Taught by Ben Polak, an economics professor and now Provost at Yale University, this free course offers an introduction to game theory and strategic thinking. Drawing on examples from economics, politics, the movies and beyond, the lectures cover topics essential to understanding Game theory–including “dominance, backward induction, the Nash equilibrium, evolutionary stability, commitment, credibility, asymmetric information, adverse selection, and signaling.”
Since Game Theory offers “a way of thinking about strategic situations,” the course will “teach you some strategic considerations to take into account [when] making your choices,” and “to predict how other people or organizations [will] behave when they are in strategic settings.”
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The 78-video playlist above comes from a course called Neural Networks for Machine Learning, taught by Geoffrey Hinton, a computer science professor at the University of Toronto. The videos were created for a larger course taught on Coursera, which gets re-offered on a fairly regularly basis.
Neural Networks for Machine Learning will teach you about “artificial neural networks and how they’re being used for machine learning, as applied to speech and object recognition, image segmentation, modeling language and human motion, etc.” The courses emphasizes ” both the basic algorithms and the practical tricks needed to get them to work well.” It’s geared for an intermediate level learner — comfortable with calculus and with experience programming Python. [Get a free course on Python here.]
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From John Sanders, Professor of Philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, comes Introduction to Philosophy. In 10 lectures, Sanders’ course covers the following ground:
Philosophy is about the rigorous discussion of big questions, and sometimes small precise questions, that do not have obvious answers. This class is an introduction to philosophical thinking where we learn how to think and talk critically about some of these challenging questions. Such as: Is there a single truth or is truth relative to different people and perspectives? Do we have free will and, if so, how? Do we ever really know anything? What gives life meaning? Is morality objective or subjective, discovered or created? We’ll use historical and contemporary sources to clarify questions like these, to understand the stakes, to discuss possible responses, and to arrive at a more coherent, more philosophically informed, set of answers.
Thinkers covered include Aristotle, Plato, and Descartes, among others. And along the way, the course introduces you to empiricism, rationalism, ontological and teleological arguments–essentially the nitty gritty of philosophy.
It’s been said that the greatest achievement in American history in the 20th century is the progress that was made – although the journey continues – toward woman’s equality, what with women’s right to vote codified in the 19th amendment (1920), women’s reproductive rights affirmed by the Supreme Court over a half century later (1973), and every advance in between and since. Our national government has done what it can to recognize that progress, and to remind us whence we came. The National Park Service, for example, tells us that when our country started:
The religious doctrine, written laws, and social customs that colonists brought with them from Europe asserted women’s subordinate position. Women were to marry, tend the house, and raise a family. Education beyond basic reading and writing was unusual. When a woman took a husband she lost what limited freedom she might have had as a single adult. Those few married women who worked for pay could not control their own earnings. Most could neither buy nor sell property or sign contracts; none could vote, sue when wronged, defend themselves in court, or serve on juries. In the rare case of divorce, women lost custody of their children and any family possessions.…
And that … “Women actually lost legal ground as a result of the new United States Constitution.”
What if there were an opportunity to study this struggle and the progress we have made in great depth – in an online course from Columbia University and the New-York Historical Society featuring its star women’s historian, Alice Kessler-Harris, now emerita, and a lineup of guest voices from all around the country interviewed under her leadership to provide their expertise on matters of progress and equality? And what if there were a new Center for the Study of Women’s History launching at the same time, even on the same day – March 8, 2017 – to provide a more permanent place for examining and understanding how to make this progress even more expansive?
Women Have Always Worked, a 20-week online class, premieres its first 10 weeks today – free on the edX platform. The offering (enroll here) is unique in the history of education. The course introduces the first collaboration between a university and a historical society to present knowledge to the world – with extended video-recorded conversations and artifact and document discussions with renowned scholars and authors including Baruch’s Carol Berkin; Deborah Gray White from Rutgers; Iowa’s Linda Kerber; Carroll Smith Rosenberg from Michigan; Thavolia Glymph from Duke; St. John’s Lara Vapnek; Blanche Wiesen Cook from CUNY; Louise Bernikow; Harvard’s Nancy Cott; Elaine Tyler May at the University of Minnesota; NYU’s Linda Gordon; the great New York writer Vivian Gornick; and more.
The course page lists some of the questions covered:
• How women’s participation in, exclusion from, and impact on American economic, political, and social life have altered American history.
• How key figures and events have challenged the role of women in the home and workplace.
• How ideas, such as democracy, citizenship, liberty, patriotism, and equality have differently shaped the lives of women and men.
