Assorted links – Massive Open Online Course

Link

CourseTalk is a nice search engine for MOOCs

Massive Open Online Courses – MOOCS

Coursera
edX
France Université Numérique
Udacity
Udemy
CodeAcademy
OpenAcademy

FutureLearn

Complexity Explorer (Mathematics for Complex Systems)

About Massive Open Online Course, Wikipedia

Extension Schools

Harvard Extension School – can earn you credit (tuition $1250 ~ $2200)
Stanford Online

TEDMED – One more reason to get a good night’s sleep

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Research paper: Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain, DOI: 10.1126/science.1241224

Important points:

  • Brain has no lymphatic system to clean it
  • During sleep brain cells seem to shrink
  • Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) acts as a detoxing agent removing toxins built up while the brain is conscious.
  • CSF influx only happens during sleep. It is inhibited during wakefulness.

and we discovered that at the same time when the brain goes to sleep, the brain cells themselves seem to shrink, opening up spaces in between them, allowing [cerebrospinal fluid – CSF] fluid to rush through and allowing waste to be cleared out.

But our most surprising finding was that all of this, everything I just told you about, with all this fluid rushing through the brain, it’s only happening in the sleeping brain.

Education and Neuroscience

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With new findings from neuroscience catching the headlines every day, surely we can tap into these results to improve our education system? The Education and Neuroscience Initiative hopes to address this question – this joint programme of work between the Wellcome Trust and the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) aims to: build research and expertise at the interface between neuroscience and education; support the responsible transfer of technologies, resources and practices based upon neuroscience into education; and help teachers to be able to make informed choices based upon the best available evidence. In this post we explain why we are embarking on this work, share some of the learning we’ve gained in the process, and we invite a wider conversation on this topic.

via ThInk : Education and Neuroscience.

Relevant: Education Endowment Foundation

Installing Some Basic R Packages in Ubuntu

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The following is how I configured my R workspace (and Rstudio) and this was first shared on a Coursera’s “Getting and Cleaning Data” course forums.

First make sure that R is version 3+. If not update it according to this stackoverflow question.

Java for rJava

Install Java (needed for rJava) first from a terminal:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre

which will install openjdk-6-jdk.
If this doesn’t work install all its packages:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-*

OR you might prefer openjdk-7-jdk

sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-*

You should find that it is installed using this command:

Continue reading

The latest earthquake that hit Lebanon [2014-09-01 @ 004136 & 012515]

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I have just found out that an earthquake has hit Lebanon. I did not feel it but 7 witnesses have reported the earthquake so far.
Details are as follows:

date: 2014-09-01 (July 06 2014)
time: 235011 / 205011 (Beirut / UTC)
depth: 20 km
epicenter: 41.14°N, 36.08°E (61 km NE of Beirut, 20 km NW of Baalbek)
(moment) magnitude Mw: 4.3

source: EMSC

Here’s an interactive map of the epicenter and the witnesses’ locations.
Source: EMSC