Instructor Data Form: Fill & Download for Free

John Medina, in his book Brain Rules, introduces data that forms the following graph:The data shows that student attention level takes a dive, approximately 10 minutes into a lesson. This is a natural occurrence (and I believe the reason YouTube videos were initially limited to <9 minutes), but can be dealt with by a good instructor. The problem is most instructors (particularly at the university level) know next to nothing about the learning process and instructional theory. A good instructor will introduce variation into a lesson every 10 minutes to regain the students' attention (as depicted in the below graph).This variation can be accomplished in many ways - from inserting a student activity to asking questions or otherwise soliciting involvement from the students to changing the delivery style or mechanism.The problem is that so many instructors see instructing as a one-way communication. If a student is not contributing to the communication, they lose focus and many literally go to sleep.There are other triggers for sleeping during lessons, such as eating a large meal immediately before the lesson, poor ventilation in the classroom, and tired students.

Here are some amazing and completely free resources online that you can use to teach yourself data science.Besides this page, I would highly recommend following the Quora Data Science topic if you haven't already to get updates on new questions and answers!Step 1. Fulfill your prerequisitesBefore you begin, you need Multivariable Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Python. If your math background is up to multivariable calculus and linear algebra, you'll have enough background to understand almost all of the probability / statistics / machine learning for the job.Multivariate Calculus: What are the best resources for mastering multivariable calculus?Numerical Linear Algebra / Computational Linear Algebra / Matrix Algebra: Linear Algebra, Introduction to Linear Models and Matrix Algebra. Avoid linear algebra classes that are too theoretical, you need a linear algebra class that works with real matrices.Multivariate calculus is useful for some parts of machine learning and a lot of probability. Linear / Matrix algebra is absolutely necessary for a lot of concepts in machine learning.You also need some programming background to begin, preferably in Python. Most other things on this guide can be learned on the job (like random forests, pandas, A/B testing), but you can't get away without knowing how to program!Python is the most important language for a data scientist to learn. To learn to code, more about Python, and why Python is so important, check outHow do I learn to code?How do I learn Python?Why is Python a language of choice for data scientists?Is Python the most important programming language to learn for aspiring data scientists and data miners?R is the second most important language for a data scientist to learn. I’m saying this as someone with a statistics background and who went through undergrad mainly only using R. While R is powerful for dedicated statistical tasks, Python is more versatile as it will connect you more to production-level work.If you're currently in school, take statistics and computer science classes. Check out What classes should I take if I want to become a data scientist?Step 2. Plug Yourself Into the CommunityCheck out Meetup to find some that interest you! Attend an interesting talk, learn about data science live, and meet data scientists and other aspirational data scientists. Start reading data science blogs and following influential data scientists:What are the best, insightful blogs about data, including how businesses are using data?What is your source of machine learning and data science news? Why?What are some best data science accounts to follow on Twitter, Facebook, G+, and LinkedIn?What are the best Twitter accounts about data?Step 3. Setup and Learn to use your toolsPythonInstall Python, iPython, and related libraries (guide)How do I learn Python?RInstall R and RStudio (It's good to know both Python and R)Learn R with swirlSublime TextInstall Sublime TextWhat's the best way to learn to use Sublime Text?SQLHow do I learn SQL? What are some good online resources, like websites, blogs, or videos? (You can practice it using the sqlite package in Python)Step 4. Learn Probability and StatisticsBe sure to go through a course that involves heavy application in R or Python. Knowing probability and statistics will only really be helpful if you can implement what you learn.Python Application: Think Stats (free pdf) (Python focus)R Applications: An Introduction to Statistical Learning (free pdf)(MOOC) (R focus)Print out a copy of Probability CheatsheetStep 5. Complete Harvard's Data Science CourseAs of Fall 2015, the course is currently in its third year and strives to be as applicable and helpful as possible for students who are interested in becoming data scientists. An example of how is this happening is the introduction of Spark and SQL starting this year.I'd recommend doing