Ever since I could recall my my memory, I had been enjoying reading. When I was a kid, the ultimate adventure and pleasure would be a weekend trip to a bookstore. My aunts would let me freely roam the store, browsing different subject shelves for a few hours until I was either exhausted or my hands full with books. We would checkout and I would carry the books back like a homesteader carrying firewood from the forest....
This is a sequel to my MOOC learning journey post, in which I compared the different online learning platforms and recommended good AI/Math/PM courses. In this post, I want to discuss how using metacognition (to be aware of what/how one’s doing and thinking) can improve learning effectiveness, in terms of absorption and knowledge application. Such self-awareness helps you adjust your strategy/approach as needed. It is like having an alter-ego that zooms above you, instrumenting each process and guiding your next step with rational data....
Learning is my biggest hobby, and I am always looking at ways to improve both my skillset and learning methods. As my main professional interest is using NLP to build recommenders, I have been using the kinesthetic learning approach in the past few years, to learn while actually coding personal projects using NLTK, SpaCy and various Japanese language modelling libraries. This approach, while fun and provides instant feedback, lacks a foundational structure....
People often have stereotype or fantasy that artists receive their inspiration from high above, as if the “drop of gift” appear all of a sudden. Wouldn’t it be eye-opening if professionals reveal how that process actually works? In fact, numerous books have been written by artists to disprove the “muse” myth, showing that it is nothing romantic but just consist of routine hard work. In this blog post, I’ll talk about what unites novelist Murakami Haruki, advertising legend James Webb Young and choreographer Twyla Tharp in the creation process....
This is Part 3 of the “Improve knowledge conversion with book tracking” series. In this series, I will explain why we should build a tracking system to assist in converting what we read into actionable knowledge. In Part 1 and Part 2, I’ve explained the why and how of the book tracking system. Now let’s dive into implementing the metrics to track our investment. How many books am I reading now?...
This is Part 2 of the “Improve knowledge conversion with book tracking” series. In this series, I will explain why we should build a tracking system to help converting what we read into actionable knowledge. In Part 1 I discussed why we need to take an investment view to scrutinize the output of what we read. In this post, I’m going to show you how I build the book tracking system using Google Sheets, Apps Script and AppSheet....
Why we can’t recall what we read This is Part 1 of the “Improve knowledge conversion with book tracking” series. In this series, I will explain why we should build a tracking system to help converting what we read into actionable knowledge. In Part 2 and Part 3 I will explain the technical details of building one. Have you spent a lot of free time reading books, only finding out later that you can’t recall anything?...