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Irsadi Aksun, a professor of electrical engineering at Koc, said, “There are two different groups of Turkish students who go abroad.” The first, he said, is “very competitive — some have taken Advanced Placement courses in high school. Some have followed the International Baccalaureate.” “This group is quite small,” he went on, adding that most came from a handful of Turkish private schools that offer English instruction in many subjects. Such schools are increasingly popular among wealthy families in Istanbul and Ankara.

But we’d like to get more American students to come here.” In the 2010-11 academic year, the most recent year for which Open Door statistics are available, the United States sent slightly more than 2,000 students to Turkey — a jump of 34 percent from the previous year, and more than double the 2006-7 number. “I can definitely see Turkey as the next frontier in studying abroad,” Mr. Pierce said.

our whole universe could have emerged from a tiny patch of space that was stretched like a rubber band by the enormous factor of one hundred trillion trillion times (1026) in a fraction of a second. The universe we observe today fits within this stretched region, like an island in an ocean.

imagine that other portions of space, neighbors to that tiny patch that gave rise to our universe, also got stretched at different rates and at different times. We would have a universe filled with island-universes, each with its own history and possibly even types of matter, etc. This ocean of island-universes is called the multiverse.

Since

hysics is an empirical science

Cosmic inflation predicts that our universe is geometrically flat (or almost) like the surface of a table but in three dimensions; it also predicts that space should be filled with radiation with a uniform temperature, as bathwater fills a bathtub

Since we can't receive information from outside our universe (or better, from outside our "horizon", the sphere that delimits how far light travelled in 13.7 billion years), how can we possibly test the existence of other universes "out there"?

However, we can do the next best thing, and see if at least neighboring universes exist. Just as with soap bubbles that vibrate when they collide with one another without popping, if another universe collided with ours in the distant past, the radiation inside our universe would have vibrated in response to the perturbations caused by the collision.

The bad news is that the probability of a collision with another universe increases with time: we could disappear at any instant: live life to the fullest!

The good news is that, although the multiverse as a whole may not be a testable scientific hypothesis, with some luck we may at least know if one or a few other universes exist. An observational test distinguishes science from idle speculation.

It's a new paradigm for a physical reality.

Unlike previous video lectures, which offered a “static” learning model, the Coursera system breaks lectures into segments as short as 10 minutes and offers quick online quizzes as part of each segment.

Where essays are required, especially in the humanities and social sciences, the system relies on the students themselves to grade their fellow students’ work, in effect turning them into teaching assistants.

The Coursera system also offers an online feature that allows students to get support from a global student community. Dr. Ng said an early test of the system found that questions were typically answered within 22 minutes.

Dr. Koller said the educational approach was similar to that of the “flipped classroom,” pioneered by the Khan Academy, a creation of the educator Salman Khan. Students watch lectures at home and then work on problem-solving or “homework” in the classroom, either one-on-one with the teacher or in small groups.

First of all, they are not simply for the education of students.  This is an essential function, but the raison d’être of a college is to nourish a world of intellectual culture; that is, a world of ideas, dedicated to what we can know scientifically, understand humanistically, or express artistically.  In our society, this world is mainly populated by members of college faculties: scientists, humanists, social scientists (who straddle the humanities and the sciences properly speaking), and those who study the fine arts. Law, medicine and engineering are included to the extent that they are still understood as “learned professions,” deploying practical skills that are nonetheless deeply rooted in scientific knowledge or humanistic understanding

When, as is often the case in business education and teacher training, practical skills far outweigh theoretical understanding, we are moving beyond the intellectual culture that defines higher education

Our support for higher education makes sense only if we regard this intellectual culture as essential to our society

This has important consequences for how we regard what goes on in college classrooms.  Teachers need to see themselves as, first of all, intellectuals, dedicated to understanding poetry, history, human psychology, physics, biology — or whatever is the focus of their discipline.  But they also need to realize that this dedication expresses not just their idiosyncratic interest in certain questions but a conviction that those questions have general human significance, even apart from immediately practical applications.  This is why a discipline requires not just research but also teaching

Students, in turn, need to recognize that their college education is above all a matter of opening themselves up to new dimensions of knowledge and understanding.  Teaching is not a matter of (as we too often say) “making a subject (poetry, physics, philosophy) interesting” to students but of students coming to see how such subjects are intrinsically interesting.  It is more a matter of students moving beyond their interests than of teachers fitting their subjects to interests that students already have.   Good teaching does not make a course’s subject more interesting; it gives the students more interests — and so makes them more interesting.

