For a while, Stanford has been offering free online engineering courses for the public free of charge. You don't get the credit but the education is out there for anyone with the gumption and wile.
Stanford has decided this fall to offer three engineering/comp-sci courses (http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/august/online-computer-science-081611.html) that you can HAND IN TESTS AN ASSIGNMENTS AND GET REAL CREDIT...
For FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
(http://www.hotflick.net/flicks/2008_Bedtime_Stories/008BTS_Adam_Sandler_032.jpg)
There's no penalty if you fail or drop. I know some of you monkeys are just a little smarter than the rest of the simians and can DO this.
DO IT.
Damn, I wish it wasn't computer science!
Me too. I wish it didn't involve teh maths.
D: I am not at the level of stuffs I need to know to take thi shit and succeed at it. FUCK.
Oh my god, anything engineering is sexy... This is amazing.
hell, yeah.
i'm there.
Cool thanks navkat, I may have to sign up to one of those :)
Oh I'm all over this. Thanks for the link nyankat
Quote from: navkat on August 19, 2011, 04:31:02 AM
Me too. I wish it didn't involve teh maths.
I like math. I like science. Computers, though? Useless.
Quote from: Disco Pickle on August 19, 2011, 12:36:32 PM
Oh I'm all over this. Thanks for the link nyankat
Mmmmm...pickle.
This is a fantastic opportunity. And it's nothing I have a grasp of. I think I'm going to check out the first few lectures of each and see what happens. Thanks for the head's up, navkat. :)
I checked this out and while it's totally awesome and amazing, they don't seem to offer any courses on ACTUAL engineering, just computer crap.
Unless someone can tell me how being able to program an iPhone app is going to get a marine diesel engine back to life in an emergency, I don't think I have much use for it.
Or you could, you know, just watch Khan Academy.
AFAIC, unless you're actually trying to get a degree for some purpose (e.g. job opportunity, research), there's no reason to care about "credit". The only credit that matters when you are choosing to educate yourself for your own benefit of increased intelligence and knowledge is that itself. A degree is just a piece of paper that "proves" you met some sort of standard of understanding or research experience.
you don't actually get credit for these courses, from what i've seen. you get a 'certificate of completion' issued by the prof. that says how well you did.
the attraction to me is that they're engineering courses offered by a well regarded university where there is actually some interaction with the professor, and it's free.
They are NOT engineering courses, they are computer courses erroneously called "engineering" courses.
:?
ok...
i'll bite.
why is software engineering not engineering?
Engineering is manipulation of materials and forces.
Software "engineering" is manipulation of code/information. Otherwise known as computer programming.
Thanks Kai! I was having trouble articulating that and was going to have to resort to something snarky but ultimately not helpful as an answer.
Ippy: What Kai said.
Quote from: Fuck You One-Eye on August 20, 2011, 03:53:47 PM
They are NOT engineering courses, they are computer courses erroneously called "engineering" courses.
My :) turned into a :sad:
Quote from: Nadezhda on August 20, 2011, 05:17:26 PM
Quote from: Fuck You One-Eye on August 20, 2011, 03:53:47 PM
They are NOT engineering courses, they are computer courses erroneously called "engineering" courses.
My :) turned into a :sad:
Why? Because some of the big kids aren't impressed?
zOMG do u maek ur lyfe decisions based on wut ur frends say to?
You were interested in these courses simply because you were interested. Go with that, it's guttural and it what drives the apes out of the nit-picking, ass-scratching jungle. Fill ur meet-bucket, spag.
In case you haven't noticed, all the old-timers on this board argue...a lot.
a lot a lot.
With everything. Doesn't mean either of us is wrong, just that we're argumentative sons of bitches. It is the True Meaningtm of "Discord."
Quote from: navkat on August 20, 2011, 05:21:29 PM
Quote from: Nadezhda on August 20, 2011, 05:17:26 PM
Quote from: Fuck You One-Eye on August 20, 2011, 03:53:47 PM
They are NOT engineering courses, they are computer courses erroneously called "engineering" courses.