the labs and lectures from 2015 and the homeworks from 2013 (2015 homeworks are not available to the public, and the 2014 homeworks are written under a different instructor than the original instructors).This course is developed in part by a fellow Quora user, Professor Joe Blitzstein. Here are all of the materials!Intro to the classWhat is it like to design a data science class? In particular, what was it like to design Harvard's new data science class, taught by professors Joe Blitzstein and Hanspeter Pfister?What is it like to take CS 109/Statistics 121 (Data Science) at Harvard?Course MaterialsClass main page: CS109 Data ScienceLectures, Slides, and Labs: Class MaterialAssignmentsIntro to Python, Numpy, Matplotlib (Homework 0) (Solutions)Poll Aggregation, Web Scraping, Plotting, Model Evaluation, and Forecasting (Homework 1) (Solutions)Data Prediction, Manipulation, and Evaluation (Homework 2) (Solutions)Predictive Modeling, Model Calibration, Sentiment Analysis (Homework 3) (Solutions)Recommendation Engines, Using Mapreduce (Homework 4) (Solutions)Network Visualization and Analysis (Homework 5) (Solutions)Labs(these are the 2013 labs. For the 2015 labs, check out Class Material)Lab 2: Web ScrapingLab 3: EDA, Pandas, MatplotlibLab 4: Scikit-Learn, Regression, PCALab 5: Bias, Variance, Cross-ValidationLab 6: Bayes, Linear Regression, and Metropolis SamplingLab 7: Gibbs SamplingLab 8: MapReduceLab 9: NetworksLab 10: Support Vector MachinesStep 6. Do all of Kaggle's Getting Started and Playground CompetitionsI would NOT recommend doing any of the prize-money competitions. They usually have datasets that are too large, complicated, or annoying, and are not good for learning. The competitions are available at Competitions | KaggleStart by learning scikit-learn, playing around, reading through tutorials and forums on the competitions that you’re doing. Next, play around some more and check out the tutorials for Titanic: Machine Learning from Disaster for a binary classification task (with categorical variables, missing values, etc.)Afterwards, try some multi-class classification with Forest Cover Type Prediction. Now, try a regression task House Prices: Advanced Regression Techniques. Try out some natural language processing with Quora Question Pairs | Kaggle. Finally, try out any of the other knowledge-based competitions that interest you!Step 7. Learn Some Data Science ElectivesData science is an incredibly large and interdisciplinary field, and different jobs will require different skillsets. Here are some of the more common ones:Product Metrics will teach you about what companies track, what metrics they find important, and how companies measure their success: The 27 Metrics in Pinterest’s Internal Growth DashboardMachine Learning How do I learn machine learning? This is an extremely rich area with massive amounts of potential, and likely the “sexiest” area of data science today. Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course on Coursera is one of the most popular MOOCs, and a great way to start! Andrew Ng's Machine Learning MOOCA/B Testing is incredibly important to help inform product decisions for consumer applications. Learn more about A/B testing here: How do I learn about A/B testing?Visualization - I would recommend picking up ggplot2 in R to make simple yet beautiful graphics and just browsing DataIsBeautiful • /r/dataisbeautiful and FlowingData for ideas and inspiration.User Behavior - This set of blogs posts looks useful and interesting - This Explains Everything " User BehaviorFeature Engineering - Check out What are some best practices in Feature Engineering? and this great example: http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/aguschin/kaggle/blob/master/forestCoverType_featuresEngineering.ipynbBig Data Technologies - These are tools and frameworks developed specifically to deal with massive amounts of data. How do I learn big data technologies?Optimization will help you with understanding statistics and machine learning: Convex Optimization - Boyd and VandenbergheNatural Language Processing - This is the practice of turning text data into numerical data whilst still preserving the "meaning". Learning this will let you analyze new, exciting forms of data. How do I learn Natural Language Processing (NLP)?Time Series Analysis - How do I learn about time series analysis?Step 8. Do a Capstone Product / Side ProjectUse your new data science and software engineering skills to build something that will make other people say wow! This can be a website, new way of looking at a dataset, cool visualization, or anything!What are some good toy problems (can be done over a weekend by a single coder) in data science? I'm studying machine learning and statistics, and looking for something socially relevant using publicly available datasets/APIs.How can I start building a recommendation engine? Where can I find an interesting data set? What tools/technologies/algorithms are best to build the engine with? How do I check the effectiveness of recommendations?What are some ideas for a quick weekend Python project? I