lecturefox

The Stanford School of Engineering announced the debut of Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE), the pilot of a free online service that provides Stanford’s popular introduction to computer science and other computer science and electrical engineering courses. Each consists of complete video lectures and materials such as handouts, assignments, exams and transcripts. With SEE, Stanford Engineering is releasing the courses under a Creative Commons license, explicitly encouraging educators and learners around the world to incorporate the video courses and materials into their educational endeavors and to form virtual communities around the classes.

“We are excited to extend our teaching and learning opportunities worldwide through SEE,” said Jim Plummer, dean of the Stanford Engineering School. “We hope SEE will enable a broad range of people to learn, to share their ideas and to make their own contributions to knowledge.”

The 10 courses, arranged in three subject areas, include one of Stanford’s most popular sequences: the three-quarter introduction to computer science. SEE also offers three courses on artificial intelligence and robotics, and four on linear systems and optimization. The address for SEE is http://see.stanford.edu

“The introductory CS sequence at Stanford provided me so much — programming fundamentals, of course — but more importantly, they provided me many of the basic building blocks that I still use to think about software, products and organizations with today,” said John Lilly, a Stanford CS alumnus (BS 1993, MS 1995) and the CEO of the open source software developer Mozilla Corp. “These classes were among the most useful of my time at Stanford, and I’m really excited to see Stanford making them widely available under a Creative Commons license.”

SEE is produced by the school’s Stanford Center for Professional Development (SCPD), which will use its 40 years of distance education expertise to provide an anywhere/anytime open access learning experience. SCPD executive director Andy DiPaolo said the ease of forming groups on Facebook and sharing information will allow learners to use Stanford engineering courses as a basis to engage with each other in the vital social aspects of learning.

“We want people to learn from it, build on it and share with others using popular social networking tools,” added DiPaolo.

The SEE pilot’s development and launch was funded by Sequoia Captial, a Menlo Park, Calif., venture capital firm.

The Creative Commons license allows for non-commercial reuse of the video lectures and materials so long as proper attribution is given. This allows educators and students to download and incorporate the materials into their own work, so long as they acknowledge Stanford and other consenting copyright holders. Any lecture or course materials for which Stanford Engineering was unable to secure a copyright holder’s consent has been omitted from SEE. With that and a few other exceptions, everything offered on SEE is exactly the same as what is offered to enrolled Stanford students. Stanford registration and credit, however, is not available to those taking courses through SEE.

To facilitate easy downloading, the video presentations are available at the SEE Web site and through iTunes, YouTube, Zune, Bit Torrent and Vyew. Videos are in multiple formats to ensure widespread compatibility and a variety of quality and download times.

Part of the technological infrastructure includes access to course-specific Facebook pages. These pages are meant to be self-sustaining user communities, rather than Stanford-moderated groups.

SEE is the latest effort at Stanford to share information and ideas with the public online. Three years ago the university helped pioneer the use of Apple’s iTunes service by academic institutions. Earlier this year Stanford launched a dedicated channel on YouTube. SEE represents Stanford’s first free site to offer complete video-based courses and materials available anywhere, anytime and on-demand.

DiPaolo said expansion of SEE beyond the initial set of offerings will depend on the public response. He said he hopes that educators and students around the globe make the most of these free and easily accessed courses to enhance learning.

“In the industrial age we went to school,” he said. “In the communications age, school comes to us.”

Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch is dying from pancreatic cancer. He gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving talk, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals. You can find a transcript, powerpoint slides and more information about the lecture and the work and life of Randy Pausch on his personal website.

This is really cool: The GamecityLab of the Hamburg University of Applied Science and the Hamburg@work Initiative have recently acquired a CryEngine 2 license from the game development studio Crytek for teaching and research purposes. This game engine with which technology Crysis has developed will be used for interdisciplinary student projects, and bachelor and master studies in “Computer Media” , as well as studies in audio/video technology and production.

The CryEngine 2 is a software engine and toolkit used by game developers that allows creation of high definition 3D environments which can be generated and experienced in real-time on personal computer systems. Computer games that use this software show realistic virtual worlds with impressive real time effects. The licensing of this high end software application for students provides them with the opportunity to use current state of the art tools for game development, and gain valuable practical experience. The examination of this innovative technology should also result in the creation of totally new products. The main purpose is to instruct students in the use of this new future-proof technology, which includes learning the subjects of game programming and game design, and creating new products such as virtual reality based movies (machinima) or developing events with new content.

