MIT puts entire curriculum at disposal of e-learners

The entire catalogue of information from 1,800 courses at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will be available free online by
the end of the year. Once uploaded, it will represent one of the internet’s most important resources.

By providing free access to course material such as lecture notes, assignment details, podcasts and videocasts, MIT’s Open CourseWare programme will transform the e-learning landscape.

MIT initiated the programme in 2001 and material from 1,550 MIT courses is already available. Anne Margulies, executive director of Open CourseWare, said that in January alone, the site had had 1.5 million visits, and the figure rose to two million if visits to language translated sites were included. Overseas visitors– from China and India in particular – dominate usage traffic, with 60% of visits originating outside the US.

Margulies said that MIT had seen little potential for making money from putting materials online and had decided to give them away. She said that about half of the Open CourseWare users were teaching themselves with the materials, 35% were students at other institutions, and 15% were teachers.

“MIT is eager for the material to be re-used, as long as it is for noncommercial purposes, and whoever re-uses it gives proper citation to the original MIT author as well as to MIT,” Margulies said...

www.iwr.co.uk

A Star investigation into Toronto's Prayer Palace congregation finds that despite
the members' dutiful tithing, the church spends little on charitable projects

After worshipping at the Prayer Palace this morning, Hyacinthe Houghron will, as she does every second Sunday, stuff her tired green minivan with a small feast: six coolers of homemade soup, a mountain of sandwiches, cakes and sweets.

Loaded down with second-hand clothes pulled from the ceiling-high piles in her hair salon, she'll give out the goods to homeless people on downtown Toronto's grittiest streets.

Missions like this aren't cheap for people like her and other volunteers at the church. "We're poor folks," says Houghron, describing the majority of the 3,000-strong congregation who attend the spaceship-shaped church at Hwy. 400 and Finch Ave.

The hairdresser scrapes together $600 of her own money each month to keep up the program because the Prayer Palace – one of Canada's largest evangelical churches – stopped running it five years ago. Other charitable works, like a promised orphanage in Brazil, either dried up or never materialized.

Meanwhile, the three white pastors – Paul Melnichuk and his 40-year-old twin sons, Tim and Tom – lead lavish lives in contrast to the mainly working-class black families that make up the bulk of the church.

Between them, the pastors have amassed a real estate fortune worth about $12 million. Each owns a multi-million-dollar country estate north of Toronto (Tim's is worth as much as $5.5 million), they share a Florida vacation villa, and the pastors and their wives drive luxurious cars – among them a Porsche Cayenne SUV, a Lexus RX 330 SUV and a Mercedes-Benz CLK 320 convertible.

Congregants are largely unaware of the pastors' extravagant lifestyles...

www.thestar.com

Migros: First Supermarket with 100% LED Lighting

The Migros Supermarket in Eschenbach, Switzerland, sets an LED milestone by switching to 100% LED lighting throughout the entire store--in the refrigerated compartments, overhead, and accenting the selection of products on offer. This project demonstrates once again the ecological superiority of the LED technology. Migros expects to sink energy use 80%, including lower air conditioning costs due to the low waste heat generation of light emitting diodes. "How many Migros technicians does it take to change a light bulb?" None for the next 16 years! That's 50,000 hours of light, compared to 1,000 hours for an old-fashioned filament lightbulb. In addition to the waste reduction achieved by this long life-span, LEDs do not use harmful mercury nor lead. And there is one last, perhaps less obvious, advantage to LED lighting in a supermarket: LEDs emit no ultraviolet nor infrared light, minimizing spoilage of foodstuffs. According to the Osram case study: "Among light experts worldwide, the project is regarded as being unique, and blazes the trail into the LED future."