Founded in 1764, Brown University is an independent, coeducational Ivy League institution. It is recognized for the quality of its teaching, research, and unique curriculum. The seventh-oldest college in the United States, Brown University is located in historic Providence, Rhode Island.
Class Central TipsLearn How to Sign up to Coursera courses for free1600+ Coursera Courses That Are Still Completely FreeExploring Neural Data is an opportunity to learn about neuroscience research and explore questions related to how brains work. It is an introductory level course designed to help you understand the real-life challenges faced by neuroscientists as they work with the large amount of data they collect from the brain. Leading neuroscientists will give tours of their labs, describe their research, and explain their data analytic techniques. You will have the chance to explore actual data collected in these researchers' labs.Throughout the course, you will gain knowledge in three main areas: basic principles of neuroscience and questions driving research in this field; programming with the open-source language Python; and essential techniques for data analysis. We will begin by exploring single neurons, then turn our attention to multiple neurons, and finally consider tools that sample from tens of thousands of neurons. At the end of the class, you will have the opportunity to investigate in detail a data set of your choice provided by one of the researchers whose work you've learned about.
Class Central TipsLearn How to Sign up to Coursera courses for free1600+ Coursera Courses That Are Still Completely FreeWhen you take a digital photo with your phone or transform the image in Photoshop, when you play a video game or watch a movie with digital effects, when you do a web search or make a phone call, you are using technologies that build upon linear algebra. Linear algebra provides concepts that are crucial to many areas of computer science, including graphics, image processing, cryptography, machine learning, computer vision, optimization, graph algorithms, quantum computation, computational biology, information retrieval and web search. Linear algebra in turn is built on two basic elements, the matrix and the vector. In this class, you will learn the concepts and methods of linear algebra, and how to use them to think about problems arising in computer science. You will write small programs in the programming language Python to implement basic matrix and vector functionality and algorithms, and use these to process real-world data to achieve such tasks as: two-dimensional graphics transformations, face morphing, face detection, image transformations such as blurring and edge detection, image perspective removal, classification of tumors as malignant or benign, integer factorization, error-correcting codes, and secret-sharing.
Can you be confident that the person sitting next to you on the bus is really a human rather than some remarkable replica conjured up by a mad scientist or, perhaps, an alien from another planet? What evidence is needed to conclude that the person casually looking at her mobile device is human? What, after all, distinguishes us humans from unhumans? Is there something unique about our brains, our external features, our consciousness, or our imaginations? How have we constructed the conceptual boundary between what we qualify as human and what we categorize as robotic, animal, android, or alien? What, in the end, makes the human “human”?Join me as we dive into these and related questions in a distinctive way through the gamified structure of this course. Using simple tools, you’ll create your own avatar and begin a virtual journey led by a humanoid and professor through various imaginative realms. Your travels will be brought to virtual life by literature and made visible on the course map. Your assignments and readings will be quests that concentrate on integral parts of a story, and themes that run throughout the duration of the course. These quests challenge you to do things such as produce visualizations (graphs, word clouds, network diagrams, etc.) utilizing easy-to-use online tools, capture interpretations through art, and engage in battles with characters from the readings.Before you choose to accept this mission, ask yourself if you answer “yes” to any of the following questions:Do you love reading literature whose plot, characters, or themes challenge you to empathize with formerly unknown or unimagined beings or feelings?Do you find reading literature a great way to think deeply about important ideas and want a fun, unusual way of doing so?Are you a gamer who loves fiction?Are you looking for a course that will put you in touch with some cutting-edge pedagogical learning strategies?Are you looking for a course that covers time-tested literary themes taught in a radically new way?Have you been looking for a way to indulge your love of literature while also dipping your toes into online gaming?Step into the realm of fiction and fantasy and join us in examining what exactly it means to be human.
Class Central TipsLearn How to Sign up to Coursera courses for free1600+ Coursera Courses That Are Still Completely FreeIn this class, we will ask and answer a series of questionsabout the role and practice of archaeology in the world today. If archaeologistsare trained to investigate the past, what is left for us to study? Who gets to be an archaeologist? How and why do archaeologists hunt for“treasures”, and what do we do once we’ve discovered them? What can we know, and not know, about peoplein the past? What do archaeologists knowabout the past that most people would never guess – and why aren’t we tellingyou? Why are people entirely willing tomurder each other over the fate of archaeological sites? Are Real Men alone capable of discovering thetruth behind all this?Archaeology famously involves getting dirty inthe line of duty. Students willexperience its hands-on nature, through the use of numerous exercises and archaeologicalcase studies. But there are other ‘dirtylittle secrets’ to learn about the field: not least how the storiesarchaeologists tell about the past have been used and abused, for purposes bothgood and bad. Our goal by the end of thecourse is to have you ‘thinking like an archaeologist’ and fully aware of the often-fraughtpolitics of doing archaeology around the globe.
