lectures
Latest
Audible's Channels offer short-form content for $5 a month
We've known about Audible's original content plans for for a few months now, but it turns out there were much bigger plans for the service. Today, the Amazon-owned company formally launched Audible Channels: a $5 monthly subscription that gets you shows, original series, comedy and news. If you're already paying for Audible, you won't have to pay extra for the new Channels. It's basically a podcast-like option from the service where the main focus has been audiobooks in the past. There's topic-based content alongside shows from notable publishers like The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and The Onion and Audible's own originals.
Physics' best-known lectures are now available to everyone on the web
Ask professors about important physics lectures, and they'll probably point you toward Richard Feynman's famous 1964 talks. They led to one of the most popular physics books ever (over 1.5 million English copies sold) and helped generations understand concepts like quantum mechanics. They've been available to the public for a few years now, but there hasn't been an easy, legal way to read them online... until now, that is. The California Institute of Technology has finished publishing Feynman's lectures in a free, HTML5-based viewer that lets you read on any device with a modern web browser. Even the equations and diagrams are visible on small screens. You're sadly not allowed to grab offline copies, but these web versions may be perfect for brushing up on the fundamentals of energy and matter before a big test -- even if you have to study on your smartphone. [Image credit: Associated Press]
$1,000 bar exam prep BarMax app now available on iPad
BarMax, the US$1000 iPhone app to help law students pass the bar exam, has made its way to the iPad. The California edition of the popular bar exam prep software is now available on the App Store. BarMax for the iPad is designed to take advantage of the larger screen real estate of the iPad by offering an outline layout of course content, a redesigned multiple choice section and the ability to highlight text, add notes and bookmark pages. The BarMax app may cost a pricey $999.99, but its 1 GB of data softens the financial blow. Customers receive two months of lecture material, thousands of pages of documentation in electronic format, sample MBE questions, sample essay exams, flash cards and a built-in calendar and task list to help them study. Once a student purchases the app, he or she has lifetime access to the course materials and a direct connection with Harvard-educated lawyers who will field any questions. The primary competitor to BarMax is BARBRI, another bar exam preparatory company that lets customers add a $295 iPhone option to its $3,000-$4,000 traditional paper and computer-based course.
Immerse yourself in TED on the iPad
Do you need a dose of inspiration, or want your mind stretched? Attending a TED talk is the answer, but now TED has come to the iPad. TED is a nonprofit group that is dedicated to spreading good and interesting ideas through a series of talks. TED means Technology, Entertainment, Design, and most of the talks fall within those categories. There is a great TED website that gives you access to the myriad talks, but the free iPad app is a portable, take anywhere, use anywhere, be inspired anywhere app that gets you access to the best of TED. To get started, you can get featured talks from the home page, or you can explore by themes or tags. Themes include things like "Ocean Stories" or "The Power of Cities." Click on a theme, and the related TED talks appear. You can also click on tags, like "Cancer," "Evolution," or "Space" and see the related talks. There's also a nifty feature called "inspire me" where you can find talks that are under topics like "jaw-dropping," "funny," or ''courageous." Once you select a topic, you're asked how much time you have, and the talk that fits your requirements will start playing. You can also download talks to watch offline. %Gallery-105106%
Rob Pardo speaks about Blizzard game design
The tenth annual Game Developers Conference is in full swing in San Francisco, CA -- and yesterday included a panel by Rob Pardo, Executive Vice President of Game Design at Blizzard Entertainment. Pardo spoke about design philosophy and how Blizzard approaches it, sharing not only Blizzard's success stories, but where they failed along the way, and what they did to fix it. Blizzard's design philosophy follows some key elements: Gameplay First: Before anything else, you want to concentrate the game on the fun. All aspects of the game -- the design, the mechanics of encounters, the quests and story are focused on making the game fun to play. Not only fun to play -- but fun to play for players, not developers. The challenge is to keep players jumping through the correct hoops, while making those hoops fun. Sometimes this involves making some changes -- for example, only night elf males could be druids in Warcraft III, but for the sake of making the druid class, something that sounded like all kinds of fun, they had to be made accessible to both genders, and both sides. So the lore was adjusted so that females and tauren could both be druids -- otherwise they couldn't have introduced the class at all. And that wouldn't be any fun.
BarMax offers bar prep on the iPhone for $1000
News is going around about yet another expensive app bucking the trend on the App Store, but here's the twist: this one actually has a good reason for such a high price. BarMax CA [iTunes link] is an app currently out that costs $999.99 -- that's right, while most developers are haggling with customers over 99 cents, this one's selling for a full $1000. But there's actually a good reason for that. It's a bar prep app, designed to help would-be lawyers pass their bar exams. Comparable services cost up to three or four times the price of this one, so if you have an iPhone and are planning to take the bar, this could actually be a "bar"gain (sorry, please don't sue us). The app is over a gig in size and brags about squeezing 50 lbs of books into the palm of your hand -- there are test questions, reference guides, audio lectures, and practice cards all included in the app's purchase. Of course, if you really do want to buy something like this, just getting it for your iPhone probably isn't the best way to do it -- you should probably do the research and see what other bar prep programs are out there before you jump into this one. And the app description in iTunes even says they'll ship you an iPod touch just to use the program, so even if you go with BarMax, you might as well see how you can get an iPod touch with it, right? But an app like this may show that there is a market for super-expensive apps, even if they have to fit very strongly into a specialty niche. Of course, to learn whether anyone actually buys it, we'll probably have to wait and see.
Blizzard developers to speak at GDC 2010
Following the pattern held in previous years, Blizzard will again be loaning out some of their top developers for panels at this year's Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, CA. WoW's former Lead Producer Jeff Kaplan, a.k.a. Tigole, presented the keynote speech at last year's GDC, and this year two top developers will be on tap to give horribly esoteric panels. Brian Schwab, Blizzard's Senior AI/Gameplay Engineer, will be presenting a lecture on AI architecture ... "AI programmers rarely use a pure architecture such as a State Machine, Planner, or Behavior Tree in isolation. Rather, several symbiotic architectures are mashed together, resulting in an overall architecture that is unique and powerful in its own way. This lecture is designed as a series of three mini-lectures where you will hear about several mashed up AI architectures along with intriguing lessons and insights." ... and Erin Catto, Blizzard's Principle Software Engineer, will be presenting a workshop on physics engines. "This one-day tutorial continues the 10-year tradition of the Math for Programmers and Physics for Programmers tutorials by bringing together some of the best presenters in gaming physics. Over the course of a day they will get programmers up to speed in the latest techniques and deepen their knowledge in the topic of physical simulation." More information, including panel times and availability, can be seen on BlizzPlanet's writeup of the announcement. This is basically total nerd talk -- it's very unlikely that we'll have any new WoW-related info from these panels, unlike Kaplan's keynote, but anything is possible. We'll keep you posted.
