First it was indie movies; now it’s classic TV shows. Thanks to a deal with CBS, you can now watch classic television shows on YouTube. Here, you’ll find Beverly Hills, 90210, MacGyver, and even Star Trek — not exactly high-culture, but you can’t win every time.
For more edifying series of YouTube videos, see our piece: Intelligent Life at YouTube: 75 Educational Video Collections.
Here’s a project that a few colleagues and I have had some fun developing. So it only seems fair that I get the scoop, right?
Starting on October 15, you can follow a timely, free course presented by Stanford University. Led by Martin Lewis, the course will explore the geography of U.S. presidential elections (both past and present), and challenge the suggestion that we are simply divided into a “Red America” and “Blue America.” It’s really much more complicated than that, as the introductory video below makes pretty clear. (Get the iTunes version here.)
The course will run five weeks, and it will include a debrief after the November election. A new video (running between 90 and 120 minutes) will be posted every Wednesday on iTunes and YouTube. And we’ve set up a web site for the course where you’ll be able to interact with the professor, and where you can also find a lot more information, including a complete course description and readings for the course. Once the course gets started, I will post a reminder. In the meantime, I wanted to give you an advanced heads up and hopefully whet your appetites a bit.
Lastly, I should mention that this course comes out of Stanford’s fine Continuing Studies program, and it will be eventually listed in our collection of Free Courses.
Here’s a course for our historical moment.…
Behavioral economics—“the study of how thinking and emotions affect individual economic decisions and the behavior of markets”—is a relatively new discipline. This approach to economics, which marries psychology and economics and discards the assumption that every economic actor is rational, was developed partly by Richard Thaler, Director of the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Now, thanks to the Edge.org, you can follow a short class on the subject. It’s taught by Thaler himself and he’s joined by Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman.
The course, delivered in text and video, is being rolled out weekly on the Edge web site in six installments. You can find Weeks 1 and 2 here and here. And you can check back for new installments here (scroll to the very bottom of the page.)
Here’s a rather amazing video (added to our YouTube playlist) that shows what happens when an artist, who happens to be autistic, takes a 45 minute helicopter flight over Rome and then works to artistically reproduce all that he sees. The human brain never ceases to amaze:
In case you missed it, here’s a paired down version of last night’s second presidential debate in all of its uninspiring glory:
As part of our effort to provide insight into the ongoing credit crisis, we present a talk just given at Oxford University by the Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz (iTunes — Rss Feed). The author of Globalization and its Discontents uses the talk as an opportunity to outline the events that contributed to the global credit crisis, and the future regulations that could get us back on track. The talk runs a good hour, and it takes about 20–25 minutes for Stiglitz to really focus on the credit crunch, and about 45 minutes before he starts discussing tangible solutions. Don’t expect any magic bullets, any short term solutions that will get the current crisis under control. It’s more pragmatic long-term solutions that you’ll find here.
Related Content:
The Financial Crisis Explained
Ten Days That Shook The Financial World
This American Life Demystifies The Credit Crisis
Today, the world can begin to explore a new web app that will undoubtedly hold appeal for book lovers on the web. The app is called Reframe It, and it lets you write in the margins of any web page, much as you’d write in the margins of a book. And, even better, it lets you share the comments with others, turning marginalia into something of a public conversation. (Watch the video below to see what I mean.)
Reframe It is being released today in beta. To give it a try, you can download the free Firefox or Internet Explorer Reframe It browser extension here. Give it a try and feel free to let us know what you think.
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