10 New iPhone Apps for the Thinking Person

in Apple, Most Popular, Web/Tech | July 10th, 2008


In advance of tomor­row’s release of the new 3G iPhone, Apple has launched its new App Store on iTunes, which fea­tures new tools that will imme­di­ate­ly make the iPhone (and iPod Touch) a more ver­sa­tile — and, in some cas­es, enlight­en­ing — device. Below, we have high­light­ed ten apps worth explor­ing if you’re hun­gry for enrich­ing infor­ma­tion. 9 of the 10 are free. (Please note: To access the App Store, you will need to down­load the lat­est ver­sion of iTunes (here) and also the new iPhone 2.0 firmware, which has yet to be offi­cial­ly released — although you can find an unof­fi­cial release and direc­tions on how to install it here. The offi­cial release should be com­ing any time now.)

1.) The New York Times: Thanks to this app, you can read “All the News That’s Fit to Print” on your iPhone. It lets you cus­tomize the news you read, and also read arti­cles offline.

2.) AOL Radio: One down­side to the first gen­er­a­tion iPhone is that it did­n’t allow you to access inter­net radio. This app helps to change some of that. It gives you access to 150 CBS radio sta­tions across the US, includ­ing some key news sta­tions.

3.) Man­darin Audio Phrase­book: Lone­ly Plan­et, the pub­lish­er of fine trav­el guides, has pro­duced a free Man­darin audio phrase­book, which includes 630 com­mon­ly used phras­es. Via the iPhone you can hear how the phras­es are spo­ken (and also see how they are pho­net­i­cal­ly writ­ten). For $9.99, you can pur­chase phrase­books in nine oth­er lan­guages, includ­ing Span­ish, French, Japan­ese, Ital­ian, Thai, Viet­namese and Czech. See full col­lec­tion here.

4.) Tru­veo Video Search: The Wall Street Jour­nal calls Tru­veo the “best web-wide video-search engine.” And now, with this Tru­veo app, you can use the iPhone to find videos from across the web, and, regard­less of their for­mat, play them all in one appli­ca­tion. This sounds like a great addi­tion, espe­cial­ly since many videos weren’t playable on 1st gen­er­a­tion iPhones.

5.) Net­NewsWire: With this app, you can add an RSS read­er to the iPhone, allow­ing you to read RSS feeds in a neat and clean way. It also lets you “clip” arti­cles that you like and read them lat­er. Don’t for­get to sign up for our feed, and you can always add more cul­tur­al feeds by perus­ing our list of 100 Cul­ture Blogs.

6.) Google Mobile App: Let’s face it. In today’s infor­ma­tion world, Google is a must-have. And so it’s nice to have an app that makes Google and its many func­tion­al­i­ties com­plete­ly iPhone friend­ly.

7.) AppEngines E‑Books: For 99 cents, you can down­load a clas­sic e‑book to your iPhone, and read it in a quite leg­i­ble for­mat. In this col­lec­tion, you will find Crime and Pun­ish­ment, Pride and Prej­u­dice, Dick­ens’ Great Expec­ta­tions, and about 40 oth­er e‑books.

8.) Talk­ing Span­ish Phrase­book: Too busy to learn a new lan­guage? Then you’re in luck. This app will do the talk­ing for you. It takes basic phras­es in Eng­lish and then con­verts them into spo­ken Span­ish. There are also free ver­sions in French, Ger­man, and Ital­ian.

9.) Epocrates: This free app turns your iPhone into a com­pre­hen­sive drug data­base. Very handy for the med­ical com­mu­ni­ty.

10.) NearPics: If you’re trav­el­ing, and if you want to dis­cov­er great places near­by, this app lets you dis­cov­er pic­tures that have been tak­en in the vicin­i­ty. The app offers a way to dis­cov­er intrigu­ing places (or things) that nor­mal­ly fly below the radar. Also, this oth­er app lets you put Flickr on your iPhone. More ways to sat­is­fy your inner pho­tog­ra­ph­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

10 Ways to Make Your iPod a Bet­ter Learn­ing Gad­get

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This American Life Demystifies the Housing/Credit Crisis

in Current Affairs, Most Popular | May 15th, 2008

There’s been no short­age of arti­cles try­ing to explain the ongo­ing hous­ing and mort­gage cri­sis. But none does a more clear and enter­tain­ing job than this recent episode of This Amer­i­can Life, “The Giant Pool of Mon­ey” (iTunes — Feed — MP3). Step by step, the show traces how we got into this mess. Along the way, you’ll dis­cov­er how 70 tril­lion dol­lars of glob­al mon­ey need­ed to get parked some­where, and it found the US hous­ing mar­ket. As the mon­ey poured in, the Amer­i­can invest­ment com­mu­ni­ty cranked out as many mort­gages as it could. And when there were no more qual­i­fied home buy­ers left, the banks start­ed low­er­ing lend­ing stan­dards until there were none left. In the end, even dead peo­ple were get­ting mort­gages (sad­ly, a true sto­ry). Give the pod­cast a lis­ten. The whole deba­cle gets pieced togeth­er in a way that you’ve prob­a­bly nev­er heard before.

