Marc

exclusive Audible? and nonstop reference to image?

Revisado: 07-27-19

Audible is calling themselves an audio book site. one would expect "exclusive releases" on such a site to be consumable without the need to constantly look at images or videos. listening to the presentation while commuting is a pain.
narration is ok and well understandable but very read-from-script with the sometimes boring intonation.

content is very slow going with too many assumptions about possible future developments that cannot be more than guesswork.

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Proof: Psychology is not a science

Revisado: 12-16-18

This course - or more its lecturer - gets a lot of things wrong. And since you cannot crawl through the cable of your headphone to grab the lecturer by his neck and ask him, politely, to not talk nonsense about things he obviously has no clue about, this is a perfect example of why "Great Courses" often aren't "great".

Since Audible does not want me to publish a full discussion on this course and where Mr Leary errs, I will cut it short:
Mr Leary starts out by claiming that "Psychology is a science like all others" - and then, lecture by lecture, demonstrates how that is not true. Obviously, there are numerous ways to "define science" and you do not have to accept any of them to be helpful, but claiming that your field of expertise is "like all the others" and then deconstructing that claim until nothing is left sounds like a bad pedagogical approach (forcing the listener to watch out for indications that you are wrong, again, instead of concentrating on WHAT you say). Now, I do have some background in History and that discipline suffers from similar issues when it comes to one of the major critics of what "science" is about: Making predictions and checking if your predictions hold up to your theory. History - as a discipline - has come a long way in carefully setting boundaries where it is "documentary" and where it applies scientific means.
Mr Leary, however, outright starts by saying "Psychology cannot predict anything". He supports that by dropping arbitrary numbers (percentages of how many subjects fall under what classification) without stating where a) those numbers have been found (ANY usable statistics MUST always explain how it has been constructed, give information about test subjects, test setup, error rates, significance etc). No information about who, why, where, when and under what conditions came up with declarations like "he's a mean guy" (I am making this one up) and then claim "21% fall under this category". You could just laugh and go on, but since "Psychology cannot make predictions", this categorization is not only useless, it is confusing.
Sure, I get it: With a documentary/descriptive science you need "labels" and I am perfectly fine with accepting (arbitrary as they may seem) those labels. Presenting them as if they were fallen from the heavens is bad style and does not support the claim that "Psychology is science". You HAVE to follow scientific rules if you want to play with the other kids.
Again, Audible does not want me to go into further detail, so as the last example of what is wrong about this course: Mr Leary confuses "Multitasking" (being able to prioritize multiple tasks and assign resources to one of them in turn) with "Parallel Processing" (being able to cope with several tasks at THE SAME TIME). Yes, someone not familiar with computer technology may fall into this, no problem at all. But if you CLAIM to know what you are talking about and then MISUSING terminology that you haven't understood - that is not scientific. What is worse: First Mr Leary says "humans cannot multitask" (he means "do several things at the same time"), a few sentences later he says "humans constantly multitask" (by taking in information and only processing that information that is currently relevant - which IS both multitasking AND parallel processing). He neither understands what he is talking about NOR does he care about his own position on the matter.

This kind of confusion is a constant factor in the course. Mixing terminology from other disciplines up (physics, maths/statistics, stochastics, computer science) and "stirring" your own soup of magic-mumble-jumble-pseudo-science that isn't even supposed to HELP anyone (because: Psychology cannot predict anything).

The narration is OK-ish if you speed up to factor 1.3 to 1.5 (Mr Leary pauses for quite some time between words or sentences, sometimes it seems as if he left the room to think about the next part of the sentence, then he's back and hurries through the rest of it).

"Why you are who you are" does not get answered. This is only an overview of terminology in the field of psychology and attempts to categorize human behaviour ("character") purely descriptively.
If you focus on the psychology side of things, this course is a good introduction into very fundamental, very superficial "first steps". Do NOT listen to this course if you take your math serious, if you insist in scientific disciplines playing by scientific rules or if you want to learn "why you are who you are". As for the last question: Ask your grandparents. They hold enough grudges with your parents to be able to answer that.

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A mystery still unsolved - and here's why

Revisado: 12-09-18

I really, really enjoyed this book - it compensates for so many really bad "Great Courses" hours!

This is a well narrated (by the book's author, see below for voice artist performance) overview on current (yes, Great Courses, CURRENT, not decades old) perspectives on the Quantum World, the Copenhagen Interpretation and approaches to the "macroscopic world and why it seems so different".
The author does not downplay any perspective, he stays fair to the angles taken by different interpretations and points out obvious and not so obvious problems with the various approaches. This is a refreshing way of looking at things, not the standard "I know everything"-attitude others are taking.

