background preloader

World’s largest natural sound archive now fully digital and fully online.

World’s largest natural sound archive now fully digital and fully online.

From A to Z: 200 Essential Resources for Entrepreneurs Building a Business Being an entrepreneur can be difficult. Being an entrepreneur attempting to launch a startup is even more challenging. The good news? You don’t have to go it alone. There are a lot of tools and resources at your fingertips online to help you successfully plan, launch and run your business. A/B tests. A/B testing your website will be crucial to your continued success and improvements online. Experimentation and Testing: A Primer - a great resource when beginning testing from Avinash Kaushik.Google Analytics - this comes with “Content Experiments” which permits users to split-test page variants within programs.Optimizely - cost-efficient A/B, multivariate, and mobile texting for starters.Crazy Egg - at $9 per month this tool provides heatmaps to understand user behavior.Vanity - “an Experiment Driven Development framework for Rails.” Analytics. There are some of the top companies that I've used to analyze every aspect of my business. Blogging platforms. Business plans and canvas. Crowdfunding.

Renewables: The 99.9 percent solution A view of wind turbines from the Hrad, in Slovakia. Photo by Ricz Ribeiro/flickr. Jan. 20, 2013 Renewable energy? By Tim RadfordClimate News Network LONDON – A combination of wind and solar power and sophisticated energy storage systems could keep a power grid fully supplied between 90 and 99.9 percent of the time, at costs comparable with today's fossil fuel and nuclear mix, according to a new study from Delaware in the United States. The key is to get the right combination of electricity sources and storage. - Willett Kempton, University of Delaware Computer simulation measured the performance of inland and offshore wind farms and photovoltaic cells, backed up by battery and fuel cell storage, under the lowest cost conditions, for a 72 gigawatt grid system (one gigawatt will typically provide power for about 750,000 to a million US households).. Huge storage costs Storage costs are huge, and increase with the need to store for each extra hour. But they found quite a different result.

A Master List of 1,150 Free Courses From Top Universities: 35,000 Hours of Audio/Video Lectures During these summer months, we’ve been busy rummaging around the internet and adding new courses to our big list of Free Online Courses, which now features 1,150 courses from top universities. Let’s give you the quick overview: The list lets you download audio & video lectures from schools like Stanford, Yale, MIT, Oxford and Harvard. Generally, the courses can be accessed via YouTube, iTunes or university web sites, and you can listen to the lectures anytime, anywhere, on your computer or smart phone. We didn’t do a precise calculation, but there’s probably about 35,000 hours of free audio & video lectures here. Right now you’ll find 133 free philosophy courses, 85 free history courses, 120 free computer science courses, 71 free physics courses and 55 Free Literature Courses in the collection, and that’s just beginning to scratch the surface. Here are some highlights from the complete list of Free Online Courses. Related Content: 700 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

Using the Archive Scientists worldwide use our audio and video recordings to better understand and preserve our planet. Teachers use our sounds, videos, and curricula to illustrate the natural world and create exciting interactive learning opportunities. We help others depict nature accurately and bring the wonders of animal behavior to the widest possible audience. New Guinea's Birds of Paradise Documenting Courtship Behavior For more than a decade, video curator Edwin Scholes has used digital video to document and study the courtship behaviors of New Guinea's birds-of-paradise (family Paradisaeidae). North American Warblers Reproduction, Climate Change, and Songs Mike Webster, director of the Macaulay Library, graduate student Sara Kaiser, and collaborators at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center are investigating how birds' behaviors may change in response to climate change. Sexual Signals in Australian Fairywrens Research Using Macaulay Library Recordings Anthropologist Jonathan D. Investigating Behavior

Born today ... Zac's Haunted House, a novel by Dennis Cooper (Kiddiepunk Press) Dennis Cooper’s tenth novel bears all of the earmarks of his legendary and controversial work — intricate formal and stylistic play, disturbing content, an exploration of the borderline between fantasy and reality, concern for the emotions and dilemmas of youth, etc. — but it is both something unique in his body of writing and possibly something of a world’s first in the novel genre itself. Instead of gathering materials from language, sentences, and the developmental character and narrative possibilities allowed and restricted by written fiction, Cooper has turned his characteristic inventiveness on the animated gif, employing gifs’ tightly wound, looping visual possibilities, nervous rhythms, tiny storylines, and their status as dismembered, twitching eye candy to compose a short novel of unexpected complexity, strangeness, poetry, and comedy. Zac's Haunted House will be available as a free download or to view online beginning today. Get yours here. FREE Mystery guest: Dennis Cooper: p.s.

Native Vegetation Group 16 - Heathlands Native Vegetation Groups for Victoria home Heathlands Native Vegetation Map High resolution map of Simplified Native Vegetation Group 16 [PDF File - 707.8 KB] - includes major roads and towns. Ecological Vegetation Class Descriptions Bioregional Conservation Status and EVC benchmarks 16.1 Heathlands - Sandy and/or well drained EVC 5 Coastal Sand HeathlandAn open or closed coastal heathland dominated by a diverse shrub layer and a variable ground layer of sedges, lilies and grasses. EVC 6 Sand HeathlandTreeless heathland (or with scattered emergent mallee-form eucalypts and/or banksias) occurring on deep infertile sands. EVC 89 Dunefield HeathlandTreeless heathland or low shrubland. EVC 90 Tea-tree ScrubA dense scrub of Mallee Tea-tree Leptospermum coriaceum associated with the Outlet Creek system. Page Top 16.2 Heathlands - Not well drained EVC 7 Clay HeathlandOccurs on sites with impeded drainage, often on duplex soils. 16.3 Heathlands - Sub-alpine

untitled We Are Now One Year Away From Global Riots, Complex Systems Theorists Say What’s the number one reason we riot? The plausible, justifiable motivations of trampled-upon humanfolk to fight back are many—poverty, oppression, disenfranchisement, etc—but the big one is more primal than any of the above. It’s hunger, plain and simple. In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The MIT Technology Review explains how CSI’s model works: “The evidence comes from two sources. Pretty simple. But how accurate is the model? Today, the food price index is hovering around 213, where it has stayed for months—just beyond the tip of the identified threshold. “Recent droughts in the mid-western United States threaten to cause global catastrophe,” Yaneer Bar-Yam, one of the authors of the report, recently told Al Jazeera. Yet the cost of food hasn’t quite yet risen to the catastrophic levels reached last year.

Four Charles Bukowski Poems Animated The poetry of Charles Bukowski deeply inspires many of its readers. Sometimes it just inspires them to lead the dissolute lifestyle they think they see glorified in it, but other times it leads them to create something compelling of their own. The quality and variety of the Bukowski-inspired animation now available on the internet, for instance, has certainly surprised me. At the top of the post, we have Jonathan Hodgson’s adaptation of “The Man with the Beautiful Eyes,” which puts vivid, colorful imagery to Bukowski’s late poem that draws from his childhood memories of a mysterious, untamed young man in a run-down house whose very existence reminded him “that nobody wanted anybody to be strong and beautiful like that, that others would never allow it.” Without any words spoken on the soundtrack and only the title seen onscreen — a challenging creative restriction for a poetry-based short — Umba depicts the narrator’s “bluebird in my heart that wants to get out.” Related Content:

Related: