Tag Archives: Coursera

Free Courses

Sane

Happy Weekend.

I will be answering some readers’ questions and posting how you can buy $1,500 suits for $50 on Ebay this weekend.  Value is where you find it.

Take a Valuation Course from Damordaran:

http://www.academicearth.org/courses/valuation

Also, choose amongst 300 courses here……But don’t let it distract too much from your 10-K readings!

Hello, Hola, Bonjour Courserians!

What a month February has been! We’re welcoming 29 new universities to Coursera. This is an extremely exciting announcement for us, not only because we’re nearly doubling the amount of schools offering courses on our platform, but also because of the diverse learning opportunities that these schools will bring to Courserians around the world. For the first time, non-English courses across many topics will be offered in languages like French, Spanish, Chinese and Italian!

Gratefully yours,
Daphne, Andrew and the Coursera Team | www.coursera.org/team
News and Updates
Aside from working to get these new universities on board, we’ve also been expanding ways that students can receive credit and more recognition for their work, including offering credit recommendations from the American Council of Education (ACE).
Coursera was also recently listed among Fast Company’s “World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies” for 2013. A warm thank you to all of our incredibly universities, professors and students for your continued participation and support.
We did it together, everyone! Thanks to all of your votes, Coursera won the Crunchies “Best New Startup Of 2012” award.
Your Coursera Community
As our student base of 2.7 million quickly grows, we’ll be sharing information and opportunities with you to get you even more involved in shaping the evolution of our community, programs and culture. For fun, our team made a visualization of Coursera’s global community, check it out!
Courses You Can Take

Networks: Friends, Money, and Bytes
Princeton University
2/4/2013
12 weeks

The Modern and the Postmodern
Wesleyan University
2/4/2013
14 weeks

Bioelectricity: A Quantitative Approach
Duke University
2/4/2013
9 weeks

Algorithms, Part I
Princeton University
2/4/2013
6 weeks

Analytic Combinatorics, Part I
Princeton University
2/8/2013
5 weeks

Compilers
Stanford University
2/11/2013
11 weeks

Clinical Problem Solving
University of California, San Francisco
2/11/2013
6 weeks

Analyse Numérique pour Ingénieurs
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
2/18/2013
7 weeks

Digital Signal Processing
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
2/18/2013
8 weeks

Linear and Discrete Optimization
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
2/18/2013
7 weeks

Computational Investing, Part I
Georgia Institute of Technology
2/22/2013
8 weeks

Natural Language Processing
Columbia University
2/24/2013
10 weeks

Financial Engineering and Risk Management
Columbia University
2/24/2013
10 weeks

Aboriginal Worldviews and Education
University of Toronto
2/25/2013
4 weeks

Introductory Human Physiology
Duke University
2/25/2013
12 weeks

AIDS
Emory University
2/25/2013
9 weeks

Games without Chance: Combinatorial Game Theory
Georgia Institute of Technology
2/25/2013
7 weeks

Introduction to Engineering Mechanics
Georgia Institute of Technology
2/25/2013
5 weeks

Women and the Civil Rights Movement
University of Maryland, College Park
2/25/2013
12 weeks
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Another CASE STUDY on Accounting; Free Course on Behavioral Finance

Science of hitting Don’t Invest until you see the money lying there on the floor–Jim Rogers, Investor.

From the 1997 Berkshire Hathaway (BRKaShareholder Letter:

In his book The Science of Hitting, Ted explains that he carved the strike zone into 77 cells, each the size of a baseball. Swinging only at balls in his “best” cell, he knew, would allow him to bat .400; reaching for balls in his “worst” spot, the low outside corner of the strike zone, would reduce him to .230. In other words, waiting for the fat pitch would mean a trip to the Hall of Fame; swinging indiscriminately would mean a ticket to the minors.

If they are in the strike zone at all, the business “pitches” we now see are just catching the lower outside corner. If we swing, we will be locked into low returns. But if we let all of today’s balls go by, therecan be no assurance that the next ones we see will be more to our liking. Perhaps the attractive prices of the past were the aberrations, not the full prices of today. Unlike Ted, we can’t be called out if we resist three pitches that are barely in the strike zone; nevertheless,just standing there, day after day, with my bat on my shoulder is not my idea of fun.

