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Technology U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, activist investor Carl Icahn, and Blackstone Group co-founder Stephen Schwarzman. To encourage the widest possible Online Course Focuses on Finance At a time when more people than ever are interested in finance, Yale Univer- sity in New Haven, Connecticut, is offering a free course on the subject. The course is part of its "Open Yale Courses," the school's free online education initiative. Finance used to be a very esoter- ic field understood by only a small group of people working in the world's financial centers, but the field is now of interest to a much wider audience, says Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale who teaches the course. "With each year that goes by, the concepts of finance are being applied more broadly and involving more people. With electronic technology, it's becoming more economical to offer sophisticated financial services to everyone," he says. The subprime crisis and subsequent financial col- lapse has made it more important than ever that everyone gain an understanding of financial fundamen- tals, he adds. "Financial Markets" comprises 26 sessions, which include classes taught by guest lecturers such as Yale's chief investment officer David Swensen, 56 BizEd JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2009 use of this and any of the other seven courses now available, the courses are covered by the Creative Commons' Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. This license permits free use or repurposing of the Open Yale Course material by others. Users may download, redistribute, remix, or build upon the content to produce new lectures or other edu- cational tools. The license, however, does not permit commercial use of course content. "Financial Markets" offers a searchable transcript, reading assign- ments, problem sets, and a closed captioning option, as well as video or audio files of the 75-minute courses. It is available to anyone through the Open Yale Courses Web site at open.yale.edu/courses. Vote for Ideas to Change the World In honor of its tenth anniversary, search engine giant Google unveiled a $10 million project that asked users to submit ideas that could "change the world" by helping "as many people as possible." Google's Proj- ect 10100 (pronounced "Project 10 to the 100th") accepted submissions until October 20. The categories included areas such as community, energy, environ- ment, health, education, shelter, and employment opportunities. People suggested ideas that ranged from the Hippo Water Roller, an inexpensive 24-gallon container that can be rolled easily to help people carry water long distances, to a project that would work to connect isolated communi- ties to the Internet. The company will choose 100 ideas to post on the Project 10100 Web site and invites Internet users to vote on the ideas they find most promising. The top 20 ideas will become semifinalists, and an advisory board will evaluate those ideas before choosing five winners. The company pledges $10 million to make those winning projects a reality. Voting starts January 9 at www. project10tothe100.com. How Big Is Your Carbon Footprint? Clean Air-Cool Planet has released its updated Campus Carbon Calcula- tor, a free tool designed to help campus administrators measure their emissions and determine long-term strategies to reduce their universities' carbon footprints. Clean Air-Cool Planet partnered with the University of New Hampshire in Durham to cre- ate the first version of the calculator. Campus Carbon Calculator Version 6 now offers projec- tions and solutions modules, which help administrators create a cost-saving sus- tainability plan in formats designed to help them make the plan's advantages clear to trustees. In addition, it also provides educa- tional tools that instructors can use to teach students about carbon manage- ment. UNH is now using the tool to develop a campuswide climate action plan over the next year. For more information, visit www. cleanair-coolplanet.org/toolkit. COMSTOCK IMAGES /JUPITER IMAGES SABINE SCHECKEL/GETTY IMAGES