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Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Letter from CMU

Dear Colleagues:

It is with great sadness that I inform you that our dear friend and colleague Randy Pausch passed away today, July 25, after a brave struggle against pancreatic cancer.

Randy captured the minds and hearts of millions worldwide with his Carnegie Mellon lecture, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” and his book, “The Last Lecture.”

Randy, who earned his doctorate from Carnegie Mellon in 1988, returned to the university in 1997 as an associate professor of human-computer interaction and computer science. Along with Carnegie Mellon Professor Don Marinelli, Randy was the co-founder of the Entertainment Technology Center, a leading interactive multimedia education and entertainment center.

At Carnegie Mellon, Randy was also the director of the Alice software project, a revolutionary way to teach computer programming. The interactive Alice program teaches computer programming by having kids make animated movies and games. A fitting legacy to Randy’s life and work, Alice may in the future help to reverse the dramatic drop in the number of students majoring in computer science at colleges and universities. Randy was also known as a pioneer in the development of virtual reality, and he created the popular Building Virtual Worlds class.

An award-winning teacher and researcher, Randy was also a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow. He used sabbatical leaves to work at Walt Disney Imagineering and Electronic Arts (EA), and he consulted with Google Inc. on user interface design. He is the author or co-author of five books and more than 70 articles.

Perhaps the greatest lesson, however, Randy taught us all was how to live, even in the face of great challenges, and how to follow our passion. While Randy’s greatest passion was clearly his family, he did not shy from sharing his passion for his work as a professor, for his students, and for Carnegie Mellon. We will miss Randy, but we will carry the memory of him and all that he did to make Carnegie Mellon a better university and each of us who knew him a better person.

A memorial service for Randy will be scheduled at a later date.

Sincerely,

Jared L. Cohon

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Songza is a new music search engine and player. It’s got the cleanest interface to a music library that I’ve ever seen. The interface conveys that there’s life beyond the busy hyperlink, keeping a clean interface while providing rich functionality. All of Songza’s music comes from the YouTube API. Essentially, Songza is just an audio player for the YouTube music category, which probably also translate into one of the largest and fastest growing online music library. With YouTube as the backbone, Songza offers unparalleled music selections that goes beyond genres and categories because you can find rare collection of live concert recordings from different countries and time period. obviously the sound quality is probably on par at 128 kbs at best, but this is probably not the main value you get from an online music library.

Pandora is definitely the king of “social” music hub. The site allows listener to customize specific playlist or radio station anchored around a particular artist. For example, if you like Pink Floyd, Pandora will aggregate many of their songs on the playlist for your enjoyment. To sweeten the deal, Pandora goes beyond the functionality to be a simple music aggregating site, it also cross link with other music that offer similar stylistic DNA and recommends them to the listener.

SeeqPod This streaming Web music player works a lot like the popular MP3 blog aggregator The Hype Machine. SeeqPod searches a collection of MP3 resources and provides results that you can easily add to your own playlist. Since it’s casting a wide net, SeeqPod provides the best results of any of the programs in this list.

Like SplashCast (below), SeeqPod uses an interface that’s completely Flash-based, and searching for music is much, much faster than most of the sites on this list. Results appear instantaneously, and songs start playing nearly as quickly. Perhaps even cooler, if there is a YouTube video related to the search result, you can start playing it immediately in a new tab in the player interface. There’s no way to add videos to the embeddable playlist, however. That’s strictly for audio tracks.

The intuitive interface and speed of SeeqPod are what sets it apart from the other players. You can access any of your playlists easily via a drop-down menu in the player interface, and continue to search for new music while you listen. You can only add music from search results to your current playlist, but that’s a minor quibble.

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The imagination of a boy is amusing, and the mature imagination of a man is purposeful, but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: hence proceeds what Kay Hymowitz describe this class of single young males (SYMs) to be in a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence & responsible self-reliance. “We” are constantly bouncing around with a cunning mixture of sentiment, pity, tenderness, and irony. “We” exist between the duality of laser focused professional ambition & the ambiguity surrounding daily life. Perhaps Fitzgerald said it best, “Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another”.

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Full Article here
Secret #1: Yes, we fall in lust 10 times a day — but it doesn’t mean we want to leave you
Secret #2: We actually do play golf to get away from you
Secret #3: We’re unnerved by the notion of commitment, even after we’ve made one to you
Secret #4: Earning money makes us feel important
Secret #5: Though we often protest, we actually enjoy fixing things around the house
Secret #6: We like it when you mother us, but we’re terrified that you’ll become your mother
Secret #7: Every year we love you more
Secret #8: We don’t really understand what you’re talking about
Secret #9: We are terrified when you drive
Secret #10: We’ll always wish we were 25 again
Secret #11: Give us an inch and we’ll give you a lifetime

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Interesting read to see whats on the horizon in the coming years of technology development

Biofuel Race, The

Climate Conflicts

Craigslist Vengeance

Criminal Recycling

Crowdware

Culinary Orientalism

Death of Checkers, The

Digital Search Parties

Honeycomb Vase, The

Hope Can Be Worse Than Hopelessness

Smog-Eating Cement

Wave Energy

Weapon-Proof School Gear

Wikiscanning

Wireless Energy

Youtube (Accidental) Audition, The

Zygotic Social Networking

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Here are a lot of things you can do to help make research papers work for you — and get a decent grade in the process.

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Create an instant bar graph in each cell of an Excel spreadsheet. Reminds me of something Edward Tufte would recommend for information communication.

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So many students feel lost it when it comes to effective study and research techniques, especially when it comes to the dreaded term paper. These tips can help you pound out a better paper in a shorter amount of time.

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inspiring words for moments when you are running low on motivational energy.

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What a chemical reaction that could be.

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