India, Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh , China and Japan will see a six and a half minutes of darkness during the daytime. The longest solar eclipse of this century. The next one, well its going to take you another 123 years, on June 13, 2132 to be precise. So maybe most of us won't last that long. So how will you view this extraordinary account - the answer of course - ONLINE.

If you are on the other side of the globe: Ustream.com will be telecasting this live! NASA's official page too has this covered.

For those following it real time tweet for your dear friends and be careful. Topicbean provides top 5 tips to view the Solar eclipse safely:

1. Pin Hole Camera - Simplest way to view an eclipse. Here is how you can make one:

2. Solar Filters or Welders glasses - Go to a nearest welder and request for a grade 14 welders glasses. Please know you can't use sunglasses - they don't have the same grade of protection as the welding glasses.

And remember to enjoy this. It won't happen again for the next 123 years.

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I have been a skeptic of being able to achieve true AI as we know human intelligence. We are talking about humans designing artificially what evolution has taken billions of years to develop.

However, I am beginning to think that I might be wrong. Jeff Hawkins - enterpreneur and scientist has been working on what is called Hierarchical Temporal Memory that tries to model the brain and this just might be the best approximation of the brain behavior we have. This video lecture has him explain its functioning and at the end of the video I come out convinced that Jeff is onto something big here. I can't help but feel that there is an opportunity to build something much more capable than the human brain overcoming biological limitations of the human body and solve very complex problems by scaling the model across powerful computers.

Jeff Hawkins company Numenta is working on commercializing this technology and has released the Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing (NuPIC) which can be downloaded from the Numenta website.

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Documentaries on Science and Nature are thrilling to watch. Many television channels produce fantastic documentaries that are mostly lost amongst all the soaps that people obsessed with. Nothing is more thrilling than knowing about how the world around you came into being and how things work. Without further banter, here are 3 Documentary series you have to watch before you die:

Planet Earth - The Complete BBC Series
Narrated by David Attenborough, Planet Earth takes us into all corners of the earth to show us the nature of the environment, its animals, plants, weather and much more in this series with mostly never before seen visual footage. 5 years in the making with 2000 days in the field, using 40 cameramen across 200 locations, Planet Earth is the ultimate portrait of our planet. There entire series is a 5 DVD set or a single Blu-Ray disc that you can buy from your local media store or online.



History Channel's Evolve
This series begins 100s of millions of years to when life first appeared and takes us on a series of journeys in which the evolution of a specific aspect of animal life is detailed. It talks about the evolution of eyes, sex, jaws, flight, communication, guts etc. This one is a must watch if you have any doubts about evolution. And the ability of scientists to put the puzzles together and figure out how things worked 300 million years back just by studying fossils is mind blowing.



BBC Horizon
A long running series from BBC, Horizon documents a wide range of topics from Einstein's life and times to How to plan the perfect murder. Learn about Nuclear weapons, their effects, nuclear accidents and how to survive a nuclear war. Learn about the Human brain and evolution.

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5 minutes Life Videopedia is a website where you can find short video solutions for practical questions and a place for people to share their knowledge. Categorized into Arts, Business, Extreme, Fashion, Fitness, Food, Games, Health, Home, Music, Parenting, People, Pets, Spiritual, Sports, Tech, Travel, Wheels, Life, Tips and Knowledge, 5 minutes is the perfect website to gain knowledge on a specific subject in less than 5 minutes without having to read through a lot of content that you would otherwise do to get your information. 

This video from 5 mins explains itself:

Here are a few interesting 5 mins videos worth checking out:

Guitar Lesson: Introduction to Bar Chords

How to Do the 90 Degree Turn with a Car

How Can I Get Over My Shyness And Ask A Girl Out?

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30% or our population is below the age of 20. Many of those people in colleges. One of the things that happen when you join college in India is you get ragged. Its illegal but seniors still think its important and you get ragged.

