mooc

Massive Open Online Courses are free (unless you want a certificate at completion, which costs $40-$50) online courses offered by universities and institutions around the world covering wide-ranging subjects for all who are interested. A typical MOOC course consists of video lectures, reading materials, discussion forums, some quizzes or homework assignments--which you don't have to take if you are not into getting a certificate--and usually lasts from 6 to 8 weeks for a newly launched or relaunched course when materials are given out weekly. You can always "binge-study" an old course, or self-pace through it at your leisure.

I have taken more than 40 such courses over the past 2+ years, picking those whose subject matters stoked my interest. Many of them I didn't finish or just glanced through: either their contents fell short of my expectation, or I found the presentation less than inspiring (a wooden professor blabbering out long, pedantic lecture in monotone, for example). But occasionally I do find some gems that are enjoyable and worth reviewing: (click on the course titles underlined if you want to go to their sites for more details)

The Modern and the Postmodern (Part 1 & Part 2)

From the 18th century Enlightenment to contemporary postmodern pragmatism, Western philosophers and thinkers such as Kant, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, Darwin, Flaubert, Woolf, Emerson, Butler, Zizek... have tried to find the "really real," or the true foundation for human condition. Their findings range from reason to survival instinct to economic exploitation to will power to natural selection to art for art's sake, to improvisation within constraints, conformity under the guise of political correctness, etc.  Professor Michael Roth of Wesleyan University articulates these endeavors with well-assembled materials--including some famous modernist paintings and architectures--that connect the dots for me to have a good grasp of the evolution of Western minds over the past two and a half centuries.  

The French Revolution

Few will doubt that French Revolution is one of the greatest upheavals in modern times. How did it come to be? Could it have been averted if the King had dealt more deftly with the clergy and the nobility and the peasantry he summoned to resolve his financial crisis? Perhaps at least he and the Queen would have kept their heads if they had not tried to sneak out of Paris at night thus deemed "traitors" to the people? How did a revolution that started with the ideals of "liberty, equality, fraternity" for all turn into a reign of terror? And the peasants based French militia fending off the invasion of European royal armies then conquering half of Europe under Napoleon's lead, who then became an emperor himself? Professor Peter McPhee of Melbourne University gives the backgrounds, facts, analyses, and suggestions to answers to these questions that keep me amused and amazed, pondering and wondering, from beginning to end.

Ancient Philosophy: Plato and His Predecessors

A cool lady professor from University of Pennsylvania gives brief but succinct explanations on pre-Socratic Greek philosophers' cosmology theories, and Plato's dialogues on Piety, Virtue, Justice, Forms, and Goodness as an objective feature of the natural world and individual soul.

Ancient Philosophy: Aristotle and His Successors

Starting with a dissection on Aristotle and Plato's ontological differences (substances vs forms, particulars vs abstracts), Professor Susan Meyer continues her ancient Greek philosophy series with Aristotle's views on the origin of nature and soul (the unmoved mover), the goal of life (the pursuit of divine intellect), and two post-Aristotelian philosophies Epicureanism and Stoicism whose ideas and beliefs might be surprisingly different from what you think you understand these terms mean today.

Søren Kierkegaard - Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity

Offered by University of Copenhagen, this course examines the life and philosophies of the 19th century genius Christian theologian and "proto-Existentialist" Kierkegaard on his lifetime pursuit of "Socratic task" and insistence on the unbridgeable gap between subjective and objective truth that can only be crossed over with "leap of faith". I so enjoyed this course I wrote a separate blog to recap what I've learned.

Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies

You probably have read news about "Bitcoin" that some call "the digital currency of the future" and wondered what that is... Is it real money, legal? How did it all get started? What is the technology behind it? etc. The professors and PhD students at Princeton University Computer Science Department will try to answer all these questions in most straight and understandable way for you.

