Variable Energy from the Sun

Solar Variability and Terrestrial Climate

NASA Science News

Jan. 8, 2013: In the galactic scheme of things, the Sun is a remarkably constant star. While some stars exhibit dramatic pulsations, wildly yo-yoing in size and brightness, and sometimes even exploding, the luminosity of our own sun varies a measly 0.1% over the course of the 11-year solar cycle.

There is, however, a dawning realization among researchers that even these apparently tiny variations can have a significant effect on terrestrial climate. A new report issued by the National Research Council (NRC), "The Effects of Solar Variability on Earth's Climate," lays out some of the surprisingly complex ways that solar activity can make itself felt on our planet.

Understanding the sun-climate connection requires a breadth of expertise in fields such as plasma physics, solar activity, atmospheric chemistry and fluid dynamics, energetic particle physics, and even terrestrial history. No single researcher has the full range of knowledge required to solve the problem. To make progress, the NRC had to assemble dozens of experts from many fields at a single workshop. The report summarizes their combined efforts to frame the problem in a truly multi-disciplinary context.

One of the participants, Greg Kopp of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, pointed out that while the variations in luminosity over the 11-year solar cycle amount to only a tenth of a percent of the sun's total output, such a small fraction is still important. "Even typical short term variations of 0.1% in incident irradiance exceed all other energy sources (such as natural radioactivity in Earth's core) combined," he says.

Of particular importance is the sun's extreme ultraviolet (EUV) radiation, which peaks during the years around solar maximum. Within the relatively narrow band of EUV wavelengths, the sun’s output varies not by a minuscule 0.1%, but by whopping factors of 10 or more. This can strongly affect the chemistry and thermal structure of the upper atmosphere.

Several researchers discussed how changes in the upper atmosphere can trickle down to Earth's surface.

There are many "top-down" pathways for the sun's influence. For instance, Charles Jackman of the Goddard Space Flight Center described how nitrogen oxides (NOx) created by solar energetic particles and cosmic rays in the stratosphere could reduce ozone levels by a few percent. Because ozone absorbs UV radiation, less ozone means that more UV rays from the sun would reach Earth's surface.

Isaac Held of NOAA took this one step further. He described how loss of ozone in the stratosphere could alter the dynamics of the atmosphere below it. "The cooling of the polar stratosphere associated with loss of ozone increases the horizontal temperature gradient near the tropopause," he explains. "This alters the flux of angular momentum by mid-latitude eddies. [Angular momentum is important because] the angular momentum budget of the troposphere controls the surface westerlies." In other words, solar activity felt in the upper atmosphere can, through a complicated series of influences, push surface storm tracks off course.

Many of the mechanisms proposed at the workshop had a Rube Goldberg-like quality. They relied on multi-step interactions between multiples layers of atmosphere and ocean, some relying on chemistry to get their work done, others leaning on thermodynamics or fluid physics. But just because something is complicated doesn't mean it's not real.

Indeed, Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) presented persuasive evidence that solar variability is leaving an imprint on climate, especially in the Pacific. According to the report, when researchers look at sea surface temperature data during sunspot peak years, the tropical Pacific shows a pronounced La Nina-like pattern, with a cooling of almost 1^o C in the equatorial eastern Pacific. In addition, "there are signs of enhanced precipitation in the Pacific ITCZ (Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone ) and SPCZ (South Pacific Convergence Zone) as well as above-normal sea-level pressure in the mid-latitude North and South Pacific," correlated with peaks in the sunspot cycle.

The solar cycle signals are so strong in the Pacific, that Meehl and colleagues have begun to wonder if something in the Pacific climate system is acting to amplify them. "One of the mysteries regarding Earth's climate system ... is how the relatively small fluctuations of the 11-year solar cycle can produce the magnitude of the observed climate signals in the tropical Pacific." Using supercomputer models of climate, they show that not only "top-down" but also "bottom-up" mechanisms involving atmosphere-ocean interactions are required to amplify solar forcing at the surface of the Pacific.