When I first heard of the double slit experiment - early 1980s at school - some of us in the class came up with a question "what about there being a secondary wave or maybe the particle is guided by the wave instead of being one or the other?" Those (to us pupils simply obvious) questions immediately were turned down by (several, actually) physics teachers as "complete nonsense". Turns out, we weren't *that* nonsensical, after all, even if we were "only teenagers" and therefore not to be taken seriously. Which is to say, I enjoyed seeing the "pilot wave" idea been taken as an option a lot, even though I see its shortcomings.

Performance: The narrator does an overall good job, his pace is comfortable, his narration is quite clear and not as muffled, mumbled or irritating as many "Great Courses outstanding teachers". His intonation is somewhat monotonous, though, but that was bearable enough.
However, he does speak in a strong American accent: Where others would split atoms, he kept on splitting ADAMS, which I found quite inhumane and, frankly, brutal. Just as an example. Then, with many theories and discussions on the matter having originated in Switzerland, Germany, Austria (and, obviously, Denmark), German language quotes seem necessary. In a (written) book this isn't a problem, just have a footnote giving the original quote and use the Engli... sorry, American translation in the text. Here, the narrator tries to use the GERMAN quotes. Since I am German, this was really frustrating, as I could not understand a SINGLE one of those quotes. Why would someone, in a more or less scientific book, use a foreign language to "say something" if he isn't fluent in that language? Just quote the English translation, so that you do not interrupt the narration.

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Nice, somewhat arbitrary - unbearable background

Revisado: 11-08-18

I love to listen to Mr. Fry. He's not the world's best writer, by far, but his British intonation, his wit, his "between the lines winking" is brilliant.

Why Audible hired an amateur(?) audio engineer to pollute Mr. Fry's narration with someone practising piano lessons is beyond my grasp. You learn, within the first five minutes of mixing lessons at a studio, that the MAIN component of a mix (here: the narration) defines what frequencies the BACKGROUND (here: the piano noise) has to lose, so that the listener can concentrate and follow what is important and does not get distracted from the content.
In this audio production, the background, although quieter, is the most prominent component - it is HIGHLY distracting, irritating, counter-informative and just an overall annoyance.

Content: The "story" (there is none) follow a few arbitrarily chosen characters from the late 19th to early 20th century (Wilhelm II for example) and tells their "secrets" (not really much of "secrets", just some yellow-press-like details of how their childhood went, what sexual fantasies they might have had, in the end just trivial gossip). The most interesting point really seems to be that having such (again, mostly sexually or at least bodily oriented) "secrets" was both important for people to know that they are "alive" and "distinct", but also kept families together - which sounds like those "secrets" have been hyped far beyond their actual gravity. Which proves the point: You don't know anything more about what really DROVE the people 150 years ago, nor do you get a better understanding of why our society still is obsessed with banalities ...

Be it as it is: The background noise (or "experimental music" or whatever) forced me to stop listening halfway into episode 2.

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Only for a very young audience or those without an

Revisado: 11-07-18

Being unsure if this review is helpful to anyone at all (there's virtually NO FEEDBACK on this site and I keep wondering why I invest so much time into trying to give honest opinions on the products I review), I don't want to shorten the title so that it fits into what Audible allows.

Anyway, here's the SHORT story:
This course isn't as "bad" as my rating makes it look. If you can stand the lecturer's narration (which I found hard), it's fine if you don't have ANY previous idea of what Philosophy in the White-West is. It's useless if you aren't interested in White-West Philosophy but in any "more global" view, I think.

Here's my personal nitpicking:
I love Philosophy. I am actually quite happy with what the lecturer brings to the table. I am fine with being not in line with some of his personal statements or conclusions and doubt my judgement when I am agreeing with him. Which is exactly the result he intended to produce.
He gives a broad overview of some standard questions in Philosophy, although (first minus) he is so desperately locked-in to Western Philosophy and narrow-minded within a Christian world-view that it is, at times, hard to listen up to the end of a lecture. The few times he acknowledges that many more people in the world believe completely other things to be "true" than the Christians he stops right there and does not consider if, maybe, their perspective would be more helpful to understand what he calls "big questions" (I am not only speaking of atheists, agnostics and other "doubters", I am speaking of all the variants on religion that you can find).

