Workshop on Philosophy and Engineering CFP

Read this doc on Scribd: wpe-2008-call-for-papers-2008-4-23

Bury the Cold War Curriculum

My essay, Bury the Cold War Curriculum published as the Last Word in the April 2008 ASEE Prism, got picked up on the web and reprinted here at Redorbit. A related set of powerpoint slides, What Engineers Don't Learn and How They Don't Learn It, is available here or in the viewer below:

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Favorite B. C. Forbes quotation

"The man who is cocksure that he has arrived is ready for the return journey." B.C._Forbes (1880 - 1954). Other Forbes pearls of wisdom may be found here.

Canonical qualitative models

Certain models in business and engineering become part of the "canon" and are thus part of the background of knowledge one takes for granted. Of course, the act of come up with such models was itself creative at one time, and the study of their structure and content is useful for developing new models of a business or technological situation.

Module 8 of my course, Creative Modeling for Tech Vision discusses some of these models and their construction and use and can be examined on slideshare here or in the viewer below.

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The course web site may be surfed here.

Biological anthropology course gets a B+

I just finished another Teaching Company course on DVD: Biological Anthropology: An Evolutionary Perspective (24 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture). The instructor was Barbara J. King, The College of William and Mary. The logical flow of the course was quite good, and the content was up to date. I found her speaking voice a bit grating and her presentation ability below Teaching Company standards. Moreover, Dr. King had the annoying habit of describing in words really interesting graphics and pictures that she didn't show!! This is really odd, because the Teaching Company goes to great lengths to get good visuals. Nonetheless, the course was worth watching, and Dr. King was at her best when talking about primates and primatology, her specialties.

ShareThis on Vator.tv

Tim Schigel, CEO of ShareThis, does the elevator pitch for the ShareThis system on vator.tv here. Tim was at AlwaysOn Media in NYC last week (see related posts here and here).

ShareThis reaches 26 million unique users

A press release today (here) announces the rapid growth of www.sharethis.com. Over 26 million viewers with over a 100 million page views have been reached per month over the last two months, making sharethis one of the fastest growing web applications on the planet. Rafe Needleman discusses the business potential (here) and AppScout discusses how the button can reduce publishing site clutter (here).

Napkintalk

Here is lecture 7 from Creative Modeling for Tech Visionaries called Napkintalk.

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See the course website here.

ShareThis going strong

The sharethis ubiquitous sharing tool*by Nextumi) now has publisher-side and consumer-side buttons (get the buttons here). Since the availability of the publisher-side button in November, installations have increased dramatically and there is growing interest among content purveyors and consumers alike.

More Teaching Company greats

Courses from The Teaching Company have become a habit for me during exercising and driving. Just before Christmas I finished watching Nature of Earth: An Introduction to Geology by WVU's John J. Renton. His lecture on plate tectonics was worth the price of admission. More recently I finished Understanding the Brain (DVD) by Vanderbilt's Jeanette Norden. The coverage of the course was a masterful mix of the anatomical, the functional, and the clinical.

In the car, on CD I listened to European Thought and Culture in the 19th Century and 20th Century by UNCC's Lloyd Kramer and I'm in the middle of 5 courses on Great World Religions.

Over many years, I have been impressed with the uniform quality of these courses. I recommend them without reservation