Imagine. You’re standing in front of a squat rack and looking at a barbell trying to figure out what the hell you’re doing here and thinking that moving heavy weights is one of the absolutely pointless, stupid, boring and tiresome activity one can engage in.

We all know the situation. You’ve spent quite a stressful day at the office, then got home, prepared all the stuff you need for workout, then got to gym, changed your clothes, but actually found yourself quite tired, lazy and not so enthusiastic at all. Quite the opposite, you’d rather surf the Internet, read a book or simply go to sleep. No need to say that you won’t get either any results or any pleasure from working out with such attitude and in such state.

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So, what is one of the most effective ways to change your state, improve your mood and therefore your performance in just few seconds?

Music. Various researches have proven that music is very effective when it comes to getting you in the right mood for training.

I’ve googled the internet and found few blog posts and forum topics discussing best tracks for heavy workouts, but it turned out that large part of these recommended tracks are quite crappy. They are either too depressive instead of energetic (applies to many metal songs) or better suited for cardio training than weight lifting (apples to many pop songs). That’s why I’ve decided to make my own lists of cool songs that will make you awaken that wild beast inside you, make you lift more and truly enjoy the process!

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1. All These Things That I’ve Done by The Killers (album torrent, video)
2. Blow Me Away by Breaking Benjamin (album torrent, video)
3. Break Stuff by Limp Bizkit (album torrent, video)
4. Down With The Sickness by Disturbed (album torrent, video)
5. Enter Sandman by Metallica (album torrent, video)
6. Eye of a Tiger by Survivor (song torrent, video)
7. Ich Will by Rammstein (album torrent, video)
8. Links 2-3-4 by Rammstein (album torrent, video)
9. Lose Yourself by Eminem (album torrent, video)
10. No Pain No Gain by Scorpions (album torrent, video)
11. Points of Authority / 99 Problems by Linkin Park and Jay-Z (album torrent, video)
12. Sleep Now in the Fire by Rage Against the Machine (album torrent, video)
13. Thunderstruck by AC/DC (album torrent, video)
14. Till I Collapse by Eminem (album torrent, video)
15. We are the Champions by Queen (well it’s classic!) (album torrent, video)

Other great bands I highly recommend to try for these purposes are Linkin Park, Guano Apes and The Prodigy.

These tracks differ greatly: some of them are very aggressive, others have motivating lyrics and energizing rhythm, but all of them will make you much more willing to workout and as a result will improve your results. Actually, they will make roar and finish your last repetition at that very moment when you feel like you have no energy left, but know it’s only mind telling you to give up, not your body.

So, I hope these tracks are going to help you succeed with your goals and make the process more enjoyable at the same time!

And I’d like to leave you with a great video compilation of bodybuilding workouts that plays the second track on the background:

NB I’m not saying that this is my favorite music overall, I’m not saying that these tracks contain genius symphonies or anything like that, I’m not even saying I would listen to them in my spare time. They just serve the purpose damn well.

These 15 worked best for me. But probably I’ve missed something? Could you share your favorites?

In 2 recent months I’ve listened to few audio books on my iPhone and written short and subjective reviews to them. So if you are interested:

1. Making It All Work by David Allen – 8/10

Amazon, torrent – audio.

This is the sequel of the widely known Getting Things Done.

GTD is not just a time management system (what a nonsensical term it actually is…), but more of a comprehensive philosophical approach to life. The goal of implementation is so called state of water – the state of consciousness when there is no tension, stress or anxiety about forgetting to do something, calm state that is characterized by 100% readiness to action. To achieve this state, realize one’s full potential and achieve the highest level of productivity David suggest the certain set of habits worth having. Of course, there is a place for high level planning (vision, purpose, long-term goals, etc) in the book as well. However, with the minimum of bull-shit and a maximum of down-to-earth advice.

