Wednesday, February 29, 2012
海峡论谈: 林书豪旋风
美国之音海峡论谈: "林来疯"从纽约吹到海峡两岸，不论你看不看篮球赛，最近一定都知道有个林书豪，尤其是台湾的媒体和民众可说是全体陷入这股"林来疯"，也已经有很多很多的相关报导了，今天我们的节目希望以一种比较理性的态度来谈一谈，林书豪究竟为什么成功，他的成功经验能够为两岸的父母和年轻人带来什么启示?
[Video] Heather Payne talks Ladies (and Gents) Learning Code
We’re a women-run not-for-profit group working to empower everyone to feel comfortable learning beginner-friendly technical skills in a social, collaborative way.
Today’s customer portrait introduces you to a talented social entrepreneur whose innovative workshop series is taking Toronto by storm!
Heather Payne is the founder of Ladies Learning Code, a women-run not-for-profit group working to empower folks to feel comfortable learning beginner-friendly technical skills in a social, collaborative way.
Believe it or not LLC was born out of a tweet Heather sent out to the Toronto community to gauge if there was interest in an accessible learning environment to introduce folks to programming! Someone casually suggested the name but it fit the workshops perfectly. LLC now runs multiple events each month on topics ranging from Getting Started with Ruby to how to enhance your personal brand using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.
We’re proud to have folks like Heather in the FreshBooks family! Watch the video to hear Heather talk about the life of the entrepreneur, on why Ladies Learning Code isn’t just for ladies, and what it’s like to trust your instincts and see a great idea take flight.
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A graduate of the Richard Ivey School of Business, Heather spent most of her first year post-graduation living in China and working towards a Masters in International Relations. That's also where she first learned to build a self-hosted Wordpress site (a blog about fitness, which she sold after a year). Upon her return to Toronto, she excelled in a corporate marketing role before her desire to join a startup became too strong to ignore. In July 2011, Heather joined a Toronto-based, three-person tech startup building on the Facebook platform. Her experience there (in a non-technical role) has made her even more determined to learn to program - so that she can contribute to building something of her own one day. Like everyone involved with Ladies Learning Code, Heather has been blown away by the support the group has received from Toronto's tech community, and beyond. If you have any comments, suggestions or ideas for Ladies Learning Code, feel free to contact Heather at heather [at] heatherpayne.ca
Melissa was born and raised in London, Ontario. When her family purchased their first computer, she began spending her evenings and summers coding a Harry Potter fan site (by trial and error). She then entered high school, where computer science was not promoted or encouraged, and lost touch with coding. Melissa went on to graduate from the Richard Ivey School of Business and since her first startup in university, she's realized what an advantage a technical skill set would bring. Since then, she’s always dreamed of a group for women that makes coding and tech sexy and really makes it accessible to complete beginners. She thinks the buzz around the #ladieslearningcode is case in point that Toronto (and the world) needs groups like this and she couldn’t be more excited to be part of it. Ladies Learning Code is more than a resource to her, it’s a community.
Breanna was born and raised in a small village in British Columbia, and knew the big city of Toronto was calling her name when she started her own online business at the young age of 10. Breanna attended The University of Toronto, Computer Science and finished her degree in Information Technology Management at Ryerson University. In her spare time, you will almost always find Breanna "Googling" anything and everything - usually from her iPhone, reading the latest technology magazines and blogs, catching a concert, Facebooking, blogging and tweeting galore! As a woman that works in IT, she wants to help encourage other women to get involved and help make tech less intimidating and scary.
Laura grew up all over Southwestern Ontario, moving around her whole life. Always “the new girl” Laura began to understand, pretty early on, the importance of relationships and “staying connected”. With an educational and professional background in Human Resources, Laura made the shift to the world of consulting 4 years ago and has not looked back. The link between technology and human relationships fascinates her. This has ignited a personal passion for exploring and helping others to learn, women in particular, how to leverage and evolve the technology available to us in our world today and even tomorrow. In her spare time, Laura is exploring what technology has to offer and how it can help her do her job better, much like many of Ladies Learning Code’s beginner-level students. She has recognized these untapped resources at her fingertips and is energized to help others break through into this world of opportunity!
Monday, February 27, 2012
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Getting started - Storify
Storify is a social storytelling platform that lets you tell stories by bringing together media from social networks like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and more.
The Tale Of A Wolfram Research Co-founder And His Beloved “Periodic Table Table” [Video]
Out of the annals of history comes this doozy. A man by the name of Theodore Gray is a co-founder of Wolfram Research, best known as the creator of Wolfram Alpha, the two-year-old computational answer engine, which Siri uses for 25 percent of her mobile searches.
