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Great Teacher and Great Message!
Review Date: July 20, 2010
Course rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
"This is a good course from TTC. Here are my positives and one area for the course to improve on:
Positives:
+ Prof Judith Grabiner is very clear and passionate - on par with other top professors from TTC. She can make tough topics v easy to understand - mark of a great teacher!
+ She gave good real-life examples for her arguments/ideas (e.g., Ford Pinto case (in lecture 3) and correlation examples (lecture 4))
+ I love her summaries at the end of some lectures (she provided key questions/checklists as well as summary bullet points)
+ I love it when answers to some numerical / technical questions are provided at the end of some lectures (other TTC courses should aim to do this as well)
+ I love it how she explained key mathematics from first principles (e.g., permutation and combination) - i.e., providing the WHY rather than just giving the HOW (or giving the formulae)
+ Good use of diagrams, slides and examples
+ I particularly love her simple and clear description of non-Euclidian geometry (including Einstein's application of it in General Theory of Relativity) and its impact on philosophy, culture and art
+ I also particularly liked her message that the application of mathematics should be balanced between certainty/precision and probabilistic/statistical(individual-by-individual) thinking. Particularly, I like her message that, at the end of the day, humans are "humans" (i.e., need to consider the moral, emotional and ethical implications of life and mathematics - can't be completely rational)
Area to improve on:
- I feel that some of the lectures are too slow / too easy. I recommend packing more insights per lecture (e.g., some of the Euclidian lectures could perhaps be combined into one or two lectures; Plato's Republic and Meno messages that are relevant to the course could have been combined into one or two lectures, etc.)
Overall, it's a good course presented by a great teacher."
Enjoyed this course!
Review Date: July 18, 2010
Overall Review: 5 stars (out of 5)
"This is another great course from the TTC. I really learnt a lot from it.
Here are the positives, negatives and summary of key insights/enjoyed that I particularly enjoyed.
Positives:
+ Prof William Cook is enthusiastic and passionate - he certainly loves the subject
+ He is a great story teller; very engaging
+ He presents varieties of Christian characters from various eras, Christian denominations and geographies
+ He provides a balanced view of the Christian characters (i.e., including their more 'negative' aspects)
+ He provides the backdrop of the history of Christianity to create context for the lives of the Christians discussed
+ Great summary at the end (final chapter) summarising what the great Christians have in common
Negatives: Can't find any; perhaps could cover more great Christians (e.g., St Padre Pio in the 20th century) but this would make the course too long perhaps. 24 lectures I think is just the right length for this course
Some key insights/ideas which I enjoyed:
1. The Christian maxim (expressed by 17th-century Lutheran Johann Arndt): "At the Judgment, God will not ask people what they know but, rather, how they have loved"
2. St Antony of Egypt argued that anyone who knows himself / herself knows God (i.e., he emphasised the importance of the 'inward journey')
3. St Antony of Egypt recommends the acceptance of criticism as well as praise with equality
4. Monk Evagrius of Pontus wrote a work on prayer:
- Any desire for vengeance blocks people when they try to pray
- The state of prayer is one of imperturbable calm
5. Amma Syncletica said that it is possible to be a solitary while living in a crowd and that a solitary might, in fact, live in the crowd of his own thoughts
6. St Augustine: Despite the fact and the sins we commit throughout our lives, we are nevertheless made to praise God, and we cannot find peace until we do so
7. St Benedict: "Idleness is the enemy of the soul"
8. Bernard of Clairvaux described God as a lover in his meditative reading on the Song of Songs
9. Clare of Assisi: Christ is the mirror into which we must gaze
10. Catherine of Siena wrote, "We always become one with the object of our love"
11. Bernardino of Siena defined how one can both be a successful merchant and a good Christian. He believed that the only Christian justification for being wealthy was that the rich had the means to be generous to the poor
12. St Thomas More made the case for a life of "rolling up one's sleeves" and try to make the world a little better (in an imperfect world)
13. John Wesley urged Christians to aim for a life of "Christian perfection" (as per Matthew 5:48)
14. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who died in a Nazi concentration camp, in the middle of suffering, learnt the necessity to live a life of trust (faith) on God
15. Maximilian Kolbe volunteered to die in place of a stranger in Auschwitz in 1944
16. Mother Teresa: "The only way to conquer the world is through love", and that holiness begins with people divesting themselves of their own wills and surrendering to God
17. The final chapter summarised the commonality of the diverse Christians outlined in this course: All were rooted in scripture (Old and New Testaments), all were fully committed, all balanced prayer (contemplative) and active (serving) life, all practiced humility (in the sense of recognising one's place in the universe, which is, far from the center of it), and all were great lovers (of God and of people)."