For more details, look here.

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Teaching on YouTube

in Most Popular, YouTube | April 22nd, 2008

Today, we have a guest fea­ture by Alexan­dra Juhasz, Pro­fes­sor of Media Stud­ies at Pitzer Col­lege, in Clare­mont, CA. This piece con­sol­i­dates length­i­er blog entries about a course she ran on YouTube, called “Learn­ing from YouTube,” in Fall 2007. The whole goal was to bet­ter under­stand this new media/cultural phe­nom­e­non, and how it can be used in the class­room. How did she set up this class? And what did she learn? Find out below. Take it away Alexan­dra (and feel free to check out our YouTube playlist as well as our piece, 60 Smart Video Col­lec­tions on YouTube) .…

I decid­ed to teach a course about YouTube to bet­ter under­stand this recent and mas­sive media/cultural phe­nom­e­non, giv­en that I had been stu­dious­ly ignor­ing it (even as I rec­og­nized its sig­nif­i­cance) because every time I went there, I was seri­ous­ly under­whelmed by what I saw: inter­change­able, bite-sized, for­mu­la­ic videos refer­ring either to pop­u­lar cul­ture or per­son­al pain/pleasure. I called them video slo­gans: pithy, pre­cise, rous­ing calls to action or con­sump­tion, or action as con­sump­tion. I was cer­tain, how­ev­er, that there must be video, in this vast sea, that would sat­is­fy even my lofty stan­dards, and fig­ured my stu­dents (giv­en their greater facil­i­ty with a life-on-line) prob­a­bly knew bet­ter than I how to nav­i­gate the site.

Learn­ing From YouTube was my first tru­ly “stu­dent led” course: we would deter­mine the impor­tant themes and rel­e­vant meth­ods togeth­er. I had decid­ed that I want­ed the course to pri­mar­i­ly con­sid­er how web 2.0 (in this case, specif­i­cal­ly YouTube) is rad­i­cal­ly alter­ing the con­di­tions of learn­ing (what, where, when, how we have access to infor­ma­tion). Giv­en that col­lege stu­dents are rarely asked to con­sid­er the meta-ques­tions of how they learn, on top of what they are learn­ing, I thought it would be ped­a­gog­i­cal­ly use­ful for the form of the course to mir­ror YouTube’s struc­tures for learn­ing, like its ama­teur-led ped­a­gogy. Yes, on YouTube there is a great deal of user con­trol, but this is with­in a lim­it­ed and also high­ly lim­it­ing set of tools. So, I did set forth the rule that all the learn­ing for the course had to be on and about YouTube. While this con­straint was clear­ly arti­fi­cial, and per­haps mis­lead­ing about how YouTube is used in con­nec­tion with a host of oth­er media plat­forms which com­ple­ment its func­tion­al­i­ty, it did allow us to become crit­i­cal­ly aware of the con­straints of its archi­tec­ture for our atyp­i­cal goals of high­er edu­ca­tion. Thus, all assign­ments had to be pro­duced as YouTube com­ments or videos, all research had to be con­duct­ed with­in its pages, and all class­es were taped and put on to YouTube. This gim­mick, plus a press release, made the course sexy enough to catch the eye of the media, main­stream and oth­er­wise, allow­ing for an exhaust­ing, but self-reflex­ive les­son in the role and val­ue of media atten­tion with­in social net­work­ing. Beyond this, stu­dents quick­ly real­ized how well trained they actu­al­ly are to do aca­d­e­m­ic work with the word—their expertise—and how poor is their media-pro­duc­tion lit­er­a­cy (there were no media pro­duc­tion skills required for the course as there are not on YouTube). (more…)

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10 Ways to Make Your iPod a Better Learning Gadget

in Most Popular, Web/Tech | December 30th, 2007


The iPod can super­charge your learn­ing. But it’s often a mat­ter of find­ing the right soft­ware and con­tent. Below, we’ve list­ed sev­er­al new pieces of soft­ware that will let you suck more edu­ca­tion­al media (DVDs, web videos, audio files, etc.) into your iPod. And we’ve also list­ed some impor­tant pieces of con­tent that will make your iPod a bet­ter learn­ing gad­get. So here it goes (and be sure to see our relat­ed piece 10 Signs of Intel­li­gent Life at YouTube):

1) Put Wikipedia on Your Ipod: Ency­clopo­dia is a free piece of soft­ware that brings Wikipedia to the iPod. Ency­clopo­dia can be installed on iPod gen­er­a­tions 1 through 4, as well as iPod Min­is. Def­i­nite­ly worth a try.