When the above was written, the party that ultimately led to the tech bubble era valuations* had already begun in the equity markets.

http://theinvestmentsblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/fat-pitch-ted-williams-science-of.html

And check out: www.theinvestmentsblog.blogspot.com/

Case Study on Earnings Qualithy

Our last case on earnings quality was National Electric found by going into the case study value vault found in the blog post in the following link: http://wp.me/p2OaYY-1ub    I promised to provide an answer. Before submitting my write-up on that case, perhaps the following case would be a good supplement to learn more about uncovering earnings quality.  This case should be pretty obvious. Don’t cheat! Just use the material provided in the link below and answer the three questions in the HBS Case Study.

 

John Chew shared a folder with you via YouSendIt.

Another Case Study Dec 2012
View this folder

If you get stuck, here is a hint: (don’t look until you have tried to solve the case on your own! http://youtu.be/l-O5IHVhWj0   With practice, certain figures and phrases in the notes to the financials should SCREAM OUT at you.  Whatever happened to the CFO?

A Christmas Vault with goodies for all will be posted if someone posts their solution.

Free Behavioral Finance Course! (Coursera)

I have signed up!

https://www.coursera.org/course/behavioralecon

Workload: 7-10 hours/week

About the Course

Behavioral economics and the closely related field of behavioral finance couple scientific research on the psychology of decision making with economic theory to better understand what motivates investors, employees, and consumers. This course will be based heavily on my own research. We will examine topics such as how emotion rather than cognition determines economic decisions, “irrational” patterns of thinking about money and investments, how expectations shape perceptions, economic and psychological analyses of dishonesty by presumably honest people, and how social and financial incentives combine to motivate labor by everyday workers and CEOs alike. This highly interdisciplinary course will be relevant to students with interests in General Management, Behavioral Finance, Entrepreneurship, Social Entrepreneurship, and Marketing.

This class has two main goals:

  1. To introduce you to the range of cases where people (consumers, investors, managers, and significant others) make decisions that are inconsistent with standard economic theory and the assumptions of rational decision making. This is the lens of behavioral economics.
  2. To help you think creatively about the applications of behavioral economic principles for the development of new products, technology based products, public policies, and to understand how business and social policy strategies could be modified with a deeper understanding of the effects these principles have on employees and customers.

About the Instructor(s)

Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, with appointments in the Fuqua School of Business, the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and the department of Economics. As one of the foremost leaders in psychology and behavioral economics, Dr. Ariely has published his research in top economic, medical and psychology journals and is the author of Predictably Irrational (2008), The Upside of Irrationality (2010), and The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty (2012), three bestselling general audience books about research in behavioral economics. In addition, he is the founding member of The Center For Advanced Hindsight.  More information about Dan can be found at:  www.danariely.com

Take an MBA course on Buffett: http://cba.unomaha.edu/execmgmt/buffettgenius/

The Difference Between Mainstream Economics and Austrian Economics

http://www.fee.org/library/detail/the-foundational-difference-between-austrian-economics-and-the-mainstream#axzz2F3xyQj7U

BOOK LISTS

The 2012 Holiday Book Survey has been tallied and the results can be found here. I want to thank everyone who participated in the survey.

The biography & memoir genre continues to lead the survey (Steve Jobs – Walter Isaacson & new comer The Passage of Power – Robert Caro) with social science still having a strong showing (The Signal and the Noise – Nate Silver & Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman). Atlas Shrugged continues to breach the top 5 although falling from its #2 spot in the last two years to #5. Overall, biography & memoir and business & finance showed the strongest growth.

I hope you enjoy this years’ book list and find something of interest to read or gift. If you have any suggestions on how to improve on the survey, please let me know.

All the best and happy holidays.


Barry Pasikov, Managing Member of HazeltonCapital Partners in Highland Park, IL 60035    Tel: 312-970-9202

 

 

Cousera: TED Talk on Free Courses from the Best Teachers

As the market goes your way, become more humble–Benard Baruch

http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2012/08/ted-talk-daphne-koller-on-what-were.html

Why you should listen to her:

A 3rd generation Ph.D who is passionate about education, Stanford professor Daphne Koller is excited to be making the college experience available to anyone through her startup, Coursera. With classes from 16 top colleges, Coursera is an innovative model for online learning. While top schools have been putting lectures online for years, Coursera’s platform supports the other vital aspect of the classroom: tests and assignments that reinforce learning.

At the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, computer scientist Daphne Koller studies how to model large, complicated decisions with lots of uncertainty. (Her research group is called DAGS, which stands for Daphne’s Approximate Group of Students.) In 2004, she won a MacArthur Fellowship for her work, which involves, among other things, using Bayesian networks and other techniques to explore biomedical and genetic data sets.

“Classes involve recorded lectures and quizzes in which the video pauses to let students answer questions.”

Ari Levy in Bloomberg BusinessWeek