November 23, 2005

The “Tepping” Point and The End of Poverty

Extreme poverty can be ended, not in the time of our grandchildren, but our time.

If that doesn’t send chills down your spine I’m not sure what will. It’s in the introduction of Jeffrey Sachs’ revolutionary new book The End of Poverty (Note: I just put up a free video lecture from Sachs here). I’m about 35 pages into this and it’s an incredible combination of history and economics lessons and a call to action that we actually have the ability to put an end to extreme poverty including the continent that suffers the worst from its economic situation: Africa.

Helping Africa has long been a personal passion of mine and I fully expect to devote significant chunks of my life to doing what I can to improve the situation over there. It’s no doubt a complex and daunting challenge to even make a dent in what often seems to be an overwhelming set of challenges. But I don’t think we have a choice. If we believe in equality and justice then I think we must help.

As I was reading The End of Poverty I developed a (very) minor thesis which I’ll call The TEPPing Point (apologies to Malcolm Gladwell). What is the TEPPing Point? It’s a simple equation:

Technology + Education = Productivity > Progress

The combination of an improved technological infrastructure and increased access to education will lead to higher productivity. At the end of the day higher productivity means higher wages and ultimately economic progress. Sachs offer some illuminating points early in the book when he talks about how just a couple of centuries ago Africa wasn’t all that far behind the rest of the world economically. However for the last couple of decades the rest of the world has advanced at a quicker rate leaving Africa in the dust. That’s the main reason (I am likely oversimplifying here) behind why we see extreme levels of wealth in North America, Europe and Asia while most people in Africa live on a few dollars a day or less.

Why am I talking about this here on LearnOutLoud? Well, for starters we’re doing our best to work on the “E” of the TEPPing Point. We feel that by enabling and encouraging audio and video education both here and abroad that we’re doing our part (albeit perhaps a small part at this stage) to raise productivity and economic progress.

Consider this. I formed a bit of this theory while listening to a great interview on the IT Conversations Globeshakers podcast. In it, Tim Zak interviews technologist Ethan Zuckerman and asks the question “Why Should We Care About Africa?” A couple of years ago I would have had no way to access that conversation. Today it’s as easy as plugging into an RSS feed and listening to it on my iPod. That’s the kind of thing we want to enable on a wide-scale. Globeshaking indeed…

As far as technology is concerned some amazing strides are being made. In the interview Zuckerman talks about the incredible impact that the sub-$100 laptop that Nicholas Negroponte and others at MIT are developing will have (for a collection of links on this click here). He also relayed a story about how parents in Ghana (where Zuckerman has spent a good deal of time) will save money for months so that their children can spend time at cyber cafes in the hopes that the technical skills they’ll pick up will help them to have a brighter economic future. (Note: When thinking about things to be thankful for tomorrow perhaps adding easy Internet access is something we should all be adding to our list?)

Indeed, I can feel a TEPPing Point coming. Things are accelerating at such a tremendous rate. If we (I speak collectively here) can bring technology and education to developing and impoverished countries without exploiting those countries in the process then we will change the world. When a kid growing up in Ghana can watch lectures from Stanford on his sub-$100 laptop or listen to foreign language training courses on her sub-$20 iPod then we will change the world. When the quality of a child’s education no longer depends on an accident of latitude and longitude then we will change the world.

And I can’t think of anything I would rather be thankful for in another decade or two than a world in which no one has to go to bed hungry or die from diseases that are ridiculously easy to prevent.

Happy Thanksgiving from all of us here at LearnOutLoud.com to all of you around the world.

November 20, 2005

New iPods: Micro, Pequeno and Invisa

The iPod Nano and Video iPod are now obsolete! Funny sketch from last night’s Saturday Night Live:

http://section3.net/stevejobs_SNL/

🙂

November 19, 2005

Educational, Entertaining and Inspirational

I just listened to a great session with Doug Kaye over on the BayCHI podcast where he talks about the new Conversations Network that he’s putting together. During the session he talks about the type of content they are looking for and says that it must be “educational, entertaining and inspirational.” He then goes on to say that he’ll take “two out of three” and that the most important of those three is inspiration.

