Why MOOCs didn't disrupt the Universities?

I think MOOCs do serve a purpose, and there is a market out there for it. But if anyone thought they would disrupt the education industry are only betraying their own lack of understanding about what education means.

My 4 years of experience as a teacher thought me that education is as much about managing student behavior as it is about transferring knowledge. Students learn by what they think and what they do, and only by what they think and what they do, and not by "knowledge transfer" or "osmosis". The job of a good educator is then to create  structure and incentives to foster thinking and doing.

At the beginning of my teaching career, I was of the opinion that if only more teachers actually cared about teaching, the overall education quality would improve. But now, I am convinced that caring comes more close to being a necessary condition than being sufficient.

Even though I think there is a significant room for improvement, Universities in general offer structure, community,  in-person interactions, and other social aspects which MOOCs don't come anywhere close to offering.

That being said, I think Universities are due for a disruption. The landscape of education is changing. With increased automation, meaningful well-paying jobs are becoming much more sophisticated and demand for higher education is increasing rapidly. Universities are extremely inefficient, and as such, are not equipped to address this growing demand at a reasonable cost. Universities are due for a disruption. 

Faith: Why is it seen as a virtue by many?

I often wondered why faith, "the act of believing in something without any evidence", is seen as a virtue by so many people.  Now, I think this is because they confuse faith for conviction. I call this "The Rocky effect".

One of the biggest reason why the character Rocky is so endearing is his utter conviction of continuing to fight even when the facts, (and indeed the evidence), were clear that he is not going to win that fight, and that continuing is only going to injure him further. So, at this point, he is being very irrational, and ignoring all the evidence, yet this act is seen as a sign of strength in character.

I agree with the above assessment of strength. Then why do I think faith is not a virtue, but the propensity to act irrationally in the above situation a virtue?

The key difference is belief. I don't think Rocky actually believed he was going to win in that losing fight. He continues to fight despite his belief (and possibly fear) that he is going to lose.

The strength in the character is the courage of fighting in the face of an obvious defeat. It is the conviction to fight without showing any regard to the end goal, it is the joy in the journey and not just the destination.

The only instance according to my observations, when faith is viewed as a virtue is in the matter of belief in a "God", however many ways that word is defined. And in these cases, I believe it is because this faith is being confused for conviction.

Rhetoric of "being tough"

There are some current political views that United States is not "being tough enough" on terrorism and illegal activities, and this usually is directed towards non-white criminals.  I don't think the facts actually reflect this, so why then the perception?

I think at the core, the reason for this is that being accepting of others (love thy neighbors) is still viewed as a positive sentiment in these circles. That is why they don't want to focus on the "they are being accepting of others", and instead want to focus on "they are being weak". 

Automation and future of our society

Several people are expressing concerns recently that automation displace more jobs, that the new opportunities will not catch up the pace of lost jobs, and that the income inequality will grow.

I agree will all these points, and if we don't do anything about it, there could be a lot of turmoil in the future.

On the bright side, I think our civilization is in a position where we can afford to adopt policies which will make the income inequality irrelevant. 

Engineering publishing, what needs to be changed

I keep hearing a lot about publishing negative results in clinical trials, and there has been a lot of push towards it. I think its also time for the same to happen in engineering journals.

There are perhaps two broad categories of engineering research, one where the approach is to take an unsolved problem and find/develop the appropriate tools to solve it, and the other where the researchers find the right problem to apply the tool they have been developing. Both have their uses, and quite frankly, from my experience, it has been very frustrating how these two situations have been treated in the publishing world. 

For the first kind of problems, I have seen many very good papers rejected because the claim from the reviewers was that there were no new techniques developed in the paper. Of course, the reviewer has completely failed to see the point of the paper in this situation. 

The second situation, I think, can run into even bigger problems. Consider a researcher working on developing computational methods for some abstract mathematical field, and wants to find an appropriate problem to showcase the usefulness of such computational methods. In this situation, it is very likely that the methods doesn't outperform other existing methods, or that it turns out (due to many practical reasons) that the method is actually not applicable for problems where the underlying mathematical theory seems to imply it should work. In both these cases, the resulting work is very unlikely to get published.  As a result, researchers feel often forced to exaggerate the usefulness of their computational methods, or perform and unfair comparison with existing methods. If the researchers are not willing to do this, then the research of the second kind is not viable in the long run. 

There is a simple fix to this: publish negative results. 

neuroscience computing terms

We know a lot more about computing terms for computers than for the brain. It is likely that the following aspects about the brain are being investigated  currently, in which case I would like to know their technical terms and learn about the research into these aspects.

1. Sometimes, while I am driving to some place, I forget to thing about a route beforehand. On the way, I realize I have to plan my route and "load the program" to plan it. I can distinctly observe a "processing time" to plan out this route, and sometimes this processing time causes me to miss an exit, an exit which was in the planned route.


2. Sometimes, while I set out to drive to a location and start thinking about something else, I arrive at a different (often traveled) location without realizing it. The closest analogy I can think of is a "non-interactive background process ". I cannot say (or can I?) that this is a subconscious act, because I distinctly remember making the decisions to make the turns, "processing" the speeds and the degrees of rotations on the steering wheels. So, was I semi-conscious?

Are the above aspects recognized and studied as neurological phenomenon?