In recent years, researchers have considered the possibility that the sun plays a role in global warming. After all, the sun is the main source of heat for our planet. The NRC report suggests, however, that the influence of solar variability is more regional than global. The Pacific region is only one example.

Caspar Amman of NCAR noted in the report that "When Earth's radiative balance is altered, as in the case of a chance in solar cycle forcing, not all locations are affected equally. The equatorial central Pacific is generally cooler, the runoff from rivers in Peru is reduced, and drier conditions affect the western USA."

Raymond Bradley of UMass, who has studied historical records of solar activity imprinted by radioisotopes in tree rings and ice cores, says that regional rainfall seems to be more affected than temperature. "If there is indeed a solar effect on climate, it is manifested by changes in general circulation rather than in a direct temperature signal." This fits in with the conclusion of the IPCC and previous NRC reports that solar variability is NOT the cause of global warming over the last 50 years.

Much has been made of the probable connection between the Maunder Minimum, a 70-year deficit of sunspots in the late 17^th-early 18th century, and the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, during which Europe and North America were subjected to bitterly cold winters. The mechanism for that regional cooling could have been a drop in the sun’s EUV output; this is, however, speculative.

Dan Lubin of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography pointed out the value of looking at sun-like stars elsewhere in the Milky Way to determine the frequency of similar grand minima. "Early estimates of grand minimum frequency in solar-type stars ranged from 10% to 30%, implying the sun’s influence could be overpowering. More recent studies using data from Hipparcos (a European Space Agency astrometry satellite) and properly accounting for the metallicity of the stars, place the estimate in the range of less than 3%." This is not a large number, but it is significant.

Indeed, the sun could be on the threshold of a mini-Maunder event right now. Ongoing Solar Cycle 24 is the weakest in more than 50 years. Moreover, there is (controversial) evidence of a long-term weakening trend in the magnetic field strength of sunspots. Matt Penn and William Livingston of the National Solar Observatory predict that by the time Solar Cycle 25 arrives, magnetic fields on the sun will be so weak that few if any sunspots will be formed. Independent lines of research involving helioseismology and surface polar fields tend to support their conclusion. (Note: Penn and Livingston were not participants at the NRC workshop.)

"If the sun really is entering an unfamiliar phase of the solar cycle, then we must redouble our efforts to understand the sun-climate link," notes Lika Guhathakurta of NASA’s Living with a Star Program, which helped fund the NRC study. "The report offers some good ideas for how to get started."

In a concluding panel discussion, the researchers identified a number of possible next steps. Foremost among them was the deployment of a radiometric imager. Devices currently used to measure total solar irradiance (TSI) reduce the entire sun to a single number: the total luminosity summed over all latitudes, longitudes, and wavelengths. This integrated value becomes a solitary point in a time series tracking the sun’s output.

In fact, as Peter Foukal of Heliophysics, Inc., pointed out, the situation is more complex. The sun is not a featureless ball of uniform luminosity. Instead, the solar disk is dotted by the dark cores of sunspots and splashed with bright magnetic froth known as faculae.

Radiometric imaging would, essentially, map the surface of the sun and reveal the contributions of each to the sun’s luminosity. Of particular interest are the faculae. While dark sunspots tend to vanish during solar minima, the bright faculae do not. This may be why paleoclimate records of sun-sensitive isotopes C-14 and Be-10 show a faint 11-year cycle at work even during the Maunder Minimum. A radiometric imager, deployed on some future space observatory, would allow researchers to develop the understanding they need to project the sun-climate link into a future of prolonged spotlessness.

Some attendees stressed the need to put sun-climate data in standard formats and make them widely available for multidisciplinary study. Because the mechanisms for the sun’s influence on climate are complicated, researchers from many fields will have to work together to successfully model them and compare competing results. Continued and improved collaboration between NASA, NOAA and the NSF are keys to this process.