As it usually is with books selling a specific system, there is a terminology and algorithms attached. But it’s secondary. David presents quite interesting approach, which favors clear sorting of all the thoughts, worries and concerns in one’s head in order to enjoy life more while moving towards one’s goals at the same time.

Books itself contains quite a lot of self-PR in the beginning: stories of the successful implementation and so on. But in some way it’s even good, because let’s a reader to believe in the potential of system more and therefore raises chances to succeed with it.

The main part is quite interesting, despite the fact that it repeats the first book a lot. But, this repeating doesn’t usually bother, because it clarifies many details, gives tricks on how to apply some ideas in practice and just reminds of something that was already forgotten. Some pieces of advice I found really great even if there are isolated from the GTD context itself, such as “pay attention to what has your attention” for example. To sum up, if you’re interested in the topic, book is worth reading.

2. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell – 8/10

Amazon, torrent – text, torrent – audio.

Tipping Point is defined by Gladwell as the moment when drastic changes become inevitable. Author thinks about and tries to answer the question of the conditions that are needed in order for “tipping point” to be reached and for world to be changed significantly. In a meanwhile he tells a lot intriguing anecdotes and quotes the results of various social science researches.

Gladwell presents details of the fight against crime in New York city, analysis of the shoe brands transfer from underground to mainstream, secrets of the people with above-the-average persuasion skills, the laws of starting ideas epidemics and many other topics.

Generally speaking, I think that books like these should be read specifically because of the stories because it’s impossible to develop a mathematically precise theory in the field of psychology and sociology. No matter how hard author tries laws will still be quite blurred and exceptions will prevail. Summing up, Tipping Point is quite educating and entertaining at the same time.

3. The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki – 8/10

Amazon, torrent – audio.

This one is very similar to the Tipping Point. Overall, I have a feeling that there is a trend of growing interest in popular science books that interpret results of social researches and try to make conclusions that are applicable in business, management and life in general. In this particular case author focused on the way groups of people make decisions, when these decisions are good when they aren’t. Well, from this description you might get an impression that the book is rather boring, but in reality it’s quite the opposite. As in the previous one, stories are the most interesting part here, no all of them, but many are rather educating and simply interesting to listen to.

Few examples of topics, covered by the book:

• peculiarities of the stock exchange dynamics: why it’s so difficult to predict stock prices, what is needed for the optimal performance of the market, how spreading of information affects people’s decisions to buy and sell and and their expectations;
• urban traffic, methods to fight traffic jams, application of the free market laws to the issues;
• various psychological experiments that prove the point that we’re as rational and egoistic (sic!) as think at all;
• dependency of the productivity and efficiency of large corporations and intelligence agencies on the degree of their centralization, etc;

4. The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Peal – 5/10

Torrent – audio.

Very short book, takes only half an hour to read. Of course, this is the classics of positive thinking. And it presents right ideas. But today they look too hackneyed and boring. Not to mention religious themes that simply seem to be out of place and inappropriate. Could be of some value for those who have lived in a cave recently not heard anything about positive thinking.

How about you, have you read anything interesting recently that you would recommend?

Anyone needs an invite? I still have 8 left.

There are so many “best iphone apps” lists out there, but most of them are generic. They include silly games and other time eaters. Enough!

I’ve decided to create a list of the iPhone apps with the specific focus. These are smart, not dull. And so will be you. For easier usage, I’ve divided all the apps into few categories and included sources where you can find them all for free. So, what are the best apps that were created since iPhone creation till the end of 2009?

Data/knowledge management

1. Dropbox app (available for free in )

Allows you to access your Dropbox account.

If you still havent’ tried it, I highly recommend you to do it. This a the storage service that let’s you store 2 GB of any info for free or 50 GB for $99 per year.
Then, you can access your data from any computer and actually sync it between them by downloading application that creates local folder on your HDD.

2. Evernote (available for free in )

Allows you to access your Evernote account.

