Tai Mingshen

Visual Literacy has made a fascinating periodic table of visualization methods for communication, engineering and business.

The Extreme Presentation Method also has some interesting chart selection recommendations.

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I’m skeptical of the results from many of the instruments that claim to measure a person’s personality traits. An article about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in The Skeptics Dictionary discusses the theory and limitations of this test.

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WebVerbix is a free on-line verb conjugator for 81 languages.

 [Source: Lifehacker]

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The University of California in Berkeley publishes a large number of its courses as podcasts and webcasts. Jimmy Ruska has complied a sorted list of the video courses and also provides a large collection of links to other educational resources.

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Mango is providing free conversational foreign language courses in Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, French, Greek, English for Spanish Speakers and English for Polish Speakers. There are about 100 lessons in each course, which you navigate through via an intuitive Flash-based interface. Written phases are clearly spoken and their pronunciation is explained word by word.

See my previous post on free language courses for links to some other good resources.

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Whatis.techtarget.com has compiled a huge collection of cheat sheets and tutorials. There are cheat sheets (quick reference guides) for blogging tools, CSS, HTML, networking, programming & scripting languages, search engines, operating systems, applications and more.

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MIT OCW provides free, searchable access to MIT’s course materials.

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FSI-language-courses.com is a website hosting language courses developed by the United States government’s Foreign Service Institute. The website itself is not affiliated in any way with the government; it is an independent effort to foster the learning of worldwide languages.

Arabic, Cambodian, Cantonese, Chinese (Standard), Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Vietnamese are currently available.

These courses are freely available in an electronic format, and are in the public domain. They are made available through the private efforts of individuals who are donating their time and resources to help others.

Pierre Thomson provides an excellent email course for learning Norwegian, called NorWord. The NorWord learning program was written by Nancy Aarsvold and Louis Janus at the University of Minnesota. The lessons arrive daily, in all 160 lessons in about 6 months, after which you should be able to hold simple conversations in Norwegian. The Norskklassen list is an informal online class for people learning Norwegian. You’ll find information on how to join the list and lots of resources for learning Norwegian on the Norskklassen website. All for free.

Here’s a listing of some free Dutch language courses which I’m currently studying: dutchgrammer.com, Taalthuis online Dutch and NT2 examen.nl

Are you wondering how to pronounce a word? Fonetiks.org provides free online pronunciation guides to 9 varieties of the English language and 9 other languages: French, French Canadian, German, Swiss German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, Mandarin, Thai. The site also provides links to several other resources for learning languages.

Update 6 Jan 2007: Chinese Learn Online is producing a Mandarin Chinese course using a combination of free audio lessons (also downloadable as podcasts) together with written materials for premium subscribers. [Via: The Red Ferret Journal]

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“Eleven dimensions, parallel universes and a world made out of strings. It’s not science fiction, it’s string theory.” PBS have many of their excellent educational television programmes available for online viewing. The Elegant Universe is a three hour series with supporting articles and interviews, providing a good introduction to the controversial string theory – an attempt at providing a theory of everything.

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LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files on their website. Their goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books and their catalogue includes complete books, short works, collections and poetry. The completed works are available for download in mp3 and Ogg Vorbis formats.

You may, of course, prefer to read your books. Project Gutenberg has about 20,000 free ebooks available in the public domain and, thankfully, a searchable database.

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