am looking to gain some experience.What is a good measure of the influence of a Twitter user?Where can I find large datasets open to the public?What are some good algorithms for a prioritized inbox?What are some good data science projects?Create public github repositories, make a blog, and post your work, side projects, Kaggle solutions, insights, and thoughts! This helps you gain visibility, build a portfolio for your resume, and connect with other people working on the same tasks.Step 9. Get a Data Science Internship or JobHow do I prepare for a data scientist interview?How should I prepare for statistics questions for a data science interviewWhat kind of A/B testing questions should I expect in a data scientist interview and how should I prepare for such questions?What companies have data science internships for undergraduates?What are some tips to choose whether I want to apply for a Data Science or Software Engineering internship?When is the best time to apply for data science summer internships?Check out The Official Quora Data Science FAQ for more discussion on internships, jobs, and data science interview processes! The data science FAQ also links to more specific versions of this question, like How do I become a data scientist without a PhD? or the counterpart, How do I become a data scientist as a PhD student?Step 10. Share your Wisdom Back with the Data Science CommunityIf you’ve made it this far, congratulations on becoming a data scientist! I’d encourage you to share your knowledge and what you’ve learned back with the data science community. Data Science as a nascent field depends on knowledge-sharing!Think like a Data ScientistIn addition to the concrete steps I listed above to develop the skill set of a data scientist, I include seven challenges below so you can learn to think like a data scientist and develop the right attitude to become one.(1) Satiate your curiosity through dataAs a data scientist you write your own questions and answers. Data scientists are naturally curious about the data that they're looking at, and are creative with ways to approach and solve whatever problem needs to be solved.Much of data science is not the analysis itself, but discovering an interesting question and figuring out how to answer it.Here are two great examples:Hilary: the most poisoned baby name in US historyA Look at Fire Response DataChallenge: Think of a problem or topic you're interested in and answer it with data!(2) Read news with a skeptical eyeMuch of the contribution of a data scientist (and why it's really hard to replace a data scientist with a machine), is that a data scientist will tell you what's important and what's spurious. This persistent skepticism is healthy in all sciences, and is especially necessarily in a fast-paced environment where it's too easy to let a spurious result be misinterpreted.You can adopt this mindset yourself by reading news with a critical eye. Many news articles have inherently flawed main premises. Try these two articles. Sample answers are available in the comments.Easier: You Love Your iPhone. Literally.Harder: Who predicted Russia’s military intervention?Challenge: Do this every day when you encounter a news article. Comment on the article and point out the flaws.(3) See data as a tool to improve consumer productsVisit a consumer internet product (probably that you know doesn't do extensive A/B testing already), and then think about their main funnel. Do they have a checkout funnel? Do they have a signup funnel? Do they have a virility mechanism? Do they have an engagement funnel?Go through the funnel multiple times and hypothesize about different ways it could do better to increase a core metric (conversion rate, shares, signups, etc.). Design an experiment to verify if your suggested change can actually change the core metric.Challenge: Share it with the feedback email for the consumer internet site!(4) Think like a BayesianTo think like a Bayesian, avoid the Base rate fallacy. This means to form new beliefs you must incorporate both newly observed information AND prior information formed through intuition and experience.Checking your dashboard, user engagement numbers are significantly down today. Which of the following is most likely?1. Users are suddenly less engaged2. Feature of site broke3. Logging feature brokeEven though explanation #1 completely explains the drop, #2 and #3 should be more likely because they have a much higher prior probability.You're in senior management at Tesla, and five of Tesla's Model S's have caught fire in the last five months. Which is more likely?1. Manufacturing quality has decreased and Teslas should now be deemed unsafe.2. Safety has not changed and fires in Tesla Model S's are still much rarer than their counterparts in gasoline cars.While #1 is an easy explanation (and great for media coverage), your prior should be strong on #2 because of your regular quality testing. However, you should still be seeking information that can update your beliefs on #1 versus #2 (and still find ways to improve safety). Question for thought: what information should you seek?Challenge: Identify the last time you committed the Base Rate Fallacy. Avoid committing the fallacy from now on.