Physicians and healthcare providers are - fundamentally - professional story-listeners, story-shapers, and story-responders. This shouldn’t come as a surprise; people have always related to each other and the world through the telling, listening, and interpreting of stories. But increasingly complex health problems, compounded by social factors and other burdens, make for increasingly complex stories. Healthcare professionals make decisions, including the appropriate use of technology, based on the stories patients share. Yet, storytelling and listening are skills that are often largely omitted from the training of healthcare professionals. Healthcare providers must think more creatively, more like creative writers. In the narrative disaster zone of the emergency department, patients’ stories often feel like first drafts, and first drafts—for most of us—can be raw and messy.Expertise with stories is a low-tech skill that’s fundamental to connection, communication, curiosity, and problem-solving. It’s a clinical ability with multiple potential benefits, ranging from making us more mindful of our thinking to improving patient engagement. Aptitude with stories can both expand our tolerance for uncertainty and reduce risk.We’ll focus on stories - challenging stories, in particular. We’ll discuss why healthcare providers must think more creatively, even in a field that prides itself on its grounding in scientific evidence. Making the right diagnosis is critically important, but so is learning how to ask the right questions, developing comfort with uncertainty, and working within constraints. In order to treat patients effectively, we must do everything in our power to ensure that the story we are hearing is the one our patients are trying to tell.
Class Central TipsLearn How to Sign up to Coursera courses for free1600+ Coursera Courses That Are Still Completely FreeAsindividuals we are defined by relationships, by our connection to people,places, and things. Such connectedness can be not only emotional or erotic or political or environmental, but even textual, enacted through writing. Inthis course we explore the nature and meaning of such connections in ten major works of narrative fiction from the 18th century to thepresent. These include: Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prévost; two works by Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener and Benito Cereno; Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre; two stories by FranzKafka, “The Metamorphosis” and “The Country Doctor”;Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; William Faulkner’s Light in August; an anthology of stories, Ficciones, by Jorge LuisBorges; The Ice Palace by TarjeiVesaas; Tony Morrison’s Beloved; and Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee.As this course will demonstrate, the mostcritical relationships in our lives—the linkages both known and unknown—arenot always easy to get a fix on, but literature offers us a special sighting onthese arrangements. Through exploratory readings of these narrative works, thecourse will seek to make relationship visible, bringing our traffic with theworld and with others into clearer focus.
What is memory? What’s the utility in exploring it and risking the activation of painful memories? What remembrance do we owe people we have lost and how is that reflected in the monuments we create to memorialize them? Why do different groups of people interpret the same event differently—even when the facts are not disputed?In The Ethics of Memory, we will discuss these questions and more by exploring personal memory, collective memory and memorial culture, and conflicts of memory.We begin early in the 20th century—the century of critical engagement with memory—when personal memory was plumbed as the basis of psychoanalysis and as a theme in the poetry and prose of World War I. Then we look at the ways in which a people, collectively, choose to memorialize those lost to war, injustice, or tragedy. Finally, we explore memory as a site of struggle, where the way we see ourselves currently implicated by a memory may depend on our group identity, such as in the case for reparations for slavery in the United States.Throughout, we will share our own perspectives on personal and collective memory and wrestle with questions of ethical responsibility for remembrance and ownership of the narrative of a memory.In this course, we will:Discover in the writing of Freud how the exploration of memory gave birth to psychoanalysis, and in Proust how such exploration was elevated to an art form; Examine poetry from WWI and the Harlem Renaissance that demonstrates the relevance of literature as a framework for understanding the ethics of memory;Reflect on examples of the many ways we collectively memorialize our losses; andShare examples of personal and public monuments to memory in order to reflect on the ethical responsibility that memorializing confers on us now.
What impact can art and the humanities have on patient care? Can art enhance medical caregivers’ powers of observation and humanize their interactions with patients? Through presence alone, can caregivers heal what they cannot cure?In Artful Medicine: Art’s Power to Enrich Patient Care, we will explore the meaning of medical professionalism, techniques for a humanistic approach to caregiving, and the positive impact of humanism on clinical outcomes.By looking closely at works of art that portray empathy in human interaction, caregivers can discover their common humanity with patients. Caregivers can also hone observation skills that help paint a portrait of a patient as a person and not a collection of symptoms, lab tests, and scans. Through presence at the patient’s side, unmediated by technology, a caregiver can make the patient feel cared for in addition to being treated.One needn’t be a caregiver to benefit from this course—though all of us have probably been cared for at some point and can therefore easily relate to the importance of a humanistic approach to caregiving. Anyone interested in how art can be used to enhance observational and empathic skills will find this application to medical humanism fascinating.We will:Explore elements of professionalism and humanism, why they are critical to patient care, and how they are threatened by technology that increasingly distances caregivers from patients;Analyze art for form, narrative, and technique;Practice techniques used by art educators to enhance observation and improve diagnostic skills;Examine works of art for the professional behaviors they exemplify;Apply techniques to patient care that will help humanize interactions, so caregivers can refocus their attention on patients and families and enhance their understanding of behaviors critical to healing; andIdentify with both the caregiver’s and the patient’s points of view.This MOOC is inspired by residential seminar taught by Dr. Schiffman at Brown University's Warren Alpert School of Medicine under the name The Doc's HeArt: Reflecting on Professional Values Through Art, and is especially relevant for healthcare professionals who are interested in differentiating themselves in their given or prospective field.