The Learn Tracker
...life-long learning: structured, organized, searchable...

My name is Edward Tanguay.
I have a Bachelors degree in Philosophy, a Masters in Education, and am currently working as a web developer in Berlin, Germany.

I watch over 200 college-level MOOC lectures per year in subjects such as history , psychology, science, religion, art, philosophy, and IT development in English, German, French, Spanish and Italian, and record my notes here.
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Contact Me via E-Mail:
edward [at] tanguay.info

Learning Activity by Month:

The primary goal of this Learn Tracker project is to build a web site which serves as one place to record the notes of everything that I am learning from MOOC classes, to foreign languages, to useful code examples and technical how-to notes, so that I not only have an overview of what I have learned, but can search and recall these notes at any time.

The secondary goal of this Learn Tracker project is to work together with companies, universities, and MOOC providers to build software that allows employees, students, and learners to record what they are learning in an efficient way so that it serves not only as (1) a record of what they have learned, but also (2) a place for them to review and search what they have learned.

Since January 2013, I have watched and recorded notes on over 300 MOOC lectures from over 30 different courses in both English and French, and have watched and recorded notes and flashcards on over 50 foreign language videos in Italian, French and Spanish. (I am curently still adding notes I took from 2013 and plan to be caught up by the end of January 2014.

June 2014 Learn Certificate
Watched and took notes on 27 college lectures:
Learned 16 vocabulary words:
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Learned about 7 people:
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Corrected 4 misspelling:
persistant, reciprical, Bischoffen, millenium
Recorded 95 Flashcards from MOOC lectures:
  • how close is the nearest star and how long would it take to get there traveling 10 km/s
                        
  • how far away are we from the center of our galaxy?
                        
  • how wide is the Milky Way galaxy
                        
  • what are the four fundamental components of an Android application?
                        
  • what is another dwarf planet besides Pluto?
                        
  • what is the brightest star
                        
  • what is the nearest star
                        
  • what was the last shogunate of Japan
                        
  • Focused on (FRENCH)
                        
  • Furthermore (FRENCH)
                        
  • I mean (FRENCH)
                        
  • I mentioned earlier (FRENCH)
                        
  • If such a treaty (FRENCH)
                        
  • Indeed (FRENCH)
                        
  • Of course (FRENCH)
                        
  • The following words (FRENCH)
                        
  • This is not the case (FRENCH)
                        
  • a treaty (FRENCH)
                        
  • acquired (FRENCH)
                        
  • also emphasize this point (FRENCH)
                        
  • approximately (FRENCH)
                        
  • are both perpetrators and recipients (FRENCH)
                        
  • as (FRENCH)
                        
  • believer (FRENCH)
                        
  • builds on the texts of Paul (FRENCH)
                        
  • capture (FRENCH)
                        
  • challenges (FRENCH)
                        
  • citizens (FRENCH)
                        
  • communication channels (FRENCH)
                        
  • concerning (FRENCH)
                        
  • considering these elements (FRENCH)
                        
  • constructed (FRENCH)
                        
  • data layers (FRENCH)
                        
  • does not innovate (FRENCH)
                        
  • encounters (FRENCH)
                        
  • everything that is good (FRENCH)
                        
  • everything that occurs (FRENCH)
                        
  • faces precisely the dogma (FRENCH)
                        
  • from the beginning (FRENCH)
                        
  • governed by (FRENCH)
                        
  • governed by the logic (FRENCH)
                        
  • implementation (FRENCH)
                        
  • implementation (FRENCH)
                        
  • it follows that (FRENCH)
                        
  • it is the adding of (FRENCH)
                        
  • layers (FRENCH)
                        
  • lean (FRENCH)
                        
  • location of waterways (FRENCH)
                        
  • moist (FRENCH)
                        
  • non-interference (FRENCH)
                        
  • one last time (FRENCH)
                        
  • otherwise (FRENCH)
                        
  • pillar (FRENCH)
                        
  • regarding human rights (FRENCH)
                        
  • retaliation (FRENCH)
                        
  • ruler (FRENCH)
                        
  • slide (FRENCH)
                        
  • such as administrations (FRENCH)
                        
  • takes place (FRENCH)
                        
  • taking into account the principle (FRENCH)
                        
  • that arise from them (FRENCH)
                        
  • the interesting points (FRENCH)
                        
  • the portal (FRENCH)
                        
  • their scope was relativized (FRENCH)
                        
  • thousands of points (FRENCH)
                        
  • tirelessly (FRENCH)
                        
  • to be bound by the treaty (FRENCH)
                        
  • to whom he speaks (FRENCH)
                        
