Category: Education

Kapitall is one of the most impressive finance-related websites I've recently come across. The site requires registration (which is free, but you do have to opt out of their newsletter) -- but in return it provides you with an incredible amount of financial data. The experience is very visual. You get a large canvas, which they call "the Playground." You can search for companies by their stock ...

Letters of Note is a fantastic personal project by Shaun Usher. It's a clean looking blog with some extraordinary content: historical letters by people like Franz Kafka, Ray Bradbury, Jochen Rindt (the only posthumous Formula One World Champion), and other celebrities. It's not all celebrities, though. The letter in the screenshot, for instance, was written by a bank manager from Hiroshima on May ...

Everyone knows what a mushroom looks like. But what do you call those fin-looking parts under the cap? You know, those thin, membrane-like things? That's the type of question you can't really use a regular dictionary for. You might get lucky with Wikipedia, but in this particular case, you won't. The Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary helps you answer questions like these. It's a large visual ...

HTML5 is here, which means Web developers now have a whole bunch of new tags and elements to play with. The Periodic Table of the Elements is an effective visual map of what the "new HTML" looks like. It's a comprehensive table, too; it contains both existing elements (such as the hyperlink tag, a) and elements that were just introduced in HTML5. Elements are sorted by their function (root ...

A while ago, we had a heated debate on our internal mailing list concerning the best way to note shortcut keys. Is it Ctrl+Enter? Maybe it should be a hyphen, so should it be Ctrl-Enter? And should there be a space? Should we capitalize, or not? This might seem fussy, but when you're authoring a large body of text (or a collaborative blog), some standards have to be established. It's not just a ...

Quick, I need an eight-letter word that starts with B, and letter six is R! Any ideas? If questions like this make you draw a blank, Word Domination can come in very handy the next time you're struggling with those last few words of a crossword puzzle. It gave me 97 different results for this particular query, including "bescorch" and "bevatron." I wasn't really sure what a bevatron was, so I ...

When I was a kid and used to fantasize about what the future was going to be like, I didn't envision a Google-like search engine. If anything, I thought the future would hold something more along the lines of Wolfram Alpha – an omniscient search box that would slice and dice numbers and facts in all sorts of crazy ways and spit out a bunch of cool graphs. And now, Wolfram Alpha has added ...

The Internet runs on cables. I mean, yes, you've got all those massive servers, but without the cables, they're not worth much. That's a fact which is pretty easy to forget. At the end of the day, all of our futuristic Web 2.0 stuff is just running on a bunch of physical cables, stretching from continent to continent, somewhere deep down at the bottom of the ocean. Greg's Cable Map provides more ...

For most people, "Google" has become synonymous with "search". Heck, Cambridge dictionary lists it as a verb. But as we all know, Google can do lots more than just search. You've got Gmail, and YouTube, and Maps, and the calculator, and a whole bunch of other Web properties. While Gmail is enormously popular, not all Google projects fare so well (cough Wave cough). Even most of the search ...

Vision of Humanity is one of the most beautiful and thorough visualizations that I have recently seen. It's a zoomable Flash world map, which lets you browse and compare a vast number of "peace indicators," such as level of violent crime, access to weapons, jailed population, relations with neighboring countries, and more. You view a world heat map, which shows where that index is most prevalent. ...

RobinWords is a simple, non-Flash game. It starts you off with one four-letter word (in the screenshot, the game picked "mist"). You then need to come up with another valid four-letter word by changing just one of the letters in the word that the computer provided. You can't shuffle the sequence, either. So, in this case, I changed "mist" to "gist." Then, it's the computer's turn, and it has to ...

You may have noticed we've got our back to school jive on here at Download Squad. We figure it's worth interrupting your usual programming for a week or two -- after all, once the kids are back at school, we're all free to do whatever we like until Christmas! Woohoo! Still, so that you don't feel completely abandoned, here's a paragraph dedicated to this week's Mozilla news: early builds of ...

First up, let me congratulate you on buying an Android smartphone instead of an iPhone. You've just saved a few hundred dollars that could be better spent on beer, bitches/blokes and books. And if you have a little money left after that, you could buy a few Android apps too! Having said that, most of the apps in this list are free with the option to pay some money if you want bonus features or ...

Half.com (by eBay) is one of those sites that should be in every college student's bookmarks. Whether you're buying new textbooks or unloading old ones, Half.com is a pretty hassle-free solution. If you're gearing up to use Half.com this semester, though, you should consider going the Half.com iPhone app route instead of hitting up the traditional Web interface. Why? Well, the free iPhone ...

IdiomDictionary has a killer domain name, because that's exactly what it is: a dictionary for idioms. I have no idea how much the domain cost, but it appears to be quite clean of advertising. The site claims to explain the meaning of over 5,000 idioms. It does not seem to use an "established" dictionary for the definitions, but the explanations seem to be well written, concise, and ...