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Website review: Open courseware, bringing higher learning to everyone

webmaster — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:39:08 +0000

When I look back at my time at the university in the nineties, I often wish that I had the web in its present form available to me back then. Because many times there were just too many students for the lecturers and the so called student assistants to handle. So, if you got stuck working on a problem, you remained stuck, because you never got around to ask anyone to help you out. There always seemed to be too many other students waiting in line ahead of you.

These days you don’t need to be stuck. Because there is so much material out there on the Internet, especially in the form of lectures caught on video. You can search YouTube for just about any topic, and you will find some video where someone explains it.

Just think about the possibilities. Want to see the lecture again? Replay. Got lost in your own thoughts for a while? Stop and rewind. Don’t understand the angle of approach? Find another video where another person approaches the problem differently. Is background information that you are not so familiar with mentioned? Pause the video and look for one that explains the background information. Things that we could not do back in the nineties.

I believe that there is one university has taken this further than any other. And it really comes as no surprise that MIT is it. At the turn of the millennium MIT decided to put their teaching material out on the net free to the world. Yep, that is right, open source education. They named it MIT Open Courseware. You might not earn a university degree just digging into this material, but you sure can learn just as much as a person who holds a degree. And it offers a great opportunity to people in countries with not so strong economies as to have access to state of the art teaching material.

Eventually many other places of higher education around the globe have followed and form what is called the Open Courseware Consortium.

Here you have a video from MIT about the initiative

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbQ-FeoEvTI

Links

MIT Open Courseware

The Open Courseware Consortium

A directory of free online courses

Disclaimer

The sites mentioned in the website review category are sites ran by people that do things we find worth mentioning. That their sites are mentioned here, does not imply that the people behind these sites are associated with Green Life Innovators in any way. And it especially does not imply that they publish their information “the open source way”.

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Website review: World Community Grid

webmaster — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 19:00:17 +0000

“Switch off your computer when you are not using it,” is one of those classical everyday green living advices you can read on environmental pages throughout. If your are like me, you will know that up against this idea there are plenty of reasons to keep your computer running when you are not using it, reasons of which running the virus scan while you are asleep is only one. For those of you who still worry that this behavior is wasteful, there is something else you can do to ease you conscience.

The World Community Grid is a system where you can let them borrow some of your processing power to do calculations for research projects for the benefit of man kind. They seem to have a major focus on medical research, like cures for cancer and AIDS, but they also got a green tech project running now called “The clean energy project”. The way it works is that you download and install a small program onto your computer. When idle, your computer will request data on a specific project from World Community Grid’s server. It will then perform computations on this data, send the results back to the server, and ask the server for a new piece of work.

As you probably remember from school, you can solve one equation with one unknown or two equations with two unknown. And that is where most people stopped. You can actually extend the principles to solve n equations with n unknown, where n can be a very, very large number. It just takes a lot of time and is prone to errors. So, it is beyond the capability of any human to get it right and produce a result in a reasonable time once the size of the problem grows. In fact it is often beyond the capability of a single computer too. Now its getting interesting. Many problems can be broken down into parts, and one computer can calculate one part and another computer can calculate another part of the problem, and then we can merge the partial solutions together. And this is really how the World Community Grid works. It is called parallel computing. The supercomputers of this world work in a similar fashion. There you have a grid of processors working in parallel on parts of the same problem. It’s nothing that says that all the processors have to be inside the same box. They could just as well be spread over a large geographical area, like the entire globe. Which is exactly what they are in the World Community Grid.

It is open to public and non-profit organizations to submit proposals for new projects in the World Community Grid. That means that we, the Green Life Innovators community, being a non-profit organization focusing on one of the areas that they support, will have the opportunity to propose new projects to The World Community Grid. I don’t believe they will grant us the use of the grid for every proposal we could make, though. Our members should, however, keep this in mind, that we do have this opportunity to submit a proposal to tap into this vast processing power if we come up with projects that need a lot of calculations and the people behind the World Community Grid find them worth doing.

Links

World Community Grid
The ongoing “Clean energy project”

Disclaimer

The sites mentioned in the website review category are sites ran by people that do things we find worth mentioning. That their sites are mentioned here, does not imply that the people behind these sites are associated with Green Life Innovators in any way. And it especially does not imply that they publish their information “the open source way”.

Further reading:

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Website review : byexample.com

webmaster — Wed, 27 May 2009 18:00:03 +0000

By Example, The quest for sustainable living, is the website of Patrick and Mel, a couple who have established their homestead in the high-desert of Arizona, based on the principles of sustainability. If you are planning on getting into this kind of life style yourself, this web page is a good place to start, as they share with us a wide range of practical hands on experience in many different aspects of sustainable living.

