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Very thought inspiring talk by philosopher and scientist Dan Dennett about what our consciousness tells us what is real and what is our consciousness. In his talk he also details some remarkable experiments. It might be argued that it is not just consciousness that tricks us, but consciousness in connection with perception that does the trick.

It is probably not a new experience, but many projects trying to centralize organizations with the aim of more coordination and the realization of synergy effects have resulted apparently for each member of the organization in an increase of "red tape" (more paper, more external control, ...), while the promised effects are not so prominent. In a very interesting blog post Ricardo Alonso et al. summarize research results that seem to point towards an opposite strategy if coordination is paramount:

In his twit Peter Murray asked about ideas connecting Personal Health Records (PHR) and Second Life. One idea that came to my mind is to offer a service that helps someone to understand and to find out more about the subjects concerning their personal health issues.

In the beginning Google started to offer a search engine for programming code. Now they are taking it even further. If you want to learn more about certain programming techniques or aspects of computer science, Google Code University might be a place you would like to visit. On this side they provide tutorials and link to course content related to  current computing technologies. While the emphasis is on web-based technologies other topics are also covered.

This report gives a very interesting overview of the current state and possible trends in open educational practices and resources. The report was compiled by the "Open e-Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS)" project funded by the European Commission.

One of the important messages of the report is that educational practices have to change considerably in order to make the best use of open educational resources. Barriers identified in the report include:

On ostermiller.org is a very informative introduction to the dilate and erode image processing algorithm. Interactive examples introduce several ways to implement the function.
Efficiently Implementing Dilate and Erode Image Functions

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I found this very good introduction to giving a good oral presentation by Philip E Bourne. He stresses some very helpful points.

It and other interesting presentations can be found on SciVee.tv.

If you want to do mindmapping and are seeking a good and free solution FreeMind might be a candidate. It runs in the Java Runtime Environment so it is operating system independent.

Main Page - FreeMind - free mind mapping software
 

If you need to do flowcharting, Dia is an open source tool that works similar to the Windows Visio. So if your are looking for a nice solution. This might be it.

Dia - GNOME Live!
 

technorati tags:flowcharts, open_source, tools

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