Again, if you aren’t the Evernote user I highly recommend you to create an account. This is the ultimate notebook for all your notes, pictures, documents or whatever you need to write down, save and organize. The best in class, IMHO.

Productivity

1. Google Calendar synchronization

Though it’s not an app, it’s incredibly useful and convenient to get your iPhone automatically synchronize with the Google Calendar. Here is how you can do it.

Again, if you don’t use Google Calendar as your planning tool, this is exactly the moment to give it a try.

2. Rememberthemilk iphone app or the ToDo Iphone app
(available for $10 in or for free in torrents)

I currently consider Rememberthemilk as the best online todo manager out there, I event bought the pro version! But as long as this is a matter of taste you might prefer something more universal like ToDo iPhone app for instance. Besides, rememberthemilk service itself only allows you to use mobile client in paid pro version (unfortunately). If you have an account on torrents.ru, you can get ToDo here or there.

Blogging

1. Twetie (available for $3 in or for free in torrents)

Supports your OCD for non-stop microblogging and reading tweets.

Again, you can steal a free version from here, if you have an account on torrents.ru

2. Wordpress iPhone app (available for free in )

Obviously, allows you to update your WordPress blog.

3. Livejournal app (available for free in )

Allows you to post to the livejournal.com

Reading

1. eReader (available for free in )

Allows you to read E-Books on your iPhone.

2. Wikiamo (available for free in ) & Wikipanion (available for free in , “plus” version is for $5)

They allow you to read the Wikipedia articles. Yes, you can do it with Safari. But it’s hell of a lot easier and faster to search for, open and read them (because of the proper formatting) with these tools. I currently have both, just in case. Probably you gonna like one more than the other, so try both.

3. NetNewsWire (available for free in , “premium” version is for $5)

This is the first RSS reader that synchronizes with the Google Reader.

Social networks and instant messaging

Though it’s disputable if social networking and (especially) instant messaging should be considered a smart and productive thing to do or simple time wasting, I still think that it would be nice to have all the tools available to you and then decide when, how and what for to use them.

1. Facebook app (available for free in )

Kind of speaks for itself.

2. BeejiveIM (available for $7 or for free in torrents)

Best and universal IM app out there.

3. Flickr app (available for free in

File management

1. DataCase (available for $7 in or for free in torrents)

Allows you to manage files on your iPhone from your computer via Wi-Fi.

Photo/video

1. Cycorder (available in Cydia and in torrents)

Allows you to record video on the older versions of iPhone. As simple as that. At the moment of writing this post I could find it in this torrent.

Office/work tools

1. Quickoffice (available for free in or for free in torrents)

Allows you to view and edit Pdf, Power Point, Word, Excel and many other types of documents.

Games

I’ve been thinking for quite a while before putting games here, but decided to do it. I personally couldn’t find time to play a lot, but these seem to fall into smart category:

1. Brain Exercise with Dr. Kawashima
(lite version is available for free in , full version is available for $5 in or for free in torrents)

2. Chess iPhone apps

For those who are into chess.

Music

1. iScrobble (available for free in )

If you’re last.fm user, you’re going to like this app. It allows you to scrobble everything that you listen to on your iPhone.

Usability

1. Wifi Toggle (available for free in Cydia)

Allows you to easily switch the wi-fi on/off right from the dashboard.

Miscellaneous

1. Flipclock (available for $1 in or for free in torrents)

Very nice app that turns your iPhone into clock.

2. Dictionary.com (available for free in )

Definitions for 275 000 English words.

3. Open Culture (available for free in )

Allows you to access various intelligent content on your iPhone, made by openculture.com

Guys, I hope you find this collection useful! It would be great if you could share some apps of the similar kind!

I’ve been re-reading Getting Things Done by David Allen recently and thinking about other ways to get closer to the “Mind Like Water” state and suddenly I’ve come up with a very simple, but useful lifehack for GMail. It aligns very well with all the recent trends in productivity, time management and lifestyle design set by Tim Ferriss in his Four Hour Workweek and assumes you should minimize all the unnecessary disturbances and batch your typical actions in order to save time.