2) Watch DVDs on Your iPod: This free, open source soft­ware works on MacOS X, Lin­ux and Win­dows, and makes it sim­ple to load and watch DVDs on your video iPod. Here are some help­ful instruc­tions to get you start­ed.

3) Load YouTube Videos to Your iPod: Con­vert­Tube allows you to take any YouTube video and con­vert it to a for­mat that works on your iPod. It’s as sim­ple as enter­ing a url and click­ing “con­vert and down­load.” If you want to give the soft­ware a test run, try con­vert­ing these UC Berke­ley cours­es that were recent­ly launched on YouTube. Or these Nobel Prize speech­es.

4) Make Oth­er Video For­mats iPod-Ready: Life­hack­er recent­ly men­tioned three oth­er pieces of soft­ware that will make a vari­ety of oth­er video for­mats iPod-ready. For Win­dows, see Vide­o­ra; for Mac, see iSquint. Or more gen­er­al­ly see Zamzar. In a nut­shell, these items will turn a wide range of video for­mats into the one video for­mat (MPEG‑4) that your iPod likes.

5) Con­vert MP3 files into One Big iPod Audio­book File: Down­load­ing free audio­books can often require you to work with a series of sep­a­rate mp3 files, which can make things rather cum­ber­some. This soft­ware does you a favor and mash­es the files into one man­age­able file. And it has a fea­ture that will let your Ipod remem­ber where you stopped if you decide to take a break. (If this one appeals to you, be sure to see item # 10.)

6) Cre­ate eBooks for the iPod: This bit of soft­ware turns text files into ebooks that you can read on your iPod. After you load a text file, it will make the text read­able through iPod Notes (which you can find under “Extra Sett­tings”). Then, voila, a portable text. Thanks to Pachecus.com for point­ing this one out.

7) Record Web Audio and Move it To Your iPod: Designed for Macs, iRecord­Mu­sic enables you to eas­i­ly record audio from web pages and Inter­net radio streams. So if you’re surf­ing the web and find a good piece of streamed audio, it lets you record it and then trans­fer the media to your iPod. The only down­side is that the soft­ware isn’t free. It will run you $24.95, but it may well be worth it. You can down­load a tri­al ver­sion here.

8) Get a Civic Edu­ca­tion on Your Ipod: This site allows you to down­load to your iPod ten impor­tant doc­u­ments that any edu­cat­ed Amer­i­can should be famil­iar with. The texts include: The Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, Con­sti­tu­tion of the Unit­ed States, Bill of Rights, Louisiana Pur­chase Treaty, Eman­ci­pa­tion Procla­ma­tion, Get­tys­burg Address, Civ­il Rights Act, and sev­er­al oth­ers. (Note: You can also down­load here an iPod ver­sion of Mer­ri­am-Web­ster’s Pock­et Dic­tio­nary for $9.95.)

9) Load Maps onto Your iPod: If you trav­el to New York City, Paris, Berlin or Moscow, how will you find your way to the muse­ums? iSub­wayMaps is the answer. It lets you down­load sub­way maps from 24 major cities across the globe. You’ll only need an iPod with pho­to capa­bil­i­ty and you’ll be good to go. (By the way, if you want to load Google Maps to your iPod, here is a tuto­r­i­al that will explain how.)

10) Study For­eign Lan­guages, Take Uni­ver­si­ty Cours­es, and Lis­ten to Audio­Books on Your iPod — All for Free: Ok, so this is a cheap but worth­while plug for some of our rich­est pod­cast col­lec­tions. Our For­eign Lan­guage Pod­cast Col­lec­tion lets your learn over 25 dif­fer­ent for­eign lan­guages. Our Audio­Book pod­cast col­lec­tion will give you portable access to 100+ clas­sic works of lit­er­a­ture and non­fic­tion. And this uni­ver­si­ty pod­cast col­lec­tion pro­vides access to over 85 cours­es record­ed at lead­ing Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties. Not bad, if I say so myself. For our com­plete pod­cast library, click here.

