What a Website !!! Countdown.com

Wow in the current world, movies, games, and series are uploaded and released at a time fixed and convenient TIME but in a very specific geographic TIME ZONE. This website tracks down the most popular ones down to the very last seconds.

Do Check This Out:

https://yourcountdown.to

Will keep you updated as and when I find more cool stuff.

Cheers

Tapish Dongre

How to Study Online Better !?!

(SKIP TO THE “5 Points List” below if you wish not to read the Intro, Point number 5 is Important.)

For the last two years, I was more focused on my studies online and I was following the pattern as suggested by the Edx or Coursera style guides. That is to give like not more than 4 to 5 hours per week, watch the video, read the material or slides and then give the end of the subject exam, pass with flying colors, show the certificate of completion and then forget all that you have learned within days of your study.

Even using the above method, I discovered that more than 70% of people who are even paid subscribers quit their learning mid of the course. At the start of the statistic learning, I felt pity for those quitters as I firmly believed that I am not one of them. I was so confident because in all my degree one on one learning, I never quit any of the courses I started. Thus it came as a shock to me when on after paying 11 months ongoing subscription to Coursera, finally I stopped my payment on Jan 2022 without completing the course I started. I literally joined the team of 70% who quit and I have my own pile of reasons why.

But I know internally I am not a quitter. There was like Cognitive Dissonance on my own belief system when my actions did not match with my own thinking. Thus I began the journey to understand the actual reason why? and for me, the answer came not in all the excuses, but in the fact of the statement, ” I am actually studying the wrong way.”

The first and foremost step will be to acknowledge and accept that online studies are way different than one-to-one or university studies. This is a simple statement and we all superficially use it, but no one goes into deep thinking of what it means to learn from these two ways of learning.

In the book, “The Social Animal” by David Brooks, the author in some lines explains that the physical touch of parents is important for a newborn and the physical presence of the teacher is important in early learning for the development of neurons. It is like monkeys see monkeys do, humans also learn the subject mimicking the nature, thoughts, and other ambiance produced in a classroom.

I won’t argue that online learning is then a no-go at all, but we do have to change or implement a few of the things which we use to do in classroom teaching.

To list a few would be:

  1. Use carrot and stick model: Give yourself a reward which will release a positive harmones in your neurological system to associate the happiness with your studies. Also, provide yourself with a significant punishment if you fail to complete a task or studies. Though I prefer the Carrot (rewards) over the stick (punishment) but I would like to emphasise their should be a consequence of our ether actions or attitude towards our studies.
  2. Do not sign up for Multiple Course: We might sign up as the course is cheap, or trendy and keep on adding the list as it is convinient to do so. But remeber its easy to add coursces on your bucket list or shopping kart, but it is difficult to put that course material inside your brain. It requires a lot of hardwork.
  3. Motivation is a Myth: This comes form Ali Abdaal teachings and you can search on Youtube from the author itslef if you want to learn more about what that point is stating, “Motivation is a Myth”. But in short it means that we should never postponed our studies for a time when we are in right mood for it. It is like going to a job or movie. Fix a time, start the show, the motivation will kick in after 5 to 10 mins into your studies.
  4. Communicate with other Learners: This is one of the big mistake I have done in the past. Remember the story of the Deaf Frog who climbed the Mountain ? I also made a video on it few years back. It says like 1000 frogs one day decided to climb the mountain, 10 quit at the start as the journey was difficult, they motivated 100 to quit as it was so cold, they motivated 500 to quit as they forgot to bring food, they motivated remaing ones to quit as the journey and idea seems impossible except one. The reason was he/she a Deaf frog. Deaf frog was not able to listen the reasons of the quitters and thus did not join the 70% club. (In this story 99% club of quitters.)
  5. Repetition is Important: This last point is the main reason of my motivation to write this blog post. And 5 mins before I started this draft I talked with one my friend “Asad” who has recenty completed two Microsoft Asure two certification in last two months. And now I will be going against the Rule 4 mentioned above. His way of learning is (A: Exposure) to go throught the whole material of the whole course, not just one or two sub subjects, but the whole course like Binge Watching a Neflix Series. We retain only 10 to 40% of the content explained in this first run of going through the material. (B: Retention Detailing) Then 2nd time we go through the material in bit detail and slow paced. This is the time we absorb more as we already know the main storyline thus we are well aware where to focus on and where not to. (C: Memory) The 3rd run will be with slides or notes as most online cources have them, this is again a faster approach as we are aware of the content we are in a little bit kind of memorisation state at this stage. (D: Active Reacall) In the fourth or finall run of the whole material you go through the whole content of the course with pausing at each start of the heading/video/slide and asking youself “What is the authour going to say in this content?”. This is the testing phase. The fourth reading is to be done without even looking inside of the content or only go through the content if you are not able to recall what is being taugh. Remember Testing is a Part of the Learning Process. And Testing is to be done before appearing for the main End of Subject Exam.