  • traffice circle (FRENCH)
                        
  • two thirds of all (FRENCH)
                        
  • what would defeat the purpose (FRENCH)
                        
  • wherein (FRENCH)
                        
  • which are flying (FRENCH)
                        
  • who are dedicated to the protection of (FRENCH)
                        
  • woody (FRENCH)
                        
  • Concerning (SPANISH)
                        
  • For now (SPANISH)
                        
  • Is there a safe way (SPANISH)
                        
  • It's time to start (SPANISH)
                        
  • Later we will see these cases (SPANISH)
                        
  • The most common syllable (SPANISH)
                        
  • What I will always find (SPANISH)
                        
  • a gap (SPANISH)
                        
  • a sound (SPANISH)
                        
  • don't have anything to do with (SPANISH)
                        
  • form a syllable with the vowel that follows (SPANISH)
                        
  • in this case, it is said to have a diphthong (SPANISH)
                        
  • key piece in the puzzle (SPANISH)
                        
  • the first that we will address (SPANISH)
                        
  • then (SPANISH)
                        
  • to strengthen our knowledge (SPANISH)
                        
  • together (SPANISH)
                        
  • we can have one or more (SPANISH)
                        
  • we write down that (SPANISH)
                        
  • you'll notice when you speak slowly (SPANISH)
                        
