teach-out from the University of Michigan on self-driving cars

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After basically omitting online classes from my life last year, I've started looking for some classes that sound interesting.


Back in the day (like, the late 1960s), the University of Michigan had teach-ins, where students and faculty gathered outside the normal academic routine to discuss important ideas of the day.

In the last year or so, the University has decided to expand on that practice.  Teach-in (for students and faculty) has been expanded to teach-out (Massive Online Open Class -- MOOC, open to anyone). 

The teach-outs are like very brief classes, and are available for free to anyone who has internet access.

[Digression:  You may recall that I took a teach-out on gerrymandering last year.  I think that was the only MOOC I took last year.  It was interesting, if horrifying.  The knowledge I gained from the teach-out helped me feel very confident about talking to random strangers about Michigan's Proposal 2 last fall.  Prop 2 was to require a citizen committee to draw districts, rather than letting political parties do that behind closed doors.  Just ask me -- Why *is* letting computers draw the boundaries a bad idea?  I know why....  End of Digression.]


Yesterday I started a teach out on self-driving cars.

The syllabus says the time required is about four hours.  I listened to the first part of the info last night.  So far I'm finding it interesting.

I wonder if they're going to address the possibility of hacking...........  We have the opportunity to ask questions, which will be answered later in the month.  At least -- some of them will be answered.  I'm going to ask if they plan to address hacking.


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top 50 MOOCS -- I've taken six of them

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ClassCentral has published a list of the top 50 MOOCs (Massive Open Online Classes) of all time, "based on thousands of reviews written by Class Central users."


I've completed five of them:

Model Thinking

Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects

Dino 101: Dinosaur Paleobiology

The Science of Everyday Thinking

Mindfulness for Wellbeing and Peak Performance


The rules have changed in the MOOC game.  MOOCs used to be totally free.  In the last few years, they've been moving toward "monetizing," which means "restricting what you are allowed access to if you don't pay for a certificate."  You can still hear all the lectures, and read all of the readings, but in  many classes you can no longer take the quizzes or do the assignments unless you pay. 

I've been exposed to all of the info presented in one more class, but chose not to pay to "complete" the class.

Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential


I recommend all of the above classes.  I found Model Thinking to be very tough.  It turns out that though I remember enough French from jr. high and high school to be able to get by, I do NOT remember a comparable amount of algebra, and Model Thinking requires a lot of algebra.  None of the other classes require algebra.  :-)

All of these classes were free when I took them, and I believe all of the lectures and reading assignments are still free.  I expect it is necessary to pay to take quizzes and/or do assignments in most of them, now, but maybe not all.


I do think "just listening" is very worthwhile.  And remember -- for free.  So if the subject doesn't grab you, or the instructor is boring (or a jerk, or both!), you can just walk away, nothing lost.

If you want to learn interesting things, in the privacy and comfort of your own home (or coffee-shop!), you can't beat a MOOC.


DIGRESSION:  I signed up for one other class on the Top 50 list, but quit following it because I thought the teacher was abusive to students.  He had a tableful of students getting filmed with him, and I felt his interactions with them were inappropriate.  (Telling one student that her comment "was the only possible wrong answer"????????  I mean, any teacher telling any student that, under any circumstances?????  And in front of tens, or hundreds! of thousands of viewers??????  Really?????????????????????)  END OF DIGRESSION


So I've completed 10% of this Top 50, have exposed myself to all of the lectures for one more, and rejected yet another.  I'm surprised to have taken so many of the "top 50", considering how computer-science-centric MOOCs tend to be.  On the other hand, computer-science classes almost certainly don't attract as wide an audience as "Learning How to Learn"................

(As someone who programmed computers professionally for nearly 30 years, I have signed up for quite a few programming MOOCs, as something I *ought* to be interested in, but not one grabbed my attention.  I failed to complete any of them.  I think that's a message.  "Been there, done that.".........)


I note that Mountains 101 (from the U of Alberta, which taught Dino 101) is on the top 50 list.  With all the contemplation of geology I did this summer, I'm thinking I'll sign up for Mountains 101 next.

We've been gone so much this summer that keeping up with classes has been a non-starter.  But now there is nothing on the travel schedule for the rest of the year, and a nice interesting class sounds like a plan!