• How women of different races and classes have experienced work, both inside and outside the home.
• How historians of women and gender study America’s past, including hands-on opportunities to practice analyzing primary sources from the present and the past.
• How women’s history has developed and changed over time.
And did we say it’s free?
The second part of the course will launch in June, in association with the annual meeting of the Berkshire Women’s History Conference at Hofstra University – the largest meeting of women’s historians anywhere. The MOOC is inspired by Kessler-Harris’s book, Women Have Always Worked: A Historical Overview, first published by the Feminist Press in 1981 and coming out in a newly updated edition also in 2017 from the University of Illinois, publisher of Kessler-Harris’s landmark Gendering Labor History (2007). The original book brings forth a million gems of knowledge and analysis in text and images; the online course brings forward video and audio and documents and artifacts such as few media can accomplish. Intelligent Television had the opportunity to produce many of the video interviews, conversations, and testimonials.
The struggle of women at work is the struggle of all who seek a better and more just world. The course is a little miracle alight within it.
Peter B. Kaufman runs Intelligent Television (www.intelligenttelevision.com) and twice served as Associate Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Columbia.
It’s been a hallmark of the culture wars in the last few decades for politicians and opinionators to rail against academia. Professors of humanities have in particular come under scrutiny, charged with academic frivolity (sometimes at taxpayer expense), willful obscurantism, and all sorts of ideological crimes and diabolical methods of indoctrination. As an undergrad and graduate student in the humanities during much of the nineties and oughts, I’ve witnessed a few waves of such attacks and found the caricatures drawn by talk radio hosts and cabinet appointees both alarming and amusing. I’ve also learned that mistrust of academia is much older than the many virulent strains of anti-intellectualism in the U.S.
As Yale Professor of British Romantic Poetry Paul Fry points out in an interview with 3:AM Magazine, “satire about any and all professionals with a special vocabulary has been a staple of fiction and popular ridicule since the 18th century… and critic-theorists perhaps more recently have been the easy targets of upper-middle-brow anti-intellectuals continuously since [Henry] Fielding and [Tobias] Smollett.” Though the barbs of these British novelists are more entertaining than anything you’ll hear from current talking heads, the phenomenon remains the same: “Special vocabulary intimidate and are instantly considered obfuscation,” says Fry. “Reactions against them are shamelessly naïve, with no consideration of whether the recondite vocabularies may be serving some necessary and constructive purpose.”
Maybe you’re scratching your chin, shaking or nodding your head, or glazing over. But if you’ve come this far, read on. Fry, after all, acknowledges that jargon-laden scholarly vocabularies can become “self-parody in the hands of fools,” and thus have provided justifiable fodder for cutting wit since even Jonathan Swift’s day. But Fry picks this history up in the 20th century in his Yale course ENGL 300 (Introduction to Theory of Literature), an accessible series of lectures on the history and practice of literary theory, in which he proceeds in a critical spirit to cover everything from Russian Formalism and New Criticism; to Semiotics, Structuralism and Deconstruction; to the Frankfurt School, Post-Colonial Criticism and Queer Theory. Thanks to Open Yale Courses, you can watch the 26 lectures above. Or you can find them on YouTube, iTunes, or Yale’s own web site (where you can also grab a syllabus for the course). These lectures were all recorded in the Spring of 2009. The main text used in the course is David Richter’s The Critical Tradition.
Expanding with the rapid growth and democratizing of universities after World War II, literary and critical theories are often closely tied to the contentious politics of the Cold War. Their decline corresponds to these forces as well. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent snowballing of privatization and anti-government sentiment, many sources of funding for the humanities have succumbed, often under very public assaults on their character and utility. Fry’s presentation shows how literary theory has never been a blunt political instrument at any time. Rather it provides ways of doing ethics and philosophies of language, religion, art, history, myth, race, sexuality, etc. Or, put more plainly, the language of literary theory gives us different sets of tools for talking about being human.
Fry tells Yale Daily News that “literature expresses more eloquently and subtly emotions and feelings that we all try to express one way or another.” But why apply theory? Why not simply read novels, stories, and poems and interpret them by our own critical lights? One reason is that we cannot see our own biases and inherited cultural assumptions. One ostensibly theory-free method of an earlier generation of scholars and poets who rejected literary theory often suffers from this problem. The New Critics flourished mainly during the 40s, a fraught time in history when the country’s resources were redirected toward war and economic expansion. For Fry, this “last generation of male WASP hegemony in the academy” reflected “the blindness of the whole middle class,” and the idea “that life as they knew it… was life as everyone knew it, or should if they didn’t.”
