This fall, Harvard has been rolling out videos from the 2016 edition of Computer Science 50 (CS50), the university’s introductory coding course designed for majors and non-majors alike. Taught by David Malan, a perennially popular professor (you’ll immediately see why), the one-semester course (taught mostly in C) combines courses typically known elsewhere as “CS1” and “CS2.”
Even if you’re not a Harvard student, you’re welcome to follow CS50 online by heading over to this site here. There you will find video lectures (stream them all above or access them individually here), problem sets, quizzes, and other useful course materials. Once you’ve mastered the material covered in CS50, you can start branching out into new areas of coding by perusing our big collection of Free Online Computer Science Courses, a subset of our larger collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
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We’ve told you about the Great Courses Plus (now called Wondrium) before–a new video subscription service that lets you watch free courses (about 8,000 lectures in total) across a wide range of subjects, all taught by some of the best lecturers in the country. The topics cover everything from History, Philosophy, Literature, and Economics, to Math, Science, Professional Development, Cooking, and Photography. And you can binge-watch entire college courses in a matter of days by watching videos on your TV, tablet, laptop and smart phone, with the help of apps designed for Apple, Google Play, Kindle Fire, and Roku.
Interested in trying out this service? Right now, the Great Courses Plus/Wondrium is offering a special deal for Open Culture readers. If you click here, and sign up for a free trial, you can use this service for 30 days … for free. And then, if you would like, you can continue to subscribe and pay their normal prices. If you have time on your hands, this is a great way to keep your mind engaged and stream what PC Magazine has called “an excellent library of college-level lectures.”
Note: The Great Courses is a partner with Open Culture. So if you sign up for a free trial, it benefits not just you and Great Courses Plus. It benefits Open Culture too. So consider it win-win-win.
The great 18th century writer Dr. Samuel Johnson, who suffered from severe bouts of depression, said “the only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life or better to endure it.”
So…is it true? Can a poem help you cope with grief? Can a sonnet stir your soul to hope?
Poets, writers and actors like Stephen Fry, Ian McKellen, Melvyn Bragg, Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time), Ben Okri (The Famished Road), Rachel Kelly (Black Rainbow) and others, will discuss their own work and the work of famous writers like Austen, Shakespeare and Wordsworth — exploring how they can impact mental health and why works of writing are so often turned to in times of crisis.
Here’s Stephen Fry on the pleasure of poetry:
Plus throughout the 6‑week course doctors will offer a medical perspective, giving an insight into different mental health conditions.
The course is offered through FutureLearn which means it’s broken into chunks — so you can do it step by step. FutureLearn also features lots of discussion so you can share your ideas with other learners, which often can be as beneficial as the course material (as one previous learner put it “a really wonderful experience and I’ve loved the feedback and comments from fellow course members”).
Here’s a runthrough of what’s on the syllabus. The course focuses on six themes:
Stress: In poetry, the word “stress” refers to the emphasis of certain syllables in a poem’s metre. How might the metrical “stresses” of poetry help us to cope with the mental and emotional stresses of modern life?
Heartbreak: Is heartbreak a medical condition? What can Sidney’s sonnets and Austen’s Sense and Sensibility teach us about suffering and recovering from a broken heart?
Bereavement: The psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross famously proposed that there are five stages of grief. How might Shakespeare’s Hamlet and poems by Wordsworth and Hardy help us to think differently about the process of grieving?
Trauma: PTSD or “shellshock” has long been associated with the traumatic experiences of soldiers in World War 1. How is the condition depicted in war poetry of the era? Can poems and plays offer us an insight into other sources of trauma, including miscarriage and assault?
Depression and Bipolar: The writer Rachel Kelly subtitles her memoir Black Rainbow “how words healed me – my journey through depression”. Which texts have people turned to during periods of depression, and why? What can we learn from literature about the links between bipolar disorder and creativity?
Ageing and Dementia: One of the greatest studies of ageing in English Literature is Shakespeare’s King Lear. Is it helpful to think about this play in the context of dementia? Why are sufferers of age-related memory loss often still able to recall the poems they have learned “by heart”?
Photography and video have advanced to such a degree that any one of us, for a modest investment of capital, can own the requisite equipment to make productions at the same level of quality as the pros. And most of us already hold in our hands computers capable of producing and editing hundreds of rich still and moving images. What we may lack, what most of us lack, are the skills and experience of the professionals. No amount of fancy photo gear can make up the difference, but you can at least acquire the education—a very thorough, technical education in digital photography—online, and for free.
Taught by Stanford professor Emeritus of Computer Science Marc Levoy, the course above, simply called “Lectures on Digital Photography,” covers seemingly everything you might need to know and then some: from the parts of a digital camera (“every screw”), to the formula for depth of field, the principles of high dynamic range, and the history and art of photographic composition.