So, what I did is very simple yet really helpful and I highly recommend you to try the same approach.

1. Create 2 labels in your GMail.

First one is “! once a wk” and another one “! once a mnth”.
The idea is to group all the not so important mail and not to get interrupted every two minutes. It doesn’t necessarily need to be once a month or once a week. Probably once a day and once a week will work better for you. Anyway, you got the basic principle.

2. Create filters for these labels.

For example:

Matches: subject:(“Facebook” OR “Linkedin”)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label “! once a wk

and

Matches: subject:(“Twitter” OR “Microsoft newsletter”)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label “! once a wk

Obviously, “Facebook”, “Linkedin”, “Twitter” and “Microsoft newsletter” are just examples. The point here is to put subjects or email addresses of those letters that you receive from time to time, but don’t need to read/process/reply the same second it’s received. It’s up to you to decide what these letters are, but I’m convinced that absolute majority of the letters fall into this category.

Then, you should tell your Gmail to apply the appropriate label for those letters and skip the inbox.

3. Schedule checks

Put view “once a week mail event and view once a month mail on your Google Calendar (or whatever calendar you’re using), make this event repeat every week/month correspondingly and create an email reminder.

3. Now, the most difficult step to actually practice: do not (do not!) check these two labels any other time than your scheduled time. I know these two labels look so yummy-yummy attractive when the number is more than zero, like in this screenshot (which is BTW the final result), but believe this is the habit worth developing.

Putting it all together.

So, if everything is done properly, you will have all the important mail (which is usually 1-10%) in your inbox right away and all the time consuming stuff (social networks, subscriptions, newsletters, etc) that prevents you from doing really important and inspirational things with your life will be held under two labels which are always available. Usually it takes very little time to process it all at once instead of doing it every single time when letter is delivered.

This is pretty much it. Good luck with implementing and improving! Hope, you won’t be spending the time saved in Twitter, but do something that you always wanted to start doing, but didn’t have enough time. And of course, I’m looking forward for your feedback!

Choosing a place to live as a part of lifestyle design

In the era of globalization more and more people realize that they aren’t bounded by the city or even the country they were born in. On average we travel more, tarlk and meet people from other parts of the world more and get to know other cultures more. Technology, Internet, blogging, global careers or location independent entrepreneurship – all of these are factors contribute to it. But once we’ve realized that in the long-term we are pretty much free to decide where to live we face another challenge. And this is how we can possibly make a choice like this?

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I, personally, think that a place that can be called “the best for everyone” simply doesn’t exist. Besides, probably there is no one single place which is “best for you”. But certainly there are places which you would or will enjoy more and less, there are places where you’ll have more opportunities for self-realization and those where list of opportunities is shorter. So, what can help one to make the decision?

Location, location, location

Well, there are many approaches answer this question. And no, I don’t consider “just live where you were born” as one of them.

One of the options is to travel the world and try to live at least for a few days/weeks/months/years in each country to understand cultural differences and other distinguishing characteristics and figure out which country fits your personality, interests and passions the best. This is what Onizou guys are doing. But it’s a kind of difficult thing to do though, considering that there are 233 countries in the world. It would be time and money consuming, but probably worth doing.

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Another option is to listen to your friends, relatives and acquaintances with the similar mindset and try to catch the gist of their impressions from different parts of the world. But still the biggest risk is the subjectivity and difference in life priorities, in likes/dislikes and interests. One person cares most about safety levels and would never live in the country where crime rate is still high because family safety is the top priority for him/her, another person values adventures more and cannot live without new exciting experiences and challenges, someone else simply has some specific interest like Argentinian tango and would obviously end-up somewhere in Latin America.

What gets measured gets managed

I think that the best way to go is to combine all the methods and analyze all the available information. But let’s look on the other side of this issue.