Hal Maring, a climate scientist at NASA headquarters who has studied the report, notes that "lots of interesting possibilities were suggested by the panelists. However, few, if any, have been quantified to the point that we can definitively assess their impact on climate." Hardening the possibilities into concrete, physically-complete models is a key challenge for the researchers.

Finally, many participants noted the difficulty in deciphering the sun-climate link from paleoclimate records such as tree rings and ice cores. Variations in Earth’s magnetic field and atmospheric circulation can affect the deposition of radioisotopes far more than actual solar activity. A better long-term record of the sun’s irradiance might be encoded in the rocks and sediments of the Moon or Mars. Studying other worlds might hold the key to our own.

The full report, "The Effects of Solar Variability on Earth’s Climate," is available from the National Academies Press at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13519.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/08jan_sunclimate/

Negative Quiddity: the Bad Big Bank Bailout

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone has a blistering article about the ongoing fraud of the TARP bailout of the big banks and subsequent actions like Dodd-Frank legislation. Taibbi claims:

• Wall Street killed financial reform
• The big banks lied to pass the bailout
• They lied about lending
• They lied about the health of the banks
• The bailouts were given by bank size rather than need for relief
• The bailout architects lied about executive bonuses
• They lied about the bailout being temporary
• Government intervention has resulted in increased risk

Much more, including some details about insurance giant AIG, at:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-20130104

Crying Wind -- Born Again Bunko

Evangelical Bunko Artists
How I Learned the Hard Way that
Pious Gullibility Is No Virtue

by Phil Johnson, July 9, 2010

My last temporary part-time job in college was proofreading at Moody Press. I was hired to work twelve hours a week for about four weeks in the summer of '76. I was getting my B. A. at the end of the short summer term, and after that I hoped to find work in some kind of local-church ministry for a year; then my plan was to enroll at Dallas Seminary the following fall.

But I loved the work at Moody Press so much that on the day before graduation I signed on to work there full time as an editorial assistant. That simple, unplanned, last-minute decision was the pivot on which my entire life and career have turned.

(Someday I'll blog a full account of how I was hired by Moody Press in the most unlikely of circumstances. I also have a hundred vivid memories of that summer and the following one that would make excellent blog-fodder. I lived in a brownstone walk-up two blocks from Wrigley, worked most nights in a downtown funeral home, ran the first Chicago marathon, sang in the Moody Church choir, and met and married Darlene. Those were the best of times.)

Anyway, one of the first books I proofread for Moody was a biographical account of a young woman who said she had lived through a tragedy-filled childhood in utter poverty on a Kickapoo reservation, found Christ through a remarkable turn of providence, endured all kinds of persecution, but persevered to become a motivational speaker for evangelical women's groups.
Crying Wind was the name of both the book and the author. Within a year of its release, Crying Wind became Moody Press's best-selling book ever. It was an extremely well-told story, and a real tear-jerker. To read it was to establish a deeply sympathetic personal connection with the author.

I loved the book. Everyone did.

Crying Wind herself spent a day in the Moody Press office shortly after I finished checking her page proofs. She was there mainly to meet with our sales and marketing staff, but she went to lunch with the editorial team. In her book she had portrayed herself as shy and emotionally tender—easily intimidated. Our editorial staff was a sizable group of very strong personalities and sticklers for grammatical precision, not necessarily an easy group to warm up to all at once. Crying Wind had expressed misgivings about the unfamiliar big-city features of Chicago. So we were all keen to put her at ease.

At the time, she lived near Tulsa, literally in the neighborhood I came from. Growing up in Oklahoma, I had several Native-American friends and relatives, so I knew that she and I had a few things in common we could talk about. I had looked forward to meeting her.

Right away, many things about her surprised me. One was that I never would have guessed she had experienced all she described in her book. Nothing about her features, her verbal skills, or her mannerisms suggested that she was Native American or that she had grown up in abject poverty. For someone as deprived of education and as utterly isolated from Main-Street America as her book claimed, she was also amazingly conversant with pop culture. She looked and talked like a Wheaton College alum, which is not at all what I expected from her own description of life among the Kickapoo.

