it and advance. Don't choke the student.

Cognitive Daily: APS 2008: Can we learn from errors? What if we're running a nuclear power plant?

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Linux Utilities

Games
http://www.linuxlinks.com/article/20080530054213402/CommercialGames.html

GNUCash

Wine

Crossover

http://www.linux.com/feature/141546

IT jobs will drop in 2009

IT staff jobs are at increasing risk -- both for contractors and in-house workers -- according to a survey of top CIOs by Goldman Sachs & Co. released last week. Global services companies will also feel the pinch because of the slowing economy.

A second survey showed that basic PC and network hardware, as well as professional services providers, would bear the largest proportion of spending cuts. It also showed that CIOs planned to emphasize economizing measures over investments in new technologies, with cloud computing emerging as the last item on their priority lists, despite the hype around it.

"Demand for discretionary IT projects dropped to its lowest point" in the 41-study history of the Goldman Sachs staffing survey, which asked 100 managers with strategic decision-making authority (mainly CIOs at multinational Fortune 1,000 companies) about their IT staffing plans for 2009.

The Sachs report states that "in a cost-constrained IT budget scenario, CIOs will most likely look to cut their resources first from lower-value augmented [contract] IT staff." The company also describes its survey as "an early warning flag" for service providers' 2009 bookings of new projects.

These intended cutbacks are a change from last fall. When the managers were asked in October which area of IT service delivery resources they would cut for application-related development or maintenance work, the answer was 0% for in-house employees. However, with a declining economy, 8% of respondents in a February survey said in-house IT programming staffers would be cut. In April, 15% of respondents said in-house staffers would be cut. That dropped to 11% in the June survey (the most recent).

But contract employees fare much worse. In the survey, 48% of the respondents said that those staffers would be cut. And 30% of the responders said on-site third-party service provider staffers would also be cut for application-related development or maintenance work. Twelve percent of the managers said they would cut employees from offshore third-party service providers.

Study: IT jobs will drop in 2009

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Oil and Commodities

I have to counter with the fact that the pump up in oil prices is artificial, and was started when the money ran out of the mortgage and hedge fund markets. This money needs to make money, and is always looking for a bull market. It found oil and other commodities.

While we'll also agree that oil consumption is overall a bad thing, and has done great damage to the environment, it is an artificial crisis, and bears no resemblance to supply and demand other than the limitations imposed on oil refinery capacity in the US. The limited capacity has the effect of amplifying the current trend, and every oil/political news sparrow fart of an RSS alert drives the price up. That's because there's a huge lump of money that needs to be making money as long as it is perceived that we'll continue to buy. No, it's not natural supply and demand. It's a squeeze job.

Look at what happened when GB the elder left office. Oil dropped in 1993 dramatically, to under $1/gal in most places. At the end of his term, it shot up, but nothing like what happened in late 2001. It dipped, then followed war. When the war in Iraq was artificially over, it dropped again as the mortgage and hedge funds were pumped (after all, there were no dot-coms to fund with exaggerated exuberance).

That money started leaving in 2006 because of all of the negative signs and that's when oil started to rise in price. Any old explosion in Nigeria or bellowing from a Venezuelan blow-hard president-for-life would cause a nice little bump up. Sneeze in the currency market? Bump. Look at the sneezes, follow the money.

You've been seduced by the pimps of the oil companies and the US press, which plays along like a lapdog with their huge benefactors, just as Washington, Inc., does.

But my sig represents not only the economy of peace, also the morality of it. I long for the day of great energy that doesn't pollute, but also a world that plans for the resources of the many that don't get to eat at night, or sleep under a roof, or get to know the luxuries of what we in the west call 'the basics'.

IT Jobs To Drop In 2009

Blogged with the Flock Browser

My outsourced Life - Esquire

Every call ends the same way: I thank her, and she replies, "You are always welcome, Jacobs." I'm starting to like her a lot.

One task for which Honey is thankful is e-mailing my colleagues. I've begun to refuse to communicate with them directly. Why should I? Honey can be my buffer from the unpleasant world of office politics. I'll be aloof and mysterious, like the pope or Mark Burnett. This morning, I ask Honey to pester my boss about an idea I sent him a few days ago: an article on modern gold prospectors.

Mr. Granger,

Jacobs had mailed you about the idea of "gold prospecting." I am sure you would have received his mail on this. It would be great if you could invest your time and patience on giving thought about his plans. Do revert and let Jacobs know about your suggestions on the same. As you know that your decision would be accepted with utmost respect.

Jacobs is awaiting your response.

Thanking you, Honey Balani

Another advantage to this strategy: My boss can't just e-mail a terse "No," as he might to me. Honey's finely crafted e-mails demand a polite multisentence response. The balance of power has shifted.

My outsourced Life - Esquire

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Women's brains different from men's

Men and women show differences in behaviour because their brains are physically distinct organs, new research suggests. Male and female brains appear to be constructed from markedly different genetic blueprints.

The differences in the circuitry that wires them up and the chemicals that transmit messages inside them are so great as to point to the conclusion that there is not just one kind of human brain, but two, according to recent neurological studies.

Men may be from Mars and women may be from Venus, and since the American psychotherapist John Gray wrote his famous book, in 1992, on the idea, it has been a commonplace to think of men and women as being from different planets in terms of their emotional responses.

But until recently, these differences were often explained by the action of adult sex hormones, or by social pressures that encouraged males and females to behave in a certain way.

Increasingly, however, these assumptions are being challenged, according to a review of recent neurological research appearing in this week's New Scientist magazine, and it is becoming clear that the brains of men and women show numerous anatomical differences.

Some of these divergences, the review by Hannah Hoag suggests, could explain a number of mysteries, such as why men and women are prone to different mental health problems, why some drugs work well for one sex but have little effect on the other, and why chronic pain tends to affect women more than men.

One area of research concerns the brain's pain-suppressing mechanisms, and points to the fact that they may be organised differently in men and women. This would explain why women can suffer long-term pain more, and why there can be sex differences in response to opium-derived painkilling drugs. The study notes: "Women get more relief from the opioid painkiller nalbuphine compared to men, whereas in men morphine is more effective and nalbuphine actually increases the pain intensity." It is possible these findings could lead to new painkillers being developed that are tailored to be more effective in women – but that is some way off.

Mental health is another area where real brain differences may offer explanations. Women are diagnosed with depression twice as often as men, and this may be linked to relative levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Boys, on the other hand, are more likely than girls to be diagnosed with autism, Tourette's syndrome, dyslexia, attention-deficit disorder and early-onset schizophrenia. The review reports that Margaret McCarthy of the University of Maryland in Baltimore believes that hormone-like substances called prostaglandins, which help masculinise the male brain around the time of birth, may be partly to blame.

Women's brains are different from men's – and here's scientific proof - Science, News - The Independent

Blogged with the Flock Browser