“The possibility of using the engine for research purposes allows the students to have a look at the production process of game development and analyzing and evaluating this from a scientific based point of view, and also looking forward to creating new prototypes. This cooperation between companies and educational institutions contributes to advancing Germany as a leader in game development technology, and also opens up new areas for educational research”, says Gunther Rehfeld, Professor for Digital editing, Graphics and Animation at the HAW Hamburg.

“Unlocking Knowledge, Empowering Minds” is the motto of MIT OpenCourseWare. The free publication of course materials
at MIT reached a milestone in November 2007: The complete publication of virtually the entire MIT curriculum, more than 1,800 courses in total. To mark the occasion, OCW held a Milestone Celebration event November 28th on the MIT campus, attended by more than 300 representatives of the MIT community and leaders of open education projects world wide. The celebration was hosted by MIT president Susan Hockfield, and included a keynote address by Thomas Friedman, columnist for The New York Times. The event also included a panel discussion on the future of education and OpenCourseWare, as well as an announcement of a new MIT OpenCourseWare initiative, Highlights for High School.

You can see the video recording of the event, which is now available on the Web: OCW Milestone Celebration

Wired News has published a big story by Justin Pope about the OpenCourse movement and free university lectures on the web: Internet Opens Elite Colleges to All

You can find another interesting article on the website of the New York Times. It’s by Sara Rimer and features Professor Walter H. G. Lewin: At 71, Physics Professor Is a Web Star

The University of Bath has won a prestigious international award for its podcasts of its public lectures, which have proved popular world-wide. The University was given the European Excellence Award for the best podcasts at a ceremony in Berlin last night. There were 600 entrants in total for all the award categories, and the University was shortlisted alongside BASF, the European Commission, Heinz and the University of Oxford.

In its entry submission, the University said that its podcasts had from November 2006 to September 2007 been seen 188,000 times. “We wanted widespread coverage, and our stats show there have been downloads by people from at least 57 countries, including the main European countries, the USA, and other countries as diverse as Argentina, India, Japan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam”, said Tony Trueman, Head of Communications.

Yale University is making some of its most popular undergraduate courses freely available to anyone in the world with access to the Internet. The project, called “Open Yale Courses,” presents unique access to the full content of a selection of college-level courses and makes them available in various formats. Each course includes a full set of class lectures produced in high-quality video accompanied by such other course materials as syllabi, suggested readings, and problem sets. The lectures are available as downloadable videos, and an audio-only version is also offered. In addition, searchable transcripts of each lecture are provided.

The seven courses in the sciences, arts and humanities will be augmented with approximately 30 additional Yale courses over the next several years. “Information technology allows the knowledge and passion of leading Yale faculty to reach everyone who wishes to explore these subjects,” said Yale President Richard C. Levin. “We hope students, teachers and anyone with an interest in these topics, no matter where they live or what they do, will take full advantage of these free and easily accessed courses.”

Diana E. E. Kleiner, Dunham Professor of the History of Art and Classics and the director of the project, noted that the full content of all the courses is now readily available online and may be accessed at the users’ convenience.

“We wanted everyone to be able to see and hear each lecture as if they were sitting in the classroom,” Kleiner said. “It’s exciting to make these thought-provoking courses available so broadly for free. While education is best built upon direct interactions between teachers and students, Yale believes that leading universities have much to contribute to making educational resources accessible to a wider audience. We hope this ongoing project will benefit countless people around the world.”

Kleiner said the courses reflect the broad liberal arts education provided by Yale College, which encourages critical thinking, intellectual exploration and creativity. She said Yale plans for future Open Yale Courses to include music and the arts.

