Rebuilding Titanic

Titanic: one of the greatest maritime legends in history. When she set sail in April 1912, she was the largest, heaviest, most expensive, and most luxurious manmade moving object on the planet.

This is a really interesting infographic from the National Geographic I have learnt about through Larry Ferlazzo.

The National Geographic has recreated everything which had to do with this formidable ship.

You can find one of the embedded video below, but you can gain access to all the Titanic infographic by clicking on any of the links on this post entry or on the picture above.

Voices

You can listen to examples of British regional accents at BBC's Voices.

Go to Voices and choose one of the recordings by clicking on a dot on the map you can find in Voices Recordings, in the top left-hand corner, right under the banners, and then do the following:

1 Click on the name of one of the speakers under 'More clips from this interview'.
2 Read 'About the interviewee'.
3 Read the transcript.
4 Listen to the recording and read the transcript.
5 Some clips have a section on 'More about the speech in this clip'. Read this focusing in particular on information about pronunciation. Some dialect words, which you may not find in the dictionary, are explained here.
6 Do the same with any other 'More clips from the interview'.
7 Go back and listen to the 'Voice clip(s)'. These don't have transcripts.
8 Do the same with accents from other parts of the UK by clicking on other dots on the map.

Activity suggested by English Pronunciation in Use Advanced, Cambridge University Press

Try something new for 30 days

Is there something you've always meant to do, wanted to do, but just ... haven't? Matt Cutts suggests: Try it for 30 days. This short, lighthearted talk offers a neat way to think about setting and achieving goals.

Matt Cutts is an engineer at Google, where he fights linkspam and helps webmasters understand how search works.

BBC Podcasts

This is the BBC podcast home where you can download podcasts on most, if not all, programmes of the radio station.


I would recommend Witness, though. On this programme, history is told by the people who were there. The programme is on five days a week, and they talk to some of the people who lived through moments of history to bring the audience a personal perspective on world events.

The secret power of smiling

From TED comes this talk by Ron Gutman about the importance of smiling in today's world.

Ron Gutman reviews a raft of studies about smiling, and reveals some surprising results. Did you know your smile can be a predictor of how long you'll live -- and that a simple smile has a measurable effect on your overall well-being? Prepare to flex a few facial muscles as you learn more about this evolutionarily contagious behavior.

Ron Gutman is the founder and CEO of HealthTap, a personalized health-info site that's currently in beta. He's also the organizer of TEDxSiliconValley.