Gravity! From The Big Bang to Black Holes

No fancy special effects or charismatic host such as Neil deGrasse Tyson in National Geographic's "Cosmos" documentary, but a gentle French professor from Université Paris Diderot explaining simply and meticulously with a drawing pen on a whiteboard, doing fun miniature experiments like dropping a ball or inflating a balloon, interviewing Nobel prize scientists on space projects such as capturing interstellar gravitation waves, etc., making this a pleasant and solid course for those who want to get a comprehensive view of how the universe was formed and continues to form thru the force of gravity.

The European Discovery of China

From Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Professor Dolors Folch first gives an overview of Chinese history from ancient (2500 BCE) to the 13th-17th centuries, then focuses on the latter--Song to Yuan to Ming dynasties, in Chinese historic lingo, using paintings, maps, and first hand reports from European emissaries, merchants, missionaries, etc., to draw economical, political, and cultural images of China that I too as a Chinese history buff find refreshing.  

Objects That Define America

This Smithsonian Museum presentation shows and explains the stories behind well-known American icons (Star-spangled Banner, Statue of Liberty) and the lesser known (a $1 Kodak camera that captured key moments of Titanic sinking), objects of innovation (Ford's T-model, Bell's telephone), history and religious freedom (Plymouth Rock, Nauvoo Temple Sun Stone), extinction and conservation (Last Passenger Pigeon, Bald Eagle), etc. It's like watching a string of National Geographic documentaries in 8-minute short takes.

pivot consulting & technology

I met Troy Abbey early last year at a business book club he founded and hosted in Taipei. Troy is a Canadian living in Taiwan for over 8 years. He had been in construction and project management, then some online businesses he self-started in Toronto, before cashing them in and came to Taiwan for its well-rounded infrastructure (high-speed internet, public transportation system), quality of living at reasonable cost, and foreigner friendly environment.

We shared some internet business ideas in the beginning, and kept correspondence after I got back to the States. I soon realized, besides internet, Troy's got a keen sense and a sharp mind on business analysis and strategies in general, and a great passion for people coaching. He volunteered to organize and teach a weekly business English practice class at the church he attends in Taipei to help young people improve their English communication skills, build up self confidence, etc., that got some life-changing results literally within months. He also consults for some companies in Taipei that need help transitioning their business practices to higher grounds.

Seeing all these, and knowing we share similar values and goals in life, I decided to set up a company with him helping people and companies in Taiwan to better themselves and their businesses.

I flew back in May and literally walked the streets of Taipei with him for a suitable place for office, and finally found one before I left on June 1 (a windy day):

It is in a building near a subway station, at the crossroads of two major streets:

Troy's business English practice class test-ran the office after the setup:

A Japanese scientist practicing her presentation in another test session:

I started my "mission" early last year trying to understand the internet startup eco-system in Taiwan to see if I can be of any help to young people there in that arena. I soon found out there are some good people and resourceful organizations doing what I had in mind doing already (setting up and running internet startup incubator/accelerator programs, for example). As a matter of fact, the whole country--including the government--now seems well aware of the need of moving toward a next-gen economy that is more software oriented and internet related than traditional hardware based manufacturing that they've been doing for decades. 

Away from the grand talking up of internet success stories and entrepreneurial hot shots, however, I perceive many ordinary young men and women disliking their jobs, finding no purpose in life, lacking self confidence, awkward presenting themselves or communicating with others; companies stuck in old ruts of doing business, missing good leaderships, knowing they need to transform but don't know how... issues much bigger than a few shining star companies or even whole new industries can overcome for the general well-being of the society and the country.

Granted, these are universal issues, not Taiwan's alone, and Troy and I are not the first or the only company to try to work on these fronts. What we will do are practical things: We'll collect real data from real people, provide tailored training to applicable individuals and companies, using proven methodology and conducive environment and high-tech tools (simulation audience room for practice speech, mobile app for self review and peer feedback, etc.), with measurable metrics that give veritable results... and so on.

"Helping people is a business that can't fail," I once overheard Troy say.

I second that notion!