Know of more soft­ware or con­tent that will super­charge your iPod? Feel free to list them in our com­ments. And if they’re good, we’ll hap­pi­ly add them to the list.

For more great iPod util­i­ties, see the recent fea­tures by Life­hack­er and Pachecus.com.

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15 Most Viewed Posts in 2007

in Most Popular | December 14th, 2007

We dug back through the his­tor­i­cal data and iso­lat­ed the 15 most viewed posts of the year. If you’re look­ing for a trend, one will leap out. Peo­ple like num­bered lists. Hence anoth­er one:

1) 10 Unex­pect­ed Uses of the iPod
2) 25 UC Berke­ley Cours­es Avail­able via Free Video
3) 45 Free Cut­ting-Edge Books … Cour­tesy of Cre­ative Com­mons
4) The War of the Worlds on Pod­cast: How H.G. Wells and Orson Welles Riv­et­ed A Nation
5) Our Ances­tral Mind in the Mod­ern World: An Inter­view with Satoshi Kanaza­wa
6) Free Beethoven and Mozart Record­ings via Pod­cast
7) Life-Chang­ing Books: Your Picks
8) 10 Free Uni­ver­si­ty Cours­es on iTunes
9) Pod­cast Primer
10) MP3 Music Blogs: For Your Lis­ten­ing Plea­sure
11) Ten Dis­cov­er­ies That Rewrote His­to­ry
12) The Hottest Course on iTunes (and the Future of Dig­i­tal Edu­ca­tion)
13) Ten Pod­casts to Build Your Vocab­u­lary
14) YouTube Gets Smart: The Launch of New Uni­ver­si­ty Chan­nels
15) The Decline and Fall of the Roman (and Amer­i­can?) Empire: A Free Audio­book

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Our Ancestral Mind in the Modern World: An Interview with Satoshi Kanazawa

in Books, Most Popular, Psychology, Science | October 21st, 2007

beautiful4.jpgHuman behav­ior is noto­ri­ous­ly com­plex, and there’s been no short­age of psy­chol­o­gists and psy­cho­log­i­cal the­o­ries ven­tur­ing to explain what makes us tick. Why do we get irra­tional­ly jeal­ous? Or have midlife crises? Why do we overeat to our own detri­ment? Why do we find our­selves often strong­ly attract­ed to cer­tain phys­i­cal traits? Numer­ous the­o­ries abound, but few are per­haps as nov­el and thought-pro­vok­ing as those sug­gest­ed by a new book with a long title: Why Beau­ti­ful Peo­ple Have More Daugh­ters: From Dat­ing, Shop­ping, and Pray­ing to Going to War and Becom­ing a Bil­lion­aire — Two Evo­lu­tion­ary Psy­chol­o­gists Explain Why We Do What We Do. Writ­ten by Satoshi Kanaza­wa and Alan S. Miller, the book finds answers not in ids, egos and super­egos, but in the evo­lu­tion of the human brain. Writ­ten in snap­py prose, their argu­ment is essen­tial­ly that our behav­ior — our wants, desires and impuls­es — are over­whelm­ing­ly shaped by the way our brain evolved 10,000+ years ago, and one con­se­quence is that our ances­tral brain is often respond­ing to a world long ago dis­ap­peared, not the mod­ern, fast-chang­ing world in which we live. This dis­con­nect can lead us to be out of sync, to act in ways that seem inex­plic­a­ble or counter-pro­duc­tive, even to our­selves. These argu­ments belong to new field called “evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gy,” and we were for­tu­nate to inter­view Satoshi Kanaza­wa (Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics) and delve fur­ther into evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gy and the (some­times dispir­it­ing) issues it rais­es. Have a read, check out the book, and also see the relat­ed piece that the Freako­nom­ics folks recent­ly did on this book. Please note that the full inter­view con­tin­ues after the jump.

DC: In a nut­shell, what is “evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gy”? (e.g. when did the field emerge? what are the basic tenets/principles of this school of think­ing?)

SK: Evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gy is the appli­ca­tion of evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy to human cog­ni­tion and behav­ior. For more than a cen­tu­ry, zool­o­gists have suc­cess­ful­ly used the uni­fy­ing prin­ci­ples of evo­lu­tion to explain the body and behav­ior of all ani­mal species in nature, except for humans. Sci­en­tists held a spe­cial place for humans and made an excep­tion for them.