DO LISTEN to the lectures to their end.
The lecturer often provides skewed or obviously flawed examples, that tend to make you go crazy and shout "nonsense, don't you see where you are going wrong there?", but he also does RECOVER from his in-your-face fallacies. After a few lectures, you get the drift: He seems to intentionally construct some theory/position that just cannot work, in order to make the audience THINK and come up with critics.

Sometimes I couldn't help myself but simply accept that the lecturer seems to see his Christianity-imprinted, US-centric perspective as the only one possible for anything and shrug. When he criticizes others (philosophers) for not giving arguments for their theories, although he "feels" like they "might be right", he completely ignores that he himself refuses to give arguments to what he, himself, considers "right just because it is right". He never judges other people's opinions the way he judges his own beliefs. While this may be because his course is targeted at a very young audience (he tends to only give real-live-examples that apply to young people) and he tries to be seen as a "luminary", I don't like this didactic. It is OK once or twice, but continuously pretending that the audience is dumb and does not get it "right away" is not my cup of tea.

This is why I can only give two stars to the "content" (the "Story"). Which is unfair, because, as mentioned above, the lecturer DOES give a broad overview.
For my taste, it is way, WAY too much "Christian-God-centric". Every other paragraph brings this figure into play, everything seems to get measured against "what would God say if God existed" - even though the lecturer does not SEEM to believe in this "God", he cannot help but think of God. That's ...

Performance:
I listened to the lecturer's (newer) course on Philosophy in Science Fiction, which I enjoyed more than this one. If I had only listened to this course, I would have wished for the professor to take a lesson in public speaking. He is constantly over-emphasizing words or syllables, pitching up his voice and even "shouting" without helping the narration.
Since his other course is considerably better in that respect, I *think* he actually *did* take a course :-) Now, I know this sounds arrogant - but such a "Great Course" is quite expensive and since the lecturer DOES have a pleasant voice, his "auditorium style" in this course is not up to par.
As for didactics: I said enough about my issues with that above, so let's just state that a "layout" for an older audience or one that does have some "life experience" would be welcome.

Gender-speak:
One (small) irritating thing: While I personally LOVE the American way of mixing male and female pronouns throughout a text in order to indicate that "everyone is addressed", this falls short if you use "she" for everyone you consider a "positive" person and "he" for everyone that is evil. This is a tendency in this lecturer's style that I do not like. Sure, it is catering for the aggressive feminists, I get that ... but why the heck is "God" always referred to as "HE"? "God" would be THE ONE figure that NEEDS to be addressed as "she" if this approach was honest.

Conclusion:
Like the lecturer says in the final sum-up: Do not expect this course to provide ANSWERS - it is a course about QUESTIONS.
The course does give you a few (though from a very narrow perspective) HINTS at how answers MIGHT look like, but it is up to you to delve further into matters, read, discuss and re-think your position over and over again.
If you don't have any idea about Philosophy, what "Moral" could be derived from or if that public talk about "soul" and "heaven" even makes any sense at all: Give this course a go.
If you do have even some limited background in the subject, and be it from a critical religious point of view, the course is much too shallow to give you any more insights or ideas, it is only reciting standard, superficial "beginners' routines", plus it is far too limited to a very specific perspective.

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Incoherent and demotivating

Revisado: 10-17-18

The narrator seems to be bored by the text and does not tell his story in an engaging or fascinating tone. He sounds tired. Speeding playback up helps a bit but doesn't make the narration sound better.
At first the story is straight confusing, jumping from topic to topic without focus or target. Later it turns into a mixture of a rant on US government, US people and Trump's "family biz" style of running things.

This audio book is NOT ABOUT weather, climate or anything like that, but about contemporary US politics and how weather data management is an example of lack of respect for scientific work.

I would have rated this with 0 stars, but there are some (few) interesting insights into weather data interpretation and big data. And it has a few nice bits about scients' history that I really enjoyed.

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For Firsttimers: One of many ways into Writing

Revisado: 10-14-18

This course obviously focuses on first time writers, the lecturer keeps mentioning high school experiences, first novels (he has published three books or so himself, so he is not a "full-time writer" but an author who has been lucky enough to land a few sales). There is nothing in this course that you don't find in all the other creative-writing courses, books, tutorials, essays.
What I find interesting about this course is: It perfectly illustrates the shortcomings of "creative writing". Way, WAY too many words for just not enough content to fill a single page. How do I stretch it if I have nothing to tell? If I don't have a story, how do I say that in the most elaborate way? If I only have to tell the same things again that I told last time, how do I make subtle changes so that my agent doesn't notice?
Or, to put it more brutal, "creative writing is the art of making money out of no air at all."