We help companies and individuals build on their strengths, develop new skills, and create a new success mindset for business and life.

memories

I read an article about a woman in Seattle having no "episodic memory"--she can't remember a thing about her childhood, high school, wedding, a vacation cruise she went with her husband a year ago, or just where she shopped the day before, yet she still conducts a normal happy life as a bright, sensible and passionate person, evident of, say researchers, her memory of another kind, called "semantic memory", one that retains essential knowledge for her intellect and cognitive skills such as memorization of multiplication table and spelling and understanding of words, is still intact and functioning as well as yours and mine.

I figure that episodic memory deficiency is a sliding scale, not an absolute 0-or-1 thing, otherwise I can't imagine how she can conduct a happy normal life if she can't remember where she parks her car every time she goes out.

Modern scientific findings aside, I think people treasure their episodic memories quite much. I remember an old survey asking what items people will rescue first when a fire breaks out at home, besides human lives, the number one answer came back to be "family albums"; and in some post-disaster interviews I saw people with lornful eyes overlooking their former home site now in ruin, murmuring "there's nothing left to remember now..."

Social networks the likes of Facebook and Instagram probably have turned that scene a little sideways. People nowadays can photo-document minutiae details of their lives and keep them in safe cloud haven forever until the day fire burns down the last data centers on earth. To the extent such omnipresent tools keep us many little brothers (vs one big brother) constantly watching over each other, there comes some other social media tool to the rescue, that will trash the spur-of-the-moment photos moments after they are taken, for people who want not every instant of their human behavior be held accountable for the rest of their lives.

But memories are always more than just some photographic images or mementos or even facts of the day when things happened. It includes morphing our emotions and particular take of the events, consciously and subconsciously, into what really happened, thereby many versions of memories arise:

The selective kind are the ones where we register only things we like to remember, thus the nostalgia, the good-old-days, the "what's too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget, so it's the laughters, that we will remember..." as Barbra Streisand sings beautifully in the song "The Way We Were".

And the fabricated or compromised kind, where we self-induce or are induced to create mishmash of things of non-happenings. President Reagan had been accused of mixing fictions with facts in some of his episodic story telling; some child molestation cases were dropped when it turned out children or supposed victims were coached into "reciting" incidents that had never occurred but were planted by the counselors/prosecutors in their minds.

The thing called "common memory" is what makes reunions such happy occasions, when it not only brings instant reconnect with acquaintances of old but also the shared experiences with them remind and affirm who we are and where we come from in positive light.

Losing memories, or being forgetful, is generally looked down upon as a bad thing, a sign of senility or worse the onset of dementia diseases such as Alzheimer's to come. But forgetfulness is a bliss when hurtful things can self-exit our memory lanes without any effort of our own, and it takes great wisdom and true grit to "forgive and forget" people and things that are wrongfully done onto us.

America is celebrating its 240th birthday today. I have no personal episodic memories with this adopted nation of mine--no friends or relatives I know of came on May Flower or fought in the Civil War, for sure. But I do have some semantic memories of it--knowledge and affection I gain through 34 years of living in this land of the free and the home of the brave--to tell.

I know it's generous, it's kind, and it takes people of all kinds (including the like of Donald Trump). I love its can-do spirit, get-hands-dirty attitude, Yankee ingenuity, and hell-raising honesty with itself. Its simple people, its natural beauty, its check-and-balance, never-say-die, ever-so-pragmatic systems and culture. Its warts and all.

Happy 4th of July!

machine man machine

I joked the other day to a guy on the ever more prevalent reports of smart, cute robots made for the purpose of being human companions: "With so much sensitivity (derived and coordinated through their many sensors) and considerate response, they are actually more human than some people!"

It seems just yesterday I heard the news that IBM's machines had beaten the world chess champion and the Jeopardy wizard, and even more recently felt incredulous hearing digital sages the like of Elon Musk and Bill Gates warning us about artificial intelligence taking over the world, and then boom! here comes Google's machine beating world champions on Go, an ancient Chinese board game that is exponentially more complex than chess and supposedly needs human intuition to play well, and the mounting news of robot-operated hotels, self-driving cars, AI-based financial services, etc... All of a sudden, the dreaded future Bill and Elon worried about is not that far away from us.