How can official statistical information, ratings and rankings contribute to your decision making? Of course this data will be more useful for those of you who care about sustainability, safety and financial issues more, but those with other priorities will definitely benefit as well.

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There are a lot of pretty interesting international rankings and ratings that sort different countries and cities on the basis of the specific factor or set of factors. Let’s take a look on some of them:

What are the best cities to live in?

1. Mercer’s Quality of Living Survey

According to wikipedia, important criteria are safety, education, hygiene, recreation, political-economic stability and public transportation. The importance of the list lies primarily in the fact that internationally operating companies use it to determine where they will open offices or plants and how much they pay the employees.

Result:
City Country Rating
1 Vienna Austria 108.6
2 Zürich Switzerland 108
3 Geneva Switzerland 107.9
4 Vancouver Canada 107.4
Auckland New Zealand 107.4
6 Düsseldorf Germany 107.2
7 Munich Germany 107
8 Frankfurt Germany 106.8
9 Bern Switzerland 106.5
10 Sydney Australia 106.3

2. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s World’s Most Livable Cities

Each city is assigned a score for over 30 qualitative and quantitative factors across five broad categories: stability, health care, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure. The categories are compiled and weighted to provide an overall rating of 1–100, where 1 is considered intolerable and 100 is considered ideal.

Result:
City Country Rating
1 Vancouver Canada 98.0
2 Vienna Austria 97.9
3 Melbourne Australia 97.5
4 Toronto Canada 97.2
5 Perth Australia 96.6
Calgary Canada 96.6
7 Helsinki Finland 96.2
8 Geneva Switzerland 96.1
Sydney Australia 96.1
Zürich Switzerland 96.1

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3. Monocle Most Liveable Cities Index

According to wikipedia, important criteria in this non-scientific survey are safety/crime, international connectivity, climate/sunshine, quality of architecture, public transportation, tolerance, Environmental issues and access to nature, urban design, business conditions, pro active policy developments and medical care.

Result:
City Country 2008
1 Zürich Switzerland (04)
2 Copenhagen Denmark (01)
3 Tokyo Japan (03)
4 Munich Germany (02)
5 Helsinki Finland (05)
6 Stockholm Sweden (07)
7 Vienna Austria (06)
8 Paris France (10)
9 Melbourne Australia (09)
10 Berlin Germany (14)

As you surely noticed, ratings are a little different. Yes, this is due to the differences in the factors and weights. I’d recommend you to follow the links above to learn more about the methodologies behind and get a better understanding of how it fits your personal priorities.

What are the most developed countries?

Here I’d suggest you to look at the list of countries by Human Development Index (top 5 are Iceland, Norway, Canada, Australia, Ireland) and the Quality-of-Life Index (top 5 are Ireland, Switzerland, Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden).

What are the richest countries?

Although money is not the ultimate measure of the quality of life, it still matters. So, if you are interested on getting to know where people on average make the most money you can take a look at the list of countries by GDP (PPP) per capita.

But those are just materialistic economic measurements, how about the actual human happiness?

Well, the problem is that it’s quite complicated to measure such an ephemeral thing as human happiness. But happily there were few attempts. One of them is satisfaction with life index.

You probably want to know the result? Well, the happiest countries in 2006 were as follows:
1. Denmark;
2. Switzerland;
3. Austria;
4. Iceland
5. The Bahamas;
6. Finland;
7. Sweden;
8. Bhutan;
9. Brunei;
10. Canada.

I won’t get into the details of methodology and discussion of the cultural differences, but if you want to know more, Wikipedia is there for you.

But happy and healthy people are supposed to live longer aren’t they?

Well, there is a correlation between those factors and if you are interested in the specific figures the following indices might be interesting for you:

1. List of countries by lifespan (CIA World Factbook, 2009 estimates):
1. Macau 84.36;
2. Andorra 82.51;
3. Japan 82.12;
4. Singapore 81.98;
5. San Marino 81.97;
6. Hong-Kong 81.86;
7. Australia 81.63;
8. Canada 81.23
9. France 80.98
10. Sweden 80.86.

