All About Game Theory

Hello and welcome back to my blog! Today's topic is my newest course (and the reason I didn't post Tuesday & Wednesday).

GAME THEORY

My newest course is Welcome to Game Theory from University of Tokyo. Taught by Michihiro Kandori, this course does NOT focus on video games, which I originally thought it was. In fact, game theory doesn't even include video games. Game theory is the process of using a mathematical model to turn a game-like situation into a game in order to see all the possible outcomes. According to game theory, a "game" is anything that what's best for 1 person/group depends on what the other person/group does. Some examples of this are politics, poker, and traffic control. Game theory also has found uses in:

• Economics
• Psychology
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Biology
• Computer Science

Poker demonstrates game theory, so roulette gambling does too, right? Wrong. Roulette gambling has a machine, so one player's actions are definite. According to Professor Kandori, things have to meet 3 requirements in order to be made into games:

1. Who are the players?
2. What possible strategies can the players take?
3. What is the payoff (reward) of each strategy?

Requirement #1 is pretty straightforward, since you just need to identify the participants in the "game"; for example, Democrats and Republicans. Requirement #2 is more complex, because each player has a range of choices. Each player's strategies make up that player's "strategy set". Finally, Requirement #3 returns to being straightforward, because the payoff is the reward; for example, the presidency of the United States.

Thank you for viewing this edition of School Stories, and I hope to see you again!

I'm back to my blog!

Hello and welcome back to my blog. I am sorry I have been away. I was taking another English course until recently. I was taking  Introduction to Essay Writing through UC Irvine and just finished this course. Because I had multiple essays for Essay Writing, I took a break from my blog. I am happy to say that I got an A in my Essay Writing course!

This post is all about the latest courses I have been taking since my last post. Now that I am done with my other writing courses, I will be blogging every day once more.

GENETICS

The first course we will be talking about today is my Genetics class. It is called Introduction to Genetics and Evolution from Duke University, taught by Professor Mohammed Noor. Let's talk about DNA and RNA bonds. In DNA and RNA, there are 4 different nucleotides, which are basically just pieces of the strand. They all have specific bonds. For example, nucleotide A always bonds with nucleotide T in DNA, while A only bonds with nucleotide U in RNA. Nucleotide C only bonds with nucleotide G and vice versa in both DNA and RNA. Nucleotide T is specifically found only in DNA, while nucleotide U is only found in RNA. The other nucleotides - A, C and G - are found both in DNA and RNA. More from genetics in another post.

MYTHOLOGY

Next up, let's talk about my Greek and Roman Mythology class. This is from the University of Pennsylvania and is taught by Professor Peter Struck. In the course, the professor often introduces rules that he calls Universal Laws that pretty much hold true across all of antiquity. By antiquity, I mean the time of Ancient Greece. When I talk about these Universal Laws, I will introduce the law an explain what I think it means. Comments as to what YOU think the Universal Laws mean are always welcome. 

Without further adieu, here is Universal Law #1:

Nostalgia is the most powerful force in the universe. This Universal Law was introduced in the course when the professor was discussing what exactly myth means. I believe that what he meant is that memories often get clouded and oftentimes when these memories get clouded, we misremember things and make these falsehoods become true. As I said earlier, what you think this law means would  make an excellent topic for a comment, so please, feel free!

FROM FREEDOM RIDES TO FERGUSON

This course, offered through Emory University is taught by Dr. Bernard Lafayette, who is a prominent Civil Rights Activist. I just completed this one with a final grade of 90.0% (90). Throughout the course, they consistently reiterated the concept that when faced with a potentially hostile situation, respond with peace and love. 