In 1992, a group of psy­chol­o­gists and anthro­pol­o­gists sim­ply asked, “Why not? Why can’t we use the prin­ci­ples of evo­lu­tion to explain human behav­ior as well?” And the new sci­ence of evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gy was born. It is premised on two grand gen­er­al­iza­tions. First, all the laws of evo­lu­tion by nat­ur­al and sex­u­al selec­tion hold for humans as much as they do for all species in nature. Sec­ond, the con­tents of the human brain have been shaped by the forces of evo­lu­tion just as much as every oth­er part of human body. In oth­er words, humans are ani­mals, and as such they have been shaped by evo­lu­tion­ary forces just as oth­er ani­mals have been.

DC: Evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gy por­trays us as hav­ing impuls­es that took form long ago, in a very pre-mod­ern con­text (say, 10,000 years ago), and now these impuls­es are some­times rather ill-adapt­ed to our con­tem­po­rary world. For exam­ple, in a food-scarce envi­ron­ment, we became pro­grammed to eat when­ev­er we can; now, with food abound­ing in many parts of the world, this impulse cre­ates the con­di­tions for an obe­si­ty epi­dem­ic. Giv­en that our world will like­ly con­tin­ue chang­ing at a rapid pace, are we doomed to have our impuls­es con­stant­ly play­ing catch up with our envi­ron­ment, and does that poten­tial­ly doom us as a species?

SK: In fact, we’re not play­ing catch up; we’re stuck. For any evo­lu­tion­ary change to take place, the envi­ron­ment has to remain more or less con­stant for many gen­er­a­tions, so that evo­lu­tion can select the traits that are adap­tive and elim­i­nate those that are not. When the envi­ron­ment under­goes rapid change with­in the space of a gen­er­a­tion or two, as it has been for the last cou­ple of mil­len­nia, if not more, then evo­lu­tion can’t hap­pen because nature can’t deter­mine which traits to select and which to elim­i­nate. So they remain at a stand­still. Our brain (and the rest of our body) are essen­tial­ly frozen in time — stuck in the Stone Age.

One exam­ple of this is that when we watch a scary movie, we get scared, and when we watch porn we get turned on. We cry when some­one dies in a movie. Our brain can­not tell the dif­fer­ence between what’s sim­u­lat­ed and what’s real, because this dis­tinc­tion didn’t exist in the Stone Age.

DC: One con­clu­sion from your book is that we’re some­thing of a pris­on­er to our hard-wiring. Yes, there is some room for us to maneu­ver. But, in the end, our evolved nature takes over. If all of this holds true, is there room in our world for utopi­an (or even mild­ly opti­mistic) polit­i­cal move­ments that look to refash­ion how humans behave and inter­act with one anoth­er? Or does this sci­ence sug­gest that Edmund Burke was on to some­thing?

SK: Steven Pinker, in his 2002 book The Blank Slate, makes a very con­vinc­ing argu­ment that all Utopi­an visions, whether they be moti­vat­ed by left-wing ide­ol­o­gy or right-wing ide­ol­o­gy, are doomed to fail­ure, because they all assume that human nature is mal­leable. Evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gists have dis­cov­ered that the human mind is not a blank slate, a tab­u­la rasa; humans have innate bio­log­i­cal nature as much as any oth­er species does, and it is not mal­leable. Paul H. Rubin’s 2002 book Dar­win­ian Pol­i­tics: The Evo­lu­tion­ary Ori­gin of Free­dom gives an evo­lu­tion­ary psy­cho­log­i­cal account of why Burke and clas­si­cal lib­er­als (who are today called lib­er­tar­i­ans) may have been right.

As a sci­en­tist, I am not inter­est­ed in Utopi­an visions (or any oth­er visions for soci­ety). But it seems to me that, if you want to change the world suc­cess­ful­ly, you can­not start from false premis­es. Any such attempt is bound to fail. If you build a house on top of a lake on the assump­tion that water is sol­id, it will inevitably col­lapse and sink to the bot­tom of the lake, but if you rec­og­nize the flu­id nature of water, you can build a suc­cess­ful house­boat. A house­boat may not be as good as a gen­uine house built on ground, but it’s bet­ter than a col­lapsed house on the bot­tom of the lake. A vision for soci­ety based on an evo­lu­tion­ary psy­cho­log­i­cal under­stand­ing of human nature at least has a fight­ing chance, which is a much bet­ter than any Utopi­an vision based on the assump­tion that human nature is infi­nite­ly mal­leable.