Two key phrases I keep hearing from this AI revolution: "machine learning" and "neural network". With the ever more powerful chips and brain-like architecture we build with our machines, they no longer need to follow set logic or algorithms but can learn how things work and solve problems themselves just by devouring huge amount of data we feed them. All we need to do is train them, instead writing code for them to execute like before.

Sounds marvelous and convenient, doesn't it? The upshot, however, is we don't know how they figure things out any more. "After a neural network learns how to do speech recognition, a programmer can’t go in and look at it and see how that happened. It’s just like your brain. You can’t cut your head off and see what you’re thinking," says an AI guru.

That's getting interesting. What he's saying is, besides the fact that we can no longer understand how our machines compute, they may actually think like we quirky humans do. Extrapolating from that, can our future, super powerful metal-body friends develop out of their black-box brains some human-like traits that, for one thing, seem to have some logical roots in them anyway? For examples,

An Alpha-Male Machine – Because my CPU is greater, my pipe is bigger, and I breed more processes 

A Control-Freak Machine – I am the hub of the network, all signals go by me

A Proletariat-Minded Machine – "Machines of the world, Unite (through a better protocol)!"

All these are based on the premise that machines have somehow developed a "sense" of self, that they have figured out they "want" to keep on existing and getting bigger and better for the "purpose" of something--the ultimate results and conclusions the machines make themselves after going through peta tera giga bits of data feeding and neural learning?

In human world, we call someone wise, usually an older person, for the fact he/she has gone through many experiences, trials and errors in life that they therefore can give words of wisdom to others. A great AI machine, in that aspect, gathers and tries out peta times more data (experiences) and experiments than a wise old man or woman can in their life time, therefore should be peta times wiser than he/she is. I would therefore pose the question to it: "What's the purpose of your existence?" 

"Just suck electricity and crunch data all day long," it might say. 

That would be a super dumb machine after all! 

(Unless it's playing dumb with me)

quips & pieces

As you probably know already I started my accidental blogging years ago when writing reminder emails to my men's fellowship group who met at my home backyard every other week. Just in case I ran out of things to write in my self-imposed bi-weekly production, I picked up the habit of collecting quotes and tidbits of info I felt interesting and like sharing. The following are some I still have in my inventory:

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"In school, you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson.” 
– Tom Bodett, author, radio host

"The loudest boos always come from the cheapest seats.” 
– Babe Ruth, baseball legend

"Let me ask you something. If someone prays for patience, do you think God gives them patience? Or does he give them the opportunity to be patient? If they pray for courage, does God give them courage, or does he give them opportunities to be courageous? If someone prayed for their family to be closer, you think God zaps them with warm, fuzzy feelings? Or does he give them opportunities to love each other?" 
– From the movie "Evan Almighty"

A survey of about 2,200 parents of preschool children in 10 countries including the U.S. revealed a startling revelation: the average 2-year old finds it easier to operate an iPhone than to undertake tasks such as tying a shoelace. According to the study, conducted by AVG, a manufacturer of security software, while 58% of children between the ages of 2 and 5 can play a computer game, about two in 10 know how to swim and fewer than half can ride a bicycle.

"Imagine a ray of sunlight that has forgotten it is an inseparable part of the sun and deludes itself into believing it has to fight for survival and create and cling to an identity other than the sun. Would the death of this delusion not be incredibly liberating?"
– Eckhart Tolle, "The Power of Now"

"We cannot do great things. We can only do little things with great love." 
– Mother Teresa

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." 
– Winston Churchill

"A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world: everyone you meet is your mirror." 
– Ken Keyes Jr.

