Since this five-week course by Jeanine Basinger of Wesleyan University officially ended this week, I guess I should write a few words on it as I usually do. I’m more reticent than usual about this because it turned out to be a rather bland course about a very narrow subject: how Hollywood depicts the institution of marriage in its films and whether this has changed over time and if so, how.
Category Archives: Personal Life
Introduction to Philosophy
Since I had some time until my next Coursera course is scheduled to start, I’ve been slowly watching the lecture videos for this one from the University of Edinburgh. It was previously offered as a normal course at least once before but has since been put into an at-your-pace mode, which means it’s always available but no professor is actively involved in it. This is the first time I’ve taken a course in this mode on Coursera.
The Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound, and Color
We’ve actually been finished with this course for a while now but I only recently realized that I never did write my usual post summarizing my experience with it. So here it is and just for the record it is taught by professor Scott Higgins of Wesleyan University.
Continue reading The Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound, and Color
A couple of concerts
My wife and I went to a couple of concerts recently, Hebe Tian on 13th December and Stefanie Sun on 20th December. I wasn’t planning on writing about either of them. Concerts are my wife’s passion, not mine, and I don’t really care about music in general anyway. But considering how both concerts were by fairly prominent Chinese female singers, took place at the same venue and in close succession, and yet differed markedly in quality, I felt tempted to write something.
An Introduction to Financial Accounting
I was planning to take a couple of computer-oriented courses on the Coursera platform over the past couple of months but real-life intervened and I had to change my plans. However, I did keep on with An Introduction to Financial Accounting by Brian Bushee of the University of Pennsylvania.
Principles of Computing
Looking back at my old posts, I see that I originally took Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python (IIPP) back at the end of 2012. Hard to believe it was so long ago. Principles of Computing (PoC) is the next MOOC from the same team at Rice University, with the addition of professor Luay Nakhleh. It is also part two of the three part Fundamentals of Computing specialization. I understand that now that Coursera is pushing the paid for Verified Certificates, quite a few students have signed up and paid for the specialization.
Functional Programming Principles in Scala
This is a course I’ve been meaning to take for a while now but the timing was just never right for me before now. The reason obviously is that this course is taught by Martin Odersky of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. After all, how often can you attend a course for a programming language taught by the designer of the language?