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Global Recession Status, Visualized

Posted in » General - by Ades

10 Comments 

Click the image for an interactive map showing each country’s economic condition. Countries that are in recession are in red color. Even the growing economies (green color) like China and India have been hit hard by this crisis.

Lets hope that the global economy will start to recover by the end of this year, and hopefully see a steady growth in 2010.

MIT goes Open Source

Posted in » General, Research - by Ades

13 Comments 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is one of the top academic institutions in the world. How about learning what MIT students are learning but for free?

MIT’s open source project called OpenCourseWare was setup to provide MIT’s lectures for free. Currently there are about 1,900 courses available on the portal. Lectures contain all the necessary files and some of the lectures include audio and video content. It will be like distance learning, you just sit at home and watch the lectures of MIT on your PC. If you are a good self-learner, you can benefit a lot from this portal.

I am particularly interested in the Sloan School of Managment section which covers topics like Management, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Strategy etc.

There are many other universities that have similar programs like MIT’s OCW; Yale, Berkeley, Tufts, Stanford etc. But I see that MIT has the most complete archive of their lectures online.

So, enjoy the free education!

Website: ocw.mit.edu

The Credit Crunch: Visualized

Posted in » General - by Ades

5 Comments 

Here is a nice short video describing the credit crunch - how the US and the World in general ended up in this HUGE MESS. Very creative.

Website: www.crisisofcredit.com

Learnerade - Genius in 28 Steps

Posted in » General - by Ades

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Sufiah’s story is well known to many, especially in UK and Malaysia. Because, currently she resides in UK and her mother is originally from Malaysia. Her story is long and sad.

Sufiah was accepted to Oxford University at age 12, but due to family and other problems, the situation grew to be too much for Sufiah and she ran away from Oxford at age 15. The rest of the story you can read it yourself here.

What I want to mention here is something else. Halimahton Yusof is the mother of Sufiah, who basically homeschooled all her children and made them extremely successful (see screenshot below).

Sufiah and my other children did not want to stay at school, as they were already so far ahead that the school did not cater to their needs.

Things seemed to work out well in spite of our difficult circumstances, and my children ended up being many years ahead of their peers. Halimahton Yusof

After all the media attention Halimahton Yusof was getting tons of emails from supporters, well wishers and others on how she made her children so successful. What technique that she used etc.

So, instead of answering them individually, she wrote a book called “Genius in 28 Steps“. In this book she shares her technique on how to help children achieve extraordinary results at an early age. It costs just $10.90 and it is in the form an ebook.

My experience has shown that any ordinary child can achieve these things — but this is only possible if the child’s potential is nurtured in the right way.

The techniques I use are simple enough that anyone can use them, and yet they are extremely effective. And now your own children can also benefit from these techniques.

In my digital book, Genius in 28 Steps, I have refined and distilled my teaching methods into 28 key principles. Everything I know about teaching children to excel is contained within the pages of Genius in 28 Steps, and I hope that you can use this book to help your children fulfil their true potential. Halimahton Yusof

What is a ten dollar? It’s a lunch for somebody, it’s a pack of cigarette for someone else… But for parents with young kids, it’s a small investment towards their children’ future, that could potentially bring huge rewards. So, if you are a young parent (like me) this is a must buy book. (I am sure bachelor bloggers can also benefit from the book, to become genius blogger perhaps? ;)

Website: www.learnerade.com

Steves Jobs’ first Macintosh demo in 1984

Posted in » General - by Ades

6 Comments 

Steve Jobs demonstrating the first Macintosh computer on-stage to a packed auditorium. He had a great presentation skills since back then…

Illustration: America’s $3 Trillion War On Iraq

Posted in » General - by Ades

13 Comments 

Here is a nice illustration about America’s $3 trillion war on Iraq and how they spent it, illustrated in 10 steps. In 2003, Secretary of Defense, Ronald Rumsfeld estimated Iraq war to be $60 billion. After five years, the cost of Iraq war stands at around $3 trillion.

What an estimation! or was it an intentional misleading?

Imagine if all these money is spent on the needy and the poor, on the education and the health of the society. They could have even bailout tens of Fords, GMs and Chryslers. But no! Bush had to spend it on the killing of more than 1 million Iraqis and over 4000 US soldiers.

Regarding helping the poor… here is an interesting documentary (trailer) on youtube about the corruption and misuse of foreign aid. In reality, those millions of dollars never really reach the poor in Africa!

Unfortunately, this is the state of the world that we are living in now.