This idea is further enforced when Dr. Lafayette gives an example of an all-night sit in at a lunch counter. The owner of the shop locked the doors and locked the protesters inside. This was a place that was supposedly opened 24 hours, so it was where cab drivers went to get their coffee. Since the doors were locked and nobody could get in or out, the cab drivers had to wait to get the coffee, hence being delayed in doing their work. Eventually, there were 13 cab driver lined up in their cars sitting and waiting for their coffee. When it became clear the owner would let the protesters out but not back in, the group nominated Dr. Lafayette to go out to the phone booth for people to come and pick them up. When in the middle of the call, one of the cab drivers came up to the telephone booth, ripped Dr. Lafayette out with force and took turns with his dozen friends punching him, kicking him and beating him up in general.

Dr. Lafayette did not strike back. When they finished, he dusted his shirt off and said, "Gentlemen, I have a call to make." He went and tried to finish his call and the police came. They arrested the cab drivers, but they also arrested Dr Lafayette. The two officers who went to respond to the call were arguing whether or not to arrest him. One said that Dr. Lafayette should be arrested for fighting. The other officer said he should not be arrested because he did nothing wrong. They argued for a bit and decided to take Dr. Lafayette to the jail house. However, he was released the next day because they interviewed the witnesses and it was clear that Dr. Lafayette had not laid a finger on the cab drivers. He was released and the cab drivers were left in the jail house.

JOURNALISM

I also just finished What is News?, a journalism course offered through Michigan State University. It was taught by multiple professors from the Michigan State School of Information. What I will be discussing with you today is sensationalism and propaganda. 

Sensationalism is making one event seem much bigger than it actually it is. One example would be having a pin drop being a front page story. It does attract readers or viewers, however, this lowers accuracy and diminishes your reputation. It can be useful if you are searching for getting clicks. However, a good news site would never just go for clicks.

Another more extreme form of sensationalism is propaganda. Propaganda is often used by politicians and in times of conflict. It is often biased and one sided information used to persuade or dissuade people toward or against certain things. Propaganda is often used during elections. We have seen it in the 2016 election season. It is used by politicians or allies of politicians to either cast someone in a good light or the opponent in a negative light. For example, if Donald Trump were to put out something saying "Hillary Clinton can't follow rules with emails, why should we trust her to become president?" This would be putting Hillary in a negative light without giving all the details. That is another one of propaganda's key traits - not giving the whole story.

NEXT TIME...

We will be discussing my Classical music class and my Spanish class. Until then, goodbye and have a good day!

The benefits of using CSS in HTML

This is an essay that I wrote for my Essay Writing class from the University of California, Irvine.  It is all about CSS (which is a course I am taking at University of Michigan online). Enjoy.

Have you ever wondered what makes up a website? Most websites use language called HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language. If the website only uses HTML, it will be bland, colorless, and all one size. There would be no bold, no italics, and nor borders. There would not be underline or any other of those fancy things we like to use when we type. If CSS (Cascade Style Sheets) is used for a website, it will become more interesting. Many people debate whether to use CSS, so here is the information you need to know.

One feature CSS uses that does not appear in HTML is the use of color. There are three ways that color can be given to something. One of these ways is to just give the color name, such as red, green, and blue. The downside to this, however, is it will not appear the same in every browser. Each browser has a different idea of what, for example, red is. The other two ways to color something are far more efficient, but a little more complicated. They include using hexadecimal values, which are 0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9 and from A to F. Six of these values combined with a pound symbol in fromt (#) are needed in order to make a hexadecimal color. An example would be #FFFFFF, which makes white. #000000 would make black. The final way is to use an RGB value, which is a red-green-blue value. Each value can have a number ranging from zero to 255, which will determine how much of the color it puts in. (255,0,0) would form pure red, the brightest red. (0,255,0) would form a bright green, while (0,0,255) would form a pure blue. As you could have guessed, (0,0,0) would form black and (255,255,255) would form white. HTML, on the other hand, cannot take any of these inputs. The only way to use CSS in HTML without creating a whole new CSS stylesheet to link to the main HTML code is to use a style tag in the head section. This is a very unconventional method, however, so try to avoid using it at all costs. As you can see, colors are of the many benefits that CSS provides over HTML.

