What's a JavaScript Closure? Ever wonder about some of JavaScript's more advanced and esoteric features? Nathan Whitehead's interactive tutorial explains and walks through each of these concepts one step at a time. At the end of each lesson, you are encouraged to write short snippets of code demonstrating the concepts that you just learned, which are then automatically checked for errors and verified.
Perhaps you're new to JavaScript, or programming in general;
CodeAcademy offers similar interactive tutorials that will teach you the basics, and hold your hand along the way. Perhaps you'd rather learn at a more even pace; CodeAcademy's
CodeYear will introduce you to one new concept every week throughout 2012.
[more inside]
posted by schmod
on Jan 20, 2012 -
42 comments
The Higher Education (Debt) Bubble - "[H]igh and increasing college costs mean students need to take out more loans, more loans mean more securities lenders can package and sell, more selling means lenders can offer more loans with the capital they raise, which means colleges can continue to raise costs. The result is over $800 billion in outstanding student debt, over 30 percent of it securitized, and the federal government directly or indirectly on the hook for almost all of it. If this sounds familiar, it probably should...
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on May 17, 2011 -
185 comments
openculture.com is offering hundreds of links to free online courses from the top universities in the United States (and Oxford).
posted by gman
on Jan 12, 2011 -
16 comments
PhDChallenge.org proposed a
challenge: To have the phrase "I smoke crack rocks" included in a peer reviewed academic paper. The winner is Gabriel Parent from Carnegie Mellon, who included it in his
paper [PDF].
posted by reenum
on Dec 16, 2010 -
54 comments
When a person graduates high school as one of the top students, all sorts of grand predictions are made for the person's future. But how many of them end up doing the things predicted of them?
The Buffalo News
did a feature in 2007 on what the top students in the Buffalo area from 1987 ended up doing after high school. Some of them have done remarkable things, while others have made their mark in smaller ways, all are interesting in their own way.
posted by reenum
on Jul 4, 2010 -
57 comments
The autodidact course catalog. Twenty-two professors at Johns Hopkins propose reading lists for courses of self-study, from "Society Can Be Dangerous To Your Health" to "Higher Mathematics in Nouns and Verbs" to "Biochemistry and Human Evolution (with Rather a Lot about Mitochondria.)" If you're not going back to school this week, why not take on one of these syllabi instead?
posted by escabeche
on Sep 4, 2009 -
42 comments
The Scholar Ship , an international floating university stewarded by top universities in
Morocco, the
United Kingdom,
China,
Australia,
Mexico,
USA, and
Ghana, have
temporarily suspended all voyages due to lack of funds - mainly caused by the withdrawal of main sponsor and initiator
Royal Caribbean International. The program ran two voyages in
2007 and
2008 before shutdown. Alumni and prospective students on
Facebook and
Ning are busily sourcing options to revive the organization, while
Semester at Sea is offering spaces to students who were accepted for the now-cancelled voyages.
[more inside]
posted by divabat
on Jun 14, 2008 -
9 comments
Open Culture's "10 Signs of Intelligent Life at YouTube" features "intellectually redeemable" channels from
UC Berkeley, @GoogleTalks, TheNobelPrize, TED Talks, FORA.tv, the European Graduate School, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, BBC Worldwide, National Geographic, PBS, UChannel, MIT, Vanderbilt, and
USC.
posted by Soup
on Dec 27, 2007 -
21 comments
The World Lecture Hall is a compedium of links to open university materials. Some include lecture notes, text books and even video. The
OCW at MIT is probably the most well known but there are many universities that provide online access to course materials. Want to learn about
medicine? John Hopkin's kindly provides some popular courses (Cadaver not included).
Notre Dame provides a number of courses focused on the liberal arts. The University of Washington provides
Computer Science and Engineering courses. Tufts provides a potpourri of
courses, including dentistry.
posted by substrate
on Feb 24, 2007 -
13 comments
NYU President John Sexton warns striking grad students that they must resume teaching or lose their benefits. After
weeks of
marching outside Bobst library and refusing to teach classes, NYU grad students have been sent a
letter from President John Sexton, warning them that any TA who does not return to work next week will lose their stipends and eligibility to teach next semester.
Until recently, NYU was the only private school that allowed graduate teaching assistants to unionize, following a
2000 NLRB decision, which was subsequently reversed.
NYU claims that it has negotiated in good faith and that the union's demands would limit decision making that should remain in the hands of academics, while the
grad students argue that they cannot trust NYU's admistration to take care of them without unionization (and representation by the
UAW). Meanwhile, many undergrads paying tuition upwards of 50K/year will have to
retake classes or opt for pass/fail. Do you
sympathize with highly educated American grad students who
receive free tuition, health insurance, and stipends in exchange for modest teaching duties (when many other students depend on student loans), especially compared the with
19th century coal miners,
third-world factory workers, and
modern-day wage slaves we normally associate with unions and strikes?
posted by banishedimmortal
on Nov 30, 2005 -
98 comments
More On Anti-Semitism at Columbia My interest in this story is primarily about how the New York Times, considered one of the great newspapers world-wide, in fact sucks!---"A week ago, Deacon and the Trunk posted on the release of a report by Columbia University on its investigation of students' charges of anti-semitic conduct by several of the university's professors. The report mostly exonerated the professors, while, at the same time, recording behavior by them which was appalling. One of the points we noted was the craven behavior of the New York Times, which said that it agreed not to report the viewpoint of the complaining students in exchange for early access to Columbia's report. The Trunk wrote:
But what about the New York Times? Is it conceivable that the Times would enter into an agreement not to talk to the subjects of a report in exchange for being given access to the report a few hours before it is made available to the public? [The Times admits it!]
posted by Postroad
on Apr 6, 2005 -
50 comments