Monday, June 2, 2014
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
IMAGINING OTHER EARTHS, Princeton University
•
solar system
•
dwarf planets besides Pluto
•
Eris
•
most massive of the dwarf planets
•
1% of earth's mass... view all notes
Vocabulary:
parsec, n. an astronomical unit of length used to measure distances to objects outside the Solar System. About 3.3 light-years, or 31 trillion kilometres or 19 trillion miles in length ⇒ "The parsec is still less than the distance to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, which is 1.3 parsecs from Earth."
parallax, n. a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight and is measured by the angle between those two lines, astronomers use the principle of parallax to measure distances to the closer stars and dwarf planets. ⇒ "A simple everyday example of parallax can be seen in the dashboard of motor vehicles that use a needle-style speedometer gauge. When viewed from directly in front, the speed may show exactly 60; but when viewed from the passenger seat the needle may appear to show a slightly different speed, due to the angle of viewing."
Kuiper Belt, n. [KIGH-per] a region of space in our solar system, shaped more like an ellipse than a circle, which is similar to an asteroid belt, while the asteroid belt is mostly metal and rock, the Kuiper Belt is composed almost entirely of icy chunks of various substances, similar to comets, located approximately 30 to 50 AU from sun ⇒ "The dwarf planet Pluto is thought to be one of the objects in the Kuiper Belt."
People:
John Cromwell Mather (1946-)
American astrophysicist, cosmologist and Nobel Prize winner in Physics for his work on the COBE Satellite
  • partner on COBE project was George Smoot
  • COBE is an NASA satellite launched into Earth orbit on Nov. 18, 1989, and which revolutionized our understanding of the early cosmos by measuring and mapping the oldest light in the universe
  • the COBE satellite helped cement the big-bang theory of the universe, and can be regarded as the starting point for cosmology as a precision science
  • John Cromwell is also the project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a space telescope to be launched to L2 no earlier than 2018
Wednesday, June 4, 2014
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
MONGODB FOR NODE.JS DEVELOPERS, MongoDB University
•
what is MongoDB
•
non-relational
•
doesn't store in tables
•
stores in JSON documents
•
key/value... view all notes
Vocabulary:
memcached, n. a general-purpose distributed memory caching system often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the number of times an external data source (such as a database or API) must be read ⇒ "Memcached was originally developed by Danga Interactive for LiveJournal, but is now used by many other systems, including MocoSpace, YouTube, Reddit, Zynga, Facebook, Orange, Twitter, Tumblr, Wikipedia."
Self, n. an object-oriented programming language based on the concept of prototypes, a dialect of Smalltalk, latest version is 4.5.0 released in January 2014, the development of Self took place at Sun Microsystems ⇒ "Self is a prototype-based dynamic object-oriented programming language, environment, and virtual machine centered around the principles of simplicity, uniformity, concreteness, and liveness, it includes a programming language, a collection of objects defined in the Self language, and a programming environment built in Self for writing Self programs, the language and environment attempt to present objects to the programmer and user in as direct and physical a way as possible."
V8, n. an open source JavaScript engine developed by Google for the Google Chrome web browser ⇒ "V8 compiles JavaScript to native machine code before executing it, instead of more traditional techniques such as interpreting bytecode or compiling a whole program to machine code and then executing it from a filesystem."
WebKit, n. a layout engine software component for rendering web pages in web browsers, it powers Apple's Safari web browser and was previously used in Google's Chrome web browser ⇒ "As of September 2013 WebKit browser market share was larger than that of both the Trident engine used by Internet Explorer, and the Gecko engine used by Firefox, however, on April 3, 2013 Google announced that it had forked WebCore, a component of WebKit to be used in future versions of Google Chrome and Opera under the name Blink."
People:
Lars Bak (1964-)
Danish computer programmer who currently works for Google where he has contributed to the Chrome browser by developing the V8 JavaScript engine
  • 1988 designed and implemented object-oriented virtual machines
  • at Sun, developed a programming environment for Self and added several enhancements to the virtual machine
  • at Sun, developed a high-performance Java virtual machine
  • in 2004, joined Google to work on the Chrome browser
  • with team of 12 engineers, Bak has coordinated the development of the V8 JavaScript interpreter for Chrome
  • co-developed the Dart programming language
Thursday, June 5, 2014
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
MONGODB FOR NODE.JS DEVELOPERS, MongoDB University
•
installing MongoDB on Mac
•
mongodb.org/downloads
•
always use 64-bit versions
•
32-bit are only suitable for development
•
they limit total amount of data to 4 GB... view all notes
Monday, June 9, 2014
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
MONGODB FOR NODE.JS DEVELOPERS, MongoDB University
•
npm
•
package manager for node.js
•
node app.js
•
cannot find package
•
express = require('express') in app.js... view all notes
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
PROGRAMMING MOBILE APPLICATIONS FOR ANDROID, University of Maryland
•
android platform
•
software stack to support phones and tablets
•
has several layers software from the low-level OS kernel up to key apps
•
comes from SDK
•
Android Architecture... view all notes
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
MONGODB FOR NODE.JS DEVELOPERS, MongoDB University
•
CRUD/Mongo/SQL terminology
•
Create = Insert = INSERT
•
Read = Find = SELECT
•
Update = Update = UPDATE
•
Delete = Remove = DELETE... view all notes
Vocabulary:
asciibetical, adj. sorting words according to their ASCII codes instead of intuitionally according to the alphabet ⇒ "Asciibetical sorting serves the needs of the computer and the compiler, but not the human being."
Saturday, June 14, 2014
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