The first courses available through Open Yale Courses are:

• Astronomy 160: Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics, with Professor Charles Bailyn
• English 310: Modern Poetry, with Professor Langdon Hammer
• Philosophy 176: Death, with Professor Shelly Kagan
• Physics 200: Fundamentals of Physics, with Professor Ramamurti Shankar
• Political Science 114: Introduction to Political Philosophy, with Professor Steven Smith
• Psychology 110: Introduction to Psychology, with Professor Paul Bloom
• Religious Studies 145: Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), with Professor Christine Hayes

To encourage the widest possible use of the courses, the license that covers most of the lectures and other course material on Open Yale Courses is Creative Commons’ Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. This license permits the free use or repurposing of the Open Yale Courses material by others. Under this license, users may download and redistribute the Open Yale Courses material, as well as remix and build upon the content to produce new lectures or other educational tools. Commercial use of the Open Yale Courses material is prohibited.

The Open Yale Courses project is produced and supported by the Yale Center for Media and Instructional Innovation (CMI2), which promotes the innovative use of technology to enhance learning at Yale and beyond.

Yale also has developed partnerships to enable these resources to be widely utilized in academic settings around the world.

In India, Yale is working with the Indo-U.S. Inter-University Collaborative Initiative in Higher Education and Research’s Amrita satellite network to broadcast courses to universities throughout India.

In China, China Education Television (CETV) has agreed to broadcast individual lectures on CETV. CETV broadcasts are viewed by millions of Chinese.

Individual faculty members at universities around the world will use Open Yale Courses in their classrooms. Faculty at the following universities are participating: University of Bahrain, Instituto de Tecnologia de Buenos Aires — ITBA (Argentina), Fudan University (China), University of Ghana, Jimma University (Ethiopia), Tec de Monterrey (Mexico), University of Mumbai (India), Peking University (China), University of Tokyo (Japan) and Waseda University (Japan).

The URL for Open Yale Courses is: http://open.yale.edu/courses/

Undergraduate students at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) created a series of dynamic videos about their work in the science laboratory. Haim Weizman is a lecturer in U.C. San Diego’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. He powers the video project. As reported by Sherry Seethaler each video is approximately five to seven minutes long and features a student demonstrating a critical procedure in organic chemistry, such as the purification of a substance by distillation or recrystallization. UCSD visual arts students produced the videos. Your can find more details about this project on the USCD NewsCenter: Organic Chemistry for the YouTube Generation

Readers around the world will soon have online access to thousands of rare books in Yale’s Library thanks to an agreement between the University and Microsoft Corp to digitize many volumes found only in the Yale collections. The Microsoft-Yale project will initially focus on the digitization of 100,000 out-of-copyright English-language books, which will then become available readers through Microsoft’s Live Search interface (http://books.live.com).

A comprehensive listing of the Library’s digital collections is available at: http://www.library.yale.edu/libraries/digcoll.html.

A pilot course taught at the University of Washington has been expanded into a national program that shows students how to program using tens, hundreds or thousands of computers. Google and IBM announced an initiative Monday to promote new programming methods that will help students and researchers address the challenges of Internet-scale applications.

“This is a new style of computing in which the focus is on analyzing massive amounts of data, using massive numbers of computers,” said Ed Lazowska, a UW computer science and engineering professor. “This has come on the scene fairly recently. Universities haven’t been teaching it in part because the software is really complex, and in part because you need a big rack of computers to support it.”

Based on the success of last year’s pilot course at the University of Washington, Google and IBM decided to donate and maintain hundreds of processors that students across the country can use for courses to address large-scale computing on the Web. University partners include the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Maryland. In future the academic consortium will be expanded to include additional researchers, educators and scientists.

For this project, Google and IBM have dedicated a large cluster of several hundred computers (a combination of Google machines and IBM BladeCenter and System x servers) that is planned to grow to more than 1,600 processors. Students will access the cluster via the Internet to test their parallel programming course projects. The servers will run open source software including the Linux operating system, XEN systems virtualization and Apache’s Hadoop project, an open source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure, specifically MapReduce and the Google File System (GFS).

For more details see the Google/IBM joint press release and Universities Combine ‘Cloud’ Forces (The Wall Street Journal).

