Financial & Travel Musings

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One of the downsides of looking in on some of the online courses around these days (of which Yales Open Yale is probably the most accessible) is that the hypochondriacs amongst us can have a real field day.

We probably all know that working around asbestos isn’t a good idea, bringing in its wake all kinds of diseases with weird names like mesothelioma and the like. However, did you know that if you’d a cat in the house when you were in the womb that you’ve a higher chance of becoming schizophrenic? Yales couple of sessions on mental illness are a real gold mine of such off the cuff remarks that you’d not ordinarily come across and yet which were presented in a very accessible form.

What’s probably not a good move is to leave through the mental illness diagnostic manual as the small sampling that I heard about courtesy of the Yale psychology course covered oodles of mental diseases, many of which had fairly “normal” symtoms.

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One of the wonders of technology these days is that heated mattress pads have moved on from just being used on beds and now extend to all kinds of heated clothing that let you carry on various pastimes well into the coldest days of winter when you’d otherwise have to lay off ’til the spring.

As with the electric mattresses that you leave on overnight you need to be careful with the wiring of these though as the outdoor clothing obviously isn’t run from the mains you don’t get the issues of being electrocuted that you could potentially have with the indoor stuff. Even so, it makes sense to avoid treating these items roughly as you’re just going to wear them out otherwise.

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One of the problems of universities these days is that they offer just too much choice in terms of courses. So much so that it would be nice to get a little taster of what a course might be like before you sign up for it.

Thankfully, a number of universities around the world have started up “open” sections that allow anyone to have a peek in at what their course material is like. Now, chances are that you won’t find the particular course that you’re looking at within this selection or perhaps even that your own university has an “open” section for that matter. However, what you can do is look at some of those subjects that are offered by other universities to get something of a feel for what it might be like.

For instance, Yale university has its Open Yale facility which’ll let you sample some courses in the fields of astronomy, english, history, philosophy, psychology and a few others (they add subject areas and courses now and again). Chances are that you’ll not actually be going to Yale but even so it’s worth looking at these (they’re generally in the form of 22 separate one hour videos) if you are considering doing, say, a psychology course elsewhere.

Be warned though that several of the courses on offer are fascinating and can easily eat up your free time!

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