Open course ware

Some of you might want to present what happens over time with your photographs. Other than creating a video, it's usually quite compelling when watching a dynamic phenomena that's true. And if you think about it, all of science is ultimately dynamic, right? Things change over time. We generally assume one has to watch a moving image to see that change. So here, for example, you are seeing something called the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. It's a complicated oscillating reaction that we're observing within a Petri dish. But it's not a video, in the sense that it wasn't taken with a video camera. You're seeing a series of still images that I made and I was privileged to make in professor Zhabotinsky's lab at Brandeis. I took the images 11 seconds apart over a period of five minutes. By the way, I made the images in film, which became slide formats, as you might remember-- or then again, maybe you don't! And you're seeing digital scan...

PATRICK WINSTON: We might wonder a little bit about the nature of human intelligence, and we might reflect a little bit on the kind of intelligence we've been talking about in the past few weeks. It's been an intelligence of sorts. Those programs, support vector machines, boosting, they can do really smart things. But the peculiar thing about systems that use those methods is that those systems don't have any idea about what they're doing. They don't know anything. So they don't give us very much of an insight into the nature of human intelligence. And, after all, I'd like to have a model of human intelligence because, let's face it, we're the smartest things around. So there are lots of ways to approach that question. And we'll approach that question first from a evolutionary point of view. Some scientists believe, me for instance, that we have a family tree that looks about like this. Too small to see much of that, but the main po...