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enzymes at the replication fork

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The title of one of the lectures I'm listening to in my DNA replication/repair class is  --  Enzymes at the Replication Fork.


This set of words reminds me of "Shoot-Out at the OK Corral."

I think Enzymes at the Replication Fork should be the title of a microscopic spaghetti western........... .





I couldn't find a creative commons image of a replication fork with lots of the associated enzymes.  If you click through to this page, you'll find an image.  Everything with a name ending in "ase" is an enzyme........

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quote from molecular biology

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In the context of accuracy when replicating DNA:


"You'll find, the more you study biology, the more biology would rather be overworked but correct, than under-worked and incorrect. So doing a little extra work to make sure it's right is worth doing."

Mama Nature has a heavy belief in double-checking and redundancy....... 

Redundancy:   the inclusion of extra components that are not strictly necessary to functioning, in case of failure in other components.

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interesting facts from molecular biology

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Interesting facts from Molecular Biology - Part 1: DNA Replication and Repair..............

"DNA replication is extremely accurate. Typically, the replication machinery makes one mistake in every 10 to the 10th base pairs synthesized."


Editorial comment:  Wow.  That Mama Nature -- she is a freakin' genius........................

In the video lecture I embedded in the previous post, they talk about how the structure of DNA is (in my words) elegant and efficient.  The shape and construction seem sort of ... inevitable, and lend themselves to ... correct use, and accurate replication.  Can't wait to hear what we learn about repair!


Continuing to listen/watch.  On the other hand..........

"We have a genome of 3 times 10 to the ninth base pairs. So that means we make a mistake about one every three cell divisions. But it's worth keeping in mind, most of those 10 to the 10th base pairs are not coding and are not that important to be correct. But if it's in the middle of a coding region, it changes the amino acid and the protein, it can be a problem. So we're pretty much full of errors is one way to think about it. Even under the best of circumstances, we have thousands and thousands of errors."

Ouch.  Sobering.............. 



I suppose, though, that it still means Mama N. is a freakin' genius, because somehow most of us manage to keep on walking and chewing gum at the same time for years and years, despite all the errors. !!!

In all of these classes about biological function, I am always left boggled that we ever managed to replicate one strand of DNA, nevermind figuring out how to be a whole functioning cell.  Nevermind figuring out how to cooperate with other cells to the extent that we could crawl out of the primordial slime. 

Nevermind walk OR chew gum, let alone both at the same time!

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DNA basics.....

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I've just started a new molecular biology class.  I think I may be in over my head......

"These π-π interactions form when the aromatic rings of the bases stack next to each other and share electron probabilities."

Aromatic rings???  Hmmmm......  But it's interesting, so I'm going to keep watching/listening! 

And I bought myself a plastic molecule-builder kit, so I can do some hands-on molecule construction.  I suspect that will help the valences (and bonds) stick to my brain.

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food-based dietary guidelines

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Have you been wondering, lying awake in the middle of the night, what the Mongolian food-based dietary guidelines are?

Well, wonder no more.  This website guides you to a ton of national food-based dietary guidelines, including the Mongolian guidelines.

(I found my way to this site through Food as Medicine.)

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May 21

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Walking to the farmers' market.

Tulips.

Tiny baby tulip tree.  There are millions and billions of tiny baby maple trees in the neighborhood, but this is the only baby tulip tree I've seen this year.

Columbines.

Petunias and other goodies in planters at the market.

My breakfast was a country scone from Zingerman's Bakehouse.  I've liked every one of their scones I've eaten, but this kind is my fave.  It has oatmeal, raisins, nuts (I think), and cinnamon sugar on top.  Mmmmmmmmmm.

Breakfast detritus, with a souvenir of Florence, Italy, from 2013.

Walking back through the market after breakfast, looking for a bouquet.  I was disappointed -- the only bouquets I saw were hot-house flowers, and I didn't like the color combinations (even had I been willing to buy a hot-house bouquet).  Oh well.  I tried.



This is rhubarb, potted up and ready to take home and add to the garden.  I love rhubarb, but it is a really big plant when full-grown.  The farmer said it would take up a circle 4-5' in diameter.  I like to eat rhubarb, but I don't have enough space to grow it.

