Friday, November 22nd, 2024

Time	Event
6:19a	Google Creates a Career Certificate That Prepares Students for Cybersecurity Jobs in 6 Months In 2023, Google launched several online certificate programs designed to help students land an entry-level job, without necessarily having a college degree. This includes a certificate program focused on Cybersecurity, a field that stands poised to grow as companies become more digital and face mounting cyberattacks. Offered on Coursera’s educational platform, the new Google Cybersecurity Professional Certificate features eight online courses, which will collectively help students learn how to: Understand the importance of cybersecurity practices and their impact for organizations. Identify common risks, threats, and vulnerabilities, as well as techniques to mitigate them. Protect networks, devices, people, and data from unauthorized access and cyberattacks using Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools. Gain hands-on experience with Python, Linux, and SQL. The Cybersecurity Professional Certificate also now includes six new videos that explain how to use AI in cybersecurity. The videos cover everything from using artificial intelligence to help identify bugs and system vulnerabilities, to refining code and prioritizing alerts with AI. Students can take individual courses in these professional certificate programs for free. (Above, you can watch a video from the first course in the cybersecurity certificate program, entitled “Foundations of Cybersecurity.”) However, if you would like to receive a certificate, Coursera will charge $49 per month (after an initial 7‑day free trial period). That means that the Cybersecurity Professional Certificate, designed to be completed in 6 months, will cost roughly $300 in total. Once students complete the cybersecurity certificate, they can add the credential to their LinkedIn profile, resume, or CV. As a perk, students in the U.S. can also connect with 150+ employers (e.g., American Express, Colgate-Palmolive, T‑Mobile, Walmart, and Google) who have pledged to consider certificate holders for open positions. According to Coursera, this certificate can prepare students to become an entry-level “cybersecurity analyst and SOC (security operations center) analyst.” You can start a 7‑day free trial of the Cybersecurity Professional Certificate here. Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture. (Comment on this)
6:59a	How to Potty Train Your Cat: A Handy Manual by Jazz Musician Charles Mingus Charles Mingus, the innovative jazz musician, was known for having a bad temper. He once got so irritated with a heckler that he ended up trashing his $20,000 bass. Another time, when a pianist didn’t get things right, Mingus reached right inside the piano and ripped the strings out with his bare hands — a true story mentioned in the BBC documentary, 1959: The Year that Changed Jazz. But Mingus had a softer, nurturing side too. If you head to the official Charles Mingus website, you will find a copy of the Charles Mingus Cat Toilet Training Program, a loving little guide created for cat owners everywhere. The trick to potty training your cat comes down to edging the litter box closer to the bathroom, eventually placing the box on the potty, and then cutting a hole in the center of the box. Expect to spend about three weeks making the transition. And who knows, Mingus says, your cat may even learn to flush. The full guide appears here. Or read it below: 1 First, you must train your cat to use a home-made cardboard litter box, if you have not already done so. (If your box does not have a one-piece bottom, add a cardboard that fits inside, so you have a false bottom that is smooth and strong. This way the box will not become soggy and fall out at the bottom. The grocery store will have extra flat cardboards which you can cut down to fit exactly inside your box.) Be sure to use torn up newspaper, not kitty litter. Stop using kitty litter. (When the time comes you cannot put sand in a toilet.) Once your cat is trained to use a cardboard box, start moving the box around the room, towards the bathroom. If the box is in a corner, move it a few feet from the corner, but not very noticeably. If you move it too far, he may go to the bathroom in the original corner. Do it gradually. You’ve got to get him thinking. Then he will gradually follow the box as you move it to the bathroom. (Important: if you already have it there, move it out of the bathroom, around, and then back. He has to learn to follow it. If it is too close to the toilet, to begin with, he will not follow it up onto the toilet seat when you move it there.) A cat will look for his box. He smells it. 2 Now, as you move the box, also start cutting the brim of the box down, so the sides get lower. Do this gradually. Finally, you reach the bathroom and, eventually, the toilet itself. Then, one day, prepare to put the box on top of the toilet. At each corner of the box, cut a little slash. You can run string around the box, through these slashes, and tie the box down to the toilet so it will not fall off. Your cat will see it there and jump up to the box, which is now sitting on top of the toilet (with the sides cut down to only an inch or so.) Don’t bug the cat now, don’t rush him, because you might throw him off. Just let him relax and go there for awhile-maybe a week or two. Meanwhile, put less and less newspaper inside the box. 3 One day, cut a small