Beware, this course may not suit the casual Instagrammer—it requires aspiration and “a cell phone won’t suffice.” Additionally, though Levoy says he assumes no prior knowledge, he does expect a few non-camera-related academic skill sets:
The only knowledge I assume is enough facility and comfort with mathematics that you’re not afraid to see the depth-of-field formula in all its glory, and an integral sign here or there won’t send you running for the hills. Some topics will require concepts from elementary probability and statistics (like mean and variance), but I define these concepts in lecture. I also make use of matrix algebra, but only at the level of matrix multiplication. Finally, an exposure to digital signal processing or Fourier analysis will give you a better intuition for some topics, but it is not required.
Sound a little daunting? You will not need an expensive SLR camera (single lens reflex), though it would help you get the most out of complex discussions of settings. The topics of some interactive features may sound mystifying—“gamut-mapping,” “cylindrical-panoramas”—but Levoy’s lectures, all in well-shot video, move at a brisk pace, and he contextualizes new scientific terms and concepts with a facility that will put you at ease. Levoy formerly taught the course at Stanford between 2009 and 2014. The version he teaches online here comes from a Google class given this year—eighteen lectures spanning 11 weeks.
Find all of the course materials—including interactive applets and assignments—at Levoy’s course site. As he notes, since the course has “gone viral,” many videos embedded on the site won’t play properly. Levoy directs potential students to his Youtube channel. You can see the full playlist of lectures at the top of this post as well. For more resources in photography education—practical and theoretical, beginner to advanced—see PetaPixel’s list of “the best free online photography courses and tutorials.”
You might have seen a new type of ancient human on the news recently, nicknamed, affectionately, ‘the hobbit’ (not because they were taking the ring to Mordor, but because of their rather diminutive stature).
If you didn’t, here’s the news in brief: a team of scientists went digging for the first Australians and instead found a completely new (and tiny) ancient human. Since then they’ve been trying to work out what happened to these small ancestors of ours.
To share their findings, some of the scientists involved in understanding ‘the hobbit’ have put together a 4 week free online course to explain how the discovery unfolded…
The course has been created with FutureLearn and will take you inside the world of this new species, giving you a run through modern scientific archaeological techniques along the way.
Here’s what’s on the syllabus:
Week 1 — Human Origins and Introduction to Archaeology
Learn about where you, me and everyone came from — before getting onto the moment ‘the hobbit’ was discovered.
Week 2 — Archaeological Methods: In the Cave
You think a festival is bad? Get to grips with how science translates in somewhere without electricity or water.
Week 3 — Archaeological Science: In the Lab
Understand what happens once all the archaeological finds are delicately hauled back to the lab.
Week 4 — Future Directions
‘The Hobbit’, despite it’s size, is having a big impact in the world of archaeology — find out exactly what this little ancient human might mean for the story of our origins.
Intrigued? Join the course today — it started this week, and you’re not too late to join.
Jess Weeks is a copywriter at FutureLearn. She has never conducted ground-breaking science in a cave, or discovered a new species, but there’s still time.
If you have any entrepreneurial aspirations, you’ve likely heard of Y Combinator (YC), an accelerator based in Silicon Valley that’s been called “the world’s most powerful start-up incubator” (Fast Company) or “a spawning ground for emerging tech giants” (Fortune). Twice a year, YC carefully selects a batch of start-ups, gives them $120,000 of seed funding each (in exchange for some equity), and then helps nurture the fledgling ventures to the next stage of development. YC hosts dinners where prominent entrepreneurs come to speak and offer advice. They hold “Demo Days,” where the start-ups can pitch their concepts and products to investors, and they have “Office Hours,” where budding entrepreneurs can work through problems with the seasoned entrepreneurs who run YC. Then, with a little luck, these new start-ups will experience the same success as previous YC companies, Dropbox and Airbnb.
Given Y Combinator’s mission, it makes perfect sense that YC has ties with Stanford University, another institution that has hatched giant tech companies–Google, Cisco, Yahoo and more. Back in 2014, Sam Altman (the president of Y Combinator) put together a course at Stanford called “How to Start a Start-Up,” which essentially offers students an introduction to the key lessons taught to YC companies. Altman presents the first two lectures. Then some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley take over. Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook co-founder), Peter Thiel (PayPal co-founder), Marc Andreessen (Netscape creator/general partner of Andreessen Horowitz), Marissa Mayer (Yahoo CEO, prominent Googler), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn co-founder), Ron Conway (Silicon Valley super angel), Paul Graham (YC founder)–they all make an appearance in the course.
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Sports Night, The West Wing, The American President, The Social Network — hardly shameful items to appear on anyone’s résumé. Sure, people disagree about the likes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and The Newsroom, but we’ve all got to admit that when Aaron Sorkin writes, he hits more than he misses, and even the supposed misses have more of interest about them than many others’ hits. How does this master of the modern American scene — its concerns, its personalities, its conversations, its politics — do it? You can find out in his Screenwriting course on MasterClass, the new platform for online instruction as given by big-name doers of high-profile work.
Back in May, we featured MasterClass’s offering of Werner Herzog on filmmaking, and though most everyone can enjoy hearing the man behind Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, and Grizzly Man talk for five hours, not everyone can summon the will to make movies like those. Sorkin, by contrast, uses his also considerable creative vitality to a different end entirely, writing snappy scripts that bring his own compelling idiosyncrasies to mainstream film and television.