I think it's attractive, though.  If I had unlimited space, I might well grow it.  I think it's amazing that leaves this big start new every year!

Petunias.

Walking home.  Iris.  I love iris..............

I don't know what this is.  I saw it in West Park.  I suspect it was deliberately planted, but do not know.  The tiny flowers are carried high (2'?) above the ground.

Pleased, again, that the phone took a pic this sharp of something tiny that was waving in the breeze.

Fancy teeny flowers which were basically round yellow blobs to my naked eye.

I just finished an online class on Food as Medicine.  It was interesting -- and tantalizing.  Nutrition science is booming, like so many parts of biology, as a result of things we are learning every day about the workings of our bodies, and the intricacies of those workings.  As with any class where knowledge expands and changes every day, we got glimpses of things that will be usual in the future, but are not yet possible.  For example -- recommendations as to what each of us, individually, should eat for optimum health.

In the mean time, while we wait for the technology/knowledge to catch up to the promise of individualized nutrition, they gave us the one-size-fits-all advice that is informed by the research.

One such piece of advice resonated with things my mother learned when she studied nutrition in the 1960s.  "Eat a variety of things, prepared in a variety of ways."

In class they said that we really don't know much, yet, about the micronutrients in foods.  They asserted that more diversity is better, to make it more likely that we are getting everything we need.  They recommended that we eat 20 different things every day, and specifically said that we are better off eating more different things, rather than a lot of one thing (even when it is a good thing).

They used orange juice as an example.  They showed us how much orange juice you'd get if you squeezed one orange.  Not much.  About 1/3 cup.  That 1/3 cup of orange juice isn't as good for you as an orange (less fiber, for one thing).  They said that we get all of the nutrition (vitamin C, for one thing) we need from orange juice in one day from that 1/3 cup.  If we drink more orange juice, we are not getting any more of the nutrients we need, but we *are* getting more calories.  We can only use so much vitamin C in a day, and we can't store it.  If we keep drinking OJ, we are basically getting no added necessary nutrition, after that first 1/3 cup, but we are still taking in the calories from the extra OJ.

Their contention is that we are better off to consume those "extra" calories in the form of some other food, so we can take advantage of the different nutrients in that other food.

This makes a good deal of sense to me...............

I'm happy to eat a lot of different foods, but am less happy to wash/cut/peel/chop/measure/mix/cook/whatever all of those different ingredients.

So I got sneaky.  I started looking for more complicated foods instead of simpler ones.  Roasted unsalted mixed nuts (5 different things), instead of roasted unsalted almonds(1 lonely thing).

Zingerman's Bakehouse makes several breads that are packed with ingredients. This, for example, is 8-grain 3-seed bread.  Hey, presto! -- 11 different things in one tasty package!

Isn't it pretty?  Pleasing to the eye, pleasing to the taste, and provides access to the nutrients in 11 different grains/seeds!

I mentioned earlier that I didn't see any bouquets at the farmers' market.

Luckily there are violets growing up between the bricks of our patio.  Some of them had really long stems.

I took this little bottle out to the patio and picked a handful of violets.  A pretty, if tiny, bouquet.

All of these violet pics were taken with the phone.  So odd, that it sees the color of the wall so differently from different angles...........  This next pic is closer to reality than the prev.

I found a recipe online for baked rhubarb jam.  I don't want jam, I just want cooked rhubarb.  But mixing the rhubarb with sugar and baking it is awfully easy (and the weather was a bit chilly over the weekend, so I didn't mind having the oven on rather than the furnace).

Rhubarb is beautiful.

The recipe said to cut in 2" lengths.  When we make rhubarb crumble, we usually cut in slices that are less than 1/2".  I compromised at around an inch, erring on "more is better."  It takes less time to cut this sort of length than the shorter slices we usually go for!

Here it is, sugared up, ready to go in the oven.

Still pretty after an hour or so in the oven.

I decided to make the crumble (oatmeal, flour, brown sugar, butter) separately, and I toasted the nuts separately, too.

This meant I could add more sugar to the rhubarb, when I discovered that I had seriously underestimated.