Well they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery so I’m going to borrow Doug’s terminology because it precisely fits the criteria we’ve established for listing content on LearnOutLoud.com. We want content that both uplifts and informs and at the same time is very enjoyable to listen to.

To educate.

That’s our mission.

(By the way, mark my words. What Doug is doing with the Conversations Network will change the world. It’s going to be so much fun to watch and to be involved.)

November 14, 2005

E-Magazine #6 – November 11th, 2005

New Online Store – Get a Free $5 Gift Certificate

Well, we’ve been working long and hard on it but
we’re proud to announce that our online
store is officially up and running. Currently,
we’re selling about 1,800 audio books on CD and
cassette. Very shortly we’ll add DVDs and
downloadable digital audio and video to the mix. We
would like to be your one-stop destination for all
of your audio and video learning needs.

So what’s in it for you? Well here are some
reasons why we think you’ll love shopping at
LearnOutLoud.com:

• Discounted prices – Most of our
  titles are at least 20% off the suggested retail price.
• Easy and secure shopping experience –
  We’ve made it very easy to find what you are looking
  for and we’ve given you all the information (e.g.,
  abridged vs. unabridged and # of CDs/cassettes) you
  need to make an informed buying decision. Plus, we
  utilize 128-bit encryption and other technology to
  keep your data private and secure.
• Real customer service – Unlike many
  online retailers we offer both e-mail customer
  service and a 1-800 number (1-800-550-6070) for you
  to call.
• 5-5-5 – LearnOutLoud.com is committed to
  5-5-5 which means we give 5% of our pre-tax profits
  to charity, 5% of employee paid time off for
  volunteering and 5% of company equity to a
  charitable foundation.

We would like to invite you to check out our
store with a very special offer. We’ll give you a
$5 gift certificate for your first order! This gift
certificate spends like cash and there is no minimum
you have to spend to use the GC. All you have to do
to claim your $5 gift
certificate is send an e-mail to newstore@learnoutloud.com.
So get your gift certificate today and start
shopping. With the holidays coming audiobooks make
perfect gifts for friends and relatives. Stock up
today!

LearnOutLoud.com
Online Store

Free iPod Nano

Do you want one of those sleek new iPod Nanos?
In just a couple of weeks we’ll be giving one
away. Although we’ve had a fair amount of people
register to win it hasn’t been a ton. Bottom line?
Enter today and you have a really good chance at
winning a free Nano! It’s incredibly easy to enter
the contest. Just do one of these two things:

Register
for our site and post a message in our forums.
-OR-
Post a link to LearnOutLoud from your website or
blog and send an e-mail to linked@learnoutloud.com
to let us know you linked to us.

And if you do both of these you’ll have double
the chance to win!

So don’t miss out. Make sure to register now for
your chance to win the hot new Nano! (Full contest
details available here.)

Over 500 Titles in Our Free Audio and Video Directory

We’ve mentioned our Free
Audio and Video Directory in our newsletter
before but we wanted to bring it up again as we hit
the 500+ mark last week. We’ve added a lot of
really cool new stuff so if you haven’t checked it
out in a while (or haven’t checked it out at all!)
you may want to stop by. Here’s a sampling of some
of the stuff we’ve recently added:

MIT
Lectures – Links to over 100 free video lectures
from MIT including ones from Jack
Welch, Michael
Dell and Noam
Chomsky
Vega
Science Trust – Links to 40 free video lectures
on subjects like nanotechnology and physics
American
Memory from the Library of Congress – Some
amazing projects including Voices
from the Days of Slavery and the September
11th, 2001 Documentary Project
Free Sermons from Sermon
Index and SermonAudio.com
– We’ve posted links to sermons from people like Billy
Graham and Billy
Sunday

This is only scratching the surface of what we
have in the directory. Check it out today at https://www.learnoutloud.com/Free-Audio-Video

Two New Titles from LearnOutLoud.com

We’re happy to announce two brand new titles for
sale on
our site. These are the first that we’ve produced
here at LearnOutLoud.com.

