Posts Tagged ‘college’
“You can never be overdressed or overeducated”*…
So many choices…
Take online courses from the world’s top universities for free. Below, you will find 1,700 free online courses from universities like Yale, MIT, Harvard, Oxford and more. Our site also features collections of Online Certificate Programs and Online Degree & Mini-Degree Programs…
From Open Culture (@openculture), “1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.”
A personal fave: MIT’s “Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey.”
[image above: source]
* Oscar Wilde
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As we hit the e-books, we might recall that it was on this date in 1922 that the United States paid tribute to the man instrumental in the technology that enables on-line education, Alexander Graham Bell…
There were more than 14 million telephones in the United States by the time Alexander Graham Bell died. For one minute on August 4, 1922, they were all silent.
The reason: Bell’s funeral. The American inventor was the first to patent telephone technology in the United States and who founded the Bell Telephone System in 1877. Though Bell wasn’t the only person to invent “the transmission of speech by electrical wires,” writes Randy Alfred for Wired, achieving patent primacy in the United States allowed him to spend his life inventing. Even though the telephone changed the world, Bell didn’t stop there.
Bell died on August 2, 1922, just a few days after his 75th birthday. “As a mark of respect every telephone exchange in the United States and Canada closed for a minute when his funeral began around 6:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time,” Alfred writes.
On the day of the funeral, The New York Times reported that Bell was also honored by advocates for deaf people. “Entirely apart from the monumental achievement of Professor Bell as the inventor of the telephone, his conspicuous work in [sic] behalf of the deaf of this country would alone entitle him to everlasting fame,” said Felix H. Levey, president of the Institution for the Improved Instruction of Deaf Mutes.
In fact, Bell spent much of his income from the telephone on helping deaf people. The same year he founded the Bell Telephone System, 1880, Bell founded the Volta Laboratory. The laboratory, originally called Volta Associates, capitalized on Bell’s work and the work of other sound pioneers. It made money by patenting new innovations for the gramophone and other recorded sound technologies. In 1887, Bell took his share of the money from the sale of gramophone patents and founded the Volta Bureau “as an instrument for the increase and diffusion of knowledge relating to the Deaf,’” writes the National Park Service. Bell and Volta continued to work for deaf rights throughout his life.
Volta Laboratory eventually became Bell Laboratories, which was home to many of the twentieth century’s communication innovations.
Smithsonian
“A helluva, helluva, helluva, helluva, hell of an engineer”*…
College fight songs are Saturday staples, memorized in freshman orientation and blasted by marching bands at every game. The best ones are shouted from the rooftops and during Heisman Trophy presentations; the worst barely register with alumni.
We gathered the fight songs of 65 schools — all those in the Power Five conferences (the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC), plus Notre Dame — to see exactly how these teams are musically willed to victory. We counted which clichéd elements (like shouting “Rah!” or spelling something out) appear in each song’s lyrics and determined how fast the song is played and how long it lasts (for the version available on Spotify)…
Saturday’s anthems get the FiveThirtyEight treatment: “Our Guide To The Exuberant Nonsense Of College Fight Songs.”
* “(I’m a) Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech”
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As we pick up the tempo, we might recall that it was on this date in 1897 that The (New York) Sun ran an editorial entitled “Is There a Santa Claus?” Written by Francis Pharcellus Church in response to a letter from 8 year-old Virginia O’Hanlon, it is now remembered best by one of its lines: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”
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