NEPTUN Biography

Learn to construct arguments that cannot be refuted and how to tell the difference between a good argument and a bad one. We will see what it means for an argument to be valid, sound, and the basics of symbolic logic.

Computers are very good at games, way better than humans. It's been many years since a human has been able to beat a computer at Chess, for example. A human could never beat a computer at tic-tac-toe if the computer really wants to win. If you've ever wondered how programs that play games get built, come try this class!

What happens when you navigate to a website on your computer? Is it magic, or something much more explainable? Find out here.

Learn to construct arguments that cannot be refuted and how to tell the difference between a good argument and a bad one. We will see what it means for an argument to be valid, sound, and the basics of of symbolic logic.

How big is big data? We will look into what people working in this field are doing, how big data can be used, and take a shot at some basic big data skills ourselves.

We started out listening to records, and now we have streaming services. This class will look at the history of how we listen to music (and things, in general)

Technology these days is getting pretty sophisticated. It doesn't seem improbable that in a couple hundred years, maybe less, that we could simulate entire worlds where everyone and everything in the simulation is completely convinced that everything in the simulation is completely real. How certain are you that everything around you is real? How certain are you that you are real? If we are living in a computer simulation, does it matter? Should we care? These are the types of questions we will strive to answer, starting with the musings of Descartes, fast-forwarding to Bostrom's well-known paper "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?," and taking a peek at pop culture pieces such as The Matrix.

We love it when machines do things for us, and more and more artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms make that possible. This class will examine what we should do and think about when these things make life very complicated. If a self-driving car kills some one, who is to blame? What do we if we accomplish true artificial consciousness? Do we have to fear the machines trying to take power from the humans? We will try to decide if artificial intelligence is just amazing, or actually our downfall.

It's the 21st century, and there's a lot of information out there. Every hip(ster) coffee shop around sells more types of tea than I even knew existed, and I don't even know how many Pokemon there are nowadays. If I'm looking for information about something in a massive pile of data that I don't care about at the moment, how do I do it quickly? That's what we'll be learning in this class - how to find the needle in the haystack. Even better than that, we'll talk about how to organize the haystack (data) so that the needle is easier to find. First, we'll cover the basics of what we mean when we say buzzwords like "algorithm" and "data structure" and then learn about some of the basic ones that will helps us find things in the fastest way possible. Some examples of the things we might cover are search algorithms on collections such as binary search and chunk search, data structures such as arrays and binary trees, and possibly some basic sorting algorithms like insertion sort and selection sort. Does some of that sound a little complicated? it's not! For example, you can basically think of arrays as a list of things, and you already do something similar to binary search every time you look something up in the dictionary. A lot of this class will just be helping you take some intuitions that you already have about how to search for something in a lot of data and formalizing them so that they're consistent and always correct. If you're interested thinking as fast as a computer when it comes to finding things and organizing things, this is the class for you - no prior experience with any of this stuff necessary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_DoEtn2XDw You want to learn this. You know you do. Well, here's your chance! In this class we'll learn some basic moves such as the 3-beat weave, butterfly, and basic wrap patterns. Don't know what any of those things mean? Even better! I'd love to get more people who have never heard of / seen glowsticking introduced to it. We'll also include resources for where to get glowsticks, how to assemble them for use, and anything you might want, because there will be little to no structure for this class. It can be anything you want it to be!

In this class, we will do our best to figure out the rules for identity. How do you know who someone is? If you get split into two people, is either of them the real you? Are they both you? Are neither of them you? We'll try several different thought experiments to try and bend each other's minds. I will guide the discussion so that we're asking all the right questions, but you'll have to decide on your own what the right answers are, if there are any at all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_DoEtn2XDw You want to learn this. You know you do. Well, here's your chance! In this class we'll learn some basic moves such as the 3-beat weave, butterfly, and basic wrap patterns. Don't know what any of those things mean? Even better! I'd love to get more people who haev never heard of / seen glowsticking introduced to it. We'll also include resources for where to get glowsticks, how to assemble them for use, and anything you might want, because there will be little to no structure for this class. It can be anything you want it to be!

Knowing how to read is vital, yet over 800 million adults worldwide can’t read at even a basic level. Literacy is the foundation of education, and education opens the door to opportunities for the extreme poor to improve their lives. We have been told about the necessity of literacy and education our whole lives, but why exactly is it so important? And if it’s as necessary as people say, why is it so difficult to get quality education in many countries, and how can this problem be remedied? In this class, we will discuss the lack of quality education systems in developing countries, and how improvements in this space impacts the lives of the poor. Finally, we will learn about several nonprofits and government organizations and their efforts to fill the gap in education in these countries. If you’re interested in diagnosing and fixing problems the world faces today, this is the class for you!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_DoEtn2XDw You want to learn this. You know you do. Well, here's your chance! In this class we'll learn some basic moves such as the 3-beat weave, butterfly, and basic wrap patterns. We'll also include resources for where to get glowsticks, how to assemble them for use, and anything you could want, because there will be little to no structure for this class. It can be anything you want it to be!