excellent websites

Where can I go to watch the world’s best thinkers present their ideas?

July 5, 2013 by Anne Austin Leave a Comment

Answer: Start with these two websites:

TED: Ideas Worth Spreading, where the world’s best thinkers talk for between 10 and 20 minutes
BIG THINK, where the world’s best thinkers talk for around 40 minutes

Filed Under: best websites to watch world's best thinkers present their ideas, excellent websites, toolbox Tagged With: Big Think, breakthrough ideas, educational websites, excellent websites, informative videos, TED videos

Good sites on how to study

November 3, 2011 by Anne Austin Leave a Comment

1. The Learning Toolbox Home –James Madison University Special Education Program

Filed Under: excellent websites, skill-building websites, toolbox

What websites teach how to apply positive psychology?

June 16, 2011 by Anne Austin Leave a Comment

Pay It Forward Movement

From the home page, written by Catherine Ryan, site creator and author of Pay It Forward:

The Pay It Forward Movement is the real-life reaction to the release of my novel in early 2000, followed by the creation of the Pay It Forward Foundation, followed by the Warner Brothers movie. I didn’t write the novel expecting a social movement, but it’s certainly been exciting to watch it grow.

The purpose of the Pay It Forward Movement website is to bring together, in one place, as many real stories as we can.

The website gives over 120 Pay It Forward stories written in by individuals from all over the world.

There’s Anthony, who was so moved by the book he bought up all the copies in his local book store and handed them out to others, requesting they pass the book on when they finished reading it.

Then there’s Bob, who tells the amazing story about the lady who gave “Stormin’ Norman Schwartzkopf a lovely tribute at the end of a talk he gave, and the lovely train of events that tribute produced.

All the stories are elevating and offer lots of good Paying It Forward ideas for the rest of us.

Then there’s information on all the 200-odd established Pay It Forward projects and school projects that have sprung up all over the world.

A person could spend many happy hours reading all the inspiring stories.

Elliot Landy’s Uplifting Films.com

Message from Elliot:

Uplifting Films

is a listing of films available on video which have

a positive vision of life, leave you feeling good and contain little or no violence, exploitative sex or other types of negative imagery. It recommends films that delight, inspire, educate and enlighten. Films are evaluated from the perspective of feeling and love – first from the heart, secondarily from the intellect.

Truly Moving Pictures

About Heartland Truly Moving Pictures

Heartland Truly Moving Pictures recognizes and honors filmmakers whose work artistically expresses hope and respect for positive values of life. Heartland is a cultural institution, but it’s also an ideal. The organization was formed around the belief that great films can inspire people to accomplish amazing things. They can increase our understanding of the world around us. They can motivate us to treat one another with compassion and respect.

Click here to see the list of Truly Moving Picture Award Winners. The winning films are sorted by year, alphabetical order, genre, and rating; a synopsis comes with each film.

Spiritual Cinema Alliance

A list of recommended movies that uplift the spirit.

Movies include:

Mother Terasa
It’s a Wonderful Life
Life is Beautiful
My Life

Filed Under: applying potitive psychology, excellent websites, toolbox

learn a language

May 24, 2011 by Anne Austin Leave a Comment

Learn any language

at My Happy Planet
From the site’s homepage:

MyHappyPlanet.com is an online community for people who are passionate about learning languages.

Our vision is to bridge cultures around the world through language learning. Our aim is to make language learning more fun, more dynamic, and more effective — without having to pay for it.

With MyHappyPlanet, you can practice speaking with a native speaker, learn more about other cultures, and make friends with people anywhere in the world. We’ve built in great features so you can teach and learn from each other through live chat, messaging, videos, and fun lessons.

MyHappyPlanet is easy to use and it’s completely free, so why not just try it and see?

Learn Spanish

at SpanishDict: the world’s largest Spanish learning website.
This site offers free video lessons, flashcards, Spanish-English translator, a Spanish dictionary with the spoken pronunciation and an active community forum, plus lots more.
at ENGLISHnSPANISH: an excellent source of lists of most used Spanish words and their pronunciations; lessons and quizzes.
“Quizzes are completed only when all answers are correct. Quiz remembers every incorrectly answered question and asks same question again.. and again.. and again.. until you answer it correctly. It is basically a drill; test is completed only when you know all the answers.” (from the homepage)

Filed Under: learn a language, skill-building websites, toolbox

excellent educational websites

May 5, 2011 by Anne Austin Leave a Comment

1. Helpguide.org

Click here for Helpguide’s list of topics covered. Helpguide’s mission statement:

Helpguide’s expert, ad-free articles help empower you with knowledge, support and hope.

Helpguide’s mission is to help you understand, prevent, and resolve many of life’s challenges. Our goal is to empower you with the knowledge and support you need to take charge of your life and make healthy choices.

Helpguide was launched in 1999, following the suicide of Robert and Jeanne Segal’s daughter, Morgan. We believe that Morgan’s tragedy could have been avoided if she had access to well-written professional information that gave her a sense of hope and direction. Helpguide is focused on providing free online resources that are motivating, balanced, and ad-free—easy to look at, easy to understand, and focused on information you can use to help yourself.