I love Google TechTalks. The newest nugget I’ve watched today is “On Getting Creative Ideas“. It was held on March 14, 2007, the length is 1 hour 10 minutes. This talk is great. The abstract on the Google video site gives information about the speaker: “Murray Gell-Mann is one of the largest living legends in physics. He’s also been described as The Man With Five Brains, and it’s no puzzle why: He was admitted to Yale at 15, got his PhD from MIT at 21, and is an international advisor on the environment. He speaks 13 languages fluently (at last count), and has expertise in such far-ranging fields as natural history, historical linguistics, archaeology, bird-watching, depth psychology, and the theory of complex adaptive systems. Oh yeah… he also coined the term ‘quark’, after developing key aspects of the modern theory of quantum physics… for which he earned an unshared Nobel prize in physics in 1969. His ideas revolutionized the world’s thinking on elementary particles. In this talk, he gives his thoughts on getting creative ideas. Murray Gell-Mann is a Distinguished Fellow of the Santa Fe Institute, and author of the popular science book The Quark and the Jaguar, Adventures in the Simple and the Complex.”

Today I have found a great new Google TechTalk: “From Nand to Tetris in 12 steps. Building a Modern Computer from First Principles” is a course by Shimon Schocken. The length is one hour. The course presents many abstractions, algorithms, and data structures learned in CS courses, and makes them concrete by building a complete computer system from the ground up. There is also a website for the book and the course: The Elements of Computing Systems And here are slides for a 1-hour presentation (62 pages, pdf) that the authors Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken sometimes give about this course/book. The course and the book are designed for any person who is interested in Computer Science and has some programming experience.

The University of California, Berkeley, announced that it is making entire course lectures and special events available, free of charge, on YouTube. It is the first university to make videos of full courses available through YouTube. Visitors to the site at youtube.com/ucberkeley can view more than 300 hours of videotaped courses and events. “UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life - academics, events and athletics - which will build on our rich tradition of open educational content for the larger community,” said Christina Maslach, UC Berkeley’s vice provost for undergraduate education.

UC Berkeley has been a leader in the open-source video movement in higher education since fall 2001, when the campus’s Educational Technology Services (ETS) launched webcast.berkeley.edu, a local site that delivers course and event content as podcasts and streaming video. In April 2006, UC Berkeley launched its audio podcast program, making audio content available as free downloads through webcast.berkeley.

At midnight the New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its site. “In addition to opening the site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain”, writes Richard Pérez-Pea in his article “Times to Stop Charging for Parts of its Web site“. In his story you can find background information about the decision to made online content free.

NYTimes.com announced yesterday that the content previously available through TimesSelect, including online access to 23 news and opinion columnists, personalization tools, access to the Times archives back to 1987 and more, will be available free of charge at www.nytimes.com beginning Wednesday, Sept. 19.

The Newspaper communicates: “TimesSelect was launched in September 2005 and, two years later, had approximately 787,400 active subscribers. Approximately 471,200 received TimesSelect free of charge as a benefit of their home-delivery subscriptions, while 227,000 paid for online access and another 89,200 received it for free on college campuses through TimesSelect University. During its tenure, TimesSelect provided exclusive online access to news and opinion columnists, including all the Op-Ed columnists appearing in the print version of The Times. In addition, TimesSelect gave readers unlimited access to The Times archives dating back to 1851, placing The Times’s daily chronicles from the past at the touch of a mouse.

This content, including columns, articles, blogs, videos, podcasts and audio recordings, as well as online research and storage tools like News Tracker and Times File and archival access back to 1987, will now be freely available at NYTimes.com. Many of these benefits did not exist on NYTimes.com prior to TimesSelect. Archival access between 1851 and 1922 will also be freely available. Archives for the years 1923 - 1986 are available to be purchased in single or 10-article packages. Home delivery subscribers to The Times, who received TimesSelect as part of their print subscriptions, will have the same unrestricted access to the site that other readers will have, but will also have access to the complete Times archives from 1851 to the present.”

On Google Video you can find a Channel 4 Documentary following the revolutionary life-extension and immortality ideas of this somewhat eccentric scientist, Dr. Aubrey de Grey. This show is all about the radical ideas of a Cambridge biomedical gerontologist called Aubrey de Grey who believes that, within the next 20-30 years, we could extend life indefinitely by addressing seven major factors in the aging process. He describes his work as Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS). The length of the documentary is 1 hour 16 minutes: Do You Want To Live Forever?

U.S. News & World Report has puplished its annual university and college ranking: Princeton Tops U.S. News Rankings, Again. In each category, data on up to 15 indicators of academic quality are gathered from each school and tabulated. Schools are ranked within categories by their total weighted score.