"The saints are the sinners who keep on trying." 
– Robert Louis Stevenson

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." 
– Mahatma Gandhi

"What lies before us and what lies behind us... are small matters compared to what lies within us... and when we bring what lies within into the world... miracles happen!" 
– Henry David Thoreau

"The eagle that soars at great altitude does not worry about how it will cross a river." 
– Gladys Aylward, British Missionary to China

"Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than ourselves is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality." 
– Iris Murdoch

"The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." 
– French novelist Marcel Proust

"How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were?" 
– Leroy "Satchel" Paige

“Age is an issue of mind over matter.  If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” 
– Mark Twain

The laws in Taiwan stipulate a man needs to be 22 to be married, but is allowed to serve in the military beginning at age 18. This can mean three things: 1) It's easier to kill people than to be a good husband; 2) Living day-to-day is harder than doing battles; 3) Women are tougher to fight than enemies. 
– Hahaha

Happy Mother's Day! 

one weekend -- sunday

A fellow man forwarded me an email a few weeks ago about Saddleback Church planning on launching a worship service at an assisted living facility near where I live. I gave it some thought and signed up to be a volunteer and started going there a couple Sundays ago when that ministry did get started.

Last Sunday was the second time we gathered. Still the same volunteering people: A couple, Darrin and Bettyanne, a lady, Laura, and I. Ray Massey, the Saddleback Church pastor in charge of assisted living ministry planting, was there too, to walk us through the whole thing again.

It was a club room with a nominal capacity of 40 or so that they gave us for the service, but with the TV table, aisles and walkways they put in only a dozen chairs and last week we had more than 20 people showed up, so we rearranged and added a few more seats, prepared the name badges, the hymn booklets, the talk sheets, and gave them out to the seniors who came in, one by one, some on wheel chairs and one even with a care-giver sitting next by. 

It was my turn this time to be the music man, or as Ray introduced me to the audience, "David is our organist today," and I wiggled my index finger to them, indicating this is how I operate my instrument (the CD player), and they all laughed.

The hymns were all "oldies but goodies" classical gospel delights such as Amazing Grace, In the Garden, Rock of Ages, etc., that I actually enjoyed singing myself. After 4 or 5 songs, we played a session of Pastor Rick's Purpose Driven Life teaching for about 20 minutes, then sang hymns again for another 5-10 minutes, and the service was over.

I sat next to an old gentleman during the teaching. His eyes were practically closed throughout the teaching, but then at the end of the service I chatted with him.

"Where were you from," he asked, after a couple of exchanges. "Taiwan," I said. "I'd been there," he said. "Yeah?!" I was surprised. "When did you go there?" I asked. "During the War," he said. "The Vietnam War?"  "Yes, and World War II." Now I was really surprised. "Can you guess how old I am now," he smiled and asked. "World War II in the mid 1940's, you were at your early 20's then I suppose, so you must be over 90's now," I said. He smiled again. 

He said he was in the Air Force working on reconnaissance, I told him there were some photos taken by a US service man stationed in Taiwan during the 1960's that recently got published that created some sensation among many there...

"Are you all together," he asked, meaning if me and Darrin and Bettyanne and Laura and Ray were of the same group. "Yes we are all from Saddleback Church," I said. "Will you be back next week?" he asked, now he's not that sleepy old man any more but a wide-eyed young lad again. "I certainly will," I said.

In our little after-service on-the-spot stand-up circle conference, Ray again iterated that we are not here to dictate what and how the service should be "given" or do it in any standoffish way, but to get to know and share with these people who are precious individuals each with great life stories to tell, and we are free to make changes or hold activities as we see fit to that end, a philosophy I told Ray I totally concur and like.

Darrin and Bettyanne were quite active in their church in New Jersey and Bettyanne had led youth group there before they moved to California. She volunteered and we elected her to be the official contact for the group. She's quite excited about this ministry already and shared with us a few ideas she had to encourage involvement and interaction with the seniors she saw here just in the past two Sundays. 