Is it really possible to improve grade school and high school teaching to the level I’m suggesting? Yes, provided we employ the same sort of selection criteria for pre-college teachers as we do for other professionals such as doctors, lawyers and college professors. In contrast to other professions, teaching is not now the domain of the most successful students — quite the contrary. I’ve known many very bright students who had an initial interest in such teaching but soon realized that there is no comparison in terms of salary, prestige and working conditions.

Given this transformation in pre-college education, we could expect it to provide basic job-training for most students. At that point, we would still face a fundamental choice regarding higher education. We could see it as a highly restricted enterprise, educating only professionals who require advanced specialized skills. Correspondingly, only such professionals would have access to higher education as a locus of intellectual culture.

On the other hand, we could — as I would urge — see college as the entrée to intellectual culture for everyone who is capable of and interested in working at that level of intellectual engagement

Raising high school to the level I am proposing and opening college to everyone who will profit from it would be an expensive enterprise. We would need significant government support to ensure that all students receive an education commensurate with their abilities and aspirations, regardless of family resources. But the intellectual culture of our citizens should be a primary part of our national well-being, not just the predilection of an eccentric elite. As such, it should be among our highest priorities.

If a brain can make crazy leaps across the cosmos and bring extra passengers along (like you when you listen to me), then in a metaphorical way, the brain is bigger than what's around it, wrote 19th century poet Emily Dickinson. The brain is wider than the sky,For, put them side by side,The one the other will includeWith ease, and you beside.

"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose," said the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, "but queerer than we can suppose." In Haldane's view, the universe is bigger than the brain. There are things we just can't know, or even conjure with the brains we've got.

If a brain can make crazy leaps across the cosmos and bring extra passengers along (like you when you listen to me), then in a metaphorical way, the brain is bigger than what's around it, wrote 19th century poet Emily Dickinson. The brain is wider than the sky,For, put them side by side,The one the other will includeWith ease, and you beside.

"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose," said the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, "but queerer than we can suppose." In Haldane's view, the universe is bigger than the brain. There are things we just can't know, or even conjure with the brains we've got.

"It's beyond our intellectual limits as a species. Put yourself into the position

"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose," said the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, "but queerer than we can suppose." In Haldane's view, the universe is bigger than the brain. There are things we just can't know, or even conjure with the brains we've got.

"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose," said the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, "but queerer than we can suppose." In Haldane's view, the universe is bigger than the brain. There are things we just can't know, or even conjure with the brains we've got.

"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose," said the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, "but queerer than we can suppose." In Haldane's view, the universe is bigger than the brain. There are things we just can't know, or even conjure with the brains we've got.

If a brain can make crazy leaps across the cosmos and bring extra passengers along (like you when you listen to me), then in a metaphorical way, the brain is bigger than what's around it, wrote 19th century poet Emily Dickinson. The brain is wider than the sky,For, put them side by side,The one the other will includeWith ease, and you beside.

"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose," said the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, "but queerer than we can suppose." In Haldane's view, the universe is bigger than the brain. There are things we just can't know, or even conjure with the brains we've got.

There are philosophers and scientists who say we will never understand the universe, we can't fathom the endless details or make good sense of the whole. We can try, but the universe is too big. The writer John Updike once explained the argument this way to reporter Jim Holt: "It's beyond our intellectual limits as a species. Put yourself into the position of a dog. A dog is responsive, shows intuition, looks at us with eyes behind which there is intelligence of a sort, and yet a dog must not understand most of the things it sees people doing. It must have no idea how they invented, say, the internal combustion engine. So maybe what we need to do is imagine that we're dogs and that there are realms that go beyond our understanding."

So does the universe get the crown?

Carl Sagan thought that we humans are good at finding patterns in nature, and if we know the rules, we can skip the details and understand the outline, the essence. It's not necessary for us to know everything. The problem is we don't know how many rules the cosmos has.

et the brain has its champions. "Consider the human brain," says physicist Sir Roger Penrose. "If you look at the entire physical cosmos, our brains are a tiny, tiny part of it. But they're the most perfectly organized part. Compared to the complexity of a brain, a galaxy is just an inert lump

my hunch is the universe will still outwit us, will still be "too wonderful" to be decoded, because we are, in the end, so much smaller than it is. And that's not a bad thing. To my mind, it's the search that matters, that sharpens us, gives us something noble to do.

Steven Weinberg famously said, "The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy."

History: from 18.5 percent to 10.7 percent

But the deeper explanation resides not in something that has happened to it, but in what it has done to itself. English has become less and less coherent as a discipline and, worse, has come near exhaustion as a scholarly pursuit.

The twin focus, then, was on the philological nature of the enterprise and the canon of great works to be studied in their historical evolution.