The above 5 points, if followed with devotion will make the online journey of studies worthwhile. Ya point number 4 is a bit arguable but it also depends on what kind of personality you are. As Steve Jobs has observed and said, “A players like to stay with A players” and “B players like to stick with B”. Thus if you really want to jump from being a B player to being an A player then you do have to put in enough energy to break the threshold. And understand yourself is that journey really worth it?

I will sign off for this post with an open mind to learn further and keep recording my journey on this blog post as well as my Youtube Channel. Hope to see you in the next post, next video, or next life whichever comes earlier.

Cheers !!!

More Freee Books: Data Science etc

Ohh wow, the Internet is full of Google Drive Links to Download so much content.

Here are the links to a few books related to Data Science related material that I recently found:

First of all, I would urge anyone reading this blog to join this Facebook group if they are interested in more free Data Science related resources https://www.facebook.com/groups/953875852069445/

Then scroll and download anything you require from this article

List of Online Resources

Excell Related PDFs

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Hra6hYXY9EzWELAJ_3pg9EwnbnTspr8Z

Data Science from Scratch

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zZ0Hu6kwYBk-LPu1UuDO0O28UgGkO5VO/view

Python Data Structure and Algorithms

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qV8sCPJVG8shcUitG__e8H3MawCs_lew/view?usp=sharing

And as posted before

Pro Python 3

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1t5UdLIEEagIOTtoRyDBlcvUSSCJYBdIr/

See you in the next post or next life, whichever comes first !!!

Tapish Dongre

FREE Course Online: Website Review

The domain name https://www.freecoursesonline.me/?1 may or may not work in the near future if/when you might be reading this article a few years down the road. This is a website to offer free copies of the paid courses available online.

Using so much paid and unpaid material to study last year, I was considering myself a borderline pirate with a quite amorphous morality. On one side I wanted to contribute to the makers of all the courses I am consuming, on the other hand, I was financially struggling myself. Thus in the future, if I make a course and you are pirating it in some way, I promise I will be able to understand and empathize with you with my full heart as today I am in that position myslef.

A Screenshot of this website looks something like this:

Screenshot of FreeCourseOnline Website

Now that you know about my moral ambiguity, we can continue to discuss how this website is of benefit to any person who wanted to learn or get a glimpse of the content on famous paid platforms before investing in the content.

  1. It has a huge collection of Cources
  2. Compressed file size for eazy download
  3. Web/Server based application dosent work as it require a paid account
  4. All other content including videos, books or open source content is free and accessible
  5. Cources are well organised
  6. You can request an upload of a course, but it dose take time to rip them and upload.

There might be many more points I can comment on but if this website or certain thing of this kind remains in the future, please do write it in the comments section below. And if you can, please do buy the paid courses to contribute to the creators.

Signing off for now

Tapish Dongre

Ali Abdaal’s “How to Study for Exams” – An Evidence-Based Masterclass

Right at 11:58 pm on a Sunday just 4 days shy from new years eve 2022, I completed Ali Abdaal’s class on “How to Study for Exam” and here is a short review about it.

Is the Course Worth it?