Having read her book, I was not surprised that she was a compelling story-teller. But what did surprise me about that was how many of the stories she told during lunch that day had the ring of familiarity. I had heard slightly different versions of at least three of her tales. For instance, she regaled us with the dead-cat-in-a-shopping bag story. I'd heard that story (with some slight differences) about a year earlier, but in Crying Wind's version it happened to someone she knew. That didn't trouble me a great deal, because I figured if it happened in Tulsa, I might have simply heard a third- or fourth-hand version. If Crying Wind personally knew the woman with the cat-in-the-bag, hers must be the canonical version of the tale.

I don't think the expression "urban myth" had been coined yet in 1977, but if I were going to describe her repertoire of stories today, I'd say it seemed like she culled them all from the pages of Snopes.com.

At the time I merely thought it a mind-blowing quirk of cosmic destiny that Crying Wind had so much personal involvement in so many amazing stories I'd already heard. At the time, I was young, naive, and no doubt willingly over-gullible. I wanted to believe her, and the almost supernatural serendipity of her tales merely increased the mystique of this amazing person.

Crying Wind—the book—became a runaway best seller. In fact, in less than two years it became (by far) the best-selling book Moody Press had ever published. Crying Wind wrote a sequel and by 1979 she was working on a third book. On the strength of her stories she had developed a thriving public ministry, speaking to large women's groups and churches. She always dressed in an authentic-looking native-American costume.

But by early 1979 a number of people were questioning Crying Wind's claims, including people from her own family. Moody Press investigated and soon learned that her entire story was fabricated. Crying Wind had no Native American ancestors. Her real name was Linda Davison Stafford. She had grown up and gone to high school in Woodland Park, Colorado, where she earned awards in creative writing.

Furthermore, many of the major plot points in her story bore an uncanny resemblance to another author's phony life story. If I recall correctly, in a 1979 Christianity Today article about the fraud, they published her photo from a high-school yearbook. She was clearly a product of white middle-class American culture, not at all what she had claimed.
To Moody Press's credit, they were the first to expose the fraud, and they immediately dropped Mrs. Stafford's books from their line, even though both volumes were still (at the time) atop the Christian best-seller lists. Warren Wiersbe (my pastor in those days and a good friend to me) wryly told me he thought Moody Press should simply change the book's title to Shooting Bull and keep it in their line as a fiction book.

He was joking, of course, but a few years later, Harvest House did virtually that. They picked up the book without changing a thing (not even the cover art), called it a "biographical novel," and re-released it. Crying Wind herself continued speaking to women's groups in her Indian costume. Most of them had heard all about the scandal, of course, but they wanted
to believe her story. They wanted it to be true so badly that many of them convinced themselves that Moody Press (and others who had merely told the truth) were the real villains in the whole ordeal.

Crying Wind is not so well known today, but she is still speaking to evangelical groups under the pretense that her books tell "her life story as she remembers it."

Several Native American groups even list her books as valuable resources. The fraud she perpetrated, though definitively exposed and debunked more than thirty-one years ago, still lives on.

She's not alone. Over the past 40 years, the evangelical movement has given birth to dozens of flash-in-the-pan phonies, frauds, and bunko artists. John Todd, Mike Warnke, Alberto Rivera, Bob Larson, and Ted Haggard are a few names that come to mind. Todd and Rivera are both dead, but Jack Chick continues to publish their fraudulent claims as true. All the others, though now out of the mainstream, are still engaged in some form of public "ministry" today—still profiting off reputations woven with webs of lies.

This is relevant, of course, to the case of Ergun Caner, erstwhile Dean of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary. For most of the past decade, Caner has been making demonstrably false claims exaggerating his childhood involvement in Islamic fundamentalism, his early indoctrination in the politics of Jihad, and his post-conversion "debates" with Islamic clerics.