hole in the very center of his box, less than an apple-about the size of a plum-and leave some paper in the box around the hole. Right away he will start aiming for the hole and possibly even try to make it bigger. Leave the paper for awhile to absorb the waste. When he jumps up he will not be afraid of the hole because he expects it. At this point you will realize that you have won. The most difficult part is over. From now on, it is just a matter of time. In fact, once when I was cleaning the box and had removed it from the toilet, my cat jumped up anyway and almost fell in. To avoid this, have a temporary flat cardboard ready with a little hole, and slide it under the toilet lid so he can use it while you are cleaning, in case he wants to come and go, and so he will not fall in and be scared off completely. You might add some newspaper up there too, while you are cleaning, in case your cat is not as smart as Nightlife was. 4 Now cut the box down completely until there is no brim left. Put the flat cardboard, which is left, under the lid of the toilet seat, and pray. Leave a little newspaper, still. He will rake it into the hole anyway, after he goes to the bathroom. Eventually, you can simply get rid of the cardboard altogether. You will see when he has got his balance properly. Don’t be surprised if you hear the toilet flush in the middle of the night. A cat can learn how to do it, spurred on by his instinct to cover up. His main thing is to cover up. If he hits the flush knob accidentally and sees that it cleans the bowl inside, he may remember and do it intentionally. Also, be sure to turn the toilet paper roll around so that it won’t roll down easily if the cat paws it. The cat is apt to roll it into the toilet, again with the intention of covering up- the way he would if there were still kitty litter. It took me about three or four weeks to toilet train my cat, Nightlife. Most of the time is spent moving the box very gradually to the bathroom. Do it very slowly and don’t confuse him. And, remember, once the box is on the toilet, leave it a week or even two. The main thing to remember is not to rush or confuse him. Bonus: Below you can hear The Wire’s Reg E. Cathey read “The Charles Mingus CAT-alog for Toilet Training Your Cat.” If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon. If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks! Related Content  Charles Mingus and His Eviction From His New York City Loft, Captured in Moving 1968 Film Charles Mingus Explains in His Grammy-Winning Essay “What is a Jazz Composer?” What People Named Their Cats in the Middle Ages: Gyb, Mite, Méone, Pangur Bán & More Cats in Medieval Manuscripts & Paintings A 110-Year-Old Book Illustrated with Photos of Kittens & Cats Taught Kids How to Read Nick Cave Narrates an Animated Film about the Cat Piano, the Twisted 18th Century Musical Instrument Designed to Treat Mental Illness (Comment on this)
10:00a	How Ancient Romans Traveled Without Maps In an age when many of us could hardly make our way to an unfamiliar grocery store without relying on a GPS navigation system, we might well wonder how the Romans could establish and sustain their mighty empire without so much as a proper map. That’s the question addressed by the Historia Militum video above, “How Did Ancient People Travel Without Maps?” Or more to the point, how did they travel without scaled maps — that is, ones “in which the map’s distances were proportional to their actual size in the real world,” like almost all those we consult on our screens today? The surviving maps from the ancient Roman world tend not to take great pains adhering to true geography. Yet as the Roman Empire expanded, laying roads across three continents, more and more Romans engaged in long-distance travel, and for the most part seem to have arrived at their intended destinations. To do so, they used not maps per se but “itineraries,” which textually listed towns and cities along the way and the distance between them. By the fourth century, “all main Roman roads along with 225 stopping stations were compiled in a document called the Itinerarium Antonini, the Itinerary of Emperor Antonius Pius.” This highly practical document includes mostly roads that “passed through large cities, which provided better facilities for housing, shopping, bathing, and other traveler needs.” With this information, “a traveler could copy the specific distances and stations they needed to reach their destination.” Still today, some seventeen centuries later, “most people wouldn’t use a paper scaled map for travel, but would instead break their journey down into a list of subway stations, bus stops, and intersections.” And if you were to attempt to drive across Europe, making a modern-day Roman Empire road trip, you’d almost certainly rely on the distances and points of interest provided by the synthesized voice reading aloud from the vast Itinerarium Antonini of the twenty-first century. Related content: A Map Showing How the Ancient Romans Envisioned the World in 40 AD The Largest Early Map of the World Gets Assembled for the First Time: See the Huge, Detailed & Fantastical World Map from 1587 Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Babylon, Rome, and the Islamic World Download 131,000 Historic Maps from the Huge David Rumsey Map Collection Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall. (Comment on this)

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