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....
A rapidly aging population is a common phenomenon for most developed countries. This is especially true in Japan, where it is estimated that by 2040, a third of the population will be over 65. This impacts various public policies such as social support system and a shrinking work population. Due to this trend, the government is keen on promoting an active and healthy elderly population. In this blog post, let’s look at a local role model for aging wisely, and what advices she can offer to the younger generation....