But he started, according to MasterClass, by writing his first screenplay on the humble medium of cocktail napkins — cocktail napkins that became A Few Good Men. Since then, he’s come up with “rules of storytelling, dialogue, character development, and what makes a script actually sell,” now ready to share with his online students.
In fact, he gives one away for free in the trailer above: “No one in real life starts a sentence with, ‘Damn it.’ ” That alone may get you writing your own Oscar-winning screenplay, thus saving you the $90 fee for the whole five-hour course, but Sorkin goes on to tease his methods for breaking through his “constant state of writer’s block” to craft dialogue as he conceives of that process: “Taking something someone has just said, holding them in your hand, and then punching them in the face with it.” He also makes reference to Aristotle’s Poetics, making his own lecturing sound like the very same high-and-low, intellectual and visceral cocktail that his fans so enjoy in the dialogue he writes. “The worst crime you can commit,” he warns, “is telling the audience something they already know,” and it sounds as if, in teacher mode to his audience of aspiring screenwriters, he plans on following his own advice.
Do you know someone whose arguments consist of baldly specious reasoning, hopelessly confused categories, archipelagos of logical fallacies buttressed by seawalls of cognitive biases? Surely you do. Perhaps such a person would welcome some instruction on the properties of critical thinking and argumentation? Not likely? Well, just in case, you may wish to send them over to this series of Wireless Philosophy (or “WiPhi”) videos by philosophy instructor Geoff Pynn of Northern Illinois University and doctoral students Kelley Schiffman of Yale, Paul Henne of Duke, and several other philosophy and psychology graduates.
What is critical thinking? “Critical thinking,” says Pynn, “is about making sure that you have good reasons for your beliefs.” Now, there’s quite a bit more to it than that, as the various instructors explain over the course of 32 short lessons (watch them all at the bottom of the post), but Pynn’s introductory video above lays out the foundation. Good reasons logically support the beliefs or conclusions one adopts—from degrees of probability to absolute certainty (a rare condition indeed). The sense of “good” here, Pynn specifies, does not relate to moral goodness, but to logical coherence and truth value. Though many ethicists and philosophers would disagree, he notes that it isn’t necessarily “morally wrong or evil or wicked” to believe something on the basis of bad reasons. But in order to think rationally, we need to distinguish “good” reasons from “bad” ones.
“A good reason for a belief,” Pynn says, “is one that makes it probable. That is, it’s one that makes the belief likely to be true. The very best reasons for a belief make it certain. They guarantee it.” In his next two videos, above and below, he discusses these two classes of argument—one relating to certainty, the other probability. The first class, deductive arguments, occur in the classic, Aristotelian form of the syllogism, and they should guarantee their conclusions, meaning that “it’s impossible for the premises to be true while the conclusion is false” (provided the form of the argument itself is correct). In such an instance, we say the argument is “valid,” a technical philosophical term that roughly corresponds to what we mean by a “good, cogent, or reasonable” argument. Some properties of deductive reasoning—validity, truth, and soundness—receive their own explanatory videos later in the series.
In abductive arguments (or what are also called “inductive arguments”), above, we reason informally to the best, most probable explanation. In these kinds of arguments, the premises do not guarantee the conclusion, and the arguments are not bound in rigid formal syllogisms. Rather, we must make a leap—or an inference—to what seems like the most likely conclusion given the reasoning and evidence. Finding additional evidence, or finding that some of our evidence or reasoning is incorrect or must be rethought, should force us to reassess the likelihood of our conclusion and make new inferences. Most scientific explanations rely on abductive reasoning, which is why they are subject to retraction or revision. New evidence—or new understandings of the evidence—often requires new conclusions.
As for understanding probability—the likelihood that reasons provide sufficient justification for inferring particular conclusions—well… this is where we often get into trouble, falling victim to all sorts of fallacies. And when it comes to interpreting evidence, we’re prey to a number of psychological biases that prevent us from making fair assessments. WiPhi brings previous video series to bear on these problems of argumentation, one on Formal and Informal Fallacies and another on Cognitive Biases.
When it comes to a general theory of probability itself, we would all benefit from some understanding of what’s called Bayes’ Theorem, named for the 18th century statistician and philosopher Thomas Bayes. Bayes’ Theorem can seem forbidding, but its wide application across a range of disciplines speaks to its importance. “Some philosophers,” says CUNY graduate student Ian Olasov in his video lesson above, “even think it’s the key to understanding what it means to think rationally.”
Bayesian reasoning, informal logic, sound, valid, and true arguments… all of these modes of critical thinking help us make sense of the tangles of information we find ourselves caught up in daily. Though some of our less rationally-inclined acquaintances may not be receptive to good introductory lessons like these, it’s worth the effort to pass them along. And while we’re at it, we can sharpen our own reasoning skills and learn quite a bit about where we go right and where we go wrong as critical thinkers in Wireless Philosophy’s thorough, high quality series of video lessons.
Find more helpful resources in the Relateds below.
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