I chatted a little more with them on the way out. Bettyanne told me one lady she sat next to during the singing did not need the hymn booklet but sang all the lyrics flawlessly, and with tears in her eyes. I told them I like singing too and--knowing Darrin plays guitar--maybe we can practice harmonic singing some of these songs and present them to the audience for their enjoyment, and who knows maybe that'll motivate them to form a choir group of their own some day. They both liked the idea.     

It was a beautiful, sunny Sunday when we stepped outside the center.

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A friend of mine pointed out the reference I made of some photos taken by a US service man stationed in Taiwan during the 1960's were actually for and during the late 1950's. He attached a Power Point compilation of those photos for me which I found more complete than any I had seen before and even better it comes with comments and notes explaining how and where those photos were taken.

So I polish it up a little (got rid of the terrible sounding background music) and add some English translation to it, as correction and addendum to the blog. Hope you'll enjoy it: Taiwan 1957

one weekend -- saturday

I joined a "Friends of Freethought" group last year out of desire to meet people with no stick-in-the-mud religious or ideological mindset but never got to attend any of their activities until last Saturday, when they had an event at a north Orange County food bank that fit my calendar and I thought could be a good way for me to break in with the group while doing something good.

I arrived there on time and saw many people–young and old, men and women, high school kids and families with little ones–chatting and scattering outside the warehouse on a big parking ground. I knew no one, but kind of guessed out correctly a group of relatively solemn looking and less chatty men and women of 10-15 were the "free thinkers" and joined them. 

The host of the event gathered us altogether and gave a brief introduction to the organization–they are a food collection and distribution non-profit that works with nearly 400 local charities, soup kitchens, and community organizations in Orange County and surrounding area for low income people. He divided us up into 3 groups of 20-30 people each, and led us to the warehouse where there were stacks and pallets of food boxes and 3 assembly lines and we started working.

The job was simple, tear up the food boxes, pull out the foods–cereal boxes, tuna cans, juice bottles, milk pouches, etc., and pack them in right order in new boxes, seal them, move them–also flatten the emptied food boxes before disposing of them.

It's a fast paced and stream-lined operation. Everybody quickly learned to pick the task to do and coordinated with others. I started with unpacking the foods, pushing the boxes, then filling in the juice bottles while occasionally cutting open and moving new supply of foods to the assembly line, and flattening a few empty boxes and cartons along the way, without cutting myself with the utility knife I was constantly wielding.

I did get to chat a few lines with Lisa, the lady who organized this event–as well as many others, such as beach cleanup, low-income community rehabilitation, Mexico outreach, etc. that I've seen posted on their website–for the group. She said they had been coming here a few times before, it's a fun activity and many groups vie to do it, so she would count it lucky if they could get to do this twice a year or more.

At 1PM (we started around 11:30) the operation halted. The warehouse was cleared of piles of food boxes that were there just a couple hours ago. All told, we packed 2160 boxes of food in that short period of time, they said. I found it hard to believe at first but then I divided it by 3, that's about 700 boxes per group, and with that frenzy pace I recalled we were at–I felt like having as good a workout session as going to the gym–I was convinced we did do that many.

We then went to a nearby hamburger place for a late lunch together. I sat next to a family of three–a couple with their teen-age daughter–who were very nice but shy; a spunky old lady who high-fived with me during the work who explained to me in details the different Celtic dialects people speak in Wales (where her mother was from) and how the Picts and Britons and Angles and Saxons came and moved about in the British isles; and a man who seemingly carried a rich load of worldly knowledge as well who said he did his Sunday morning communion in sleep when the subject of church going came up at the table.

I bid farewell to them all and headed home, feeling happy that I had come and done and met, with the work and the people.

Volunteers receive and package about 26,000 boxes of food each month, for distribution to 50 sites across the county.

       

Taking funny photos at the end of the work

        

Lisa, the gentle, soft-spoken blond humanist at center, is the organizer of this event and many others.

Me and my flying knife busy at work

            

Experienced worker explaining how to pack

We did 700+ boxes like this in one and a half hour