Liberty University investigated his claims, acknowledged that he had made "factual statements that are self-contradictory," demoted him from the presidency of their seminary, and issued a statement announcing that Caner has "apologized for the discrepancies and misstatements." But they kept him on their faculty, and the Liberty party-line seems to be that the investigation actually "exonerated" Caner.

Those who questioned Caner's honesty in the first place are clamoring for more precise answers to some very specific questions. Caner himself is saying nothing, and no less than Norman Geisler has issued a series of statements more or less in defense of Caner—basically suggesting that the whole controversy in the first place was a Muslim-Calvinist conspiracy to discredit Caner.

When I read Dr. Geisler's articles on the Caner scandal, it brought to mind a meeting I had with Dr. Geisler during the big Council on Biblical Inerrancy convention in San Diego in 1982. I was still working for Moody Press at the time, and Dr. Geisler was one of our authors. I needed to meet with him to discuss the cover design for Moody's re-release of A General Introduction to the Bible. That question was settled fairly quickly, and then we had a long discussion over dinner about the state of evangelicalism. The Crying Wind scandal came up in our conversation that evening, and Dr. Geisler expressed his dismay over the pious gullibility of evangelicals.

He was exactly right about that.

For the very same reason he is wrong about the Caner situation today.
However, the pathetic track record of evangelicals' consistent failure in dealing with frauds and bunko artists in our midst leads me to be pessimistic about any real resolution in the Caner scandal. The Liberty investigation most definitely did not "exonerate" Caner, but he remains on the Liberty faculty. Caner himself is stonewalling while a handful of his most outspoken supporters are doing their best to demonize his critics. If Liberty continues officially to offer sanctuary to Caner, he will eventually be able to weather the controversy without ever actually admitting any specific wrongdoing. Evangelicals—who have no stomach for protracted controversies and a 40-year habit of offering unconditional restoration to fallen leaders whether they truly repent or not—will soon turn against Caner's critics.

Of course, by this approach Caner, Liberty, and the little cadre of Arminian bloggers who are determined no-matter-what to defend Caner have already lost all credibility with those who love truth. That loss will most likely be permanent. Sadly, it is another major loss for American-style Evangelicalism, which has already made itself a laughingstock for all the wrong reasons.

http://teampyro.blogspot.com/2010/07/evangelical-bunko-artists.html

The story of Snap, Crackle, and Pop

Snap, Crackle, and Pop! are the cartoon mascots of Kellogg’s breakfast cereal Rice Crispies (Australia:
Rice Bubbles).

The gnomic elves characters were originally designed by illustrator Vernon Grant in the early 1930s. The names are an onomatopoeia and were derived from a Rice Krispies radio ad:

Listen to the fairy song of health, the merry chorus sung by Kellogg's Rice Krispies as they merrily snap, crackle and pop in a bowl of milk. If you've never heard food talking, now is your chance.

The first character appeared on the product's packaging in 1933, Grant added two more and named the trio Snap, Crackle and Pop. Snap is always portrayed with a baker’s hat and Pop with the military cap of a marching band leader. Crackle's red or striped stocking cap leaves his occupation ambiguous.



Corporate promotional material describes their personalities as resembling brothers. Snap is the oldest and a problem solver, Crackle is an unsure "middle child" and Pop is a mischievous youngster.


From their original design as elderly elves with large noses, ears and hats, Snap, Crackle, and Pop were reimagined with younger and more proportional features in 1949. They first appeared as animated characters in the 1960s, targeted towards such children's shows as The Howdy Doody Show. The voices of the original gnomes were provided by Daws Butler, Paul; Winchell and Don Messick. More recent voices have included Chris Evans, Keither Chegwin, Chard Dorect, Eddie Deezen, Thom Adcox-Hernandez, and Dino Andrade. As of 2009, the three gnomes ] are voiced by Andy Hirsch (Snap), Danny Cooksey (Crackle) and MarkBallou (Pop). The trio were used in conservation messages during World War II and briefly re-imagined as superheroes in the early 1990s, but later returned to their original elf-like form. Likewise, there was briefly a fourth gnome in the 1950s named Pow who represented the explosive nutritional value of Rice Krispies.

