The Daily Beast is a reporting and opinion website published by Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, whose name comes from the fictional newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop. It has a wide range of articles and has three million unique visitors per month. Here is a sample of this week’s pieces:
Can Teen Killers Be Rehabilitated?
Tour America’s Most Mysterious Communities for Just $69.95.
British Bad Girl Tracey Emin’s Naughty New Work
This is more of an update really. I have already featured Open Yale and they have recently added ten new courses, recorded during the 2008-2009 academic year:
Dante in Translation with Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta
European Civilization, 1648-1945 with Professor John Merriman
Freshman Organic Chemistry with Professor J. Michael McBride
Global Problems of Population Growth with Professor Robert Wyman
Introduction to New Testament History and Literature with Professor Dale B. Martin
Introduction to Theory of Literature with Professor Paul H. Fry
Listening to Music with Professor Craig Wright
Principles of Evolution, Ecology and Behavior with Professor Stephen C. Stearns
The Psychology, Biology and Politics of Food with Professor Kelly D. Brownell
Roman Architecture with Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner
Here is the link:
The Personality Test Center is a website where you can find tests based on five factor model of personality. They have a very exhaustive test and there are also some fun ones. I haven`t had time to do it yet but I hope to find time in the next few weeks. Here is the link: http://www.personalitytest.net/ipip/ipipneo120.htm
The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) is a British multi-disciplinary institution, based in London, whose notable members have included Benjamin Franklin, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, William Hogarth, Charles Dickens and Guglielmo Marconi. For brevity it is known as the Royal Society of Arts. The Society runs a public lecture programme which seeks to introduce new and challenging thinking. These lectures are made freely available as podcasts on its website. Recent lecturers include Al Gore, Joseph Stiglitz, Francis Fukuyama, Amartya Sen, Daniel Dennett, Anthony Grayling, Alain de Botton and Peter Singer. Here is a link to the RSA’s lecture podcasts.
I discovered this site a while back and I forgot to post a link for it. It offers audio walking tours of London in MP3 format. They are absolutely free and titles include: Alleyways and courtyards of the mediaeval city, Hampton Court, Covent Garden, Legal London – Temples, Inns and the Da Vinci Code, Soho – Sex, Chinatown, Theatreland and Notorious London – a walk for adults only. I am going to try them out this summer. Here is the website:
Here is a selection of the links I have posted over the last year:
According to founder Denis Dutton, Arts & Letters Daily is a web portal for “the kinds of people who subscribe to the New York Review of Books, who read Salon and Slate and The New Republic — people interested in ideas.” A&L Daily’s layout evokes the 18th century broadsheet format associated with The Enlightenment. Three columns of links dominate the site: Articles of Note, Book Reviews, and Essays/Opinions. Each link is introduced with a 25-word teaser. The teasers are often witty and provocative.
HowStuffWorks is a website dedicated to explaining the way many things work. These things could be mobile phones, mortgages, pickpockets or cults. The site uses photos, diagrams, video and animation to explain complex terminology and mechanisms in easy-to-understand language. It was founded by Marshall Brain in 1998 and has 58 million visitors annually.
As someone who sometimes falls asleep on the sofa watching a film, I find this site very helpful. They give you a detailed plot summary and the endings of hundreds of films. In fact, with some films it’s probably better to skip the film and go directly to the spoiler.
http://www.themoviespoiler.com/index.html
If you like short stories, I can recommend the New Yorker magazine. They have a monthly section of short story podcasts. They are beautifully read and have a discussion included afterwards. You can then go to the magazine archive and find the written version. All of this is absolutely free.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/podcasts/fiction
The Skeptic’s Dictionary is a collection of sceptical essays by Robert Todd Carroll, an atheist and uncompromising sceptic from the USA. The site was launched in 1994 and contains more than 400 entries. It covers such categories as alternative medicine, cryptozoology, extraterrestrials and UFOs, frauds and hoaxes, junk science, New Age and the paranormal. For me this is an invaluable resource, which helps to explain the appeal and popularity of these irrational beliefs that have survived despite the enormous advances that science has propitiated and the power of the scientific method to explain the world.
An excellent trivia website with 91,000 quizzes and over 1,700,000 questions. They have 1,900,000 members but you can play without being a member. The quizzes are organised into categories such as history, geography and science.
Podictionary
The website podictionary.com is a place where you can hear short podcasts with a transcription about words, their meanings and their history. Words you can listen about include: nemesis, quagmire, scapegoat and trivia.
