Dr Thrun leaving Stanford to teach online - 500,000 Students at a time!

Digital Age is on the brink of disrupting Education from centuries-old traditions. From online courses, to Apple's iBook2, to Khan Academy, to many more. How would this wave, Education 2.0 if I may call it, affect our Arab world? Looking forward to that.

Classrooms With 500,000 Students
http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/01/30/classrooms-with-500000-students/

Professor Sebastian Thrun (Robot Cars pioneer & winner), announcing leaving Stanford: 

"Having done this [teaching an online course attended by 150,000 students, 264 getting perfect score, none at Stanford], I can’t teach at Stanford again…It’s impossible…there’s a red pill and a blue pill and you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill and seen Wonderland."

Old (2010-2011) blog posts are here

For the period Jan 2010 to Dec 2011 I worked for Microsoft as Developer Evangelist in Jordan. I created a blog on MSDN. You can read my posts during that period here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/msjordantech 

with this, most my old blog posts are "re-linked" here. from now on, it's a new beginning.

Another "Calorie is not a Calorie" Researcher

(an old post from my lost blog ehcafe.com - Oct 2009)

(hat tip to Chareffine)

Robert Lustig, MD, a UCSF pediatric neuroendocrinologist, says that sugar, especially the fructose part, is very harmful. he says that a calorie is not a calorie because fructose-calories do not get digested the same way in the body:

http://www.ucsf.edu/science-cafe/articles/obesity-and-metabolic-syndrome-driven-by-fructose-sugar-diet/

very similar to Taube's explanation.

simulating a brain at chemical level

(an old post from my lost blog ehcafe.com - Oct 2009)

(hat tip to Husam)

A fascinating project! They are simulating a rat's brain at the chemical level. They expect that in less than 10 years, they will be able to reproduce the exact behavior of the human brain on a single computer. They are probably a bit too optimistic, but I would not say that this goal is unachievable.

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/out_of_the_blue/

Stanford ATOZ Battle of the Diets: Atkins wins

(old post from my lost blog at ehcafe.com, Oct 2009)

Chris Gardner, a professor of nutrition at Stanford University, and a 25-year
strict vegetarian ran an impressive study petting 4 diets for a whole year. The
attrition rate is one of the lowest in such studies, around 20%.

The lecture is very interesting if you have the time, but if you insist on
results:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eREuZEdMAVo