My :) turned into a :sad:
Why? Because some of the big kids aren't impressed?
zOMG do u maek ur lyfe decisions based on wut ur frends say to?
You were interested in these courses simply because you were interested. Go with that, it's guttural and it what drives the apes out of the nit-picking, ass-scratching jungle. Fill ur meet-bucket, spag.
My impression is that, like me, she was interested in engineering courses, and is disappointed because it turns out that these are actually computer science courses. There's no need to make fun of her for that.
Quote from: navkat on August 20, 2011, 05:21:29 PM
Quote from: Nadezhda on August 20, 2011, 05:17:26 PM
Quote from: Fuck You One-Eye on August 20, 2011, 03:53:47 PM
They are NOT engineering courses, they are computer courses erroneously called "engineering" courses.
My :) turned into a :sad:
Why? Because some of the big kids aren't impressed?
zOMG do u maek ur lyfe decisions based on wut ur frends say to?
You were interested in these courses simply because you were interested. Go with that, it's guttural and it what drives the apes out of the nit-picking, ass-scratching jungle. Fill ur meet-bucket, spag.
LOLZ
I was looking for real engineer courses. Software engineering is cool, but not really something I'm interested in at this moment in time, hence the sad. As a student of Anthropology, in the middle of her degree, I HAVE been fillin mah meet-bukkit with the actual reasons that apes went out of teh junglez. I have too much reel edukashuns to focus on to waste my time with something mislabelled that I was never interested in, in the first place.
THANX 4 POSTING THO, IF I EVER WNT TO LERN COMPLUTER PROGROMMIN OUTSIDE OF TEH UNERVISTIY, I VILL TOTES LOOK THESE LINQS UP AGAINZ. :sexybeast:
[EDIT - I type slow. Basically, what Nigel said, but with a splash reactionary asshattery!]
Quote from: navkat on August 20, 2011, 05:21:29 PM
Quote from: Nadezhda on August 20, 2011, 05:17:26 PM
Quote from: Fuck You One-Eye on August 20, 2011, 03:53:47 PM
They are NOT engineering courses, they are computer courses erroneously called "engineering" courses.
My :) turned into a :sad:
Why? Because some of the big kids aren't impressed?
zOMG do u maek ur lyfe decisions based on wut ur frends say to?
You were interested in these courses simply because you were interested. Go with that, it's guttural and it what drives the apes out of the nit-picking, ass-scratching jungle. Fill ur meet-bucket, spag.
Maybe she was just interested in, y'know, ACTUAL engineering courses.
ETA: Oops, looks like Nadezhda didn't need anyone's help laying the ownage down. :lulz:
Okay, my bad.
You should poke at the Stanford course offerings anyway. Even the ones which don't offer a cred might be of interest to you. I wish I had the head for maths, but alas for Alice! I got all the verbal/vocab/written/reading brainz and none of the "OMGzORZ SHOW ALL WORK" algorhythms are my LYFE brainz.
My brain, as far as number-like things go, is to FLAIL and NOT UNDERSTAND and be ANGST and then all of a sudden get it and be able to do it perfectly. It's easier to do this under the care of a professor/TA. I'm not sure how difficult it would be to take American courses as a Canadian student (as far as transferring credit goes :P)
Quote from: Fuck You One-Eye on August 20, 2011, 05:32:22 PM
Quote from: navkat on August 20, 2011, 05:21:29 PM
Quote from: Nadezhda on August 20, 2011, 05:17:26 PM
Quote from: Fuck You One-Eye on August 20, 2011, 03:53:47 PM
They are NOT engineering courses, they are computer courses erroneously called "engineering" courses.
My :) turned into a :sad:
Why? Because some of the big kids aren't impressed?
zOMG do u maek ur lyfe decisions based on wut ur frends say to?
You were interested in these courses simply because you were interested. Go with that, it's guttural and it what drives the apes out of the nit-picking, ass-scratching jungle. Fill ur meet-bucket, spag.
Maybe she was just interested in, y'know, ACTUAL engineering courses.
ETA: Oops, looks like Nadezhda didn't need anyone's help laying the ownage down. :lulz:
I didn't realize I was being owned. Sorries. I'll try to be moar butthurtz after I've finished my coffee.