The second benefit that CSS provides is the ability to modify text. Using the text-align command in a stylesheet, any text that has been put into the HTML code that the stylesheet is linked to will become either aligned to the center, the left or aligned to the right. For example, the whole first heading that might read "Benefits of CSS" could be centered perfectly over the rest of the text, which is aligned to the left or the right. Another text modification feature provided by CSS is the ability to change the font style. If someone wishes to change the font from Arial to Comic Sans MS, they can using the font-family command. The person who changes the font, however, needs to be sure to put AT LEAST two back up fonts just in case the browser they are using doesn't support the style they choose. If none of the choices are supported by the brower being used, it will just switch to the browser's default font, which I believe in many cases is Arial. The final text modification command being discussed here is the text-style command. While it may seem similar to the font-family command, it is completely different. One of the options for the text style is small-caps, which allows the user to change lower case text into all upper case text, but it will be the same size as the lower case text. Large text, on the other hand, is basically the same thing except it makes it all upper case without it being the same size as lower case. Essentially, it is like putting the caps lock key on while you type without needing to.

A third benefit of CSS is the ability to surround the text with borders of varying styles using the border command. The border command allows people to not only choose the style of border, but also the width of the border on every side and the color of the border. There are multiple styles for the border, as mentioned above. Here are a couple of them: dotted and solid. A dotted border is basically what one would expect. Instead of being a solid line surrounding your text, it's a dotted line. No surprise there. Also as the name suggests, solid is a solid line. Determining the width of each side of the border is a totally different matter, however. One can put in anywhere from one to four values, preferably measured in pixels, in order to determine how large the border will be. However, the number of parameters determine what each number controls the size of. If you put in one parameter, it determines the width for every side of the rectangular border. If you put in two parameters, the first parameter determines the width of the top and the bottom sides, while the second parameter determines the width of the left and right sides. If one decides to put three parameters, it gets a little tricky. The first parameter determines the width of the top. The second parameter determines the width of the bottom and the third parameter determines the width of the sides. If four parameters are put in, the first parameter determines the top, the second determines the right, the third determines the bottom, and the fourth determines the left.

Needless to say, none of the things stated above about CSS work in HTML without the style tag. If one is willing to put in the effort of making a whole new stylesheet to link in with their HTML code, the rewards will be well worth their time. As you can see, HTML is greatly enhanced by the use of CSS.

HTML 5, Margaret Mead, Grammar & Chinese

Hello and welcome to my blog on this fine Thursday.

The first topic of today's of discussion will be the end of my Grammar & Punctuation class from the University of California Irvine (UC Irvine). I completed the course and my final grade, as some of you may want to know, is a 92%. In this course, we learned about the proper uses of commas, parallel structure, sentence variety, and the different types of sentences. The class was fairly enjoyable. The one thing I really liked about this was that it forced you to interact with your peers in order to pass the class. The one downside, I think, is that there was only one video per lesson. I would have preferred more, so we could dig deeper. It was not an "Amazing, that was SO enlightening" kind  of class.

I am in another computer class since I finished my others. Today I started HTML 5 through the University of Michigan's School of Information. This is my second course through Michigan. My Python course was the first one. This is a different professor.The last one was Dr. Charles Severance. My new professor is Dr. Colleen van Lent. I do like her. HTML is often taught in correspondence with CSS, with HTML typically being used to create the content and CSS being used to create the styling and make it all fancy. With the release of HTML 5, however, HTML can now do not as much as CSS can, but it now can do a bit of styling as well. Examples of the styling it can do (to an extent) background or text color changes. Again, this is to a limited extent.

In my Chinese class, I have been learning about food, time, and numbers. Today, I learned about colors. Last year, I took Spanish and it was much, much easier than Chinese. Chinese is okay, but my preference is Spanish for a foreign language, or maybe something else similar to English.
Not many words in Chinese are similar to English. An exception is the word coffee, which is kāfēi.