This was good.  But.  We usually eat it with ice cream, and I didn't have any ice cream.  I'm sure I could have tolerated sour rhubarb more easily if I'd had ice cream, which has both sugar and soothing cream (which, I bet, would mitigate the sourness, even without sugar).

This was the first rhubarb I'd eaten this season.  Cooking it this way is very easy.  I mean to make more and freeze it.........  (Note to self -- 2.75 pounds of rhubarb doesn't come close to filling the oblong glass cake pan.  Get more next time.)

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everyday finance

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I am currently taking a class called Finance for Everyone: Smart Tools for Decision-Making.

Our prof is continually quoting Albert Einstein as saying "The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest."

We are looking at various problems, noting how much difference there is between the amount we put in, and the amount we get out, at different interest rates, and for different periods of time.

The problem we just looked at was saving for retirement.

If we save 1000 a year, and get an 8% increase (as is about what the American stock market has done, on average, over the last 50 years), if we do that for 25 years, we'll end up with $73,105.94.

If we do it for 50 years, we'll end up with $573,770.16.

I knew it would be bigger, but that much bigger?  Wow.

When they say "start saving early," they are not kidding.  !!!

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and the lima beans laugh and laugh

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When I took the excellent on-line class What a Plant Knows I learned a lot about plants and their reactions to the world around them.  The fact that they can't move means they have evolved a lot of ways to cope with their changing environment while staying put................

Here's a video from Atlas Obscura about how lima beans fight the caterpillars which eat them.  Attracting the enemies of their enemies is one of the plant defenses we learned about in the class.

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Finishing up Theropods to Birds

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I took the last quiz for Palaeontology:Theropod Dinosaurs and the Origin of Birds today.

This is part of the "Congratulations, you have passed the class!" message I got from the University of Alberta team who taught the course:

"Recall from this course that the wings and feathers, feet and claws, furcula, and maniraptoran wrists of birds were not solely their own. Such features evolved long ago in an age when the world was ruled by dinosaurs – an age that was almost, but not quite, extinguished. You can now appreciate that the sight of a bird in the sky is a triumph of evolution and a defiance of both gravity and extinction." 

Birds -- "a triumph of evolution, and a defiance of both gravity and extinction."  Yeah. 

Cool.

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Doggerland

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Not about dogs, alas, but about the land between Britain and continental Europe that is submerged beneath the ocean, now, but was above ground during the last ice age.  Doggerland was home to tens of thousands of people....

Sea level was 120 meters (!) lower, during the last ice age, than it is now.



By Juschki [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Here's a link to a page with an image of Doggerland.




 We learned about Doggerland in Maritime Archaeology.

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for you Arabia fans in the audience -- the Mary Rose

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In Maritime Archaeology, we learned about the Mary Rose.  She was a British warship (Tudor period), which eventually sank after being retrofitted to hold more and more cannons (note how close some of those cannons are to the water line, in the image below....).

this image is in the public domain

When the Mary Rose was recovered from the sea bottom, 4.5 centuries later, lots of artifacts were also recovered.  The set of finds are described, just like the Arabia, as being an excellent time capsule of life at sea in the first half of the 16th century.

I had heard of the Mary Rose, but didn't realize that there is a Mary Rose Museum....

Having found the Arabia's museum very interesting, the Mary Rose is definitely on my list of things to visit in the United Kingdom (as is Hadrian's Wall, since I took the Hadrian's Wall class!).




When people talk about the benefits of Massive Online Open Classes (MOOCs), I've never heard them mention enhanced tourism, but I can't help but think they have an effect...............


The people running the Maritime Archaeology class have asked students to let them know about archaeology in our parts of the world that has to do with water and boats.  I'm told the Arabia has been added to our class map of archaeological sites as a result of info I provided.

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another interesting time line -- history of maritime archaeology

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Here's another interesting timeline (with pictures!).  This is the history of maritime archaeology.


This timeline, too, is from my Maritime Archaeology class.

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We've controlled fire for 800,000 years?

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Here's an interesting interactive timeline of human evolution (from the Smithsonian).

It says bi-pedal primates been able to control fire for 800,000 years.

Wow.  That's a lot longer than I would have predicted!



I heard about the timeline in my Maritime Archaeology class.

