China Is Beautiful

marvelous photos!

clipped from www.slightlywarped.com clipped from www.slightlywarped.com clipped from www.slightlywarped.com

Boston's $14.8B Big Dig finally complete - Yahoo! News

Boston's $14.8B Big Dig finally complete - Yahoo! News: "Boston's $14.8B Big Dig finally complete". Not only Yerevan builds transportation infrastructure. The story is a good starting point to compare projects in different cities.

free college e-textbook

Freeloadpress.com offers textbooks and other educational materials (like study guides or instructional materials) for free. It is an interesting proposition to offer educational materials paying for it by the revenues from advertisements placed in the books. Print copies of the books are available for order on the website.

The post on the Economist.com's Economics blog, discusses the concept and its implementation. Freely downloadable textbooks have a potential to seriously change textbook publishing industry and secondary market of used textbooks. However I think the model can be very useful for delivering quality instructional content to educational institutions in developing countries.

virtual collaboration and training gain popularity

I think virtual training rooms and simulation are even more important in the developing country settings. It can overcome lack of trained professionals in schools, and especially improve the quality of training in higher education institutions.

clipped from economist.com PIXELearning, a British company based in Coventry, has developed a simulator for a big international accounting firm in order to train interns who are fresh out of university. The role-playing simulator lets them develop their skills by interacting, for example, with a difficult client who is being aggressive on pricing. This is invaluable, says Kevin Corti, PIXELearning's boss, because it allows them to make mistakes before being unleashed on a client. Similarly, a big American bank is using PIXELearning's simulator for “diversity and inclusion” training. networked virtual environments are used to host meetings and to create virtual workspaces for employees who may be part of the same team but spread out over half a dozen countries. The hope is that the use of virtual worlds, rather than more structured forms of communication such as e-mail or conference calls, will make serendipitous meetings more likely and interpersonal networking easier.

estimated 150M records have been involved in security breaches

clipped from www.scmagazineus.com data breaches continue to occur across all industries. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse reports that more than 155 million records including sensitive information have been involved in security breaches to date.

Why Time Goes Faster as We Age

Worth looking at article: neat and clear

clipped from ourworld.compuserve.com Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way. ...You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today And then one day you find ten years have got behind you. ...Every year is getting shorter; never seem to find the time... -- "Time" from The Dark Side of the Moon: Pink Floyd Since the linear view of time perception seems inadequate, it is reasonable to look for a non-linear alternative. The observations we make about the apparent shrinkage of our years as we age strongly suggest a logarithmic scale: stretched out at the low end and compressed at the high end. the human mind judges the length of a long period of time, such as a year, by comparing it with current age. For example, a year adds 10% to the life of a ten-year-old, but only 5% to that of a twenty-year-old. For the twenty-year-old, two years are required to add 10%.