For undergraduates looking for the top program in engineering physics, Cornell is the best place to go, according to U.S. News and World Report. The magazine has given the Cornell program top billing for the third year in a row in the category Engineering Science/Engineering Physics under Specialties for Best Undergraduate Engineering Programs. In overall rankings for best national colleges and universities, Cornell took the 12th spot, tied with Washington University in St. Louis — the same ranking as last year.

The top 10 national universities:

1. Princeton University
2. Harvard University
3. Yale University
4. Stanford University
5. California Institute of Technology
   University of Pennsylvania (tie)
6. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
7. Duke University
8. Columbia University
   University of Chicago (tie)

Details of the U.S. News ranking: America’s Best Colleges 2008

Cornell University Library is partnering with Google Inc. to digitize materials from the library’s collections and make them available online through Google Book Search. About 500,000 volumes from Cornell’s collection of nearly 8 million will be digitized over the next six years, including both public domain and copyrighted works. Cornell is the 27th institution to join the Google Book Search Library Project, which includes the New York Public Library, 19 other universities and several European libraries.

Cornell Library is involved in several other initiatives aimed at putting the university’s special and core collections online, including partnerships with Microsoft, Amazon.com and the U.S. Agriculture Information Network. A list of Cornell digital collections is available at http://rdc.library.cornell.edu.

The Open University has been awarded a further $4.45 million grant to support its work to make course materials freely available to anyone in the world. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation approved a bid to enable the OpenLearn website to double the amount of free learning content by April 2008. The website will also have more learning support and collaboration tools to connect learners and educators online.

Professor Andy Lane, Director of OpenLearn, said: “This funding will have a huge impact on the development of the website. Not only will we be able to increase the amount of content we make freely available and make it relevant to the needs of most learners using the site – such as providing more skills-based courses - but we’ll introduce new technologies such as video blogging and wikis and expand the number of interactive and multimedia resources. We’ll also be working with partners in the UK and abroad to extend the use of the free content in more targeted ways.”

OpenLearn launched in October 2006 as part of the Open University. The site publishes cohesive learning objects taken from Open University courses under a Creative Commons licence. This means that users can download and reuse the materials, amending them to suit their purpose and context. The Open University is the United Kingdom’s only university dedicated to distance learning.

Find a list with all the free courses: OpenLearn LearningSpace

Surmounting several distinct hurdles to quantum computing, physicists at Harvard University have found that individual carbon-13 atoms in a diamond lattice can be manipulated with extraordinary precision to create stable quantum mechanical memory and a small quantum processor, also known as a quantum register, operating at room temperature. The finding brings the futuristic technology of quantum information systems into the realm of solid-state materials under ordinary conditions. “These experiments lay the groundwork for development of a new approach to quantum information systems,” says Mikhail D. Lukin, professor of physics in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Here you can find the whole story: Harvard University Gazette

Quantum computing is a huge field. Two good introductions can be found on the website of the Cornell University Library:

Quantum Computation explained to my Mother (7 pages, PDF)

An Introduction to Quantum Computing for Non-Physicists (45 pages, PDF)

(Thanks to dpapathanasiou, member of Y combinator startup news.)

There is a new TechTalk on Google Video: “Python for Programmers” by Alex Martelli. Additionally you can find a document about the topic (pdf) with 50 pages for download on the website of Mr. Martelli. This lecture was held on April 10, 2007 and addresses software developers who are experienced in other languages but have had limited or no exposure to Python yet. The talk offers a rapid overview of the main characteristics of the language, plus a brief synopsis of its main implementations, its standard library, and third-party extension packages.

