While John Wood was a top executive at Microsoft, he made a life-changing decision to found Room to Read, a non-profit organization which now provides educational access to 1.3 million children in developing nations through its 400 schools and 5,000 Reading Rooms. What John brought to this organization was a vision for scalable solutions to world problems, an intense focus on results, and an ability to attract a high-level group of employees, volunteers and investors.
Countries: US
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Strategy by Design
Successful innovations must be desirable to consumers, technically feasible, and viable from a business point of view. But how do you meet these requirements? Tim Brown advocates using the three stages of “design thinking”: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. For inspiration, innovators must look at the world, performing research that is generative rather than evaluative and using empathy to understand consumer needs. For ideation, they can gain insight by finding analogous situations or studying extreme users. Implementation involved early prototyping and realistic testing. Then for the ultimate test: does it tell a story? If a narrative can be developed around an innovation, that’s when it has the best chance of taking off.
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Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
The Age of Collaboration has dramatically changed business forever through blogs, wikis, chat rooms, peer-to-peer networks and personal broadcasting. Millions of people -consumers, employees, suppliers, business partners and even competitors-now harness technology to innovate and collaborate like never before. Based one $9 million research project, Tapscott describes how winning companies innovate and succeed using the knowledge, resources and computing power of millions of people self-organizing into a massive collective force.
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Physical Anthropology: The Evolving Human
Physical Anthropology: The Evolving Human provides students with an understanding of human evolution and diversity from a biological perspective. While new techniques and discoveries are continuing to alter our understanding of the human species and its place in the biological world, this course provides the student with essential tools to appreciate the key theoretical and methodological issues involved in this subdiscipline of anthropology.
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Premodern Humans
Around 780,000 years ago a new species of Homo appears, perhaps descended from the hominins that lived in Spain and Italy between 900,000 and 800,000 years ago. This is time period, called the Middle Pleistocene, is marked by alternations of glaciations and interglacials. The new species is called Homo heidelbergensis. Around 125,000 Homo heidelbergensis gives rise to the Neandertals. The Neandertals are the main focus of this video lesson. You will see that the Neandertals were a robust people adapted for a cold, harsh environment. Their survival depended on more than just biology, however. A major factor to their survival was their stone tool culture, known as the Mousterian. In addition, the fact that they transported raw materials during their migrations to make future tools demonstrated forward planning.
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Origin & Dispersal of Modern Humans
The main question of physical anthropology since its origins in the 1770s was the origin of modern humans. At that time this was in reference to the different populations of humans. Today it refers to our origins as a species in evolutionary time. This video begins by introducing you to the three current models for human origins. Then a physical comparison is made between modern humans and Neandertals and you will see that it is in the brain case that we differ the most. You will journey to southern Ethiopia to see one of the earliest modern humans, discovered in 1967, but forgotten until recently. Associated with modern humans is a great advancement in technology that marks the Upper Paleolithic. The video ends with researchers discussing the advent of art and personal adornment and what this might have meant to the people of the Upper Paleolithic.
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Patterns of Variation
The video begins with comments on some instances of ethnic genocide that have occurred in the past in the Sudan, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Nazi Germany during World War II, and relates these occurrences to the concept of ?race,? a concept that is based on physical differences between groups. It defines the everyday usage of the word ?race? and includes its biological definition, which leads to the conclusion that the word and concept of ?race? cannot apply to Homo sapiens because, as is well understood, there are no subspecies of Homo sapiens. The video then briefly explains the historical context of how the concept of race emerged among European explorers during the sixteenth century. And, it explains that today anthropologists and scholars look beyond visible physical differences to explain human variation, that they analyze genetics and DNA, the cornerstone of genetic studies, to describe and understand human diversity.
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Patterns of Adaptation
How do humans adapt to environmental challenges? In this video, experts explore this question from many angles. The difference between acclimatization and adaptation is explained. Nina Jablonski explains skin color function and adaptations related to UV radiation levels, the vitamin D hypothesis, and preventing the loss of folate in the body. High-altitude adaptations are also discussed, along with responses to heat and cold stressors. In the last segment, the evolutionary dance between humans and their pathogens is brought to light. The interwoven interactions between human cultural activities, and the evolution of new pathogens, as well as the evolution of drug resistance in existing pathogens are discussed.
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Legacies of Human Evolutionary History
The interaction between human biology and culture, and human impact on the environment are discussed is this eye-opening video. It begins with a discussion of human life history from birth to senescence. The biocultural evolution of dietary patterns is demonstrated with an emphasis on the ancestral diet and the influence of agricultural practices on modern diets. The impact of these changes on human health is also discussed. Finally, Melvin J. Konner takes a look at human interaction with other organisms and the environment. He touches on antibiotic resistance, pollution, habitat destruction and the loss of biodiversity, mass extinctions, and global warming, and how we can take steps to reduce human impact on the earth.
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Applied Anthropology
The video opens by defining applied anthropology as a field of study in which anthropological knowledge and methods are used to analyze and solve practical problems. In its three segments, the video gives clear and varied examples of where applied anthropology is used in the workforce and demonstrates how applied anthropology fits within all four subfields of anthropology?physical (or biological) anthropology, cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology.