Introduction to Databases
When I watched the first lecture on databases I thought I was crazy and didn't know what was going on. I had to pause and rewind the video multiple times. I felt completely in over my head. After a very shaky start, it became my favourite of the three courses. There were many additional exercises that meant I could really get my teeth into the material. I did everything. It brought back the joy and excitement of learning which made university such a wonderful time for me. I've missed the intellectual challenge.Machine Learning
This was by far the most mathematical of the courses which meant that I could follow fairly easily. The programming exercises in Octave were frustrating at times as I seem to have a great ability to make the program crash. My poor laptop found it a little tough at times to process everything such as a load of spam emails to predict whether another one was spam or not. It's been great to see the sort of techniques used behind the scenes to analyse spam, categorise news or predict whether someone has a tumour or not.Artificial Intelligence
This has been the most frustrating and yet most interesting course. I think if I'd watched the course from a casual point of view, I would have loved it. There have been hiccups over precision in asking questions which have lead to confusion. The lecturers are enthusiastic and you can really see how keen they are to explain their subject. It's a shame about the problems but the potential for a great course is there.What's Next?
I'm trying to learn Java over Christmas so that I can take part in some more courses from January to April. A list of the available courses can be found at the bottom of this page: http://www.anatomy-class.org/. There are 16 courses at the moment, one of which is the machine learning course mentioned above. I don't know which ones I will do yet as they all sound interesting. I think I might just watch some of the courses without being active since I am sure my coding will not be good enough by then and it's also impossible for me to do 15 courses at once.Java
So, in order to do these courses I've been working my way through http://codingbat.com/java which I'm finding quite helpful. It's a basic enough level that I can work quite quickly while learning some of the classes. I'll need to find something else later on to drag myself up to a higher level but I'll look for that later. I did start off with http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/TOC.html but it went too fast for me so I've paused that for a while and will come back to it later.Regex
I've started reading one of the recommended books for Natural Language Processes and it looks like I need to get to grips with regular expressions. I've been intending learning this for several years so finally I'm going to do it.Other Aims
I have quite a few other things I want to get done next year, and I've started to collect them together at a new site called Schemer. The following link is an invitation to the site: http://schemer.com/invite/9vidub2r7rqn6 (It's good for 20 invitations.) You can see other people's goals as well so there is lots of inspiration. Some of the things I'm hoping to do are- become proficient at sewing - I have a sewing machine (well several) but I am not really confident in using it. I'd like to be able to alter clothes, make clothes and do patchwork on it.
- make a patchwork quilt
- finish some of the many half done projects I have
- learn some yoga
- learn three new things a day
- learn some more Dutch
- learn to recognise the constellations of the stars
- improve my knowledge of physics
- cook my way through a cookery book
- walk a few miles every week
- grow some vegetables
I'd rather have too many aims than too few - more chances to succeed! I don't know how I'm going to fit everything in but it going to be fun anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment