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....
Nakano Yoshihisa, a 79-year-old entrepreneur, is a role model I am going to introduce in this blog post. I first came to know him via his book, and was deeply moved by his youthful energy to live everyday as a new journey to explore. who is Nakano Yoshihisa Growing up in post-war years without parents, Nakano was used to living alone and making all decisions by himself. His resume included developing new products/services in various department stores in both Japan and overseas....
Minimalist living, especially in big cities like Tokyo, has always fascinated me. A few years ago, I rented a 25 square meter Airbnb condo in Tokyo for a few weeks and attempted to live as much like a local as possible. I went to local supermarkets to buy and cook my own meals everyday, strolled around the neighboorhood to patronize the smallest shops, and commuted by packed trains to the...
Mental distraction from information/choice overload is a common problem worldwide. Having an anchor for our taste and what we are meant to do provides a more stable path without being easily swayed by cyclical trends that are just like seasonal wind. But is good taste innate or honed by practice? In this post, we’ll look at Matsuura Yataro, who is a renowned lifestyle essayist and ex-chief editor of Kurashi no Techo (Notes on everyday living), a magazine dedicated to promoting aesthetics in living well....
In this digital era, what values can physical bookstores still offer? In this post, we’ll look at the Japanese cultural mecca Tsutaya Daikanyama T-Site, which started a revolutionary wave of curated spaces promoting idea exchange, lifestyle exploration and rural revitalization. Its central promise is that visitors can enrich what they already know, and find some new hobbies at the same time. We’ll also look at how the company behind Tsutaya...
My professional interest is in applying recommenders to travel planning and reservation. So it is natural that I’ll keep up with books on both technical implementation and those that dissect the cultural influences of recommendation systems. After finishing the book Computing Taste, which charted the change of recommendation systems in the music/movie industry, I want to extend what was discussed in the book to changes in software development paradigm, as well as societal views on mistakes or criteria for finished products....
In the book “100 basics of life”, the Japanese essayist Matsuura Yataro has proposed writing down your kihon - the core basics, or guiding principles of your life. It not only acts as your anchor and guidance, but also becomes a living document for reflection during uncertain times. With it, you can also trace your important changes as you continue to learn and evolve, something akin to a changelog. Kihons...