(more…)

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Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History

in Books, History, Most Popular | September 23rd, 2007

tendiscoveries.jpgHere are a few facts to know about the adven­tur­ous Patrick Hunt. He’s a Stan­ford archae­ol­o­gist who has spent more than a decade try­ing to unrav­el the mys­tery of how Han­ni­bal, the great ancient mil­i­tary leader, crossed the Alps in 218 BCE with 25,000 men and 37 ele­phants. (Lis­ten on iTunes to the course he gave on this adven­ture, and get more info below). He has bro­ken more than 20 bones while doing field­work, fought off kid­nap­pers, and twice sur­vived sun­stroke-induced blind­ness. And now he has just pub­lished an excit­ing new book called Ten Dis­cov­er­ies That Rewrote His­to­ry. It’s pub­lished by Penguin/Plume and starts ship­ping tomor­row. I asked Patrick what makes these dis­cov­er­ies — rang­ing from the Roset­ta Stone to the Dead Sea Scrolls to Machu Pic­chu — so impor­tant. Below he gives us a brief glimpse into what makes each dis­cov­ery his­tor­i­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant and fas­ci­nat­ing. Read on, and check out his cap­ti­vat­ing new book for the fuller pic­ture.

Patrick Hunt: “First I should say that not every archae­ol­o­gist would agree that these are the ten most impor­tant dis­cov­er­ies of all time. On the oth­er hand, the ten sto­ries retold in this book are often regard­ed as among the most excit­ing archae­o­log­i­cal dis­cov­er­ies of the mod­ern era (since 1750). And no one would deny that these ten vital dis­cov­er­ies have for­ev­er changed the world of archae­ol­o­gy, trans­form­ing how and what we know about ancient his­to­ry. Let me tell you a lit­tle about them.

Roset­ta Stone: This excit­ing dis­cov­ery in 1799 was the key to deci­pher­ing Egypt­ian hiero­glyphs and unlock­ing the his­to­ry of the ancient world texts. It pro­vides a win­dow into the real his­to­ry of Egypt rather than an imag­i­nary one; all oth­er deci­pher­ings of ancient lan­guages since the Roset­ta Stone’s ini­tial decod­ing in 1822 are based on its prece­dents. (See pho­to here.)

Troy: Its dis­cov­ery and exca­va­tion begin­ning in 1870 proved once and for all that Troy was not just a myth based on Homer; Troy was a his­tor­i­cal site where real peo­ple lived and fought. Its ear­li­est exca­va­tor, the oft-maligned and often-uneth­i­cal Hein­rich Schlie­mann has been most­ly cred­it­ed — right or wrong — as being the “Father of Archae­ol­o­gy” and his tech­niques became the foun­da­tion of archae­o­log­i­cal research, how­ev­er great­ly improved, after­ward.

Nin­eveh and the Roy­al Assyr­i­an Library: This riv­et­ing find begin­ning in 1849 by Austen Hen­ry Layard, a sleuth of antiq­ui­ty, even­tu­al­ly unearthed a whole lost library of cuneiform texts, includ­ing ones not only from ancient Assyr­ia but also from far old­er Sumer, Akkad, Baby­lon and oth­er great civ­i­liza­tions. This had a very sig­nif­i­cant impact on world lit­er­a­ture, intro­duc­ing such sem­i­nal works as the Epic of Gil­gamesh.

King Tut’s Tomb: The dra­mat­ic open­ing of this roy­al tomb in 1922 — sought for years by a deter­mined Howard Carter — was the first time in mil­len­nia a pharao­h’s tomb had actu­al­ly been found intact; its trea­sure gave the world a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to actu­al­ly account for stag­ger­ing Egypt­ian roy­al wealth. [Dan’s note: Nation­al Geo­graph­ic has a nice web site on this archae­o­log­i­cal find.]

Machu Pic­chu: The remark­able high jun­gle moun­tain dis­cov­ery in 1911 of the remote Lost City of the Inca by Hiram Bing­ham made it pos­si­ble for the world to final­ly see an undis­turbed Inca roy­al city mys­te­ri­ous­ly aban­doned on a moun­tain­top but nei­ther con­quered nor changed by the colo­nial world. (See pho­to here.)

Pom­peii: Pre­served by the erup­tion of Vesu­vius in AD 79 and not dug out for almost two mil­len­nia, Pom­peii (prob­a­bly acci­den­tal­ly found by a farmer dig­ging a well) is the sin­gle most impor­tant Roman site in the world; its arti­facts offer the largest and fullest record of life in a Roman city. Pom­pei­i’s mis­for­tune is our great for­tune. It pre­serves a city with thou­sands of objects vir­tu­al­ly unchanged. (See images here.)