Some examples to illustrate this: When the lecturer quotes from his own novels, especially when he does so in order to make a point, the examples don't exactly sound "polished" or "perfected", but seem arbitrarily written. That is NOT to say that his books are "arbitrary", it is just that the whole method presented here is NOT about writing GOOD books but about "writing if you don't know how to write - or getting a book hammered together if you don't have the material to fill it."
Near the end of the course the lecturer even says (I am paraphrasing here): "That scene in my book could have been much shorter but I made it so long because I wanted to have fun and maybe the reader would have, too."
To me, it should have been "I made the scene as long as necessary to make it work and as short as possible to keep the momentum going. The fun the reader has should always be the main target, leave the FUN in writing to your first draft!"
But, as I said above, "creative writing" is not and never has been about "writing a good text", but about "get that damned text written in the first place."

To be fair: I do agree with a lot of suggestions the lecturer gives, I do disagree with some full-heartedly, and that seems like a good sign for a course on something so personal as WRITING. Especially the last couple of chapters where he talks about not limiting yourself when writings drafts, trying to keep the energy flowing and finalize the text AFTER you put everything in that needs to be in are actually GOOD.

Unfortunately, and this is partly due to the presentation, those perfectly helpful notes are drowned in loads of repetitive variations of the same statement. Not only does the lecturer repeat the same information over and over again as if his audience was too dumb to memorize it the first time around, he sometimes even pretends to say something NEW when in fact he simply states the same idea again he had the paragraph before. Most of the lectures could have been shortened to 5-10 minutes without losing a single bit of information and without getting too complex.
The lecturer's narration is very slow, I had to speed up playback considerably - this, along with the feeling of "get to the point, you said that before!" made listening to the course exhausting. I did listen to it all because THERE are some good points and I can still recommend this course to someone who has never written more than a few pages at school.
What I would have prefered are discussions about what makes a text GOOD and WHY this definition of "good" would be valid. Some examples showcasing how a BAD text was turned into a GOOD text and WHAT made that good text better than the first (I am afraid that I would have disagreed on some of those examples as I did with some of those the lecturer actually did give in the course ;) )

The good stuff: Anyone who doesn't know how to TRAIN writing, should follow the lecturer's suggestions for exercises. Nothing helps you more in becoming a better author than constant exercise. Don't expect to PUBLISH everything you write, in fact: DO WRITE for the bin. Let it all out. Experiment. Then keep the good stuff and refine it, but keep writing, experimenting, take to your heart all the etudes from this course and vary them.

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Not so much about Ripples, but about measuring

Revisado: 09-24-18

Since this is the second time I review this title - I guess Audible deleted my previous review - I am summing up. I just don't have the will to give all the arguments over again that I gave the first time.
This book is undecided between telling a personal journey with anecdotes, vast amounts of name-dropping and place-mentioning that don't help with understanding the topic at all. and giving an insight into how "measuring quantum physics" developed over a century. While most of the historical sidenotes are interesting by themselves, they don't "help" that much with understanding what "ripples in spacetime ARE".
If you have a more or less "solid" background in what the current state of affairs in physics are, most of this book's content will be well known to you. If you don't you may find yourself slightly lost at times. So it *would* have been the subjective, personal experiences the author has "glimpse through" that could have made this a fascinating listen, but those incidents are rare, unconnected and unmotivated.

Narration is good, but very slow. I listened at 1.25 speed and that was fine.

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A Mixed Bag of Not Much

Revisado: 09-12-18

The title of this course is misleading, to say the least, as it is not about "mastering the art of story", but about "reverse engineering what successful screen-writings look like".
Just because a screen-writing has been successful at the box office does not tell you that it is GOOD. It only tells you that the movie, as a whole, has been a success. The author confuses commercial success with quality.

