Now that the semester is over, you’re probably wondering what you’re going to be doing with all your free time. You could watch some more Netflix, but your parents will probably tell you to get off the couch. You’d rather stay on the couch. Solution: watch something educational on Kanopy.
Did you know that Middlebury libraries provide students with access to the ‘academic version of Netflix’? Well, if you didn’t, you do now. It’s called Kanopy, and it gives you access to tons of documentaries and movies that you can stream even while you’re off campus. Just follow this link to sign up using your Middlebury email address to start watching!
I’ve compiled a list of the most popular STEM Kanopy offerings to get you started.
Silicon Cowboys
The Rise and Fall of Compaq Computers (2016)
Three friends dream up the Compaq portable computer at a Texas diner in 1981, and soon find themselves battling the mighty IBM for PC supremacy. Their improbable journey altered the future of computing and shaped the world we now know.
Winner of the Special Jury Prize-New Jersey Films Competition for Archival Filmmaking at the Montclair Film Festival.
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch
How Humans Have Impacted the Planet (2019)
A stunning sensory experience and cinematic meditation on humanity’s massive reengineering of the planet, ANTHROPOCENE: THE HUMAN EPOCH is a years-in-the-making feature documentary from the award-winning team behind Manufactured Landscapes and Watermark and is narrated by Alicia Vikander. The film follows the research of an international body of scientists, the Anthropocene Working Group, who, after nearly 10 years of research, argue that the Holocene Epoch gave way to the ANTHROPOCENE EPOCH in the mid-twentieth century as a result of profound and lasting human changes to the Earth.
Nominated for Best Canadian Feature Film at the Toronto International Film Festival. Official Selection at the Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival.
Top Secret Rosies
In 1942 a secret U.S. military program was launched to recruit women to the war effort. But unlike the efforts to recruit Rosie the Riveter to the factory, this clandestine search targeted female mathematicians who would become human ‘computers’ for the U.S. Army. From the bombing of Axis Europe to the assaults on Japanese strongholds, women worked around-the-clock six days a week, creating ballistics tables that proved crucial to Allied success. Rosie made the weapons, but the female computers made them accurate. When the first electronic computer (ENIAC) was developed to aid the Army’s calculation efforts, six of these women were tapped to become its first programmers.
Top Secret Rosies is the as-yet-untold story of women and technology that helped win a war and usher in the modern computer age. This is the chronicle of four very different women who worked as human computers at the University of Pennsylvania from 1942-1946. Capturing the opportunities and exhilaration of the times and exploring the moral dilemmas inherent in their work, Top Secret Rosies follows their efforts as they labored night and day to create the mathematical computations that made every Allied bomb and bullet more deadly.
NOVA: Black Hole Apocalypse
Join astrophysicist and novelist Janna Levin on a mind-blowing voyage to the frontiers of black hole science, which is shining new light on the most powerful and mysterious objects in the universe.
The Future of Work and Death
The Impact of Technological Advances on Human Life (2015)
‘What is humanity?’ In this revealing documentary, world experts in the fields of Futurology, Anthropology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy consider the impact of technological advances on the two certainties of human life: Work and Death. Charting human developments from Homo Habilis, past the Industrial Revolution, to the digital age and beyond, THE FUTURE OF WORK AN DEATH looks at the shocking exponential rate at which mankind has managed to create technologies to ease the process of living.
As we embark on the next phase of our adaptation, with automation and Artificial Intelligence signifying the complete move from man to machine, this film asks what the implications are for the human purposeful fulfillment, making money, and ageless immortality. In its combination of archival footage, infographics, and interviews, directors Sean Blacknell and Wayne Walsh’s debut feature gives us a provoking and shockingly realistic look into the future of human life.
Big Data
From science to sales, from sociology to sports, data analytics is unraveling the fascinating secrets hidden in numbers, patterns, relationships, and information of every kind. Get introduced to the key concepts, methods, and accomplishments of this versatile approach to problem solving. See the big picture of big data and the crucial role in data analytics.