In my astronomy class, Astronomy: Exploring Time and Space from the University of Arizona, it is more about recent discoveries. They are talking about the big telescope that they are building, which is going to be the largest in the world when it is finished. It is being built at the University of Arizona. In the beginning, it starts off by having you answer 30 questions about your prior science experiences. After you finish that, the second week was all about the Scientific Method and how it applies to astronomy. The big theme was CORRELATION and CAUSATION.

I learned about Margaret Mead, who explored the South Pacific islands, where she noticed natives that were actually putting head lice into the children's hair. The reason behind this was that the natives noticed that when the child has a fever, the head becomes hot and that lice abandoned ship so to speak when the temperatures got hot. They thought that no head lice was caused by fever. Because of this they believed that lice could make a fever go away. They were not trying to harm the children. They were trying to protect them from fever, even though in reality lice didn't make a fever disappear.

Thank you for coming to see today's edition of School Stories (Where School is ALWAYS in Session) and I hope to see you again soon.

History of Rock

Hello and welcome to my blog.

Today we're going to be talking about my music class, The History of Rock: Part 1, through the University of Rochester. This week, I am learning about what happened while Elvis Presley was serving in the military. As some of you may or may not know, he was called to serve in the military in 1958. He was gone for about two years.

I also learned about the Payola scandals. Artists were paying DJs money or favors to play their music and, therefore, they were getting exposure instead of everyone getting equal exposure like it is supposed to be.

With the Payola scandals,  Elvis's departure for the military, and other deaths & other circumstances, it opened up the teen market for music. There used to not be a market for teenagers, but after Rock & Roll started exploiting it, it became a big thing.

Elvis came back in early 1960. He noticed the gap that was left by the first wave of Rock & Roll and he started appearing in movies. Many fans of Elvis agreed that movies weren't all that good, but they liked them because Elvis was in them.

There were also movies with beach themes. Those were a big hit too.

What about music during this time?

There was the brill-building approach to pop. This was another way that people - after Elvis left - came in and said, "Hey, we should exploit this gap. Maybe we should come up with the next Elvis."

The Aldon Publishing Group attempted to come up with the next Elvis and they were the leaders of the brill-building approach. That's not to say that they were trying to come up with another male hit, but they were trying to come up with another Rock & Roll hit.

Some of the people and groups they attempted to turn into the next Elvis, so to speak, were Little Eva, The Shirelles, The Cookies, The Ronettes, The Crystals, and Neil Sedaka.

There was also something called teen idols. They were handsome people who were not necessarily all that talented. That's not to say that there weren't any talented teen idols. There were. They just weren't all that common. When it came to teen idols: Attractiveness first and talent was just an added bonus.

Who were these teen idols?

The teen idols that are more well known:

• Frankie Avalon with his songs "Venus" and "Why"
• Fabian with "Turn Me Lose" and "Tiger"
• Bobby Vee with "Take Good Care of My Baby"
• Bobby Vinton with "Roses Are Red (My Love)"
• Bobby Darin with "Splish Splash", "Dream Lover" and "Mack the Knife"
• Elvis Presley (once he returned) with "Are You Lonesome Tonight"

My personal favorite song from this time happens to be a song called "Calendar Girl" by Neil Sedaka. I thought it was well sung and I also liked the costumes there were used to represent each month of the year. I also thought that from the approach of musical producers and companies that song would have done really well.

One last thing about the teen idols is that they were marketed as sort of the "ideal boyfriend" - that is how the music company wanted to put them out and that is how they reached a lot of their teenage female listeners.

Thank your for visiting this music edition of School Stories (Where School is ALWAYS in Session) and I hope to see you again soon.

Space, Games and Chinese

Hello and welcome to the latest publication of my blog. Today's topic is an overview of the new courses I am enrolled it. I recently completed Ancient Greek (Wesleyan University) and the FIRST: The New Hampshire Primaries (University of New Hampshire). I also finished SQL, a programming language.

Right now, I have three new courses:

1. The Evolving Universe, through Caltech. It is about space and the universe; it's about outer space and what occurs in the great unknown. In my space class, it gave a couple of metaphors for the vast of our universe. If the earth was the size of a grain of sand, the sun would be 5 feet away. The nearest star that isn't the sun would be 250 miles away.

Our galaxy would be 10 million miles across and the closest large galaxy, the Adromeda galaxy, would be 130 million miles away from the earth. Proportionally, that would be a HUGE distance! One last thing about the space class - if our galaxy was the size of a frisbee, the most distant celestial body that we know of would be 100 miles away, but that it only proportionally.

2. Introduction to Game Design through California Institute for the Arts. This is about designing your own games- it can be on paper or a video game. If you finish the class, you will be able to build your own games completely from scratch. You never know, it might be the next big hit, like Flappy Bird or Angry Birds. There are other hits that don't involve birds, though.

In the first week of this gaming course, which you can enroll in through December 7, is an introduction to the professor and his Sesame Street-like character who assists him. It also talks about the different goals you can have in your game- the need for a story line, as well as the fact that you should involve a little bit of chance and a little bit of skill in your game.

The final assignment for the first week is to create your own game that can fit on a single sheet of paper and is for just one player. What's that? You want to hear a little bit about the game I am working on? If you say so!

• The came is called Kingly Quest.
• The storyline goes as follows: The queen has been kidnapped. You need to go on a journey to rescue her. It's like Monopoly except with only one dice. You roll the dice and follow the instructions on the space you land on.
• The way you win is by fighting the dragon who has taken the queen captive. In order to fight the dragon, you have to roll the die twice. If the total is even, fortunately, you win. Unfortunately, if the total is odd, you lose and have to play the game again.

3. My third course is Chinese for Beginners through Peking University. As the title indicates, it is learning the Chinese language. It seems a little bit difficult at first, but once you get a little further in, it gets a little bit easier. My Chinese class starts out with you learning about the different tones.

There are 4 tones and they indicate a different pitch that you say it in. There is one that is a straight line over the letter and as it kind of indicates, it represents there being no change in how you say it.

There is one that looks like a small V over the letter, which represents a decrease in the pitch and then an increase in the pitch so eventually you would end at the exact same pitch that you started with.

There is one that looks like an accent mark with the top facing to the left, which represents only a decrease in the pitch.

The final tone is opposite of the third one, representing an accent mark with the bottom end facing the left. This is for an increase in the pitch. Those are the different tones that you learn in the first week. I do not want to give too much away, so I will not go into more detail right now.

Thank you for tuning in to this edition of School Stories (Where School Is ALWAYS In Session!). I hope to see you again soon!

Wrapping Up Greek

Recently I finished my Ancient Greek course from Wesleyan University. In the final week, it discussed the end of the Peloponnesian War, the death of Socrates, and the rise of Alexander the Great. Socrates was on trial, where he proposed that his punishment would be lifetime maintenance paid for by the state of Athens. The jury disagreed, however. In the end, after turning down an opportunity to escape from the prison that he was being held in, he had to drink a lethal poison. After Socrates’ demise, Greece came under the rule of so-called “charismatic leaders”, who rapidly rose and fell and rose and fell. One of these leaders was Philip II of Macedon. His son, Alexander, was tutored by the great scholar Aristotle, and went on to conquer much of Asia.


I personally thought that the course, although difficult at times, was overall an enjoyable learning experience. One thing that would have made the course better, at least in my opinion, would be if they went more in-depth about than the mythology of Ancient Greece. All in all, however, the course made for an excellent tool for knowing all that one can about the history of Ancient Greece. I would strongly recommend this course to anyone interested in Ancient Greece. Thank you for tuning in to School Stories (Where School Is ALWAYS In Session!) today, and I hope to see you again soon!