Studying English taught us how to write and think better, and to make articulate many of the inchoate impulses and confusions of our post-adolescent minds. We began to see, as we had not before, how such books could shape and refine our thinking. We began to understand why generations of people coming before us had kept them in libraries and bookstores and in classes such as ours. There was, we got to know, a tradition, a historical culture, that had been assembled around these books. Shakespeare had indeed made a difference—to people before us, now to us, and forever to the language of English-speaking people.

today there are stunning changes in the student population: there are more and more gifted and enterprising students coming from immigrant backgrounds, students with only slender connections to Western culture and to the assumption that the “great books” of England and the United States should enjoy a fixed centrality in the world. What was once the heart of the matter now seems provincial. Why throw yourself into a study of something not emblematic of the world but representative of a special national interest? As the campus reflects the cultural, racial, and religious complexities of the world around it, reading British and American literature looks more and more marginal. From a global perspective, the books look smaller.

With the cost of a college degree surging upward during the last quarter century—tuition itself increasing far beyond any measure of inflation—and with consequent growth in loan debt after graduation, parents have become anxious about the relative earning power of a humanities degree. Their college-age children doubtless share such anxiety. When college costs were lower, anxiety could be kept at bay. (Berkeley in the early ’60s cost me about $100 a year, about $700 in today’s dollars.)

Economists, chemists, biologists, psychologists, computer scientists, and almost everyone in the medical sciences win sponsored research, grants, and federal dollars. By and large, humanists don’t, and so they find themselves as direct employees of the institution, consuming money in salaries, pensions, and operating needs—not external money but institutional money.

These, then, are some of the external causes of the decline of English: the rise of public education; the relative youth and instability (despite its apparent mature solidity) of English as a discipline; the impact of money; and the pressures upon departments within the modern university to attract financial resources rather than simply use them up.

several of my colleagues around the country have called for a return to the aesthetic wellsprings of literature, the rock-solid fact, often neglected, that it can indeed amuse, delight, and educate. They urge the teaching of English, or French, or Russian literature, and the like, in terms of the intrinsic value of the works themselves, in all their range and multiplicity, as well-crafted and appealing artifacts of human wisdom. Second, we should redefine our own standards for granting tenure, placing more emphasis on the classroom and less on published research, and we should prepare to contest our decisions with administrators whose science-based model is not an appropriate means of evaluation.

“It may be that what has happened to the profession is not the consequence of social or philosophical changes, but simply the consequence of a tank now empty.” His homely metaphor pointed to the absence of genuinely new frontiers of knowledge and understanding for English professors to explore.

In this country and in England, the study of English literature began in the latter part of the 19th century as an exercise in the scientific pursuit of philological research, and those who taught it subscribed to the notion that literature was best understood as a product of language.

no one has come forward in years to assert that the study of English (or comparative literature or similar undertakings in other languages) is coherent, does have self-limiting boundaries, and can be described as this but not that.

to teach English today is to do, intellectually, what one pleases. No sense of duty remains toward works of English or American literature; amateur sociology or anthropology or philosophy or comic books or studies of trauma among soldiers or survivors of the Holocaust will do. You need not even believe that works of literature have intelligible meaning; you can announce that they bear no relationship at all to the world beyond the text.

With everything on the table, and with foundational principles abandoned, everyone is free, in the classroom or in prose, to exercise intellectual laissez-faire in the largest possible way—I won’t interfere with what you do and am happy to see that you will return the favor

Consider the English department at Harvard University. It has now agreed to remove its survey of English literature for undergraduates, replacing it and much else with four new “affinity groups”

there would be no one book, or family of books, that every English major at Harvard would have read by the time he or she graduates. The direction to which Harvard would lead its students in this “clean slate” or “trickle down” experiment is to suspend literary history, thrusting into the hands of undergraduates the job of cobbling together intellectual coherence for themselves

Those who once strove to give order to the curriculum will have learned, from Harvard, that terms like core knowledge and foundational experience only trigger acrimony, turf protection, and faculty mutinies. No one has the stomach anymore to refight the Western culture wars. Let the students find their own way to knowledge.

In English, the average number of years spent earning a doctoral degree is almost 11. After passing that milestone, only half of new Ph.D.’s find teaching jobs, the number of new positions having declined over the last year by more than 20 percent; many of those jobs are part-time or come with no possibility of tenure. News like that, moving through student networks, can be matched against, at least until recently, the reputed earning power of recent graduates of business schools, law schools, and medical schools. The comparison is akin to what young people growing up in Rust Belt cities are forced to see: the work isn’t here anymore; our technology is obsolete.

unlike other members of the university community, they might well have been plying their trade without proper credentials: “Whereas economists or physicists, geologists or climatologists, physicians or lawyers must master a body of knowledge before they can even think of being licensed to practice,” she said, “we literary scholars, it is tacitly assumed, have no definable expertise.”

