Category: Elink 8

Posted on

Inspiring::Salman Khan, math master of the Internet

Salman Khan, math master of the Internet
James Temple, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, December 14, 2009
During the years Salman Khan spent scrutinizing financials for hedge funds, he rationalized the profit-obsessed work by telling himself he would one day quit and use his market winnings to open a free school.
Salman Khan, the creator of Kahn Academy.Salman Khan, the creator of Kahn Academy, records “A Form…Salman Khan in his home studio in Mountain View is surrou… View More Images
Instead, he started one almost by accident.
It began with long-distance tutoring in late 2004. He agreed to help his niece Nadia, then a seventh-grader struggling with unit conversion, by providing math lessons over Yahoo‘s interactive notepad, Doodle, and the phone.
Nephews and family friends soon followed. But scheduling conflicts and repeated lectures prompted him to post instructional videos on YouTube that his proliferating pupils could watch when they had the time.
They did – and before long, so did thousands of others. Today, the Mountain View resident’s 800-plus videos are viewed about 35,000 times a day, forming a virtual classroom that dwarfs any brick and mortar school he might have imagined. By using the reach of the Internet, he’s helped bring education to the information-hungry around the world who can’t afford private tutors or Kaplan prep courses.
“With so little effort on my own part, I can empower an unlimited amount of people for all time,” Khan, 33, said. “I can't imagine a better use of my time.”
via Salman Khan, math master of the Internet.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Posted on

rePost::Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on our fascination with excess | Books | The Guardian

Excesses of appetite are the ways we conceal from ourselves what we hunger for. Kafka’s Hunger Artist – the man in the story of that name, who does performance-fasting for a living – is asked why he devoted his life to starving himself in public; he couldn’t help doing it, he says, “because I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you and everyone else”.
via Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on our fascination with excess | Books | The Guardian.

loved this article! I’m reposting my favorite line. Hope you can read the whole thing, don’t agree with a lot, but it made me introspect!

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Posted on

rePost::Overcoming Bias : Key Disputed Values

Rich communities achieve more when divorce and abortion limit the harm of volatile families, while poor communities can’t afford such breakups. Poor competing communities can’t afford arbitrary cultural barriers to getting cash or tech, but such arbitrary restrictions hurt a family less if its neighbors are similarly restricted.
via Overcoming Bias : Key Disputed Values.

I see this as the reason why there was a trend when a lot of rich Filipino couples opted to get married in other countries where divorce is legal.

Posted on

Cloud of Atlases by The Editors – The Morning News

Cloud of Atlases
Maps without legends may not be immediately informative, but determining what they represent is extremely fun. If you’re into that kind of thing, THE EDITORS have a game for you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack are the founding editors of The Morning News.
If you’ve ever picked up an old globe in a thrift store, you already know the sport of trying to determine its age based on where certain borders are demarcated and how territories are designated. And if testing your combined knowledge of history, culture, and cartography sounds like your kind of fun (it’s our kind of fun), you may enjoy what we’ve got in store.
We’ve removed the legends and all other telltale labels from the maps below, and challenge you to guess what each map depicts using only clues contained within the maps: the color-coding, names, landmarks, and whatever else you can detect. Here’s one clue to get you started: None of the maps represent gross national anything.
via Cloud of Atlases by The Editors – The Morning News.

This has been a huge time sink for today. Link surfing wikipedia has always been a weak point.

Posted on

Elink:: African Film Library

I saw a TED talk video of an african woman writer who  sad it amazed her how her roommate only seemed to view Africa with such narrow lenses. Let us not fall to a similar conundrum. Let us see the world in all its beauty with all its parts, blemishes and everything in between!
http://www.africanfilmlibrary.com/
link here

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Posted on

rePost::Charter Cities: Rules and Culture: Corruption in Hong Kong

Fighting corruption is not hopeless guys, although can’t see how we can implement something like this in the Philippines. I think we need something like No Term Limits for Ombudsman.  How does one find good people ? This is a recurring problem that I fear is really unsolvable, in the sense that we need to first foster a or encourage a culture of honesty and trust and the way I see it if people in government are corrupted in a way that may be called systematic, people from below, need to take honesty from the ground up. For now the top down corruption is winning but I am hopeful that eventually the bottom up idealist will eventually succeed!

The government’s initial attempt to fight corruption relied on a combination of an anti-corruption branch within the police force and a reduction in the prosecution’s burden of proof. For instance, the Prevention of Bribery Ordinance (1971) made it an offense to be in control of property unexplained by past income. However, since the police themselves were corrupt, relying on the police to investigate corruption proved futile.
After initial failures, in 1974 the governor general moved anti-corruption responsibilities to a new elite ministry: the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC). The ministry was independent, directly responsible to the governor, well paid, and recruited from the civilian population. The public, confident in the new ministry’s independence, became much more cooperative in reporting instances of corruption.
via Charter Cities: Rules and Culture: Corruption in Hong Kong.

Posted on

rePost::“How to read articles about health” – by Dr Alicia White – Bad Science

As we I get older I notice a marked uptick in the interest of people in health and healthcare related issues, With this in mind I think the following advice is very valuable and I hope you read the linked article!

How to read articles about health and healthcare
By Dr Alicia White
If you’ve just read a health-related headline that’s caused you to spit out your morning coffee (“Coffee causes cancer” usually does the trick) it’s always best to follow the Blitz slogan: “Keep Calm and Carry On”. On reading further you’ll often find the headline has left out something important, like “Injecting five rats with really highly concentrated coffee solution caused some changes in cells that might lead to tumours eventually. (Study funded by The Association of Tea Marketing)”.
The most important rule to remember: “Don’t automatically believe the headline”. It is there to draw you into buying the paper and reading the story. Would you read an article called “Coffee pretty unlikely to cause cancer, but you never know”? Probably not.
Before spraying your newspaper with coffee in the future, you need to interrogate the article to see what it says about the research it is reporting on. Bazian (the company I work for) has interrogated hundreds of articles for Behind The Headlines on NHS Choices, and we’ve developed the following questions to help you figure out which articles you’re going to believe, and which you’re not.
via “How to read articles about health” – by Dr Alicia White – Bad Science.

Posted on

rePost: Magnetic Monopoles? Oh, dear. : Starts With A Bang

Blame the bad science reporter, blame the stupid reposter.
NO MAGNETIC MONOPOLES, sorry for the misinformation!

Magnetic Monopoles? Oh, dear.
Category: Physics • Scientific papers
Posted on: September 4, 2009 1:17 PM, by Ethan Siegel
Electric charges come in two types, positive and negative. Magnetic poles also come in two types, North and South. In both cases, like charges/poles repel, and opposites attract. The big difference? Electric charges can exist in isolation; you can have just a positive or negative charge by itself. Whereas in a magnet, you always need both a North pole and a South pole; you can’t have a magnetic monopole.
via Magnetic Monopoles? Oh, dear. : Starts With A Bang.