We are delighted that Helpguide has grown from a small local project to an internationally acclaimed resource that received 30 million visits in 2010.

2. Business Balls

Free career help, business training, organizational development – inspirational, innovative ideas, materials, exercises, tools, templates – free and fun.

This list of topics covered gives you an idea of what the site offers.

Filed Under: educational websites, excellent websites, toolbox

Handy websites

May 3, 2011 by Anne Austin Leave a Comment

1. How can I find out if a non-doctor-prescribed treatment or product that claims to have health benefits is probably just an expensive waste of time?

Answer: Go to Quackwatch.

Quackwatch Mission Statement

Quackwatch is now an international network of people who are concerned about health-related frauds, myths, fads, fallacies, and misconduct. Its primary focus is on quackery-related information that is difficult or impossible to get elsewhere. Founded by Dr. Stephen Barrettin 1969 as the Lehigh Valley Committee Against Health Fraud (Allentown, Pennsylvania), it was incorporated in 1970. In 1997, it assumed its current name and began developing a worldwide network of volunteers and expert advisors. Our activities include:

Investigating questionable claims
Answering inquiries about products and services
Advising quackery victims
Distributing reliable publications
Debunking pseudoscientific claims
Reporting illegal marketing
Assisting or generating consumer-protection lawsuits
Improving the quality of health information on the Internet
Attacking misleading advertising on the Internet
Consumer Health Digest, a free weekly e-mail newsletter
The healthfraud discussion list, which has about 600 members

Filed Under: excellent websites, handy websites, toolbox

A fun game to develop your share-market technical-analysis skills

April 24, 2011 by Anne Austin Leave a Comment

How good are you at reading share charts?

The object of this share-trading game is to make a hypothetical fortune using technical-analysis skills.

You are given $100,000 to start with. You are then presented with share charts that have been randomly selected from stock market data from the last 12 months. You study the chart and then decide whether to buy, sell, look to see what happens next, or move to another chart.

This game is a fun way to test your charting theories and to develop your trading discipline. Consistently making money from charts alone is very hard. Hopefully this game will convince you of that and encourage you to perfect your technical analysis before you spend your own money.

This is how the game looks. It’s free, ready to play straight away and it’s quite fun!

This is how the game looks

Account Value: $100,000.00 Entry Price: $23.97 Current Price: $23.97
Days

Filed Under: excellent websites, skill-building websites, toolbox

wonderful videos on how the brain makes us who we are

April 22, 2011 by Anne Austin Leave a Comment

The tell-tale brain: A Neuroscientist’s quest for what makes us human

by neuroscientist R.S. Ramachandran; duration 59 minutes, recorded at D.G. Books, La Jolla, california on January 22, 2011

Why we love: The nature and chemistry of romantic love

Presenting groundbreaking research that sheds new lights on the mysteries of romantic attraction

by anthropologist Helen Fisher; duration 43 minutes, June 8, 2006

3. A fascinating theoretical model of how our brain works and a peek into the future of artificial intelligence –a 22-minute TED talk by Jeff Hawkins

Filed Under: educational websites, excellent websites, toolbox

Handy websites

April 21, 2011 by Anne Austin Leave a Comment

Philanthropy websites:

GiveWell

What is GiveWell?

GiveWell is an independent, nonprofit charity evaluator. We find outstanding charities and publish the full details of our analysis to help donors decide where to give.

Unlike existing evaluators, which focus solely on financials, assessing administrative or fundraising costs, we focus on how well programs actually work – i.e., their effects on the people they serve.

How and why did GiveWell start?

GiveWell started as a group of donors, employed full-time in the hedge fund industry, discussing how to accomplish as much good as possible. We found ourselves fascinated by the research we were conducting, but also found that it isn’t a part-time job, and few public resources exist that can help with it. We raised $300,000 from our former coworkers and left our jobs to start GiveWell. More …

What are you trying to accomplish?

Individual donors give over 100x as much every year as the Gates Foundation and over 6x as much as all foundations combined. (See chart)

We aim to direct as much funding as possible of this large pool to the best charities we can find, and create a global, public, open conversation about how best to help people.

How does GiveWell get information about charities?

We obtain information about charities by (a) reviewing materials posted on an organization’s website, (b) contacting an organization directly, or (c) conducting applications for direct grants (charities share information with us in the hopes of being awarded a grant).

Kiva – micro-finance loans

Filed Under: handy stuff, handy websites

TED: a video collection of our world’s greatest thinkers

March 29, 2011 by Anne Austin Leave a Comment

TED: http://www.ted.com

(stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design).

Their slogan:

Ideas worth spreading: Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world.

From TED’s website:

TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The annual TED conferences, in Long Beach/Palm Springs and Edinburgh, bring together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes or less).

On TED.com, we make the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free. Almost 900 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week. All of the talks are subtitled in English, and many are subtitled in various languages. These videos are released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.

Our mission: Spreading ideas.

We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we’re building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other.

Here are the current top ten inspiring talks: