The mono-monostatic gömböc in the stable equilibrium position

I recently encountered this young motivator from the Philippines. He's a self-made young man who decided to change his mindset and elevated himself out of his condition through hard work. He is now sharing his philosophies with the world. He maintains a blog aptly titled ZeroDramas. It's about the power of positive thinking. He draws on examples of his own life and how his transformation is motivated by his new outlook on life.

With his permission, here is a re-post of one of his articles Winner vs Whiner:

Kyle Johnson authored the following article for WIRED.com

Another pair of Stanford faculty said this week they were starting a company around Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). According to Inside Higher Ed, engineering professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller have started Coursera, which includes content from Stanford, the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley.

Joshua Kim argues that not every institution of higher education needs to offer MOOCs. I tend to agree, but for different reasons. The cloud services model works because a few large entities (think on the scale of Amazon or Google) provide an infrastructure service with the reliability and cost structure smaller companies can’t match.

When you frame MOOCs as educational cloud services, you see that incubators like MIT and Stanford can provide course content at a scale very few institutions can match. And just as with IT infrastructure, if an institution can get educational content from the cloud that is of better quality and lower cost than they can create in-house, they should consider it.

Innovative faculty at any institution can take this core content and use it to enhance a student’s experience at their local campus. The quality and type of faculty interaction combined with guided group leaning experiences can provide the differentiation for which college and universities are looking, and the growth in educational cloud services provide the opportunity for faculty to focus on providing tailored experiences for their students.

Earlier this year, Stanford faculty member Sebastian Thurn teamed up with partners David Stavens (also at Stanford) and San Francisco researcher Michael Sokolsky to start Udacity. Their aim is to provide high quality, university-level education at a low cost.

This quote is originally from Marianne Williamson but is often attributed to Nelson Mandela's inaugural speech. It's from her book A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles", Ch. 7, Section 3 (1992).