Aloha!
Hello from the other side, the side where student discounts and free wifi no longer apply. As hard as it has been for me to accept it, I have come or at least try to embrace adulthood and all the perks and challenges it brings.
Speaking of perks is the void that is evenings and weekends disguised as free time. In my attempts to fill this void by consuming the internet, I stumbled across the Coursera Learning How to Learn course by Dr. Barbara Oakley and Dr. Terrence Sejnowski. I was so hooked that I vowed to actually finish it. Well, I did sorta, I followed on until the part where Barbara mentioned something about 'if something doesn't excite you anymore, let it go'. Actually, she may or may not have mentioned it but I do remember not enjoying it anymore. However, I did learn cool things that I'd like to share.
Hello from the other side, the side where student discounts and free wifi no longer apply. As hard as it has been for me to accept it, I have come or at least try to embrace adulthood and all the perks and challenges it brings.
Speaking of perks is the void that is evenings and weekends disguised as free time. In my attempts to fill this void by consuming the internet, I stumbled across the Coursera Learning How to Learn course by Dr. Barbara Oakley and Dr. Terrence Sejnowski. I was so hooked that I vowed to actually finish it. Well, I did sorta, I followed on until the part where Barbara mentioned something about 'if something doesn't excite you anymore, let it go'. Actually, she may or may not have mentioned it but I do remember not enjoying it anymore. However, I did learn cool things that I'd like to share.
- The difference between diffuse vs focused thinking, and how they compliment each other. Interesting is diffused thinking which as opposed to focused thinking, happens when you are not actively concetrating on the subject, for instance when chatting or watching related videos.
- A few good hours of focused thinking a day over a period beats trying to cram everything in a day and the stress that comes with it.
- The importance of REST and SLEEP. (Bold for a reason)
- The importance of running. Okay, I'm pretty sure Dr. Terrence mentioned the importance of sports, but he's a runner so that's all I heard.
- How to procrastinate productively. Procrastination is inevitable and everyone does it. Just allow for it after the important bits are done.
- The importance of feedback. If you ever find yourself lacking motivation for a task, feedback, negative or positive will probably solve your problems.
- Barbara is a super awesome human being. she casually transitioned from linguistics to Industrial System Engineering, hosted a radio in Antarctica and runs a cool newsletter that I immediately subscribed to. Check it out here.
The course touched on productivity and learning, I dare say the core of my existence. I'll get back to it one day, but like Bill Gates My attention was captured by another interesting course - Computer Vision course on Udacity. The idea of being able to detect cats from pictures and directing self driving cars sounded very appealing at the time. Aside from laughing at the hilarious jokes of Dr. Aaron Bobick, I learnt a thing or two.
- Computer Vision(CV) != Image Processing != Computational Photography, even though they do have lots of overlap. While Image Processing manipulates images to create new images, Computer Vision extracts models and features from images. Moreover, Computational Photography is sort of the inverse of Computer Vision as it involves rendering good images of objects.
- Linear Algebra, Cordinate Geometry is very handy to CV, it's worth refreshing all these concepts before starting the course. Images are after all just matrices.
- Homography, Stereo, Filtering, Hough Transform, Perspective Projection and all the new jargon I can now speak.
- Image and Object Recognition can be done with CV or ML techniques. CV is faster and less hacky but probably less accurate than deep learning.
- The course is very long graduate level (900 videos of content), ideally it is to be done in 4 months and I got through 2/3 of it in a month. I'm sure Barbara approves the fact that I need a break from it.
That's exactly what I did, not that I intended but I came across a Computational Bioinformatics course on Stepik that pressed the all the right buttons.
- Its free
- A combination of Math, Biology (especially Genetics) and Programming is very to resist.
- Very easy to follow for people for people without Biology experience.
- It is text based, no video required. May not seem like a plus but in the land of South Africa where data is not cheap, it means everything.
- It has easy coding challenges that I looked forward to solving. Check out my repo. Although I could get away with Java, I wish I implemented them in a functional language. Oh yeah, there goes my next challenge. I will definitely write about it.
- Its free , need I say more?
Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to take this opportunity to announce that I finished it (in a week!) -- Round of applause please, Even though it only covers one chapter, I'm thirsty for more, so the next step is as you might expect, enrolling in a proper Course, assuming my short lived attention span is not captivated elsewhere.
Considering that I'm working at a very fast paced company, with a steep learning curve ,you might wonder why bother? I happen to be a very curious character in a very fast paced, fascinating field called Tech. There is always something new to learn, a constant reminder to stay humble. Plus, I very much see myself going back to school for further studies, by then I'll know exactly what excites me.
So here's to learning and hopefully making our lives better.
So here's to learning and hopefully making our lives better.
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