Leo Burnett Worldwide assigned Chicago-based cartoonist Don Margolis to do Snap, Crackle and Pop for the Rice Krispies boxes as well as other applications. Davidson Marketing also used him for their Rice Krispies assignments. Don did the three gnomes
until the end of 1998.

Names in other markets

• Denmark - Pif! Paf! Puf!
• Finland - Riks! Raks! Poks!
• France - Cric! Crac! Croc!
• Germany - Knisper! Knasper! Knusper!
• Switzerland - Piff! Paff! Poff!
• South Africa - Knap! Knaetter! Knak! (in Afrikaans)
• Quebec - Cric! Crac! Croc!
• Mexico - Pim! Pum! Pam!

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap,_Crackle_and_Pop

Positive Quiddity: Magnus Carlsen

Sven Magnus Øen Carlsen (born 30 November 1990) is a Norwegian chess Grandmaster and former chess prodigy who is the No. 1 ranked player in the world. His peak rating is 2861, the highest in history. Carlsen was also the 2009 blitz chess World Champion.

On 26 April 2004, Carlsen became a Grandmaster at the age of 13 years, 148 days, making him at that time the second youngest Grandmaster in history, though he has since become the third youngest. On the November 2009 FIDE rating list, Carlsen had an Elo rating of 2801, becoming the fifth player to achieve a rating over 2800; aged 18 years, 336 days at the time, by far the youngest to do so. On 1 January 2010, at the age of 19 years, 32 days, he became the youngest chess player in history to be ranked world No. 1, breaking the record held by Vladimir Kramnik. On the January 2013 FIDE rating list, Carlsen reached an Elo rating of 2861, thus surpassing Garry Kasparov’s rating record of 2851 (set in July 1999). Based on several of his FIDE rankings, Carlsen qualified for the Candidates Tournament that will determine the challenger to World Champion Viswanathan Anand in the World Chess Championship 2013. He also previously qualified for the 2011 Candidates Tournament, but withdrew.

Known for his attacking style as a teenager, Carlsen later developed into a more universal player. He does not focus on opening preparation as much as other top players, and plays a variety of opening moves, which makes it harder for his opponents to prepare for him. His positional mastery and endgame prowess have drawn comparisons to those of former world champions Anatoly Karpov, Jose Paul Capablanca and Vasily Smyslov. Beyond chess, Carlsen has modeled for G-Star Raw’s Autumn/Winter 2010 advertising campaign.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Carlsen

The Khan Academy and Internet Teaching

The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization and a website created in 2006 by Bangladeshi-American educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School. With the stated mission of "providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere", the website supplies a free online collection of more than 3,600 micro lectures via video tutorials stored onYouTube teaching mathematics, history, health care and medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, American civics, art history, macroeconomics, microeconomics and computer science. Khan Academy launched a computer science module in September 2012. Khan Academy has delivered over 200 million lessons.

History
The founder of the organization, Salman Khan, was born to a Bangladeshi father and Indian mother from Kolkata living in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States of America. His father is from Barisal, Bangladesh. After earning three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (a BS in mathematics, a BS in electrical engineering and computer science, and an MS in electrical engineering and computer science), he pursued an MBA from Harvard Business School. In late 2004, Khan began tutoring his cousin Nadia in mathematics using Yahoo’s Doodle notepad. When other relatives and friends sought similar help, he decided it would be more practical to distribute the tutorials on YouTube. Their popularity there and the testimonials of appreciative students prompted Khan to quit his job in finance as a hedge fund analyst at Connective Capital Management in 2009, and focus on the tutorials (then released under the moniker "Khan Academy") full-time. Bill Gates once said that "I'd say we've moved about 160 IQ points from the hedge fund category to the teaching-many-people-in-a-leveraged-way category. It was a good day his wife let him quit his job".