English departments need not refight the Western culture wars. But they need to fight their own book wars. They must agree on which texts to teach and argue out the choices and the principles of making them if they are to claim the respect due a department of study.

They can teach their students to write well, to use rhetoric. They should place their courses in composition and rhetoric at the forefront of their activities. They should announce that the teaching of composition is a skill their instructors have mastered and that students majoring in English will be certified, upon graduation, as possessing rigorously tested competence in prose expression.

The study of literature will then take on the profile now held, with moderate dignity, by the study of the classics, Greek and Latin.

But we can, we must, do better. At stake are the books themselves and what they can mean to the young. Yes, it is just a literary tradition. That’s all. But without such traditions, civil societies have no compass to guide them.

In overdeveloping the capacity to show how texts, institutions or people fail to accomplish what they set out to do, we may be depriving students of the chance to learn as much as possible from what they study.

As debunkers, they contribute to a cultural climate that has little tolerance for finding or making meaning — a culture whose intellectuals and cultural commentators get “liked” by showing that somebody else just can’t be believed.

Liberal education in America has long been characterized by the intertwining of two traditions: of critical inquiry in pursuit of truth and exuberant performance in pursuit of excellence. In the last half-century, though, emphasis on inquiry has become dominant, and it has often been reduced to the ability to expose error and undermine belief.

fetishizing disbelief as a sign of intelligence has contributed to depleting our cultural resources. Creative work, in whatever field, depends upon commitment, the energy of participation and the ability to become absorbed in works of literature, art and science. That type of absorption is becoming an endangered species of cultural life, as our nonstop, increasingly fractured technological existence wears down our receptive capacities.

Liberal learning depends on absorption in compelling work. It is a way to open ourselves to the various forms of life in which we might actively participate. When we learn to read or look or listen intensively, we are, at least temporarily, overcoming our own blindness by trying to understand an experience from another’s point of view.

we are learning to activate potential, and often to instigate new possibilities.

Liberal education must not limit itself to critical thinking and problem solving; it must also foster openness, participation and opportunity. It should be designed to take us beyond the campus to a life of ongoing, pragmatic learning that finds inspiration in unexpected sources, and increases our capacity to understand and contribute to the world

Professors were more responsive to white male students than to female, black, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese students in almost every discipline and across all types of universities

We found the most severe bias in disciplines paying higher faculty salaries and at private universities

our own discipline of business showed the most bias, with 87 percent of white males receiving a response compared with just 62 percent of all females and minorities combined.

Surprisingly, several supposed advantages that some people believe women and minorities enjoy did not materialize

Were Asians favored, given the model minority stereotype they supposedly benefit from in academic contexts? No. In fact, Chinese students were the most discriminated-against group in our sample

Did reaching out to someone of the same gender or race — such as a black student emailing a black professor — reduce bias? No. We saw the same levels of bias in both same-race and same-gender faculty-student pairs that we saw in pairs not sharing a race or gender (the one exception was Chinese students writing to Chinese professors).

Did it help to be in a discipline with a greater representation of women and minorities? Again, no. Faculty members in those more diverse disciplines, like criminal justice, were no less likely to discriminate than those in less diverse disciplines,

Did it help that these were students in the pre-applicant stage, when some believe underrepresented groups enjoy advantageous access to selective opportunities? Again, no

each of the supposed hidden advantages of being a woman or minority proved to be no more than a phantom.

Dr. Tegmark, in his new book, “Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality,” turns the idea on its head: The reason mathematics serves as such a forceful tool is that the universe is a mathematical structure. Going beyond Pythagoras and Plato, he sets out to show how matter, energy, space and time might emerge from n

“Above all,” he wrote, “I would like to extend the boundaries of what is not regarded as unthinkable, in light of how little we really understand about the world.”

Neuroscientists assume that these mental powers somehow emerge from the electrical signaling of neurons — the circuitry of the brain. But no one has come close to explaining how that occurs. Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story That, Dr. Nagel proposes, might require another revolution: showing that mind, along with matter and energy, is “a fundamental principle of nature” — and that we live in a universe primed “to generate beings capable of comprehending it.” Rather than being a blind series of random mutations and adaptations, evolution would have a direction, maybe even a purpose.

the mathematician Edward Frenkel noted that only a small part of the vast ocean of mathematics appears to describe the real world. The rest seems to b