The course is centered on the technique of reverse engineering: Looking at a movie or script and backward-explaining how it may have been constructed in order to create what you see. Of course, this is NOT how (successful) scripts are being created (if it was, every single script that was constructed this way would be an equal success, which it is not). It is simply a cheap trick of killing time in a workshop (been there, done that!) if you don't have any original ideas.
That said, it is a good idea to DO reverse engineering every now and then! Understanding how others managed to create certain feelings in the audience or how characters can be built is helpful when you are just starting out with writing. And, no doubt, a lot of scripts out there are being manufactured this way: Just redo what was successful before. Luckily every now and then someone dares to think for herself and try something else - luckily, because else this course would have had to concentrate on a single script that had been copied over and over, right? :-)

In short, the content is GOOD if you never dissected a script before. The content is FINE if you never watched a movie "analytically", trying to grasp "how they did it" (how did they fascinate you?). The content is COOL if you don't have any ideas (or experience in life) of your own but want to rely on other people's recipes.
If you want to "master the art of story" - visit other places. Read books. Listen to story-tellers. Understand, how STORIES work (not how movies are successful at the box office). Different topic altogether, really.

Performance: Whenever someone starts to yell at me, my reaction is "oh, is she THAT uncertain of her arguments? Is she so afraid that she might be wrong - so that yelling and shouting at me makes her more confident?" The lecturer here is constantly yelling and pushing his perspective as if he was afraid that a single voice in the audience might say "erm, Sir, that's not quite believeable what you say ..."
Interestingly the lecturer calms down and switched into a confident, narrative voice when he talks about the course as such (one single lecture!) - he is also much calmer when he (unconsciously?) questions his theory and method (in the TV/Series lectures at the end). I found that observation quite intriguing.

One can have quite different opinions on how "the Classics" (the Greek dramas) worked and how "drama" and "comedy" where perceived or considered when they were written. I happen to HAVE such a different perspective and question the author's understanding of the historic meaning of theatre.

By the way ... the name is "Brecht" (talking about the German theatre writer), not "Bragged", as the lecturer keeps calling him.

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Focuses on what the lecturer is interested in

Revisado: 07-29-18

Giving the "story" only 2 stars here feels unfair - yet, I am trying to judge the overall impression I am left with after finishing the course. What the lecturer tells about is interesting and for the major part of it coherent. What irritates me is the VASTNESS of what she leaves out.
The course starts out with a very short hint at "the" Celtic realm not yet being well defined in geography, linguistics, ethnics or time. From almost the Arab "frontiers" over Spain, the (sorry:) English group of islands to France, Northern Germany and parts of Scandinavia "they" roamed, yet the lecturer exclusively focuses on what she is interested in: Everything King Arthur (which, of course, is unfair again - it's just clear that this is the topic she loves, so it takes up quite some space). I find it unfortunate to only hear about Ireland, Scotland, Wales over and over again - those Celtic heritages have been covered so often in such detail that I often thought "yes, heard that before, tell me something NEW".
What I would have LOVED to hear was more about that Spanish enclave. Where the Celtic (speaking) people moved (on the continent) and why. What interaction with (not-British-Island-related) peoples they had. What their mythological, political, sociological history was. In short: DETAILS, not the broad overview you can find everywhere in books, TV documentaries or the interweb.
On another point, I found it irritating that the lecturer kept contradicting herself. There have been quite a lot of - often small - points where I went "huh? Didn't she say something else just the other lecture?" A trivial example might be: She explains that the common belief is OUTDATED that "The Celtic" had been a Central-European "movement" that spread out and could be described as a homogenous area that was well defined and that you could reliably define an "area of origin". In the next lecture(s) she then says "let's now concentrate on the area that the Celtic originated from or that they lived in", basically saying the exact opposite of what she proposed before.
She seems to dislike Archeology - the chapter on "what is usable historical research" seems to dismiss the whole approach of "digging up dirt and basing assumptions on your findings" as nonsense. I am exaggerating here. Yet, over the following lectures, she often uses EXACTLY that "digging up dirt" as a PROOF of her theories ("this has been confirmed by archeological findings"), which sounds strange, after she put Linguistic and text-evidence based research over Archeology.

In short: Content-wise this is mainly, if not almost only, about the Ireland/Scotland/Wales part of Celtic history, a good part of the lectures is spent on English history (independent from its relevance to the topic "Celtic World"). You do NOT get an impression of what the lecturer calls the modern view of where and when the Celtic peoples lived but are limited to somewhat stereotype England-centric History lessons. At this, the course is quite good, well presented and captivating. Just don't expect too much "new".

(Technical note: Again, the audio quality, although mostly good, lacks professional editing. Often the sound "fades" when the lecturer seems to move her head to one side, not talking towards the microphone consistently. A simple pre-fetching EQ pass and moderate compression would have helped. It's OK if you listen through headphones on in quiet surroundings, but less so in distractive environment.)

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