If you’re an advertising professional or if you
have a business that advertises, you’ll want to
check out Bill Grady’s seminar How
You Can Create Advertising That Really Works.
This seminar is guaranteed to help you build a
stronger and more profitable advertising program.
It’s available on 2 CDs for $15.95 (a downloadable
version will be available soon).

If you’re looking to build wealth and find
financial independence, The
Science of Getting Rich
is a must listen. This book was written by Wallace
Wattles, is narrated by Brian Johnson and is a
classic in the field of self development. A
downloadable version of this one is coming soon as
well.

Two Cool New Articles: Seth’s Tutorial & Gandhi Out Loud

We’ve been feverishly writing new content for you
here at LearnOutLoud.com.

Seth just wrapped up a great tutorial on audio
recording that helps make it easy to understand. If
you’re contemplating getting into podcasting or
trying to record your own audio book this is a perfect
primer.

How
to Begin Home Recording: Level I

Jon wrote the first in an upcoming series of “Out
Loud” articles. This series will cover audio and
video material available for great leaders and
historical figures. The first articles in the Out
Loud series covers India’s Mahatma Gandhi. Look for
more of these in the near future.

Gandhi Out Loud

Latest Resources and Blog Posts

Resources:

• 
  Zondervan Publisher Page
• C.
  S. Lewis Author Page

BlogOutLoud.com:

• Stanford
  Lectures on iTunes
• The
  State of Podcasting
• How
  to Subscribe to Our Blog

Visit our blog at:
www.BlogOutLoud.com.

Register and
participate in the
LearnOutLoud.com Forums.

Coming Soon!

Our new program LearnDirect is in the works and
we should have some more details in our next
newsletter. Stay tuned!

November 11, 2005

Peter Drucker: 1909-2005

Peter Drucker, perhaps the most famous “management guru” in history, passed away today at the age of 95 (link to FT article). Drucker had an enormous impact on the business world and leaves a tremendous legacy. Here’s a brief bio of Drucker from Wikipedia:

Drucker, born in Vienna, Austria, moved to the United States in 1937. In 1943, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He taught at New York University as Professor of Management from 1950 to 1971. From 1971 to his death he was the Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at Claremont Graduate University.

He wrote about 30 books, the first in 1939, and from 1975 to 1995 was an editorial columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and was a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review. He continued to act as a consultant to businesses and non-profit organizations when he was in his nineties.

We have four Peter Drucker audio titles on LearnOutLoud. If you’re interesting in learning more about this man and his management theories, visit the following link:

Peter Drucker Audio Books

October 22, 2005

How to Subscribe to Our Blog

Please excuse my manners. We’ve been posting blog entries for almost a year and I realize that we never stopped to explain how you can subscribe to our blog. Shame on us! Seriously though, just a few months ago I had no clue how to subscribe to a blog. Once I figured it out it literally changed my web-surfing life. So I thought I would take a few minutes to share the basics with you. And of course if you’re already subscribed or know how to subscribe to a blog then please kindly disregard this post.

Step #1 – First, it’s important to understand what you are doing when you are subscribing to a blog. Essentially you are setting it up so that when a new post is made to the blog you’ll be automatically updated. Why is this nice? Well, let’s say that there are five blogs you really like. Instead of having to check five different websites separately for updates you can check one place and see updates to any of the blogs. Pretty cool huh?

Step #2 – The next step is figuring out what your options are for subscribing to blogs. There are literally dozens of blog readers (often called RSS readers, aggregators, etc.) out there. If you have a My Yahoo! page that can actually be your blog reader. Google now has a reader called the Google Reader. I am partial to Bloglines, an online service that is pretty easy to use. What you use is totally up to you. If you’re looking for some more options try searching for rss reader or rss aggregator.

