
100,000+ Sign Up For Stanford’s Open Class on Artificial Intelligence. - ph0rque
http://singularityhub.com/2011/08/18/100000-sign-up-for-stanfords-open-class-on-artificial-intelligence-classes-with-1-million-next/
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axiom
If I'm not mistaken all people did was sign up for a mailing list to receive
updates about the course.

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briggers
Exactly. Very few of these people will actually listen to the first lecture,
and very few of those people will put in the work to complete the course and
master the material.

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kennywinker
How is this new? The stanford iPhone course
(<http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/drupal/>) has been downloaded
more than a million times.

<http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/may20/million-052009.html>

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tryitnow
Is the Stanford iphone class interactive? It seems like something you just
download and watch.

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MaxGabriel
It is not

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rodh257
I'd be interested to see stats of how many people actually finish it. Seeing
as its free its easy to say 'yeah ill do it' and then not find the time.

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polymind
wow..This is unbelievable. This clearly shows how much progress we are making
in terms of the way we are getting educated. Thanks Stanford.

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earl
Damn. AI 3rd ed on amazon is $115. Assume the authors get $50 so Norvig gets
$25. He may have just banked $2.5MM.

No disrespect meant -- it's awesome to see Stanford experimenting with
education like this. But still... wow.

Edit: reminds me of the $24MM house Stewart -- of Stewart's calculus -- built
with earnings from his calc texts [1]. I'm not hating on educators being paid
well, but particularly stewart seems a little... unseemly, particularly in
light of the constant churn of new editions. Has calculus or calculus pedagogy
seriously changed in the last 10 years in a way that requires a stream of new
calc book editions?

[1]
[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123872378357585295.html#proj...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123872378357585295.html#project%3DSLIDESHOW08%26s%3DSB123869600484183257%26articleTabs%3Darticle)

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impendia
> Has calculus or calculus pedagogy seriously changed in the last 10 years in
> a way that requires a stream of new calc book editions?

Speaking as a math prof: No. No. NO. It is a ripoff of our students, pure and
simple.

When teaching calculus at a previous job we used the eighth edition of this
calculus book by Varberg et al., and the statement of Taylor's theorem (one of
the major theorems of calculus) was wrong. You figure, eight editions, you
could get it right. But evidently I was naive.

However, a couple of universities I have taught at have explicitly told
publishers that if they go to a new edition, and stop selling the old one,
then the department will move to a different book entirely. I've finally moved
up to a tenure track job; I'm going to enjoy this game of hardball :)

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plinkplonk
"Speaking as a math prof: No. No. NO. It is a ripoff of our students, pure and
simple."

As a math prof, which texts(old or new) do you think are good? (fwiw I like
Spivak)

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knowledgesale
The best introduction to Calculus is classic "Calculus Made Easy" by Silvanus
P. Thompson. It is in public domain, is a de-facto standard and is praised by
many working scientists (Antony Zee, for example).

The book itself <http://djm.cc/library/Calculus_Made_Easy_Thompson.pdf>

Wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_Made_Easy>

It gives you a working knowledge to get going with almost any practical
problem you may encounter that needs to be approached with mahtematical
analysis.

I would say that Spivak books are more about learning the culture of working
mathematicians, and while with its merits one must be careful with commitment
of investing her personal time to it.

Also, here is a great page to learn about good (and usually public) books for
different branches of mathematics and physics by a Nobel-winning theoretical
physicist G. t'Hooft <http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/theorist.html>

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benmlang
That's the future of education. Udemy is going to rock it.