Spiked is an online magazine focusing on politics, culture and society. The magazine describes itself like this :
Spiked is an independent online phenomenon dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms. spiked is endorsed by free-thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, and hated by the narrow-minded such as Torquemada and Stalin. Or it would be, if they were lucky enough to be around to read it.The website was launched by Mick Hume in 2000 after the bankruptcy of its predecessor, Living Marxism magazine. It is currently edited by Brendan O’ Neil. It is a bit difficult to place on an ideological continuum. Their social critique has been defined as Libertarian Marxist but they have been criticised by journalists such as George Monbiot for following a right wing and pro-corporate agenda while pretending to be left wing. you like contrarian opinions, go to their website:
videojug.com is a website where you can find short videos explaining how to do thing.The list is very extensive and includes: Manners And Body Language Across Cultures, Serving In Tennis, Wedding Etiquette and Strategies For Rock, Paper and Scissors.
World Wide Words is a website run by the linguist Michael Quinlon. He discusses new terms, displays weird words, gets behind expressions in the news, helps you with tricky points, and answers questions. Quinlon collaborates with the Oxford English Dictionary. He is the author of dictionary of affixes, Ologies and Isms, Port Out, Starboard Home: And Other Language Myths and Gallimaufry about words that are vanishing from the language.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/index.htm
This is a podcast hosted by professor Russell Roberts, a student of Milton Friedman and an Austrian School economist, who teaches economics at George Mason University. The weekly podcasts feature Roberts interviewing a guest, often a professional economist, with each programme lasting about an hour. The podcast is notable for its clarity and these thoughtful conversations really help you to understand the economic way of thinking as applied to a vast range of subjects. Provocative and stimulating – I highly recommend it.
Open Yale Courses is an initiative of Yale University to share full video and course materials from its undergraduate courses. Its website launched in December 2007 with seven courses from various departments and they now have 15, with the goal of reaching 30 by 2010.
My first favourite link back in April 2008 when I started this blog was for EconTalk a weekly hour-long discussion that applies the economic way of thinking as to a vast range of subjects. EconTalk is part of a larger website called The Library of Economics and Liberty. I particularly recommend The Concise Encyclopaedia of Economics. The articles, which are free of charge, are written by the most respected economists in their fields, including many Nobel Prize winners. They also have a Guides page, which explains basic economic concepts.
http://www.econlib.org/index.html
One of the teachers at IH Tom uses www.travelpod.com to post accounts of his travels. He has been to 14 countries and has four separate blogs:
Western Illinois University – the funniest five months of my life! Aug 07, 2001 to Dec 19, 2001
Road Trip: California and beyond Dec 28, 2004 to Jan 20, 2005
Yemen – poor in oil-wealth, rich in culture… a forgotten jewel in the sun-drenched Arabian crown. Oct 13, 2005 to Dec 22, 2006
My Arabian Odyssey – learning Arabic, separating people from politics and dispelling myths in the heart of the Middle East Feb 22, 2007 to Jul 19, 2008
I can recommend an article about a bus journey from hell in Yemen.
Here is the place to go:
Arts and Letters Daily website
I discovered this website in the interview with Dennis Dutton I included in My media week. According to founder Denis Dutton, Arts & Letters Daily is a web portal for “the kinds of people who subscribe to the New York Review of Books, who read Salon and Slate and The New Republic — people interested in ideas.” A&L Daily’s layout evokes the 18th century broadsheet format associated with The Enlightenment. Three columns of links dominate the site: Articles of Note, Book Reviews, and Essays/Opinions. Each link is introduced with a 25-word teaser. The teasers are often witty and provocative. Examples of this week’s teasers include:
Organ donation, some argue, should be built on altruism, pure kindness to complete strangers. Lovely ideal, but what if it means people die for want of transplant organs?…
In the last years, the financial system created a fog so thick that even its captains could not navigate it. Like the rest of us, they fell for a kind of pseudo-objectivity…
Good Americans don’t seriously question English aesthetic judgments, said H.L. Mencken. Film critic David Thomson has long dined out on that maxim…
The cognitive capacities that have made us so successful as a species also work together to create a human tendency for religious thinking…
Dutton is a libertarian and Tran Huu Dung, the other editor is more liberal, in the American sense of that word.
Here is a the website:
MeasuringWorth is a service for calculating relative worth over time. A colleague of mine mentioned this site whose mission statement is: to make available to the public the highest quality and most reliable historical data on important economic aggregates, with particular emphasis on nominal measures. You can calculate what £50 in 1723 would be worth in today’s prices (2007 to be precise). It’s great for questions such as was Andrew Carnegie richer than Bill Gates? Did Babe Ruth make more than David Beckham? So far, they have these calculators:
Annualized Growth Rates
Relative Values – US $
Relative Values – UK £
Relative Values – China
Relative Values – Japan ¥
Conversion ($ and £)
Purchasing Power – US $
Purchasing Power – UK £
Savings Growth – US $
Inflation Rates
Stock Growth Rates (DJIA, SP500, & NASDAQ)
http://www.measuringworth.com/index.html