Step #3 – Cool, now you’ve got your blog reader in place. Now you need the details for subscribing to our blog. For most blog readers you’ll need to plug a URL into your reader (this is called an RSS feed or an XML feed but that’s not important). To subscribe to our blog you can use the following feed:

https://feeds2.feedburner.com/BlogOutLoud

You’ll notice that if you click on that link you’ll get a bunch of gobbledy-gook. Don’t sweat that. Just cut and paste the link above into the place where your blog reader tells you to. And if you’re My Yahoo! you’ll see a link on our blog page that makes it pretty easy.

So that’s pretty much all there is to it. If you aren’t subscribing to blogs, give it a try. It’s a great way to stay up to date with a lot of cool stuff. And definitely subscribe to BlogOutLoud. We’ve got lots more good stuff coming for you in the next few months!

October 17, 2005

Thinking 100 Years Ahead…

I was listening to Wayne Dyer’s excellent course Choosing Your Own Greatness tonight and he repeated the following Chinese proverb. I felt it pretty apropos in terms of what’s going on here at LearnOutLoud.

If you are thinking one year ahead, sow seed. If you are thinking 10 years ahead, plant a tree. If you are thinking 100 years ahead, educate people.

Take a minute today (or tomorrow if you’ve already gone to bed) and think about how you can help to educate someone in your life. Maybe it’s reading to one of your children or telling someone you know about some you’ve recently learned. If you’re stuck, why don’t you share the love and tell someone else about LearnOutLoud.com. That’ll count. 🙂

Here’s to thinking 100 years ahead!

October 13, 2005

Richard Feynman

I just put up a Richard Feynman author page. For those of you that don’t know of him, Feynman is quite possibly one of the most popular physics teachers ever. He worked on the atom bomb, came up with so many breakthroughs its hard to name them all in one space, and was an all around eccentric and cool guy. His lecture series is expansive, and is possibly the best place for anyone interested in physics to start. I hope this page is useful!

p.s. I also just found out that late in his life Feynman was a major player in the commission that was put together surrounding the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. His views clashed with the official transcript and he managed to get a footnote added to showcase his different opinion on what happened during that horrible incident. What an awesome life this guy had.

October 4, 2005

LearnOutLoud.com E-Newsletter #4

The new E-Newsletter has been posted to the site here. Dead Time Learning, Free Audio Books and a whole lot more! Check it out and if you’re not subscribed to our E-Magazine yet please do so by going here.

October 4, 2005

Choices

I’m listening to Wayne Dyer’s old Nightingale-Contant program How to Be a No-Limit Person right now (Note: Unfortunately it’s out of print so your best hope of finding it is probably eBay. We do have a ton of other Wayne Dyer audio though!). In it, he talks about how we always have choices about how we can perceive the world. He specifically mentions our choice about how we respond when we’re faced with a traffic jam.

Many people decide to let the situation control how they feel. They’ll start to feel mad or frustrated or bored because of their external situation. Dyer makes the point that letting external conditions impact your internal emotions is very disempowering. Rather than get angry about the way the world is you should instead look for ways to make the best of whatever situation you’re given. His recommendation for traffic jams? Audio learning! He tells the audience (it’s a live recording) that you can learn French in a couple of years of sitting in traffic jams without ever having to set foot inside a classroom. How right he is…

It all boils down to choices. When you drive to work tomorrow morning you’ll have an endless array of choices of things to listen to. Some will educate you, fulfill you or uplift you. Others won’t. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t always (or sometimes even often…) make the best choices. But I don’t think that being perfect is the goal. I tihnk the goal is to continue to strive to make better choices.

That’s one of the main reasons we started LearnOutLoud.com. We want to give you better choices for your morning commute and for any other time of the day when you can listen to something or watch something. There is SO much good stuff out there and we’re only scratching the surface with our website. Having said that we do hope that we can help you to find some alternatives and that before long, like Wayne Dyer, you’ll look forward to sitting in traffic.

OK, this rant is over.