Their quest for sustainable living is based on six simple principles. These are:

Live simply.
Be happy and at peace.
Start with the basics.
Make do with what’s available now.
Avoid going into debt.
Keep tax liabilities as low as possible.

Whether its raising chicken or rabbits, organic gardening, drilling a fresh water well or making a solar shower you are interested in, this page has information about it, and more. Talking of rabbits, whenever people hear about them, they would guess that breeding rabbits would be the easiest task in the world. After all, rabbits are believed to be notoriously reproductive creatures. While still not exactly rocket science, By Example’s article on rabbit breeding does, however, reveal that there too, there are some practical considerations to take into account for a successful outcome.

You’ll find the website at:
www.byexample.com

Disclaimer

The sites mentioned in the website review category are sites ran by people that do things we find worth mentioning. That their sites are mentioned here, does not imply that the people behind these sites are associated with Green Life Innovators in any way. And it especially does not imply that they publish their information “the open source way”.

Further reading:

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Website review : TED Ideas worth spreading

webmaster — Thu, 21 May 2009 19:56:59 +0000

“Once a year 1000 remarkable people gather in Monterey, California, to exchange something of incalculable value. Their ideas.” This used to be the old intro to a video from the TED conference. Since then, they have moved the conference from Monterey to Long Beach and changed the video intro, but the concept behind the main event remains the same.

TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, started as early as back in 1984, as that annual conference in Monterey. In recent years the concept has been greatly extended and now spreads across the globe, across the Internet and across different social media. They now host TED events in other locations world wide, they simulcast the main event to different venues, you have a TED blog, a TED Facebook group, a TED online community site, and so on, and so on.

So, who are the people sharing their thoughts on TED? They are actually some of the most important people in this world today, from a wide variety of fields, like science, technology, business, politics and cultural life. They are mankind’s movers and shakers, thinkers and dreamers. They are the people in positions to see their ideas actually come to life. Therefore, TED should be among the bookmarks of everyone interested in what tomorrow will bring us. TED is also a great source of inspiration and motivation for everyone. I could watch their videos for days, and with almost 500 of them, on average approximately 20 minutes long, that is true both literally, as well as metaphorically.

I have included a sample of four different videos from pretty different fields. Those of you who would like to see more can follow the links at the end of this article. A warning should be issued at this point. These videos can be very addictive

The first video is almost mandatory to include in a sample made by the admin of a green tech site. Here inventor Saul Griffith talks about using kites in wind turbine systems to generate electricity.

The second video deals with something completely different. Garrett Lisi is developing his own grand unifying theory as an alternative to super string theory. Apart from that, he seems to live a life that most people could envy him, living on an exotic island, practicing his other great passion, surfing.

Clay Shirky has been mentioned before on this blog. Here he is again, from TED, with a lecture about the effects of social media on people’s ability to self organize in groups.

The last video shows Michael Shermer, the director of the Skeptics Society. This lecture is a healthy and refreshing antidote to the anti scientific sentiments, that unfortunately have taken such a strong hold on the mind set of many western people the past decades.

Links

TED’s web page

TED’s YouTube channel

Wikipedia on TED

Disclaimer

The sites mentioned in the website review category are sites ran by people that do things we find worth mentioning. That their sites are mentioned here, does not imply that the people behind these sites are associated with Green Life Innovators in any way. And it especially does not imply that they publish their information “the open source way”.

Further reading:

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Website review : Green Power Science

webmaster — Thu, 21 May 2009 13:03:06 +0000

Green Power Science is the name of a web site and a YouTube channel operated by Dan and Denise Rojas from Tampa, Florida. Their YouTube channels was started on May 28th 2007. This means that the channel will celebrate its 2 year anniversary in one week from today. During that period, their videos have been viewed more than four and a half million times.

Dan and Denise Rojas from one of their videos

In their own words they describe their goal like this, quote: “Green Power Science is dedicated to the backyard scientist. Our belief is that some of the smartest people in the world discover the best things through trial and error IN THEIR OWN BACKYARDS OR GARAGES.” unquote.

Their videos show many different, interesting and very educational do it yourself experiments, like solar cooking, stirling engines, fresnel lenses, vertical axis wind turbines and many other types of green tech. One of the really nice things about this site is that they perform experiments in such a wide variety of technologies.

Here are two of their videos. In the first video, apart from talking about parabolic mirrors, Dan also shows us how to cut a perfect circle with a table top saw (Yes it is posssible ). In the second video, Denise shows us, so called, Tera Preta enriched soil. Enjoy.

Links

Green Power Science

Green Power Science YouTube channel

Disclaimer

The sites mentioned in the website review category are sites ran by people that do things we find worth mentioning. That their sites are mentioned here, does not imply that the people behind these sites are associated with Green Life Innovators in any way. And it especially does not imply that they publish their information “the open source way”.

Further reading:

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