Right or Moral

Accountabilities

Paying attention is what I didn't do for a moment :)

If something's not correct, should you fix it? Or should you leave it be, and learn from it the next time? Obviously, not everything in life is as binary as this, or as simple. 

Roots and freedom

I see you

Spreading light

Discovery

"Mistakes are the portals of discovery" 

-James Joyce

A month of writing

Despite following its journey since it's launch, I had no idea what to actually expect from the AltMBA.

I'm glad I leaned into the experience after the first conference call, because it has been, without doubt, one of the two best courses I've done in the last decade (the other being Dr. Barbara Oakley's Learning How to Learn). I've met some amazing people, dismantled several assumptions I've held:  both about myself & about how connections between people happened in general, & discovered how much time I actually have in the day that goes to waste. 

I've written every day.
Whether it was responding to the 13 "prompts", or feeling some sort of emotion that needed to be transferred from my brain to paper, I've been writing incessantly. Cathartic, in many ways.

The AtlMBA officially ended yesterday.

Analogies

My son's cello tutor, while trying to explain how to keep his 9-year old fingers on the finger-board:

"Imagine an O made with your thumb and middle finger, separated by the fingerboard. It's like the fulcrum on a see-saw, lets you move your other fingers without losing their balance"

He understood it instantly. The power of a relevant analogy.

Now if only I had the right analogy for him to keep up his practice.

Recommendations list from the "warm up project"

Good lord, I'll never have the time to go through all these, but here's a list of things /books/ resources recommended by first few warm up projects on AltMba37.
I'll update this list as I go along

Books

Contagious - why things catch on (viral marketing)
A Technique for Producing Ideas - James Wood Young
Obviously Awesome  - April Dunford (product positioning)
The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking
The Order of Time - Carlo Rovelli

Sites

http://startupstatus.co/ - Australian startup ecosystem
http://www.liberatingstructures.com/ Radically inclusive effective meetings

Podcasts

Episode: Homes for the homeless

Tools

Visualise your work, aka mindmapping:  Whimsical 

Biteable 

Mindjet Mindmanager 

Save hours of repeated text typing. TextExpander 

Others

Improve your handwriting

This was my warm-up project on the 37th cohort of the AltMBA.

I’ve been fascinated with handwriting for as long as I can remember. Ornate letters, written neatly often using a reusable (!) fountain pen, the words as beautiful as the sentiment they gave shape to. Most of the adults I knew back then seemed to have that ability to write beautifully, and very few of my pre-teen peers seemed to care.

Fast forward a little over three decades. Internet access, time, curiosity all aligned late one Friday night. Browsing through the returns for a web search for “calligraphy”, I came across https://www.iampeth.com/ (The International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers & Teachers of Handwriting).

What blew my mind was this quote: “In the tradition of the Zanerian College, Master Penman inductees were required to produce their own certificate as proof of their ability.” There are only 16 living Master Pen(folks) in the world.

The treasure trove that is the library of rare books (https://www.iampeth.com/rare-books) inspired me to re-learn how to write better. Simple as it is, it’s craftsmanship that I find worthy of trying out myself. It’s helped my kids and a few of their friends start learning how to write better - a process that seemingly isn’t greatly encouraged these days.

I must be getting a little better after a few years of inconsistent practice: our family’s Christmas cards are, according to my wife, getting more attention than (in my opinion) the absolutely delicious Christmas savories she spends hours making :slight_smile:

On Learning habits

I'm sure I'm not alone in doing this.

Something catches my attention, & I want to learn more about it.
I immediately jump to the resources that seem to appeal to me.
I try to do it.
I fail.
I give up.
Ad infinitum.

I think there's a word for it: dilettante. A pejorative.

Occasionally, something sticks with me long enough that I learn the basics well enough that they become habits. "know enough to be dangerous".

On a quest now to figure out, mid-life, what motivates me to want to learn something new, and how to learn about it so it sticks.

Learning to type

My son, all of 8 years old, has started learning to type.  He's figuring out what the home row means, & how his fingers don't have to move all that distance to type just one letter, that he can do it with both hands, and things are not as complicated as the jumbled letters on the keyboard.  Sure, it confuses the bejesus out of him, but he keeps going on.

What's the point of this post? Who knows, I just found it fascinating that age is just a number when it comes to learning. Kids probably learn much faster than than we give them credit for.

Random thoughts throughout today

Nearly 3 weeks into 2019, & it already feels like a whole year has gone by.

What do you do when you feel like there's no more energy to get through the day? At mid-day?

How often should I take a break from work? Or from whatever it is I'm doing?

How much is enough?  How do you know?

Why is motivation so often intrinsic?


Quote of the day: 
In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit. -Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobel laureate (14 Jan 1875-1965)

the MailChimp founders, a profile

A profile of the MailChimp founders:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2018/10/08/the-new-atlanta-billionaires-behind-an-unlikely-tech-unicorn


Keyhole surgery

A goldmine

https://www.r-bloggers.com/in-depth-introduction-to-machine-learning-in-15-hours-of-expert-videos/

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/asadoughi/stat-learning/master/ch2/answers

http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/

Skills for the next 5 years

Vala Afshar's outlines the transformation going on right this moment in time

Transitioning towards a data science career

These two articles made for good reading/ reference

Rafael Knuth blogged about his transition into a data science career. He inspired someone else to follow his footsteps, & write about his experience.

Comparing read_csv with spark_read_csv

Reading in a csv file into R using dplyr's `read_csv()` function is so simple. The syntax & parameters of dplyr are fairly easy to remember, once you've done it a few times.

read_csv(file, 
    col_names = TRUE, 
    col_types = NULL,
    locale = default_locale(),
    na = c("", "NA"), 
    quoted_na = TRUE,
    quote = "\"", 
    comment = "", 
    trim_ws = TRUE, 
    skip = 0, n_max = Inf,
    guess_max = min(1000, n_max), 
    progress = show_progress()
)



I've only just started working with big data sets, & was began wondering if what I know about the dplyr syntax can be carried over to sparklyr's spark_read_csv() function.

While not exactly the same, but if you know one, you can quite easily pick the other. There's an additional parameter `sc`, aka spark connection, that's required.

spark_read_csv(
    sc, 
    name,
    path, 
    header = TRUE, # FALSE forces a "V_" prefix
    columns = NULL,
    infer_schema = TRUE, # to infer column data type
    delimiter = ",", 
    quote = "\"", 
    escape = "\\",
    charset = "UTF-8", 
    null_value = NULL,
    options = list(),
    repartition = 0, # number of partitions to distribute the generated table.
    memory = TRUE, 
    overwrite = TRUE, ...
)

Inspirations for humorous speech contests

and John's Anatomy of the speech here


More movie based speeches - Johnny Cash - Walk the line 


and this one on any speech in general - David Henderson

Reading list - week ending 30 Sep 2018

https://stratechery.com/2018/instagrams-ceo/

https://fs.blog/mental-models/

https://medium.com/@timberners_lee/one-small-step-for-the-web-87f92217d085 & related https://solid.inrupt.com/

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/science/neil-armstrong-auction.html


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-13/amazon-s-clever-machines-are-moving-from-the-warehouse-to-headquarters