Uh, nifty. Of course, no one reading this entry would ever do this because it violates Apple's EULA (even if you bought a Mac, deleted its copy of MacOS X, and installed from its media onto your, uh, alternative hardware). Nah, none of you would ever do that. Nope, won't happen.Professor Randy Pausch delivered his "Last Public Lecture", entitled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" at [[Carnegie Mellon University]] on September 18, 2007 [5] (the full version of which is viewable at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5700431505846055184).
During this lecture, Randy Pausch was very upbeat and humorous, rapidly switching between standup comedy, insights on computer science and engineering education, advice on building multi-disciplinary collaborations, working in groups and interacting with other people, offering inspirational life lessons, and doing one-handed push-ups on stage.
This talk was modeled after an existing series of lectures where top academics were asked to think deeply about what matters to them, and then give a hypothetical "final talk", i.e., "what wisdom would you try to impart to the world if you knew it was your last chance?" And in Randy's case, this was more than an academic exercise.
Before he even started speaking, Randy got a long standing ovation from a large crowd of over 400 colleagues and students. When he motioned them to sit down, saying "make me earn it", some in the audience shouted back "you already did!".
Andries van Dam (a professor from Brown University) followed Randy with a tearful and impassioned speech praising Randy for his courage and leadership, calling him a role model and "a Mensch" (which in Yiddish means "someone to admire and emulate, of noble character").
Electronic Arts Inc. (maker of the popular "Sims" family of computer games with over 100 million copies sold) is now commercializing Randy's Alice system (http://www.alice.org/), and pledged to create in Randy's honor a memorial scholarship for women in computer science, in recognition of Randy's staunch support and mentoring of women in CS and engineering.
The president of CMU (Jared Cohon) spoke emotionally of Randy's humanity, and called Randy's contributions to CMU and to education "remarkable and stunning". He then announced that CMU will celebrate Randy's impact on the world by building and naming after Randy a raised pedestrian bridge that will connect CMU's new Computer Science building with their Center for the Arts, symbolizing the way Randy linked those two disciplines. It will be called the "Randy Pausch Memorial Footbridge".
Professor Pausch was named "Person of the Week" on ABC's World News with Charles Gibson on September 21. His last lecture has also attracted wide attention from the national media.
David Donaldson plans to revolutionize the investment industry by bringing accountability to financial advisers.
“I just can’t stand when I see people who are individual investors who get taken advantage of,” Donaldson said. “My goal is to be kind of a watch dog to make sure financial advisers are doing their job.”
On Aug. 27, he announced the launch of Advisor Check, a service that analyzes investment portfolios so that individual investors can see whether their financial advisers and asset managers are addressing their personal investment goals. Donaldson is the managing director and senior portfolio analyst for Advisor Check.
[....]
“It turns out what we found is a majority of people really want someone to give them a second look at their portfolio, but are afraid that if they go to someone else like a financial adviser, they’ll just be told what they want to hear,” Donaldson said, adding that he rushed to launch the service officially because of the current volatility of the market.
[....]“I would say that about 79 percent of the portfolios we look at are improperly allocated and expose clients to more risk than they actually need to be taking,” Donaldson said.
Donaldson offers his clients an unbiased, third-party analysis. In order to avoid any conflict-of-interest, he does not offer advice or sell any services beyond a comprehensive portfolio analysis.
“If anything, it gives [investors] the ability to ask the right questions” of their advisers, he said.
“It gives financial advisers – if they do a good job – a lot of kudos for what they do, but if not, it’s a good reality check for them,” Donaldson said.
[....]