Posted on 23rd April 2008 by Judy Breck in biology | brain | general science
auditory, balance, brain, hearing, neural
To begin to learn how hearing and balance work a good introduction is an online overview from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. The overview begins:
Hearing is one of the five senses. It is a complex process of picking up sound and attaching meaning to it. The human ear is fully developed at birth and responds to sounds that are very faint as well as sounds that are very loud. Even in utero, infants respond to sound. The ability to hear is critical to the attachment of meaning to the world around us.
The ASHA webpage then explains the functions of the five sections of the hearing mechanism: 1. Outer ear, 2. Middle ear, 3. Inner ear, 4. Acoustic nerve, and 5. Brain’ s auditory processing centers.
Much more about hearing can be learned in the Open University’s Science and Nature materials about Hearing. The illustration with this learn node is from those Open University materials in the section about neural processing of auditory information. To get into even more minute details, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States have an in-depth article on how visual speech speeds up the neural processing of auditory speech. Together these resources, and the links they in turn provide, are a starting learn node for many related hearing subjects.
Posted on 17th April 2008 by Judy Breck in biography | government
books, constitutional, jefferson, john, locke, theory, thomas
Thomas Jefferson got his ideas most certainly in part from his own genius. But that genius was fed by being an avid reader. The Internet opens Jefferson’s ideas and his reading globally. The image of his books shown here is from the Thomas Jefferson Library online exhibition at the Library of Congress website. The Library at Monticello, Jefferson’s Virginia home, provides more of his reading and thinking. To learn from a scholar of how Jefferson built his ideas on the shoulders of giants, you can sit in on a lecture by Yale University’s Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science Steven B. Smith. Videotaped from a course on Introduction to Political Philosophy the lecture describes the influence of Locke and other political thinkers on Thomas Jefferson:
John Locke had such a profound influence on Thomas Jefferson that he may be deemed an honorary founding father of the United States. He advocated the natural equality of human beings, their natural rights to life, liberty, and property, and defined legitimate government in terms that Jefferson would later use in the Declaration of Independence. Locke’s life and works are discussed, and the lecture shows how he transformed ideas previously formulated by Machiavelli and Hobbes into a more liberal constitutional theory of the state.
Posted on 14th April 2008 by Judy Breck in agriculture | engineering
agriculture, farm, irrigation, sprinkler, tutorials
Sprinkler irrigation coverage is illustrated in the image here that comes from Lecture 3 in a course in the Biological and Irrigation Engineering department at Utah State University. Agricultural students anywhere across the world can learn water handling and conservation from the Utah State lectures. IrrigationTutorials.com is a website with a broad range of tutorials on the practicalities of selecting and installing irrigation systems. Extensive details of sprinkler irrigation are provided by the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences in a website section on factors to consider in selecting a farm Irrigation system. Websites about irrigation are interconnected richly, making one of humankind’s most ancient technologies a click or two away from anyone with Net access who wants to understand and implement irrigation.
Posted on 1st April 2008 by Judy Breck in engineering | health | sciences
bulb, energy-saving, hygiene, industrial, Johns Hopkins, led_lighting, light, safety
If you have been wondering just how dangerous it is to break one of the new energy-saving light bulbs, click to play this video to find out. As it has recently been opening more of its content online, the Wall Street Journal is becoming a valuable resource for learning content. The above video is an example. Students interested in the health an safety implications from the video can flip on some outstanding expertise from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health course materials. An introductory lecture includes this definition of Industrial Hygiene:
Science and art devoted to the anticipation, recognition, evaluation, and control of those workplace environmental factors which may cause sickness, impaired health and well-being, or significant discomfort and inefficiency among workers or among citizens of the community.
If you have time to listen to the complete brief video, you will get a preview on LED lighting, which this expert predicts as the future of lighting. You can also copy the code by clicking the icon on the video, and embed it in teaching, learning or other bright idea online locations.