Four more great Python talks from this year are available: “Python 3000″ by Guido van Rossum (February 14, 2007) and “Advanced Python (or Understanding Python)” by Thomas Wouters (February 21, 2007). Together with the two talks about Python Design Patterns this is a great source of information. Here it goes to current Python knowledge:

Python for Programmer by Alex Martelli (1 hour 40 minutes)

Python 3000 by Guido van Rossum (1 hour 26 minutes)

Advanced Python by Thomas Wouters (1 hour 15 minutes)

Python Design Patterns - Part 1 by Alex Martelli (59 minutes)

Python Design Patterns - Part 2 by Alex Martelli (44 minutes)

Yesterday the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, Tenzin Gyatso, visited the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Wisconsin Public Television has made available an archived streaming video of the talk on its website. The speech “Compassion: The Source of Happiness” has a length of 1 hour 28 minutes. It was the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize winner’s fifth visit to the Madison campus. “His Holiness, who in 1998 received an honorary degree from the university, has taken great interest in the university’s Buddhist studies, and in UW-Madison’s research regarding the effects of meditation and similar practices on brain function, emotions and physical health”, so the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

see: Compassion: The Source of Happiness

Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, lectured at Rice University on May 1, 2007. He talked about “The Meaning of Compassion in Everyday Life” and in another unit about “Tolerance and Universal Responsibility”. Both lectures take one hour 30 minutes. You can watch the lectures or download the MP3 audio files. Rice University and The Boniuk Center for Religious Tolerance have made a special website for this event: Dalai Lama at Rice University. There you can find the streaming video, MP3 and a photo gallery. Also available is a short list of teaching resources about the 14th Dalai Lama.

“Change your Mind, Change your Brain: The Inner Conditions for Authentic Happiness” is the title of a lecture given at Google on March 15, 2007. I just found the full video (length: 60 minutes) on Google Video. It’s an entertaining and profound lecture of a wise man. Ricard is an active participant in the current scientific research on meditation and the brain. He emphasizes that we truly underestimate the power of transformation.

For Ricard, happiness is a deep state of well-being and wisdom that flourishes in every moment of life, despite the inevitability of suffering. Individuals can learn to minimize suffering in life by practicing moderation in all things, as well as meditation. Abstract of the lecture from the Google website: “If happiness is an inner state, influenced by external conditions but not dependent on them, how can we achieve it? Ricard will examine the inner and outer factors that increase or diminish our sense of well-being, dissect the underlying mechanisms of happiness, and lead us to a way of looking at the mind itself based on his book, Happiness: A Guide to Life’s Most Important Skill and from the research in neuroscience on the effect of mind-training on the brain.”

Matthieu Ricard has lived and worked in the Himalayan region for the last thirty years. He is a Buddhist monk and resides at Shechen Tennyi Dargyeling Monastery in Nepal. Born in France in 1946, he grew up among the personalities and ideas of Paris’ intellectual circles and worked for his PHD degree in biochemistry at the Institute Pasteur. After completing his doctoral thesis Ricard decided to forsake his scientific career and concentrate on Tibetan Buddhist studies. For the last few years, Matthieu Ricard has spent several months a year in Tibet implementing charitable projects that build and maintain clinics, schools and orphanages in the region (more: Dilgo Khyentse Fellowship Shechen). Since 1989, he has accompanied the Dalai Lama to France acting as his personal interpreter.

Enjoy the lecture: Change your Mind, Change your Brain

A book which gives an overview of plasmonics, an area of physics that could revolutionise computing and telecommunications over the next two decades, has been published by a researcher at the University of Bath. Dr Stefan Maier’s 250-page work, Plasmonics: Fundamentals and Applications, published by Springer, was released last week. In it Dr Maier, a member of the Centre for Photonics and Photonic Materials in the University’s Department of Physics, describes the basics of plasmonics, in which light signals are sent down the surfaces of small metallic nanostructures. This makes it possible to create light circuits that are much smaller than those that can be made with insulating materials such as glass, the backbone of fibre-optic communications.

The new plasmonic devices could pave the way for computer chips that transmit and process information using light instead of electrons, with vastly improved computing speeds. This offers the promise of computers that are much more efficient than today’s machines, which have developed rapidly as microchips have been made smaller. But this process is due to end shortly because the laws of nature create a natural limit to electronics.