The short, one-word answer is “YES”. But since I am too excited and being long term fan of Ali Abdaal’s work on Youtube, I would like to elaborate it was a wonderful journey only to learn 3 key ingredients about studying for anything. Giving some spoilers and no spoilers ahead, they were to UNDERSTAND, REMEMBER and FOCUS. But these three words cannot sum up the course as there were more than 100 other points in the course to learn out of which I can retain only 60% knowledge. (Based on my capacity to process the data I learned at this stage of life).

WHY did I take this Course?

I am trying my best to complete the IBM Data Science Course I signed up for last November, and it has been almost a year since I am unable to complete it. I kept missing out on the information or losing motivation or just not focused enough. Internally I don’t want to be the person who signed up for something and left it midway, even after knowing how important it is. Thus now I wanted to know if am I doing something wrong in my study technique that I am unable to reach my target. And these unique situations lead to my search for “how to learn better”. Few Google Search and a few friends of friends recommendations took me to a specific link on SkillShare and that was this course:

https://www.skillshare.com/classes/How-to-Study-for-Exams-An-Evidence-Based-Masterclass/728748026?via=user-profile

How much time does it take to complete the Course?

The point here is not how much time did it take me to go through one run of the whole video played at 1x speed. But it is more important how we think about how much can we learn in any given amount of time. But I will not hide any truth in this article. It took me a whole week to go through the material of the course including the time I spent absorbing and assimilating the material I just consumed. Probably others can do it within 24 hours by binge-watching the content. But if you need to learn something from it, it would be great to at least keep 3 days to one week in hand just to try out a few of the new techniques we learned

What’s Next?

As mentioned in the course about “Active Recall” and “Spaced repetition,” I would probably try to implement the skills I upgraded and try to go through the re-wired learning methodology I was just enlightened with. Hopefully, I can use these skills soon for learning anything in life and currently complete the Data Science Course with a more focused and enthusiastic approach.

I will make it or not, in either case, I will keep this blog updated on how did I go further.

Happy New Year in Advance

Best Regards

Tapish

Pro Python 3

In general, I don’t openly promote piracy but as joining multiple groups learning python, data science, and cloud I came across many resources.

Some resources are freely available and some are heavy on our pocket.

The views expressed by fellow learners put me into the moral dilemma of, “to what extent the resources should be charged and to what extent they should be available for free?”

I have decided from time to time I would share some of these resources which will enable everyone to grow as a collective community.

One of the links I got recently introduced with from a FB group about Python Programming is :

“PRO Python 3 Features and Tools for Professional Development” by J. Burton Browning and Marty Alchin

All rights to the book are reserved to the respective owner, and the book is available to download only for a short period of time till the kind fellow humans keep the sharing link active.

To download please follow the link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1t5UdLIEEagIOTtoRyDBlcvUSSCJYBdIr/

Also if the link is not available in the future, please write it in the comments section below and I will remove this post.

Thanks

Tapish Dongre

Data Science Methodology (IBM)

Compleated another certificate realted to data Science. This was was step by step explainaiton of the whole procedure of a Data Science project. It showed the pattern as a whole instead of goind too much deep into how each operation is being done. In the discussion coloum of the IBM portal some students found it way too eazy, whereas the idea of working with so much data and numbers on a excell sheet in future overwelmed me a bit.

So finally I overcame my fears and compleated this bit and here is the link to flaunt on another certificate from IBM

https://coursera.org/share/728d9ea3de111e743bf30d7be0dd2050

Yes I also love the badging system by IBM and I have three digital version collected till now.

Link: https://www.credly.com/badges/ac38f9af-f9ac-459c-a909-3052efd041f6/public_url

Or the whole collection at https://www.credly.com/users/tapish-dongre/badges

Hope I can add more in the future months.

Year 2021 is looking promising. See you in the next post or next life….