Dead Sea Scrolls: Since 1947, when two Bedouin boys in the desert stum­bled upon the first cave at Qum­ran, these hid­den desert texts have rev­o­lu­tion­ized our per­cep­tions of ear­ly Jew­ish and Chris­t­ian reli­gion; their find­ing has pushed back our knowl­edge of bib­li­cal man­u­scripts by a thou­sand years. This dis­cov­ery and the off-and-on secre­cy of the finds reads like spy fic­tion but is real instead. (See pho­to here.)

Akrotiri on Thera: Archae­ol­o­gist Spyri­don Mar­i­natos had been laughed at by his peers for his the­o­ries and was final­ly vin­di­cat­ed 30 years lat­er (cir­ca 1967). Like Pom­peii, ash from the vol­canic erup­tion in 1620 BC pre­served a whole Aegean city that might have been the source of the Atlantis myths but was cer­tain­ly a wealthy city with fab­u­lous wall paint­ings depict­ing Bronze Age life. It gives us for the first time a whole new body of Minoan art and under­stand­ing of Mediter­ranean sea trade. (Images here.)

Oldu­vai Gorge: Since the 1920’s, the Leakey fam­i­ly dogged­ly per­sist­ed search­ing in East Africa for the most ancient human ori­gins; dra­mat­ic unearthing of bones and tools in 1959 from Oldu­vai and oth­er sites in Great Rift Africa for­ev­er showed the world how long — at least a mil­lion years — antecedents to human life have per­sist­ed, final­ly pro­vid­ing proof of Dar­win­ian evo­lu­tion from ear­li­er pri­mate and hominid finds.

Tomb of 10,000 War­riors: This stag­ger­ing tomb from around 220–210 BC, spread­ing over hun­dreds of acres, sin­gle-hand­ed­ly awak­ened West­ern inter­est in Chi­nese his­to­ry and revi­tal­ized Chi­nese archae­ol­o­gy. The opu­lence and grandeur of an emper­or’s tomb aston­ished the world. Archeo­tourism in Chi­na has prof­it­ed immense­ly from the acci­den­tal 1974 find of a pre-Han tomb where lies the author­i­tar­i­an emper­or who forcibly unit­ed and rewrote Chi­nese cul­ture in many ways that still sur­vive today.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: Above, I men­tioned that you can lis­ten to Patrick Hunt’s Stan­ford course on Han­ni­bal on iTunes. The course is going to be rolled out in install­ments over the next sev­er­al weeks. Sep­a­rate­ly you can lis­ten to a stand­alone lec­ture that he gave on Han­ni­bal short­ly before the start of the course. (Lis­ten on iTunes here.) This lec­ture gets ref­er­enced in the course at sev­er­al points. Patrick­’s work on Han­ni­bal is spon­sored by Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Soci­ety.

Sub­scribe to our feed and see our com­plete col­lec­tion of free uni­ver­si­ty cours­es.

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10 Unexpected Uses of the iPod

in Apple, Most Popular, Technology | April 30th, 2007

New tech­nolo­gies often have unin­tend­ed uses. Take the Ipod as a case in point. It was devel­oped with the inten­tion of play­ing music (and lat­er videos), but its appli­ca­tions now go well beyond that. Here are 10 rather unfore­seen, even sur­pris­ing, uses:

1. Train Doc­tors to Save Lives: A new study pre­sent­ed at the annu­al meet­ing of the Amer­i­can Col­lege of Car­di­ol­o­gy indi­cates that iPods can dou­ble interns’ abil­i­ty to iden­ti­fy heart sounds that are indica­tive of seri­ous heart prob­lems (i.e., aor­tic or mitral steno­sis). By using the iPod to repeat­ed­ly lis­ten to record­ings of nor­mal and abnor­mal heart beat pat­terns, interns can effec­tive­ly hear when some­thing is going awry.

Or how about this for anoth­er med­ical appli­ca­tion: Will Gilbert, who heads up the bioin­for­mat­ics group in the Hub­bard Cen­ter for Genome Stud­ies, stores the entire human genome on his iPod. As you can read in Wired, he has found that the iPod is a great way to store the gene sequence, all 3 bil­lion chem­i­cal let­ters of it, and, com­pared to using a net­work, he can access data more quick­ly with the lit­tle Apple gad­get. [Thanks to one of our read­ers for point­ing this one out.]

2. Bring Crim­i­nals to Jus­tice: On an exper­i­men­tal basis, a Unit­ed States fed­er­al dis­trict court has start­ed using iPods to hold copies of wire­tap trans­mis­sions in a large drug-con­spir­a­cy case. Why? Because it’s eas­i­er than stor­ing the record­ings on cas­sette tapes or CDRoms; the defen­dants and attor­neys can access and work through the record­ings with ease; and it can all be done in a secure envi­ron­ment.