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skellingtons

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Theropods to Birds is my new dino class.  Week 1 is on bird anatomy.  Birds are not like us.  In many ways.  Do you remember that I was gobsmacked, in Dino 101, to learn that birds breathe in a completely different way from mammals? 


Strange and curious.  Birds keep air all over the place, and a full respiration takes two inhale/exhale cycles.  Who knew............  Birds need to be able to expand their skeleton, in order to breathe.  You can suffocate a bird, by holding it too tightly.............

The "birds breathe" link describes the whole process, with excellent images.  (The above image is part of the story, and [unlike the pics at Foster & Smith Pet Education] this one is ok for me to copy and use here.)



Anyway.  Bird anatomy.

One of the things we were asked to contemplate in Theropods to Birds is the difference between the sternums of cats, and the sternums of flying birds.  (cats have tiny sternums; flying birds have enormous sternums)

In class they gave us some tiny skeleton pics to look at.  I went hunting for better pics.

Wow, did I ever find them!  This page, from the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, has some spectacular skeletons!

I've only looked at the chicken and the cat.  Scroll down, and click on the individual links.  Nice clear pics, nice labels..............

Really excellent!  So grateful to the people at UWLAX who took the time to make this wonderful learning resource available to all of us!  I wrote them a mash note.  I bet it went to the people who put up the web page.  I mean it for them, as well as the people who did the work on the skeletons, and the people who took the pics and got them ready for the web........  I hope the web people will share it with the biologists.


Speaking of why we love modern times, the www is surely a big reason!  All of this excellent info, available at the click of a few buttons............. 

This is a great time and place for a curious person to be alive.

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finished Orion class

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I just finished Orion class.  It wasn't mostly about Orion.  It was mostly about astronomy in general.  But I enjoyed it, and learned many things.

Here's the Orion nebula, from Wikimedia Commons.

This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA and ESA. NASA Hubble material (and ESA Hubble material prior to 2009) is copyright-free and may be freely used as in the public domain without fee, on the condition that only NASA, STScI, and/or ESA is credited as the source of the material.


That's 21 certificates earned, out of 32 MOOCs in which I listened to all of the lectures.  (Leaving 11 classes which I listened to, but for which I did not do exercises or take quizzes/tests.)

Given that I started my first MOOC in September of 2012, that's not too shabby.  :-)

How does anyone ever get bored, when there are so many interesting things to learn about???


Today, as we finished lunch, my husband asked me what I was thinking about.  I told him "Comet tails!  A comet has two of them -- one is dust (yellowish and curved), and the other is plasma (blue-white and straight) -- and both point away from the sun (because the sun is pushing them away)."

It occurred to me that I was probably the only person on the face of this Earth whose spouse had just asked that question, and gotten that answer!  :-)

I told him so, and he told me that he thought that I was very often the only person on the face of the planet to have said whatever I just said.  :-)

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Want to try putting a lander down safely on a comet?

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Want to try putting a lander down safely on a comet?

My first try got me "75% success" (better than the actual mission....).

I tried two more times, with worse results.............


If you scroll down on the page linked above, you can see the BBC's description, in a slate quarry, of what it might be like to try to land on a chancy surface with sharp pointy boulders (nevermind trying to do that landing from millions of miles away, on a moving target, unable to see what you're trying to land on!).............

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atmospheric opacity

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I saw this chart of the opacity of our atmosphere to various parts of the electromagnetic spectrum in Orion class today.  (They were talking about where different kinds of telescopes could or could not be placed, if they were to be useful.)

I was interested to see the visible spectrum is in one small trench, but the really "opportunity window" is for radio waves.  I did not know this.........

This version of the image is not very large -- if you like, you can click on it to see an embiggened version.

This image is from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atmospheric_electromagnetic_opacity.svg .

Here is the copyright data:  This file is in the public domain in the United States because it was solely created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that "NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted".

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you, too, can classify galaxies, too......

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You, too, can classify galaxies, too.  Hop on over to GalaxyZoo, if you like.  They show you an image, and then ask you some questions about it.  They have so many people working that it doesn't matter if you make a mistake -- they'll go with "majority rules"...............

Is this a cool thing to be able to do, or what?!?  You get to help do actual science, by lending your eyes and your judgement for a while............



They sent us to Galaxy Zoo from Orion class............

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