PROGRAMMING MOBILE APPLICATIONS FOR ANDROID, University of Maryland
•
Android development environment
•
you need JDK6
•
JDK7 will work but is not fully supported by Android
•
download and install the Android Tools ADT Bundle
•
latest Android platform... view all notes
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
MONGODB FOR NODE.JS DEVELOPERS, MongoDB University
•
sometimes you want a union of operators
•
use $or
•
the shell helps you with this by highlighting
•
$and is also available, but there is an easier way to do it in most cases except those are are very complicated... view all notes
Monday, June 16, 2014
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
WEB INTELLIGENCE AND BIG DATA, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
•
Turing Test
•
based on 1950s party game where a person takes type-written answers to questions and tries to determine if it was written by a man or a woman
•
human tries to determine if text is written by human or computer
•
a CAPTCHA is an example of a Turing Test in reverse
•
examples of successful artificial intelligence... view all notes
Vocabulary:
Kryder's Law, n. A theory that states that the density of data storage devices increases by a factor of 1,000 every 10.5 years (doubling every 13 months), a pace faster than Moore's Law, or the doubling in semiconductor chip performance every 18 months. ⇒ "Kryder's Law has held for three decades, surely it is good for another decade or two."
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
MONGODB FOR NODE.JS DEVELOPERS, MongoDB University
•
modifying documents
•
API for updating can update in various ways:
•
wholesale replacement
•
replacement of fields
•
upserts... view all notes
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
PROGRAMMING MOBILE APPLICATIONS FOR ANDROID, University of Maryland
•
four kinds of application components
•
1. Activity
•
users see these
•
enables users to give and receive
•
2. Service... view all notes
Vocabulary:
blunderbuss, n. a short gun or firearm with a large bore and funnel-shaped muzzle, capable of holding a number of nailes, stones and shot, and intended to be used at a limited range without exact aim, it has been long obsolete in civilized countries ⇒ "Using this workaround for update is a sort of blunderbuss way of modifying the database."
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
A HISTORY OF THE WORLD SINCE 1300, Princeton University
•
16th century China exemplifies the ways in which the arrival of new wealth can lead to new concentrations of authority and power
•
but it is hard to predict at the outset the affect this wealth will have, not only on the country but on the surrounding political landscape
•
what was happening in China (Ming dynasty 1368–1644) began to have an effect on its surroundings
•
Japan
•
hitherto the primary source of silver for China... view all notes
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
MONGODB FOR NODE.JS DEVELOPERS, MongoDB University
•
schema design
•
in RDBMS it is best to keep it in the third normal form
•
in Mongo, it is more important to keep the data in a way that the data will be used, e.g. keep together the data that is:
•
used together
•
used read-only... view all notes
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
THE MODERN WORLD: GLOBAL HISTORY SINCE 1760, University of Virginia
•
the age of the Americas
•
1950s: the United States takes on a particularly important role in shaping world history
•
1920s was important for the United States, but most of that was commercial and cultural
•
in the 1940s, the United States becomes exceptionally important militarily and politically
•
1940-1954: formative period... view all notes
Vocabulary:
Daimyo, n. [DIGHM-yo] the powerful territorial lords in pre-modern Japan who ruled most of the country from their vast, hereditary land holdings, but subordinate to the shogun, the Daimyo era came to an end in 1871 ⇒ "Seventeenth century Japan was similar to 17th century Europe in which you had a large land area beset with civil wars, regional warlords and ruling households called Diamyos struggling for power."
peonage, n. system by which debtors are bound in servitude to their creditors until their debts are paid ⇒ "During the 1910s and 1920s, Africans in the American South were able to increasingly free themselves from this kind of peonage."
benighted, adj. lacking knowledge or education, unenlightened ⇒ "In the 1920s and well into the 1930s, the American South was regarded as the substantially unreconstructed backward backwater of American society: weaker education, oppression of the Negros, a kind of benighted, colorful place, fit for the fiction of William Faulkner but hardly for imitation in the rest of the country."
Thursday, June 19, 2014
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
INTRODUCTION AUX DROITS DE L'HOMME, Université de Genève
•
en 1945 encore, cette idée des droits d'hommes paraissait utopique, révolutionnaire
•
l'internationalisation des droits de l'homme a nécessité une évolution importante de l'ordre juridique international
•
les fondements du droit international classique
•
le modèle classique de droit international est souvent appelé le modèle westphalien
•
assurer la coexistance entre les États... view all notes
Friday, June 20, 2014
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
ÉLÉMENTS DE GÉOMATIQUE, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
•
représentation
•
l'échelle
•
petite échelle
•
une carte qui donne une vue d'ensemble à une échelle du 1:25000ième
•
grande échelle... view all notes
Sunday, June 22, 2014
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
THE MODERN WORLD: GLOBAL HISTORY SINCE 1760, University of Virginia
•
the Korean War (1950-1953)
•
it's important not to see the Cold War as just a simplistic linear story of two sides in conflict with each other
•
the character of this confrontation in 1949-1950 changed much of how the world progressed in the subsequent decades
•
this is a pivotal point in world history
•
in 1949, important parts of Europe and Asia are being organized around completely different social systems... view all notes
People:
Syngman Rhee (1875-1965)
First president of South Korea
  • before WWII, elicited outside help to get the Japanese out of Korea
  • Harvard, Princeton graduate
  • anti-Communist and a strongman
  • led South through the Korean War
Kim Il-sung (1912-1994)
Leader of North Korea from 1948-1994
  • authorized invasion of South Korean in 1950
  • established an all-pervasive cult of personality
  • succeeded by Kim Jong-Il reigned 1994-2011
  • succeeded by Kim Jong-un in 2011
Monday, June 23, 2014
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
PROGRAMMING MOBILE APPLICATIONS FOR ANDROID, University of Maryland
•
resources
•
layout files
•
specifies what some part of your application will look like
•
these are XML files
•
in res/layout/\.xml... view all notes
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
PROGRAMMING MOBILE SERVICES FOR ANDROID HANDHELD SYSTEMS, Vanderbilt University
•
prime reason for concurrency
•
leveraging advances in hardware and software
•
it's hard to buy a computing device that has just one core
•
today there are even quad-core Android phones
•
historically... view all notes
Vocabulary:
heisenbug, n. a software bug that seems to disappear or alter its behavior when one attempts to study it ⇒ "Heisenbugs occur because common attempts to debug a program, such as inserting output statements or running it in a debugger, usually modify the code, change the memory addresses of variables and the timing of its execution."
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
KARL DER GROßE - PATER EUROPAE, Universität Würzburg
•
Wer war Karl der Große?
•
in seiner Zeit war er unterschiedlich gesehen von unterschiedlichen Gruppen:
•
von den Bischöfen seine Reiches
•
"Garant einer Christlichen Weltordnung"
•
von den Gelehrten an seinem Hof... view all notes
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
PROGRAMMING MOBILE APPLICATIONS FOR ANDROID, University of Maryland
•
the intent class is basically a data structure
•
it serves two purposes in Android:
•
1. specifies an operation
•
2. represent an event that has occurred in the system that you want to notify other components about
•
intents are a kind of language for specifying operations that you want to have performed... view all notes
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
BUDDHISM AND MODERN PSYCHOLOGY , Princeton University
•
which recording artist sang the most Buddhist song in recording history?
•
Mick Jagger
•
"I can't get no satisfaction"
•
if you've read much Buddhist literature you probably don't recall running into that phrase, because I don't think it's there
•
but Mick Jagger's song captures the spirit of Buddhism's First Noble Truth, or "Duhka" is usually translated into English as "The Truth of Suffering", yet a more accurate translation is "unsatisfactoriness in life", which makes the first noble truth sound a little bit more plausible and reflects the teaching that Duhka is not something that happens occasionally but is is pervasive in life.... view all notes
People:
Albrecht Altdorfer (1480-1538)
Deutscher Maler der Renaissance, Schüler von Dürer
  • neben Wolf Huber war er Hauptmeister der Donauschule
Thursday, June 26, 2014
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
CALVIN: HISTOIRE ET RÉCEPTION D'UNE RÉFORME, Université de Genève
•
Calvin est un des plus cohérents théologiens du Saint-Esprit
•
la doctrine du Saint-Esprit constitue plus des deux tiers de l'ensemble
•
la doctrine du Saint-Esprit exprime quelque chose de tout à fait central pour Calvin
•
le Saint-Esprit est présent dès le début
•
le Saint-Esprit veut dire dans la pensée de Calvin, Dieu, en tant qu'il est à l'oeuvre; Dieu en tant qu'il agit... view all notes
Sunday, June 29, 2014
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
THE MODERN WORLD: GLOBAL HISTORY SINCE 1760, University of Virginia
•
the Korean War intensified in a way that it felt as though WWIII was about to begin
•
WWII had two theaters which eventually combined and became a global war
•
people in 1950 still had this in mind
•
June 1950, Korean War starts
•
September 1950: Americans get enough forces so that they can turn the tide... view all notes
People:
Peng Dehuai (1898-1974)
Chinese Communist military leader who supported Mao's suggestions to involve China directly in the Korean War
  • Defense Minister from 1954 to 1959
Matthew Ridgway (1895-1993)
U.S. Army general credited for turning the Korean War around in favor of the UN side
  • in 1986 recognized by the award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom
  • when MacArthur was relieved by Truman in April 1951, Ridgway assumed command of all United Nations forces in Korea
Monday, June 30, 2014
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
PROGRAMMING MOBILE APPLICATIONS FOR ANDROID, University of Maryland
•
Android uses permissions to protect resources
•
which applications can use cost-sensitive APIs, e.g. SMS
•
protects user information
•
system resources such as the camera
•
permissions are represented as strings... view all notes
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
FUNDAMENTOS DE LA ESCRITURA EN ESPAÑOL, Tecnológico de Monterrey
•
la división silábica es la pieza clave en este rompecabezas de la acentuación
•
¿qué es una sílaba?
•
un sonido o grupo de sonidos que se pronuncian en una emisión de voz
•
al pronunciar las palabras, hacemos estas divisiones silábicas, que notarás cuando las dices lentamente
•
veamos:... view all notes
Watched and took notes on MOOC lecture:
THE BIBLE'S PREHISTORY, PURPOSE, AND POLITICAL FUTURE, Emory University
•
many references of early Israel are found in Egypt
•
defeat, subjugation, conquest and destruction stand at the beginning of Israel's history
•
these kinds of events also mark the pivotal events in Israel's history
•
Israel's experience of defeat is closely tied to the rise and fall of empires throughout the ancient Near East
•
so to understand the history of Israel, you need to understand the empires throughout history in this part of the world... view all notes
Vocabulary:
execration text, n. ancient Egyptian hieratic texts, listing enemies of the Pharaoh, most often enemies of the Egyptian state or troublesome foreign neighbors ⇒ "Egyptian execration texts call for the destruction of various places putting curses on these places, and the Merneptah Stele announces the demise of Israel at the hand of an Egyptian ruler, Merneptah."
ziggurat, n. a massive structure built in the ancient Mesopotamian valley and western Iranian plateau, having the form of a terraced step pyramid of successively receding stories or levels ⇒ "Canaan is not where we witness major technological advancements or the erection of pyramids and ziggurats."
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