Along with Stephen Wolfram, Gray helped develop Mathematica, the computational software used in technical computing that makes Wolfram Alpha, among other things, tick. He is an author, polymath, and, it seems, an amateur Chemist — or should I say, element collector. Yes, as the story goes, about 10 years ago, he built and created his own wooden “periodic table table” (presumably on company time), complete with compartments underneath in which Gray collects samples of the periodic table’s elements. This feat of carpentry, Rams-ian design, and wizardry won him an “Ig Nobel Prize” in Chemistry back in 2002.
Yesterday, a new video, or rather episode of “Bytesize Science,” emerged on YouTube wherein Gray discusses the tale behind his periodic table table. The video has been being passed around, and was tipped to us (thanks to Kirk Zamieroski). We thought it was worth sharing, based on pure awesomeness, the high quality kitsch, and DIY mastery. Luckily no radioactive elements made it into the table — or at least we didn’t spot any lead. No one was hurt in the making of the table, as far as we know, other than perhaps Schrodinger’s cat?
As the video’s uploader points out, Gray has gone on to win less Ig Nobel awards, becoming the 2011 winner of the ACS Grady Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public, and the periodic table table is a “testament” to his love for chemistry — and his compulsive eBay purchasing habits.
We hope you enjoy.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Digital future of newspapers, seen from 1981 and 2012
The future of newspapers seems precarious, given the rise of digital media. However, back in 1981, when only about 3,000 people in the Bay Area had PCs, newspapers were already contemplating their online futures. Eleven newspapers, in fact, pooled their efforts to pilot an online venue. Media watcher Jim Romenesko surfaced this report from KRON on the earliest effort to put newspapers online.
Of course, in 1981, the interface was all text. But still, the promise of online news was enticing. An enthusiast in the video pointed to the fact that articles from online newspapers could be copied and printed out. “Engineers now predict the day will come when we get all our newspapers and magazines by computer,” according to the report. A commentator added, however, that it took two hours to download the complete newspaper text by [phone-based acoustic coupler modem], so with a $5-an-hour access fee, the cost of the paper was a lot more than a 20-cent (at the time) copy of a newspaper.
Of course, the online newspapers predicted in that report are already yesterday’s news. What no one in 1981 could have foreseen is the rise of converged media — in which both newspapers and television re-invent themselves into something remarkably similar in a new channel. Consider this: if you go to a newspaper site such as USA Today and Wall Street Journal, you can watch videos of breaking news, interviews, or special interest stories. Is USA Today or Wall Street Journal now a broadcast network?
Similarly, if you go to CBS News, or CNN, you can read text stories. Is CBS News or CNN now a newspaper? Does the difference even matter anymore?
The Internet has converged these two media to the point where you can’t distinguish between the two. Newspapers provide video reports, and television stations provide articles to read. If there’s a future for newspapers, converged media is it. And the distinctions between newspapers and broadcast networks are no longer so clear.
Storify is reinventing storytelling for the social media age
Storify is reinventing storytelling for the social media age, and today we're bringing our platform to the device that is reinventing computing: the iPad.
Storify demo from Burt Herman on Vimeo.
在這個資訊爆炸的年代，整理、收集網路上源源不絕的資料，可不是一件簡單的事情。美國創業公司Storify，以類似剪報的形式，幫使用者將收集到的網路資訊集結成冊。Storify週一正式推出公開測試版，歡迎網友們試用比較。
Storify幫助使用者針對特定事件或主題，收集網頁、新聞、圖片等各種資料。Storify以簡單清爽的介面，讓使用者搜尋Google、 Flickr、 YouTube、 Facebook和Twitter等多項來源。使用者找到資料之後，可以直接將資料拖曳到「故事」頁面，Storify會針對不同的資料性質，顯示網頁摘要、影片、圖片等。當使用者想要回顧時，只要打開這個故事頁面，所有的資訊都一目了然。
位於美國舊金山的Storify，成立大約才一年半，目前資金總額兩百萬美元左右。Storify今年稍早曾經推出限定試用版，邀請需要大量閱讀網路資訊的記者們使用，獲得了相當正面的迴響。現在Storify正式開放給一般大眾，只要有Twitter帳號就可以免費註冊使用。根據美國廣告雜誌Adweek的報導，Storify打算利用廣告、或是與企業品牌合作的方式獲得營收。目前Levi's和Samsung已經開始利用Storify的服務推廣行銷活動。
The Good Stuff — Episode 2: One Cool Kid
The Good Stuff — Episode 2: One Cool Kid
What can one person do? A lot! Just ask Cole! At just 8-years old, he organized his schoolmates to take on KFC.