The book, the product of one year’s work, is one of first modern overviews of plasmonics since the 1980s and is aimed at those starting in the field and experienced researchers as well. Plasmonics also holds out hope for the treatment of tumours: researchers have created tiny ‘nanoshells’ a hundred-thousandth of a millimetre in size that absorb infrared energy that passes through the rest of a human body. (Source: Press Release - 27 April 2007, University of Bath)

A very good article about the fundamentals of plasmonics was recently published on Scientific American: The Promise of Plasmonics by Harry A. Atwater.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed a new series of robots that are simple enough for almost anyone to build with off-the-shelf parts, but are sophisticated machines that wirelessly connect to the Internet. The press release says that the robots can take many forms, from a three-wheeled model with a mounted camera to a flower loaded with infrared sensors. They can be easily customized and their ability to wirelessly link to the Internet allows users to control and monitor their robots’ actions from any Internet-connected computer in the world.

The new tools that make this possible are a single piece of hardware and a set of “recipes” that people follow to build their ’bots. Both are part of the Telepresence Robot Kit (TeRK) developed by Associate Professor of Robotics Illah Nourbakhsh and members of his Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab. Their goal is to make highly capable robots accessible and affordable for college and pre-college students, as well as anyone interested in robots.

At the heart of each TeRK robot is a unique controller called Qwerk that combines a computer with the software and electronics necessary to control the robot’s motors, cameras and other devices. Qwerk, developed by the CREATE Lab and Charmed Labs of Austin, Texas, also connects the robot automatically and wirelessly to the Internet so it can be controlled by any Internet-connected computer.

“The Internet connection means the robots are much more global,” Nourbakhsh said. Not only can the robot be operated remotely at any location with a wireless Internet connection, but it can also send photos or video, respond to RSS feeds, or access the Internet to find information. That combination opens a wide range of possibilities. “We’re hoping people notice that the sky’s the limit,” he added.

Among the TeRK recipes already available is a small, wheeled robot with a video camera that people might use to keep an eye on their home or pet while they are at work or school. Another recipe under development includes environmental sensors for air quality and sound pollution. A less conventional recipe will produce a robotic, six-petaled flower that can open and close based on moods or use its petals to play a game of catch.

“We want robots that don’t just subscribe to geeky notions of what robots should be,” Nourbakhsh said. One recipe under development, for instance, can control a stuffed teddy bear.

Qwerk itself is a full-fledged computer with a Linux operating system that can use any computer language. It features a field programmable gate array (FPGA) to control motors, servos, cameras, amplifiers and other devices. It also accepts USB peripheral devices, such as Web cameras and GPS receivers.

Recipes, software, technical support and other information are available free at the TeRK website. The Qwerk controller is available for sale from Charmed Labs.

“Attaining lasting happiness requires that we enjoy the journey on our way toward a destination we deem valuable. Happiness, therefore, is not about making it to the peak of the mountain, nor is it about climbing aimlessly around the mountain; happiness is the experience of climbing toward the peak.”

I’ve found this nugget of wisdom on the website of Tal Ben-Shahar. He is an author and lecturer at Harvard University and currently teaches the largest course at Harvard on “Positive Psychology”. You can find 23 lecture videos and lecture notes for this course free on the net.

If you are interested in Positive Psychology: Dr. Ben-Shahar has 13 free articles and 20 newspaper articles on his site (The New York Post: “HAPPINESS 101″, The London Times: “Harvard flocks to see the guru of happiness”, The Crimson: “The Science of Smiling”, The New York Times: “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”).

Psychology Today offers interesting articles about the subject:

• The Winning Edge by Peter Doskoch
• The Secrets of Happiness by David G. Myers
• The Perfect Trap by Monica Ramirez Basco
• Perfectionism: Impossible Dream
• What Makes Marriages Work by John Gottman and Nan Silver
• Lust for the Long Haul by Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn

Happy reading!

The Google TechTalks from March 14, 2007 is about Python Design Patterns. It’s very interesting stuff. Alex Martelli, famous book author (Python Cookbook, Python in a Nutshell) and Googler in Mountain View since 2005, presents his talk in the Advanced Topics in Programming Languages Series. You can see the two parts on Google Video. In addition there are 82 pages (pdf) for download from Martellis own website.

Python Design Patterns - Part 1 (59 minutes):

Python Design Patterns - Part 2 (44 minutes):

Knut or Kanute is a Scandinavian first name, of which the anglicized form is Canute. It is derived from the Old Norse Knútr meaning “knot”; other forms include Cnut and Knud. It is the name of several medieval kings of Denmark, two of whom reigned also over England during the first half of the 11th century. (Source: Wikipedia) Knut also refers to the cute Knut, who was born in Berlin on December 5, 2006.