Cheers

Tapish

Tools for Data Science

In this article, I am just documenting my journey of learning Data Science. Currently, I have completed Course 2 of the IBM Data Science Professional Certificate titled “Tools for Data Science”

I have currently two digital badges from IBM to flaunt on this Digital Universe

The link to the Badges is:

  1. Data Science Orientation

https://www.credly.com/badges/82b8daa6-9d94-4ea5-a7ed-1dcd78accc91

2. Tools for Data Science

https://www.credly.com/badges/e8119c02-2b2f-4fdd-852e-bab85cc64bfa

Now Coming to the main part of this article. The final takeaway of this course was the final assignment learned in week 4 of the course where we executed the learning of different Markdowns (i.e Fonts / Caligraphy in Coding). This has complied in a Jyupter Notebook made inside Waston Studio provided by IBM. I am sharing a link to my work as this would be the first-ever task I managed to pulled of in my Data Science journey. (I know I know in the future I will laugh that I shared a barely minimum sill level task but it is just the start of a big Marathon thus I thought the smaller achievements are worth a share)

The link to my work is :

https://eu-gb.dataplatform.cloud.ibm.com/analytics/notebooks/v2/86e5b12c-d95a-4038-9873-35835cafb4d8/view?access_token=486577407cc406a91d70ef53ec197f2ba50cb70e79295bbd588de37513a605c0

Hey I can also share my Completion certificate now, the link to my Certificate is :

https://coursera.org/share/27abd5146bfe79343b0fe0e678b289b8

Hopefully, more Certificates, as well as projects, would come in the future to flaunt my skills thus do sign up / follow /Subscribe or bookmark this website to get further updates posted as and when I learn new cool stuff.

Thanks

Tapish

Jupyter Notebooks on the Internet

Copy of Original Article by “Romeo Kienzler” in IBM Data Science Course

There are thousands of interesting jupyter notebooks available on the internet for you to learn from. One of the best sources is: https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/wiki/A-gallery-of-interesting-Jupyter-Notebooks

It is important to notice that you can download such notebooks to your local computer or import them to a cloud based notebook tool so that you can rerun, modify and follow along what’s explained in the notebook.

Very often jupyter notebook are already shared in a rendered view. This means, that you can look at them as if they were running locally on you machine. But sometimes, folks only share a link to the jupyter file (which you can make out by the *.ipynb extention). In this case you can just grab the URL to that file and past it to the NB-Viewer => https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/

The list above gives you a very nice start with a huge collection of materials to explore. Therefore it’s maybe more useful to give you some pointers to interesting notebooks. As we have covered some toy examples with toy data in the labs, let me just point to some work which uses these data and goes further down the road of data science. In addition, as we’ve covered the different tasks in data science we’ll also provide an exemplar notebook for each of those.

First you start with exploratory data analysis, so this notebook is highly recommended to have a look at: https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/Tanu-N-Prabhu/Python/blob/master/Exploratory_data_Analysis.ipynb

For data integration / cleansing at a smaller scale, the python library pandas is often used. Please have a look at this notebook: https://towardsdatascience.com/data-cleaning-with-python-using-pandas-library-c6f4a68ea8eb

If you want to already experience what clustering is, have a look at this: https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/temporaer/tutorial_ml_gkbionics/blob/master/2%20-%20KMeans.ipynb

And finally, if you want to go for a more in-depth notebook on the iris dataset have a look here: https://www.kaggle.com/lalitharajesh/iris-dataset-exploratory-data-analysis

“I have just kept a copy of this page on my website as a personal note that this infomation is useful and I should read the individual links in my free time.” – Tapish Dongre

Creative Markdown Cheatsheet

While practicing work on Jupyter Notebooks there are many fancy ways to write a code markdown. Markdown are like Headings, Titles and Subtitles in a code which are not executed in while we run the programme. These Markdowns are only there to guide the reader of what the code is about or explain the code step by step or add hint or comments.

There is a cheat sheat to guide us through the variety of Markdown styles. I will provide the link to original post so that the credit goes to the content creator rather than just copy pasting the styles in this web page.

This link to the Markdown Sheet is: https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheatsheet

Hope to share more info about Data Science as and when I learn about it.

Regards

Tapish