Fry admits that theory can seem superfluous and needlessly opaque, “a purely speculative undertaking” without much of an object in view. Yet applied to literature, it provides exciting means of intellectual discovery. Fry himself doesn’t shy away from satirically taking the piss, as a modern-day Swift might say. He begins not with Coleridge or Keats (though he gets there eventually), but with a story for toddlers called “Tony the Tow Truck.” He does this not to mock, but to show us that “reading anything is a complex and potentially unlimited activity”—and as “a facetious reminder,” he tells 3:AM, that “theory is taking itself seriously in the wrong way if it exhausts its reason for being….”
A tall man, a short woman, a setting that’s sterile to the point of soulless, and a couple dozen bananas…
It practically writes itself!
If you’re slow to recognize the potential in these extremely potent elements (culled from the above video’s opening shot), this free online course on storytelling, part of Khan Academy’s popular Pixar In A Box series, might help strengthen those slack storytelling muscles.
The lessons will hold immense appeal for young Pixar fans, but adults students stand to gain too. Children are naturally confident storytellers. Unfortunately, time can do a number on both fluency and one’s belief in one’s own ability to string together narratives that others will enjoy.
The Pixar directors and story artists drafted to serve as instructors for this course are as deft at encouragement as they are at their craft. They’ll help you move that rubber tree plant… for free.
Each short, example-packed video lesson is followed with an activity in which the viewer is asked to parse his or her favorite stories.
Ratatouille animator Sanjay Patel, whose observations consistently struck me as the most profound and out of the box, went withThe Killing Fields, a title that’s probably not on the radar of those most squarely in Pixar’s demographic.
The first installment stresses the importance of providing a rich setting for well-developed characters to explore, though the teachers are divided on which should come first.
Director Pete Docter, whose daughter’s tweenage passage into theReviving Ophelia-land inspired Inside Out, stresses “writing what you know” need not pin you to the narrow confines of your own backyard. He was well into production on Monsters, Inc. when he realized it wasn’t so much a tale of a monster whose job is scaring little kids as a story of his own journey to fatherhood.
As you may have guessed, examples from the Pixar canon abound.
Khan Academy will be taking the whole of 2017 to roll out Pixar in a Box’s five remaining Storytelling units
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and theater maker, whose new play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in less than two weeks. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Taught by professor Steven B. Smith, this course from Yale University offers an Introduction to Political Philosophy, and covers the following ground:
This course is intended as an introduction to political philosophy as seen through an examination of some of the major texts and thinkers of the Western political tradition. Three broad themes that are central to understanding political life are focused upon: the polis experience (Plato, Aristotle), the sovereign state (Machiavelli, Hobbes), constitutional government (Locke), and democracy (Rousseau, Tocqueville). The way in which different political philosophies have given expression to various forms of political institutions and our ways of life are examined throughout the course.
You can watch the 24 lectures from the course above, or find them on YouTube. To get more information on the course, including the syllabus, visit this Yale website.
The main texts used in this course include the following. You can find them in our collection of Free eBooks.
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Over the years, we’ve featured the many drawings that have adorned the pages of Dante’s Divine Comedy, from medieval times to modern. Illustrations by Botticelli, Gustave Doré, William Blake and Mœbius, they’ve all gotten their due. Less has been said here, however, about the actual text itself. Perhaps the most important work in Italian literature, Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) wrote the Divine Comedy (consisting of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso) between the years 1308 and 1320. And that text is largely the subject of Dante in Translation, a free online course taught by Yale’s Giuseppe Mazzotta. The course description reads as follows:
The course is an introduction to Dante and his cultural milieu through a critical reading of the Divine Comedy and selected minor works (Vita nuova, Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia, Epistle to Cangrande). An analysis of Dante’s autobiography, the Vita nuova, establishes the poetic and political circumstances of the Comedy’s composition. Readings of Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise seek to situate Dante’s work within the intellectual and social context of the late Middle Ages, with special attention paid to political, philosophical and theological concerns. Topics in the Divine Comedy explored over the course of the semester include the relationship between ethics and aesthetics; love and knowledge; and exile and history.
You can watch the 24 lectures from the course above, or find them on YouTube and iTunes in video and audio formats. To get more information on the course, including the syllabus, visit this Yale website.
Primary texts used in this course include:
Dante. Divine Comedy. Translated by John D. Sinclair. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968.
Dante. Vita Nuova. Translated by Mark Musa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973.
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