2. List of countries by lifespan (list by the United Nation, average for the 2005-2010 period):

1. Japan 82.6;
2. Hong-Kong 82.2;
3. Iceland 81.8;
4. Switzerland 81.7;
5. Australia 81.2;
6. Spain 80.9;
7. Sweden 80.9;
8. Israel 80.7;
9. Macau 80.7;
10. France 80.7.

These are the rankings I wanted to share with you. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not implying that you should believe them 100% and move to mentioned cities/countries ASAP. But I hope it widened your perspective on the world and gave some additional food for thought. I would love to hear your opinion or some additional information of that kind!

Last Friday we’ve been to the amazing presentation give by two designers traveling the world that call themselves Idea Nomads in Moscow. Oni and Zou (these are their aliases) have a goal to travel the world without taking flights.

So far, they visited China, Hong Kong, Tibet, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Russia, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan giving various creative/design presentations and arranging the workshops and of course doing some self-PR. They don’t seem to be willing to stop so far, the route they had drawn on the world map is far from being complete.

I don’t know about you, but it’s another source of inspiration for me:
http://www.ideanomads.com
http://twitter.com/onizou

Why even think of educational online courses?

In my opinion, full freedom implies self-improvement and the ability to learn new things every day. And you know what? I don’t really think that joining the university is absolutely the best way to do it.

I guess I’m not the only one here who has a feeling that education in the traditional meaning of this word is dying in the 21st Century. Sounds like a bold statement, but it’s true. Even now, in 2010 amount of the information available for free is unbelievable. And it’s increasing exponentially. If you still have doubts I recommend you to watch this truly amazing video:

I’m not sure about you, but it definitely made me think a lot. Old traditional universities with big names won’t disappear overnight, of course not. Degree is still the best available indicator of credibility, top universities still have an opportunity to provide their students with the wide range of various subjects and classes. The point is if you worry about practical knowledge more than about degree and credits there are some alternatives available for you. Probably, you just don’t have that much time to spend on educating yourself in a traditional way or probably you don’t want to settle down in one place for a few years?

The change in the educational system is not going to be revolution. It resembles evolution more. And we can see it now: more and more universities (even the top ones) discover alternative ways of providing people with opportunity to learn and acquire the knowledge. Currently, it’s possible to find lots of free courses on economics, psychology or science and study any time that’s comfortable for you.

Okay, let’s make the long story short. I guess everybody knows how to use Google and/or wikipedia here. That’s true, you can get virtually any piece of information using these two tools. But there are a lot more opportunities for distant learning and broadening you mental outlook. So, what are the best places to search for free and high-quality educational videos, lectures and cases?

Here is the brief list of sources I personally liked and highly recommend you to try:

1. Academic Earth.

Academic Earth is a website which offers free online video lectures from universities such as UC Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale [3] in the subjects of Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Economics, Engineering, English, Entrepreneurship, History, Law, Mathematics, Medicine, Philosophy, Physics, Political Science, Psychology, and Religion.

Free. Online. Video. Lectures. If you feel like watching something online and stupid youtube “funny videos” isn’t quite for you, then Academic Earth should be your first choice. Every lecture can be viewed in either text, mp3 or video format.

If you have difficult time deciding where to start I can suggest you try the Yale course of the Introduction to Psychology lectures by Paul Bloom, it’s insightful, funny and extremely easy to understand at the same time.

This site alone is almost infinite source of interesting, insightful and various lectures that will make you forget about your TV for a long time (in case you didn’t give up on it yet).

2. TED conference.

I’m totally in love with TED! This is where you can find the most amazing presentations given by the most interesting people!