No seriously: I know my post was kind of sarcastic but I wasn't trying to own Nadhezzzawhatevhumhur. It was more of an encouraging poke saying "Fuck what these morons think! PUT IT IN YOU."
I believe that MIT and UC Berkeley both offer more extensive free online courses, so that might be the more effective way to go.
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/
ECH. your definition of engineering is too limited.
the application of science and mathematics to create useful systems is engineering.
software fits that bill...
and if you say that they are only manipulating a machine, then where do you draw the line?
If you are designing an IC chip, i assume you would call that engineering, right?
and if you were taking an FPGA design and creating an ASIC from it, wouldn't that be engineering?
so when you do the FPGA design, that is engineering, right?
well, that's done in code, though.... so, is it programming, or engineering?
I don't speak acronym.
And I'm really not interested in a semantic argument about it anyway. you're probably right in a very technical sense, but in an old-school "how fucking useful is this going to be with my ass on the line?" sense, if I can't use the knowledge to make it float, fly, drive, power something that does one of those things, or keep nature and/or other destructive elements at bay, it's not the kind of engineering I'm interested in.
I mean, hell, there are people who are into social engineering. That's all well and good and they're creating and influencing systems too, but I'm still going to be eating them when the time comes for that sort of thing.
Gotcha. i can understand your sentiment.
I would just be remiss to let your statement that software is not engineering go by unchallenged, since i work directly with a lot of coneheads. :) particularly since it's in a field where the software and hardware engineering disciplines intermingle significantly.
as far as those acronyms... they just represent a technology that points out the boundary between hardware and software being blurry.
Quote from: navkat on August 20, 2011, 06:11:03 PM
It was more of an encouraging poke saying "Fuck what these morons think! PUT IT IN YOU."
There was an Engineer in my Medieval Archaeology class last month (Summer classes are only 3-5 weeks long!) We had a conversation similar to this about the retardity of some of the humanities students trying to apply their non-logics to our respective group projects, and then he put it in me. The moral of this story is that we were being snobby Anthropologists and then we had sex.
Quote from: Nadezhda on August 20, 2011, 08:44:19 PM
Quote from: navkat on August 20, 2011, 06:11:03 PM
It was more of an encouraging poke saying "Fuck what these morons think! PUT IT IN YOU."
There was an Engineer in my Medieval Archaeology class last month (Summer classes are only 3-5 weeks long!) We had a conversation similar to this about the retardity of some of the humanities students trying to apply their non-logics to our respective group projects, and then he put it in me. The moral of this story is that we were being snobby Anthropologists and then we had sex.
:lulz:
Quote from: Nigel on August 20, 2011, 06:39:29 PM
I believe that MIT and UC Berkeley both offer more extensive free online courses, so that might be the more effective way to go.
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/
WINNAR.
Nigel ALWAYS wins my threads! GOD!
Quote from: navkat on August 20, 2011, 11:10:03 PM
Quote from: Nigel on August 20, 2011, 06:39:29 PM
I believe that MIT and UC Berkeley both offer more extensive free online courses, so that might be the more effective way to go.
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/
WINNAR.
Nigel ALWAYS wins my threads! GOD!
:thanks:
If you want to learn how to engineer (as opposed to write code)...well, the Pirate Bay has literally thousands of engineering text books.
Of course, you may need to brush up on your maths a little first....but the Pirate Bay also has thousands of mathematical texts books.
Of course, you may need to brush up on your reading a little first...but etc etc etc
The only excuse for not having the grand sum of human knowledge inside your skull is a lack of time or interest.
i think interactive discussion with a teacher greases the wheels considerably.
or even a group discussion among those learning the topic.
just going it by yourself is significantly more difficult for the majority of people.
i would imagine that since all the knowledge is there, a forum for learning in as efficient way as possible will emerge before too long. that will be pretty revolutionary..
Quote from: Iptuous on August 21, 2011, 04:51:06 PM
i think interactive discussion with a teacher greases the wheels considerably.
or even a group discussion among those learning the topic.
just going it by yourself is significantly more difficult for the majority of people.
i would imagine that since all the knowledge is there, a forum for learning in as efficient way as possible will emerge before too long. that will be pretty revolutionary..
Speaking as someone who has been almost entirely self-educated since 3rd grade with the help of a bicycle, a bus pass, and a library card, I can say that even the most highly-motivated autodidact may find instructor interaction more conducive to learning in some areas than in others, and peer discussion is really vital in forming a solid grasp on some subjects. I was terrible at math and had no confidence in my abilities until I took a college math class with a real live instructor who explained and demonstrated the principles on a blackboard. My friend Dinah, on the other hand, devours math books alone in her dining room.
I don't need the instructor and the blackboard when I'm reading about biology, and I don't especially feel like I need peer discussion, but in philosophy, literature, and psychology, peer discussion helps develop my understanding from different perspectives.
Quote from: Nigel on August 21, 2011, 05:18:48 PM
Quote from: Iptuous on August 21, 2011, 04:51:06 PM
i think interactive discussion with a teacher greases the wheels considerably.
or even a group discussion among those learning the topic.
just going it by yourself is significantly more difficult for the majority of people.
i would imagine that since all the knowledge is there, a forum for learning in as efficient way as possible will emerge before too long. that will be pretty revolutionary..
Speaking as someone who has been almost entirely self-educated since 3rd grade with the help of a bicycle, a bus pass, and a library card, I can say that even the most highly-motivated autodidact may find instructor interaction more conducive to learning in some areas than in others, and peer discussion is really vital in forming a solid grasp on some subjects. I was terrible at math and had no confidence in my abilities until I took a college math class with a real live instructor who explained and demonstrated the principles on a blackboard. My friend Dinah, on the other hand, devours math books alone in her dining room.
I don't need the instructor and the blackboard when I'm reading about biology, and I don't especially feel like I need peer discussion, but in philosophy, literature, and psychology, peer discussion helps develop my understanding from different perspectives.
Well put.
there's a big difference between "software engineering" and "writing code".
it's probably not "really real engineering for realness" (though nobody defined that yet, ITT), but probably moreso than "social engineering" which is something else entirely and just called "engineering" in a very different, looser, meaning of the word.
"writing code" is what small webdevelopers do, and what computer scientists do (whether they're writing code for biology or physics, doesn't matter), simple one-off stuff, get the task done, crunch the numbers or serve the webpage. computing science code is generally horrible, doesn't matter, it gets the job done (except that it kinda puts a wrench into the whole "repeatable" bit of scientific research, which becomes kinda tough if nobody can or wants to read your code--but that's a whole other discussion).
"software engineering" is a completely different beast. it deals with billing systems for phone companies (you know how complicated all the different subscriptions are? multiply that by millions of clients signing new contracts every month), accounting hours, treatment and medicine for hospitals, things like that. including the parts where the archives of the system worked completely different a year ago, but still keeping the databases not to contradict eachother, and not lose data, and how certain things could be a lot simpler if they didn't have to pass through several layers of management and government regulations. in order to keep all of this even *slightly* in check, there's many protocols for automated testing, manual testing, deployment and development cycles.
it's also (IMVPO) major boring crap that I hope I never have to do (though it pays extremely well), but just "writing code", it is not.
I have no idea what specifically these courses are teaching though, I didn't look. Just saying that software engineering involves a whole lot more than just writing code, it's not even "writing code at a very advanced level and doing it really professionally" because often the code itself is rather simple (there's a lot of it, though), the tough bits is all the stuff I mentioned above.
It's three courses: Machine Learning, Intro to AI, and Intro to Databases.
Ok, I've done courses with pretty much the same titles in university.
My very personal opinion :
The first two are "mindcandy", in the sense that they're really cool to learn about, but not particularly useful career-wise, unless you're going into research and/or doing a full Computer Science education next to it.
Intro to AI is probably quite broad and you'll learn about a variety of topics, though probably mostly from the perspective of getting to know what you'd like to delve deeper into later.
Machine Learning was the topic of my Master's research project (that I never finished), and I can talk about it for hours :) It's a bit more math and statistics oriented, but from a practical point of view. It deals with number crunching and datamining of big datasets in order to make predictions about it. The basic idea is that you feed the computer (Machine) a bucketload of labeled data points, and you want to make the computer learn to label unseen data in a similar way. Spamfilters are based on Machine Learning, you tell it what is spam or not, and after a while it manages to classify it on its own. Some ML algorithms allow you to tweak the false positive and false negative rates, which is probably important for spam.
In quite a few algorithms, Bayesian reasoning is employed, which is an area of interest to some people here on the board, there's bound to be a lecture on this topic in this course, so they might want to check out at least that video or lecture slides once it is put online.
Career-wise, if you were ever thinking about applying at a search engine company, having a completed course on Machine Learning on your CV will definitely work in your favour. Possibly even if the position doesn't immediately involve code. Similar for analytics-type jobs at larger "social" web companies.
Actually, turns out that Intro to AI has two lectures involving Bayesian learning: http://robots.stanford.edu/cs221/schedule.html
Additionally, possibly the lectures on "Planning in Belief Space" and "Games (Adversarial Search)" (that's Game Theory) may be of interest to the LessWrong-fans as well. (from Intro to AI schedule (http://robots.stanford.edu/cs221/schedule.html))
Waitwait I got it all wrong, that's the meatspace schedule. The online cyberspace schedule is different and mixes up the lectures a bit: Intro to AI online schedule (http://robots.stanford.edu/cs221/online.html), seems to cover the same topics, but a bit more condensed .. hm.
Aha, and in the good traditional of (technical?) university course information, the format for the schedule of the ML course is of course presented in a completely different manner: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs229/ additionally it seems to be the information for the 2010 course, but there is no newer info, typical ... (I'm getting flashbacks here ... :lol:) Nice thing is that the lecture notes and lots of material seems to be already available for download (http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs229/materials.html), so you can start right away! A quick glance shows that the ML course gets pretty technical, though, they're not kidding about the requisites of computer programming, linear algebra and probability theory. So that's not for everyone, I'm afraid. (although there's "Section Notes" available for download with review/refreshers about Linear Algebra and Probability. You still need to be able to write and read code--but there's links to tutorials for Octave [opensource version of MATLAB])
These two courses, however, really have nothing to do with Software Engineering. But neither do they claim to be, BTW, that was just navkat mentioning "engineering" in the OP :) You can just about call it "engineering" in the sense that it's technical topics. Definitely not Software Engineering though.
Intro to databases kind of falls under the category of Software Engineering. In the sense that traditional SE is really more about the design, management and planning of large-scale software projects (seriously more like part Business, part IT). But databases are usually the central or key component in such large projects, and looking at the schedule/lecture titles, it seems that this course deals both with the technical parts of databases as well as the problems you'll encounter in design/planning a large database-based system ("Data management challenges at Facebook & Twitter"), and selecting the right tool (type of DB) for the job.
Even though I understand the absolute necessity of this kind of knowledge for building large IT projects, this topic was for me major boring shit. Though it wasn't taught well at my university, very outdated stuff, this course seems a lot more by the times. Also because of that reason I can't really estimate the level of knowledge required to do this course.
Possibly the important thing to consider about the Intro to Databases course is that, though it may be boring shit, very complex boring shit even, it is also the subject where the really well-paid solid IT jobs are at. It's always in demand, because so much of our society and industry is dependent on IT solutions that make use of gigantic database systems, and they're always going to need dependable, knowledgeable people that can dig into the innards of these systems in order to keep them running. In that sense, don't tell me it's not engineering.
Schedule: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~widom/cs145/index.html
TLDR: if you wanna learn new smart things for fun, cherry-pick some of the cool shit from Intro to AI. The ML course is probably too hard if you can't linear algebra, probability and computer program. The DB course is a subject I'm not very familiar with, the type of thing that can land you a really good job, though I'm not sure if just one course on DB systems is going to cut it.
bump for enrollment has begun:
https://www.ai-class.com/registration/
HAWT.
Can I touch it?