Jessica Kirkpatrick wrote a great post describing her move from astronomical research to a data science job at Yammer. (We were classmates in grad school.) She discusses the technical skills she needed to learn (IDL alone won’t get you a tech job) as well as the differences between business and academic culture. (Peter Fiske’s book Put […]
A number of recent articles have returned to the question of why such a high proportion of graduates from elite U.S. colleges take jobs in management consulting and investment banking. (When I graduated from Harvard in 2005, it was nearly 50% of the class; today it’s more like 30%.) The general consensus of these writers […]
This week marks the end of the Kaggle Automated Essay Scoring Competition. I participated as a way to build my machine learning skills after learning the basics in Andrew Ng’s online class. The goal of the competition was to develop algorithms that could automatically score student essays for standardized achievement tests. Kaggle (and the sponsoring […]
This year has been momentous for online education, with first Stanford and now MIT offering free online courses designed for the web. Taking a number of cues from the Khan Academy, these courses are different from previous online offerings. They are free to take and have no admissions requirement, in contrast to online classes provided […]