The project is funded by donations. Khan Academy can be a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, now with significant backing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Google. Several people have made US $10,000 contributions; Ann and John Doerr gave $100,000; total revenue is about $150,000 in donations. Additionally, it earned $2,000 per month from ads on the website in 2010 until Khan Academy ceased to accept advertising. In 2010, Google announced it would give the Khan Academy $2 million for creating more courses and for translating the core library into the world’s most widely spoken languages, as part of their Project 10¹⁰⁰.

Khan Academy has eclipsed MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) in terms of videos viewed.
Its YouTube channel has more than 202 million total views, compared to MIT's 43 million. It also has twice as many subscribers, at more than 429,000. Khan Academy also had a language release in mid-2012. It was supported by volunteers from Amara and included Indonesian, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Swahili, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Xhosa, Greek, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Bengali, Hindi, and Chinese.

Technical Format
The Khan Academy started with Khan remotely tutoring one of his cousins interactively using Yahoo Doodle images. Based on feedback from his cousin, additional cousins began to take advantage of the interactive, remote tutoring. In order to make better use of his and their time, Khan transitioned to making YouTube video tutorials. Drawings are now made with a Wacom tablet and the free natural drawing application SmoothDraw 3, and recorded with screen capture software from Camtasia Studio.

All videos (hosted via YouTube) are available through Khan Academy's own website, which also contains many other features such as progress tracking, practice exercises, and a variety of tools for teachers in public schools. Logging into the site can be done via a Google or a Facebook account for those who do not want to create a separate Khan Academy account.

Khan chose to avoid the standard format of a person standing by a whiteboard, deciding instead to present the learning concepts as if "popping out of a darkened universe and into one's mind with a voice out of nowhere" in a way akin to sitting next to someone and working out a problem on a sheet of paper: "If you're watching a guy do a problem [while] thinking out loud, I think people find that more valuable and not as daunting". Offline versions of the videos have been distributed by not-for-profit groups to rural areas in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. While the current content is mainly concerned with pre-college mathematics and physics, Khan's long-term goal is to provide "tens of thousands of videos in pretty much every subject" and to create "the world's first free, world-class virtual school where anyone can learn anything".

Khan Academy also provides a web-based exercise system that generates problems for students based on skill level and performance. The exercise software is available as open source under the MIT license. Khan believes his academy points an opportunity to overhaul the traditional classroom by using software to create tests, grade assignments, highlight the challenges of certain students, and encourage those doing well to help struggling classmates. The tutorials are touted as helpful because, among other factors, they can be paused by students, while a classroom lecture cannot be.


The success of his low-tech, conversational tutorials—Khan's face never appears, and viewers see only his unadorned step-by-step doodles and diagrams on an electronic blackboard—suggests an educational transformation that de-emphasizes lecture-based classroom interactions.

Services and Vision
The major components of Khan Academy include:

• a video library with over 3600 videos in various topic areas and over 200 million lessons delivered. These videos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
• Automated exercises with continuous assessment; as of December 2012, there are 381 practice exercises, mainly in math.
• peer-to-peer tutoring based on objective data collected by the system, a process that will be projected in the future.

Not-for-profit partner organizations are making the content available outside YouTube. The Lewis Center for Educational Research, which is affiliated with NASA, is bringing the content into community colleges and charter schools around the United States. World Possible is creating offline snapshots of the content to distribute in rural, developing regions with limited or no access to the Internet.

Khan has stated a vision of turning the academy into a charter school:
　

This could be the DNA for a physical school where students spend 20 percent of their day watching videos and doing self-paced exercises and the rest of the day building robots or painting pictures or composing music or whatever.