Could be presented in a much, much better way
Review Date: July 4, 2010
Overall Review: 2 stars (out of 5)
"Compared to other TTC course that I have finished, this one took me the longest by far. It was difficult for this course to hold my attention from one lecture to the next. Here are some positives (including good insights) and negatives of this course:
Positives:
+ There are some good insights / examples offered - I will summarize some of them at the end of this review.
Negatives (most or all refer to presentation rather than content):
- Prof's Stevens' presentation is often too slow in certain easy parts (e.g., explaining the hawk and dove game in the first 8-10 mins in Lecture 18 is way too long) and too fast for difficult 'please explain' parts (e.g., in the beginning of Lecture 9, he came up with the mixed strategies of 3x3 matrix (Stephen and Maude) too fast (in less than 30 seconds) - I asked myself: How did you come up with that?)
- Within each 30-min lecture, the presentation often lacks structure. Sometime it's difficult to follow where Prof Stevens is at in his arguments, and where he's going next
- At frequent points in the lectures, Prof Stevens relied too much on his jokes / styles to engage - often he just needs to 'get to the point' much faster!
- I recommend Prof Stevens to put the tables together with the video of his lecturing (side by side). This is done sometime - but not often enough. Often it's difficult to follow him otherwise
- I recommend Prof Stevens move from using 'you and I' to Parties 'A and B' (for example) - using 'you and I' is confusing (because 'you and I' parties change a lot as I think about it to myself (vs him saying it))
- Need answers to the questions provided at the back of the guidebook. I think (particularly for the more technical courses like this one) it defeats the purpose of having these questions if the answers are not provided
- Soccer penalty kicker & goalkeeper example in Lecture 8 - Prof Stevens saying that the statistics are replicated closely in real life is really 'circular' in thinking. The probabilities are obtained from the real-life data, so saying that the real life data agrees with the probabilities obtained is obviously circular.
Some of the useful insights and examples from this course include (not in any order):
1. Signalling (quality firm offering 'introductory offer')
2. Signalling (Coke doing a WOW ad - to signal they are strong financially; companies having lavish offices)
3. Threats (blanket threats can work if we individually identify / number threatees)
4. Incentive (Buffett example - if proposal fails, pay money to the minority group - i.e., make the proposal less likely to fail)
5. Sections on Oligopoly and Monopoly - interesting; e.g., it pays to pay a potential competitor to stay of a market
6. (Success of) Robert Campeau's two-tiered bid (vs Macy's) for Federated Stores (eg of prisoners' dilemma for shareholders)
7. Gov't ban on cigarette advertising - boon for cigarette companies (solving their prisoner's dilemma!)
8. How to make strategic moves credible (e.g., Peoplesoft use 'Doomsday Device' in response to hostile takeover; using 'agents' in negotiations)
9. Anonymous players (increasing social distance) reduce cooperation
10. Axelrod's winning Tit for tat strategy suggests: be Nice, Provokable, Forgiving & Straightforward
11. Bounded rationality in people (people only think 2 - 3 steps ahead; not more)
12. Evolutionary game theory (lecture 18) - the best phenotypes' Evolutionary Stable Strategies (ESS) or 'fitness' occur (even without the necessity of 'rationality')
13. Auctions: If people are risk averse, 'Dutch' beat 'English' auctions, and 1st price sealed bids beat Vickrey (2nd price) sealed bids.
14. Auctions in the internet: 'Dutch' beat 'English' auctions (people don't want to waste time (say in e-bay)), and vice versa in real (physical) auctions ('English' beat 'Dutch')
15. Auctions: Watch out for 'collusions' of buyers
16. Splitting the pie: Use Shapley value or Nash cooperative bargaining solution (basically you get the value you can get yourself (without the other party(ies)), and everything else gets shared equitably)
17. Coopetition - good examples (e.g., Nintendo in the 1980s (lots of bargaining power!))
18. Business - changing rules in contracts can be useful (e.g., most favoured customer, meet the competition, everyday low prices, and take-or-pay clauses)."
