Does Online Education work? Some thoughts

I’m one of those happy guys who participated in the legendary 2011 Stanford MOOC, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. That course made me (and thousands of students around the world) discover a whole different and revolutionary method of learning. I think today there is no question that Online Education works, but sometimes the question still comes … Read more

Why I dropped a MS in CS from Germany and turned to self-education

I went with a pretty high expectancy [1,2] to pursue a Master’s degree in Computer Science at one of Germany’s best Universities in Computer Science. Soon I found that the education wasn’t at all as good as I had expected. The main reasons are unnecessary complexity or pretended knowledge and academic arrogance. I will briefly explain some … Read more

How to learn the fundamentals of Computer Science

Over the years I’ve observed two bad things when it comes to computer science education. First, it simply is bad in general, with bad I mean badly structured and incomplete. Focusing on one thing but missing many other which are necessary to grasp the whole picture. In case the education is good, it still is mostly … Read more

The 80/20 Principle — Summary

Explore this principle of nature to improve your life You have probably observed that often the majority of output stem from the minority of input. It could happen in your business when the majority of sales come from a little subset of your products. Often this ratio is around, but not limited to 20% and 80%. That’s … Read more

The Talent Code — Summary

Myelin, neural pathways, and skills Everything we think, feel and do is a result of electrical impulses traveling through our nerve fibers. We call this connected fibers “circuits.” Each circuit is responsible for a certain action, for example, thought or feeling. When we move a part of our body, it is the result of electrical impulses … Read more

Retrieval based learning, the best study method?

Jeffrey Karpicke is a cognitive psychologist from Purdue University. His area of research looks at strategies for long-term learning and comprehension. He published several interesting studies [1,2] in which he questioned college students on how they would study for an exam. After they had read their notes or textbook one time, they had three options … Read more

The logarithmic learning curve, why its possible to be good at many things

I’m always getting a kick out of learning something entirely new. Perhaps that’s why I like to read about things outside of my expertise. Conceivably that preference of mine has something to do with the fact that we learn new skills in a logarithmic time curve as I learned in this TEDx talk. The logarithmic … Read more