A November 2011 grant of $5 million from Ireland-based The O'Sullivan Foundation, founded by Avego MD and cloud computing pioneer Sean O'Sullivan, will be directed to three initiatives:

1. Expanding the teaching faculty
2. Extending content through crowd-sourced contributions following a Wikipedia-style model
3. Developing curricula to help users blend the content with physical teaching through STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Math] learning

　
Recent teaching appointees as a result of the grant include Dr. Steven Zucker, formerly of Pratt Institute, and Dr. Beth Harris, from the SmARThistory project at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to produce art and history content. YouTube video creators Vi Hart and Brit Cruise have also joined the teaching faculty.


A series of summer school camps are planned to start in Northern California from June 2012 to test curricula for real-world schools.

Educational Impact
There are both critics and proponents of Khan Academy, disagreeing on the actual effectiveness and potential that it has. Some critics have stated that the Khan videos are insubstantial, "repetitive," and "leave kids staring at screens" rather than promoting interaction and active engagement. Although Salman Khan himself has addressed the fact that there is no "consistent, comprehensive plan" for revamping school courses, critics are unsure of the reliability and wide-spread application of Khan Academy.

There are many however, that support Khan Academy for its technological ingenuity and its ability to introduce different educational dynamics. The Khan Academy's ability to freely distribute lessons has demonstrated technology's ability to eliminate economic barriers that prevent effective education. Since Benjamin Bloom’s 1984 study on the effectiveness of "one-on-one tutoring," close student-teacher interaction has been aggressively sought after. However, both the cost and the realistic implementation of this ideal has been an issue. Critics promote that the Khan Academy has addressed these issues, through both cost-free nature of the site and its wide accessibility via the internet.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy

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Footnote by the blog author
Formal academic settings in the United States have become so corrupted by political correctness and indirect federal loan guarantees that a technological wilderness has been created in which in it inevitable that a new, cheap and fact-based approach like Khan’s would surface and developed an internet and YouTube following. There will be more of this and in the Khan Academy or copycats, it is going to challenge and potentially derail academia due to the ridiculously high cost and brutal biases of the status quo.
Having said this, it IS possible to exceed both the academic status quo and at least match the Khan Academy. It isn’t free, but for a startlingly reasonable amount of money, a classical college education under the best teachers in North America is available through the "The Great Courses" from The Teaching Company. Their overview course on western philosophy and their Shakespeare courses are, simply, unbeatable, anywhere, at any price. Here’s the link:

http://www.thegreatcourses.com/

Footnote to the blog author’s footnote
The future certainly belongs to those educated in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). But one or more mediocre or merely boring teachers of STEM subjects in junior high school or high school can end the road to success with a quiet but soul-crushing thud.

I don’t have any teen children in seventh through twelfth grade in the USA, but if I did I would certainly get them THESE computer tutorial tools as linked below. I’d have them take the algebra tutorials the summer before algebra, the geometry tutorials the summer before geometry, the trigonometry tutorials the summer before trig, and the same with chemistry and physics. Here’s the link:

http://www.mathtutordvd.com/

Positive Quiddity: The Rules of Adventure

The Rules of Adventure

from Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales

Perceive, believe, then act.
Avoid impulsive behavior; don't hurry
Know your stuff
Get the information
Commune with the dead
Be humble
When in doubt, bail out

When Trouble Comes

1. Perceive, believe (look, see [reality], believe [that you are really in danger and must be alert]

2. Stay calm (use humor, use fear to focus)

3. Think/Analyze/Plan (get organized – set up small, manageable tasks)

4. Take correct, decisive action (be bold and cautious while carrying out tasks)

5. Celebrate your successes (take joy in completing tasks)

6. Count Your Blessings (be grateful – you're alive)

7. Play (sing, play mind games, recite poetry, count anything, do mathematical problems in your head)

8. See the beauty (remember, it's a vision quest)

9. Believe you will succeed (develop a deep conviction that you'll live)

10. Surrender (let go of your fear of dying; "put away the pain")

11. Do whatever is necesssay (be determined; have the will and the skill)

  12.   Never give up (let nothing break your spirit)