The Good Stuff — Episode 1: Take THAT, plastic bags!
The Good Stuff — Episode 1: Take THAT, plastic bags!
What do Northern California and Brownsville, Texas have in common? A lot more than you might think!
Thursday, February 23, 2012
How the Angry Birds Almost Died Before the First Level
How Rovio Aims to Keep its Angry Birds Flying High (02:46)
Mikael Hed almost pulled the plug on Rovio while the Angry Birds were still in development.
After several years in business, his mobile game company had yet to produce a hit. Rovio’s chief backer, Hed’s father, Kaj, was struggling to figure out how to keep the company going.
“He told me that he wanted to mortgage my grandparents’ flat so he could put some more money in the company to keep it afloat,” Mikael Hed said in an interview. “That was pretty tough. I certainly did not want to be the person responsible for putting my grandparents on the street.”
Angry Birds was in development and Hed thought he might have a winner on his hands. But at the same time, the company had made dozens of games already without striking it rich, and even the best iPhone games weren’t making that much money.
“Just looking at the odds, we shouldn’t take that kind of a risk,” Hed recalls thinking. But his father went ahead anyway.
“I’m glad he did,” Hed said, noting his grandparents still have their home. “Now I am glad he did, but it was a big gamble.”
The move has clearly paid off. According to figures made public and noted this week by a Finnish newspaper, Kaj Hed owns nearly 70 percent of the company, worth by some estimates between $6 billion and $9 billion.
Mikael Hed almost pulled the plug on Rovio while the Angry Birds were still in development.
After several years in business, his mobile game company had yet to produce a hit. Rovio’s chief backer, Hed’s father, Kaj, was struggling to figure out how to keep the company going.
“He told me that he wanted to mortgage my grandparents’ flat so he could put some more money in the company to keep it afloat,” Mikael Hed said in an interview. “That was pretty tough. I certainly did not want to be the person responsible for putting my grandparents on the street.”
Angry Birds was in development and Hed thought he might have a winner on his hands. But at the same time, the company had made dozens of games already without striking it rich, and even the best iPhone games weren’t making that much money.
“Just looking at the odds, we shouldn’t take that kind of a risk,” Hed recalls thinking. But his father went ahead anyway.
“I’m glad he did,” Hed said, noting his grandparents still have their home. “Now I am glad he did, but it was a big gamble.”
The move has clearly paid off. According to figures made public and noted this week by a Finnish newspaper, Kaj Hed owns nearly 70 percent of the company, worth by some estimates between $6 billion and $9 billion.
A history of communication
Follow us during 140 years of communication development, connecting places, people and now finally things in the Networked Society.
Short film captures the importance of ‘thinking cities’
The film, “Thinking Cities,” focuses on how cities are using Information Communications Technology (ICT) to start to come up with these solutions. It highlights interesting projects in cities like Boston, Seattle, and Stockholm where ICT is being used right now to address issues like waste, energy use, and civic engagement.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Newton’s Third Law | University of Southern California
Newton’s Third Law | University of Southern California
The college lecture: Send us your favorite videos
The lecture, an efficient yet often impersonal form of teaching, is under attack, reports The Post’s Daniel de Vise.
Science, math and engineering departments in particular are finding the lecture method’s a turn-off for students.
Really, why spend hundreds of dollars to sit in a room with hundreds of others when you can learn for free from the comfort of your laptop?
With that in mind, what’s the best online lecture you’ve seen? We’ve rounded up a handful of interesting and quirky videos, but we need your help to expand the list:
Pittsburghese | Carnegie Mellon University
Barbara Johnstone, a professor in CMU’s English department, breaks down the nitty-gritty of the Pittsburgh dialect. (For instance, “feel” sounds like “fill” and “fool” like “full.”) Plus, she digs into the cultural reasons that locals keep these quirks alive.
Justice | Harvard University
The college lecture: Send us your favorite videos
The lecture, an efficient yet often impersonal form of teaching, is under attack, reports The Post’s Daniel de Vise.
Science, math and engineering departments in particular are finding the lecture method’s a turn-off for students.
Really, why spend hundreds of dollars to sit in a room with hundreds of others when you can learn for free from the comfort of your laptop?
With that in mind, what’s the best online lecture you’ve seen? We’ve rounded up a handful of interesting and quirky videos, but we need your help to expand the list:
Pittsburghese | Carnegie Mellon University
Barbara Johnstone, a professor in CMU’s English department, breaks down the nitty-gritty of the Pittsburgh dialect. (For instance, “feel” sounds like “fill” and “fool” like “full.”) Plus, she digs into the cultural reasons that locals keep these quirks alive.
Justice | Harvard University
Monday, February 20, 2012
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