I was ragged on my first day to college. It wasn't a hostile ragging session, quite weird, I felt a little sad that people were picking on me, but nothing that bothered me for too long. I was happy that the first day was over and I was initiated into the college by my seniors. But its not the same for many people. Ragging can be hostile and down right dirty.

The Legal Definition of Ragging is and I quote "Ragging means the doing of any act which causes, or is likely to cause any physical, psychological or physiological harm of apprehension or shame or embarrassment to a student, and includes– (a) teasing or abusing of playing Practical joke on, or causing hurt to any student. or (b) asking any student to do any act, or perform any thing, which he/she would not, in the ordinary course, be willing to do or perform."

*

A few examples of the extent of Ragging are given below (extract from www.noragging.com)

 

We were asked to strip, lift pens with our buttocks, sit on empty bottle with their mouth upward

 

My friend may not talk about it because he has to study 5 more years in college. But later on i took my revenge by ragging my juniors

 

“They are made naked and ordered to do bad things... I can't tell it even to my parents. It is not justified but I can't bear it any more."

Amit committed suicide on 11 October 2005 by jumping in front of a moving train

This is serious and now many organizations are getting together to solve the issue of ragging. Its about time too! Here are a list of sites that you can go to if you want to read more about ragging and how you can report it you should try out the following sites.

http://muthoot.com/antiragging/

http://www.no2ragging.org/

http://www.noragging.com/

Here is a small video that talks about the extent of ragging in our country.

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I came across the following website while trying to sign up for Twitter for my previous article. I was blown away about how Sachi and Lee make complex online tools easy to understand. I can show this to my mum and I know for sure she'll be able to understand what a wiki is or how it works (in fact I learnt quite a few things from this page myself and it was fun.)

Hence, Education meet Entertainment.

I love the way how paper and pen is still classy, and how we can make simple ideas to go a long way! Common Craft is also an Official Honoree of the 2008 Webby Awards! Congratulations you guys. I also want to try my hand at making a video like this, but meanwhile. Please have a look at a couple of videos I fell in love with on their site.

This one explains what I'm doing here and you're doing there - and of course in Plain English.

This one explains Social Media.



I urge all of you to go check out the Common Craft Show.

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iTunes University is the hidden jewel of the Itunes store. Accessible via the Itunes media player, ItunesU is a collaboration between Apple and universities across the world to bring the very best of audio/video lectures on a variety of subject, for free.

To download the video/audio lectures, all you need is the iTunes software that you can find here. You don't have to register at the itunes store to access these free audio video lectures.

To access iTunes U,
1) Install iTunes
2) Click on the iTunes store in the sidebar
3) If prompted that iTunes service is not available in your country, choose United States
4) The iTunes store box in the top left corner has iTunes U as the last link
5) Beneath this choose away your subject category and view all the lectures
6) Alternatively choose your university and see all the university specific courses

Ride the free knowledge!

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MIT OpenCourseWare commonly referred to as OCW, is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. For those who haven't heard of MIT, it is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the premier universities in the world. Information is shared in the form video/audio lectures, class notes, exams, recommended books and course syllabus.

To quote the OCW description at their website:

MIT OpenCourseWare is a free publication of MIT course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT.
OCW is not an MIT education.
OCW does not grant degrees or certificates.
OCW does not provide access to MIT faculty.
Materials may not reflect entire content of the course.


Now the cool part:
1) There is no registration
2) Dowloads of course material and other details are free
3) There are discussion groups to interact with other people taking the course

Bookmark the course index page available here.
Find all Audio/Video lecture based courses here.

Courses covered range from Architecture and Planning, Engineering, Health Sciences and Technology, Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences, Management and Science.

Some of my favorite courses:
1) Circuits and electronics
2) Linear Algebra
3) Structure and interpretation of computer programs (SICP)

The OCW website doesn't seem to have the lectures for the SICP course, but I found them here.

There is no excuse anymore for not having a world-class source of educational information at the click of your mouse. Enjoy!

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