What New Year? Miscellaneous ramblings

Posted in » General, Islam - by Ades

23 Comments 

New Year: It’s almost 2 hours into 2009 here in Malaysia. So technically speaking, we are one year ahead of Western countries at the moment (This is the only time Asian countries can be ahead of US and Europe ;) Since I don’t celebrate New Year, for me it was just another day (but with fireworks).

Gaza Crisis: While people worldwide are celebrating new year and watching fireworks in the sky, people of Gaza, Palestine are being pounded by Israeli bombs. Close to 400 people have died and around 1600 have been injured in a fifth straight day of Israeli bombardment. This is how the Gaza looks in reality (warning:graphic images) click here and here

The strange thing is that, there has been a lot of news reporting and fact statement but no one really came out and condemned this horrible massacre. President elect Obama is playing golf, the Bush administration has advised Israeli government to avoid civilian casualties, the World is silent and the Arab League couldn’t even arrange emergency meeting quickly. That basically sums up the world’s reaction to Gaza crisis.

Donate: If you want to help the people of Gaza, please donate some money to them http://www.un.org/unrwa/emergency/donation/index.html. Every contribution counts, no matter how small.

PageRank: Google seems to have updated its PageRank system for the new year. My not so long ago launched website www.adesclrpicker.com is now showing PR4 (previously PR0), my main site www.adesdesign.net has not changed (PR6) and this blog of mine still PR2 (previously PR7).

Soon, the pagerank of this blog should be back to normal as well (hopefully), because I had submitted my blog for reconsideration few weeks ago.

What 2009 holds for us: Only God knows what it holds, but it’s going to be a difficult year, that’s for sure. Effects of the current financial crisis will be felt mostly in 2009, especially in the Asian region. But nevertheless, let’s stay positive and hope that 2009 will be a better year than the past year.

Good luck to everyone with your internet projects and blogs in 2009!

Predictions are just that - “predictions”…

Posted in » General, Personal - by Ades

8 Comments 

About a decade ago when I was doing my degree in the University, in my management class I clearly remember that the book (I forgot the publisher of the book, but it was pretty standard book, maybe McGraw Hill on Management) was forecasting about the auto-makers of the world. And the book was suggesting that auto industry would consolidate and only few major auto-makers would dominate the world’s auto production. The rest would die of slowly.

And, in the top three spot they were all Western companies (no Asian automaker was in the list), I do not remember the third one but GM and Ford were in the list. But today after 10 years, we see a different picture…

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Today, US auto makers which were predicted to dominate the world’s auto industry are struggling to stay alive. US Congress is yet to decide on the fate of the three automakers, whether to bail them out or to let them bankrupt. The companies were seeking $14 billion from the financial industry bailout for emergency loans, but the bill was rejected in the Congress. Now the fate of the US automakers solely depend on the White House’s next move.

Regarding Asian automakers, we all know that Toyota had passed Ford Motor Co. as the world’s No. 2 automaker in 2003. And it officially took over General Motors as the world’s No.1 automaker in 2007. While Honda is not far behind on the fifth place (see below).

This shows that the prediction was wrong on two counts; one, GM and Ford would be one of the strongest automakers (i.e financially stable). Two, no Asian automakers would be in the Top 3.

It also shows that nothing can be predicted precisely. And you can’t be 100% sure about the future events that are going to take place. I think this is best explained with the whole Credit Crunch crisis that we are now seeing worldwide. It’s really ironic that, after governments of countries worldwide spent millions of dollars on establishing all kinds of economic forecasting and risk management institutions, none of them had detected the Credit Crunch crisis and had an alternative solution in place for it. No one had a clue that the crisis would hit this soon, this quickly and this hard. How come?! So, much for the advancements in forecasting and crisis prevention!

So what was the point of spending all those money in establishing all those institutions, and employing all those professionals for years?

Downloading YouTube videos as MP3

Posted in » General - by Ades

10 Comments 

Here is an interesting and very useful software, it converts YouTube videos into MP3 or more specifically it extracts the MP3 out of YouTube videos.

As you know YouTube has lots of beneficial videos (besides all the junk that is put in), but since you don’t have the time to watch all the beneficial lectures - with this software you can download them as an MP3 file and listen to them in your car while you are stuck in the traffic-jam.

I did try it on one video just now, and it did a very good job.

URL: http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/guides/dvd/convert-YouTube-to-MP3.htm

Top Commenters: October 2008

Posted in » General - by Ades

8 Comments 

Top commenters for the last month were: YourDownline.co.uk, Jaseem Umer, Andrew. Estate Lawyer., Minnesota Attorney, Angelina Maben, gout, reddebt, appleblogger, Rice Blogger, SEO Services, and Marketing Man. Thanks a lot for being part of AdesBlog community guys! Appreciate it.