3. Get Your­self Into Seri­ous Shape: Many jog­gers love how their iPods can pro­vide enter­tain­ment that will spice up a monot­o­nous rou­tine. But prob­a­bly few know that you can use the iPod to plan train­ing routes for their runs. Trail­Run­ner lets run­ners do pre­cise­ly that. This free pro­gram helps you plan your route and then loads your iPod with maps, dis­tances, and time goals.

4. Tour Around Great Cities: iSub­wayMaps lets you down­load sub­way maps from 24 major cities across the globe. They range from New York City, Paris and Berlin to Moscow, Tokyo and Hong Kong. (Get the full list here.) To take advan­tage of these maps, your iPod will need to sup­port pho­tos, but that should­n’t be a prob­lem for most recent iPods.

We’ve also talked recent­ly about a ven­ture called Sound­walk that pro­vides engag­ing, some­what off­beat audio tours of New York and Paris (plus Varanasi in India). In New York, they offer indi­vid­ual tours of Lit­tle Italy, the Low­er East Side, Times Square and the Meat Pack­ing Dis­trict, among oth­er places. In Paris, they take you through the Marais, St. Ger­main, Pigalle, Belleville, and the Palais Roy­al. Each audio tour is nar­rat­ed by a celebri­ty of sorts and can be down­loaded for about $12.
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5. Cal­cu­late the Right Tip: If you’re a lit­tle math chal­lenged, you can use your iPod when you’re out to din­ner to cal­cu­late the cor­rect tip. Tip­Kalc helps you fig­ure out both the tip and the grand total on your bill, and it even lets you split your check up to five dif­fer­ent ways.

6. Record Flight data: Accord­ing to a report in Flight Glob­al, a com­pa­ny called LoPresti Speed Mer­chants has announced plans to use iPods as flight data recorders in light air­craft. The lit­tle white box will serve as the “black box” with­in the air­planes and will have the abil­i­ty to record over 500 hours of flight time data. Does this mean that iPods can sur­vive plane crash­es? Who would have thunk it.

7. Throw a Mean­er Curve­ball: Jason Jen­nings, a pitch­er for the Hous­ton Astros, start­ed using a video iPod last year to review his pitch­ing frame by frame and to improve his over­all tech­nique. He also reviews video of all oppos­ing bat­ters before each game. Since incor­po­rat­ing the iPod into his train­ing, he has since seen his ERA go down, and oth­er teams — notably the Mar­lins and Mariners — have looked into using the iPod in sim­i­lar ways.

8. Learn For­eign Lan­guages: iPods are becom­ing more com­mon­place in uni­ver­si­ty class­rooms, with stu­dents using them to record lec­tures, take notes, and even cre­ate elec­tron­ic flash cards. (See in depth arti­cle here.) The gad­gets are also being used to help stu­dents for­mal­ly study music and learn for­eign lan­guages. Now, if you’re a reg­u­lar Open Cul­ture read­er, you’ll know that you don’t need to be a uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent to learn for­eign lan­guages with the help of an iPod. With the help of our pod­casts col­lec­tion, you can pick up most any lan­guage on your own.

9. Learn to Love and Buy Wine: Here’s a nov­el way to get intro­duced to wine. For $35, you can down­load an audio file called Mark Phillips Wine Guide onto your iPod. This primer will, among oth­er things, teach you how to describe, taste, and buy wine, and you’ll come away with a cer­tain je ne sais quoi.

10. Test Cheat­ing: Yes, unfor­tu­nate­ly tech­nol­o­gy can be used for bad as well as good. It was wide­ly report­ed just this past week that stu­dents are appar­ent­ly using the iPod to cheat on exams. Dur­ing tests, they’ll appar­ent­ly sneak ear­buds into their ears and tap into valu­able for­mu­las, class notes, voic­es record­ings, etc. Oth­ers will even write out crib notes and enmesh them with­in song lyrics.

Bonus: The iPod as Flash­light: Dur­ing the major black­out in 2003, many New York­ers impro­vised after night­fall and used the light gen­er­at­ed by their iPods to get around their apart­ments. It was a makeshift way of doing things. But now there is a more for­mal way of using your iPod to light your way. For about $13, you can pur­chase Griffin’s iBeam, an attach­ment that will quick­ly turn your iPod into a com­bo flash­light and laser point­er. As they say, be pre­pared.

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