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design)

is an annual conference that defines its mission as “ideas worth spreading”. The lectures, also called TED Talks, cover a broad set of topics including science, arts and design, politics, education, culture, business, global issues, technology and development, and entertainment. Speakers have included such people as former U.S. President Bill Clinton, Nobel laureates James D. Watson, Murray Gell-Mann, and Al Gore, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and Billy Graham.

I’m personally subscribed to the TED youtube channel and TED blogvia RSS. I honestly consider TED the best online video channel that I’m aware of at the moment. Speakers vary from the entrepreneurs to scientists and politicians. Topics vary from the cutting-edge technology to the hunger in Africa. But few things remain the same: amazing speakers, incredible topics, leadership, insights and vision. The only reason why this is on the second place after Academic Earth is because it’s partially entertaining and not totally educational. The objective here is not really to educate you in the specific narrow field, but to widen your horizons, to make you think about things you normally wouldn’t think about and to inspire you to discover more on the presented subjects yourself.

Here are some of my favorites:

Dan Gilbert: Why aren’t we happy?

Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that well be miserable if we dont get what we want. Our “psychological immune system” lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.

Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.

Jill Bolte Taylor: How it feels to have a stroke

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened — as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding — she studied and remembered every moment.

Hans Rosling: No more boring data

With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling uses an amazing new presentation tool, Gapminder, to debunk several myths about world development.

A.J. Jacobs: My year of living biblically

Speaking at the most recent EG conference, author, philosopher, prankster and journalist A.J. Jacobs talks about the year he spent living biblically — following the rules in the Bible as literally as possible.

Jonathan Harris: The art of collecting stories

At the EG conference in December 2007, artist Jonathan Harris discusses his latest projects, which involve collecting stories: his own, strangers’, and stories collected from the Internet, including his amazing “We Feel Fine.”

Of course, there are hundreds more that you’ll probably like more than these, so feel free to explore the TED site.

3. The best way to learn languages online for free

There are at least two web-sites that can help a lot with your foreign languages learning:

http://livemocha.com/

Livemocha is the world’s largest language learning community with over 2 million members. A lot of learning courses for all the aspects of learning: reading, writing, speaking, etc. Plus, the social aspect and opportunity to connect with people learning languages and foreign cultures around the world.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/

Another great source.

4. Open Universities

Open Yale courses

http://oyc.yale.edu

MIT free courses

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

5. Business Education

Sloan School of Management

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Sloan-School-of-Management/index.htm

One of the first business schools that made a lot of materials available online. Management, psychology, economics, entrepreneurship or finance, pick what interests you most.

Distance Learning topic @ businessweek

http://bx.businessweek.com/distance-learning/

Case Study of Harvard Business School

http://harvardbusiness.org/search//100011

If you don’t mind paying for your distant education there are a lot of paid courses available for you at Harvard web-site.

List of universities and websites offering free business and entrepreneurship courses online

http://education-portal.com/articles/7_Universities_and_Websites_Offering

99 Free Online Classes on Business and Entrepreneurship

http://www.cheaprevolution.com/the_cheap_revolution/2008/01/85-free-onlin-1.html

6. Other resources

If you are looking for more these links may help:

Wikipedia article about distance learning (not a bad place to begin with)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance_learning

Dmoz Directory: Distance learning (dozens of links to the online courses, institutions and so on)

http://www.dmoz.org/Reference/Education/Distance_Learning/

Best distance learning courses available on the internet list created by British Council (lots of highly useful links)

http://www.britishcouncil.org/ge-education-distance-learning-courses.htm

Distance learn @ about.com (this site is mostly focused on the online colleges as an option to get a distance education)

http://distancelearn.about.com/

List of cultural and educational video sites:

http://www.openculture.com/2009/06/intelligent_video_the_top_cultural_and_educational_video_sites.html

I guess this is more than enough for now. Hope, you have more time than me to spend on these sites!

Guys, I hope you found this helpful! Can you recommend anything else?