I do not remember what friend first lead me to the TED talks. Maybe it was Gardner Campbell. But they are world class speakers and thinkers in accessible presentations. For instance here is Matt Cutts a computer scientist with a intriguing idea of trying something for 30 days. Try Something New for 30 Days  As the school year begins this openness to change is salutary. What if one read the Bible every day for thirty days, began a new prayer regimen for 30 days. You get the point. Watch his talk and try TED talks for 30 days. And by the way its free.

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Jeff Jarvis observation about the death of business journalism  reflects on the transformation of many institutions in the technological age including the church. Seminarians like undergraduate journalism majors face a world where education is not a union card for a stable job in a stable industry. Instead it is a vistas to survey the range of opportunities of a new frontier.

Mike Stroup describes the vista idea in his blog mereHope.

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I happened upon Google Translate by accident but now it is clear it was a happy accident. Let’s say you are writing an article and you have a foreign language source that you need a rough translation. If you scan the foreign language source as a RTF (rich text format) then you will be able to feed that into the translation window of Google Translate. You are able to do some tweaking of the Google translation on the website.  You must get a good clear scan. However you will want to clean it up, how much will depend on you, in a regular word processor, WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, or Open Office.  Some of you will no doubt say this is still cumbersome; however it is much less cumbersome than attaining real fluency in foreign languages.