Useful Resource

MIT has one of the best Cognitive Science style programs in the country, and being MIT, they decided that their course resources should all be online. They don't all have the relevant materials online, but the syllabi and links to reading are generally there, and sometimes lecture notes, too. Particularly interesting is noting the differences between Introduction to Neural Networks at MIT and Principles & Methods of Cognitive & Neural Modeling (CN 510) at BU, in which I am currently enrolled. I think I might be a little more pleased if there were more of a consensus here about what is the best way to go about, oh, teaching an introductory course in neural network type stuff.

Going to graduate school has some unpleasant properties that are akin to religion, in that you kind of choose one approach to whatever you're going to study and then kind of ignore all the rest. My opinion of religion can be summarized in that there are N religions, so all things being equal, you have a 1/N chance of just being completely wrong. I think the same thing applies here to a certain extent, and that if something isn't part of the curriculum in my department, I should at least know what it is. And what's even stranger is that my department seems to agree - each year there is a huge conference here at BU covering a huge array of relevant studies, not just what's in our syllabus. But if it's important enough to show up at a conference sponsored by my department, then why do we have such a high level of redundancy in the courses here as opposed to covering this other material? Mysteries abound. I'm pretty sure that similar things are taking place at other universities, but in truth, I have no idea.