There are many things in life that will catch your eye, but only a few will catch your heart…pursue those. (Anonymous)

Found on the website of Dr. Dan Garcia - Full Frontal Nerdity

Fun Interests:

• Heart Candy
• Eye Candy
• Body Candy
• Brain Candy
• Ear Candy
• Random Candy

Dr. Garcia is the man who presents the outstanding computer science lecture Machine Structures (C, Assembly, CPU design…) at the University of California Berkeley.

“He who is ignorant of other languages is ignorant of his own.” Good old Goethe was right. It is worthwile itself to learn a foreign language. You can find great resources on the Internet: audio books and podcast lessons. Do you want to improve your language skills? Do you want to learn English, French or German the easy way? Then this list with free resources is for you.

Learn English

English as a Second Language Podcast
ESLPod.com is run by a volunteer team of experienced English as a Second Language professors. The site provides a collection of free podcasts. They provide English at a slower speed and use everyday phrases and expressions and they explain what these expressions mean and how to use them.
Business English Podcast
Business English Pod delivers free weekly MP3 podcast lessons for intermediate and advanced business English learners. Each podcast is focused on a particular skill (meetings, presentations, telephoning etc) and language function (clarifying, disagreeing, questioning etc).
The Bob and Rob Show
The Bob and Rob Show with weekly English lessons from a Yankee and a Brit is a variety show for learning English. It’s aimed at intermediate to advanced learners of English. At present you can find 79 free mp3 files.
BBC Learning English
The site is intended to help you improve your learning of the English language. Throughout the site you will find short courses, quizzes, grammar, vocabulary, audio and video. On BBC Radio you can listen to world news or BBC bulletins.

Selection of Free Audio Book Podcasts from LibriVox:
Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein
Philosophy and Fun of Algebra by Mary Everest Boole
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Odyssey by Homer
Call of the Wild by Jack London
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Cosmic Computer by H. Beam Piper
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
King Lear by William Shakespeare
Frankenstein by Mally Wollstoncraft Shelley
Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Childhood by Leo Tolstoy
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Clue of the Twisted Candle by Edgar Wallace
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Learn French

French for Beginners
This is a site with 25 audio lessons and vocabulary sheets (pdf). It’s a great start for learning French the easy way.
The French Pod Class
Here you can find weekly podcasts with vocabulary, cultural points, knowledge, movies, musics and books from France or the French language.
Learn French by Podcast
Here you can find 54 audio podcasts for learners of French as a foreign language.
DailyFrenchPod
This site provides free daily audio lessons from native speakers.

A Free Audio Book Podcast from LibriVox:
Le tour du monde en quarte-vingts jours by Jules Verne
(Around the World in Eighty Days)

Learn German

Deutsche Welle
Slowly spoken news reports: Every day, you can find the 10:00 a.m. newscast from Deutsche Welle’s German Service here — read slowly and clearly articulated just for German learners. This Deutsche Welle online offer is available as an audio file (MP3) and as a text file. Deutsche Welle’s German courses are designed to help you improve your language skills on an individual basis. You can download the audio files and the accompanying booklet.
GerGermanGrammarPodcasts
Here you can find a huge podcast collection with grammar explanations.
MyDailyPhrase German
Learn German step by step, day by day, phrase by phrase. MyDailyPhrase provides a 20-week course with 5-minutes audio lessons.

Selection of Free Audio Book Podcasts from LibriVox:
Der Schimmelreiter by Theodor Storm
(The Dykemaster)
Die Leiden des jungen Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(The Sorrows of Young Werther)
Winnetou I by Karl May

The Mixxer: Find a Language Partner

You can find a language partner for a language exchange with the help of The Mixxer. It’s a free educational site. The language partner is someone who speaks the language you study as their native language and is studying your native language. The partners then meet online to help each other practice and learn a foreign language. The program most commonly used among Mixxer language partners is Skype. I’ve found this site today and I think it’s a great idea!

soZiety and xLingo
An interesting community is soZiety from Spain, a language-learning social network based on Skype. The blog for soZiety started on January 31st, 2007, so the project is very young. Another site with a similar concept is xLingo.