(5) Know the limitations of your tools“Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.” - Miles KingtonKnowledge is knowing how to perform a ordinary linear regression, wisdom is realizing how rare it applies cleanly in practice.Knowledge is knowing five different variations of K-means clustering, wisdom is realizing how rarely actual data can be cleanly clustered, and how poorly K-means clustering can work with too many features.Knowledge is knowing a vast range of sophisticated techniques, but wisdom is being able to choose the one that will provide the most amount of impact for the company in a reasonable amount of time.You may develop a vast range of tools while you go through your Coursera or EdX courses, but your toolbox is not useful until you know which tools to use.Challenge: Apply several tools to a real dataset and discover the tradeoffs and limitations of each tools. Which tools worked best, and can you figure out why?(6) Teach a complicated conceptHow does Richard Feynman distinguish which concepts he understands and which concepts he doesn't?Feynman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said to him, "Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics." Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, "I'll prepare a freshman lecture on it." But he came back a few days later to say, "I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don't really understand it." - David L. Goodstein, Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the SunWhat distinguished Richard Feynman was his ability to distill complex concepts into comprehendible ideas. Similarly, what distinguishes top data scientists is their ability to cogently share their ideas and explain their analyses.Check out https://www.quora.com/Edwin-Chen-1/answers for examples of cogently-explained technical concepts.Challenge: Teach a technical concept to a friend or on a public forum, like Quora or YouTube.(7) Convince others about what's importantPerhaps even more important than a data scientist's ability to explain their analysis is their ability to communicate the value and potential impact of the actionable insights.Certain tasks of data science will be commoditized as data science tools become better and better. New tools will make obsolete certain tasks such as writing dashboards, unnecessary data wrangling, and even specific kinds of predictive modeling.However, the need for a data scientist to extract out and communicate what's important will never be made obsolete. With increasing amounts of data and potential insights, companies will always need data scientists (or people in data science-like roles), to triage all that can be done and prioritize tasks based on impact.The data scientist's role in the company is the serve as the ambassador between the data and the company. The success of a data scientist is measured by how well he/she can tell a story and make an impact. Every other skill is amplified by this ability.Challenge: Tell a story with statistics. Communicate the important findings in a dataset. Make a convincing presentation that your audience cares about.Good luck and best wishes on your journey to becoming a data scientist! For more resources check out Quora’s official Quora Data Science FAQ

In the 1960s, psychologist Daniel Kahneman was working as a consultant for the Israeli Air Force.His job was to explain to flight instructors the latest research in behavior psychology; specifically, how rewarding positive behavior is far more effective than punishing mistakes.Suddenly, one of his students stood up in irritation.He argued that, in his experience, those whom he praised for well-executed flight patterns always did worse the next time, while those whom he screamed at for poorly executed ones invariably performed much better the next time. “Don’t tell me that reward works and punishment doesn’t work,” he said. “My experience contradicts it.”The other flight instructors agreed. But in Kahneman’s mind, a different idea was forming. Surely the instructors’ experiences were legitimate, but there was something else going on…What Kahneman realized, and what his students failed to account for, was the existence of a statistical phenomenon known as regression towards the mean.Think about the flip of a coin for a second. There’s a fifty percent chance it’ll land on heads, and the same for tails as well. Given a fair coin, this probability holds true no matter how many times you flip—even if you got ten heads in a row, there is still only a fifty percent chance you’ll get heads.In fact, if you were to graph a coin toss experiment as a probability curve, you’d get a normal distribution, where the data centers around the mean:This is where regression into the mean comes into play.Suppose that I flipped a coin and got heads for ten straight runs. While I can never be certain that the next toss will also result in heads, I can be fairly certain that the next run of heads will be less than ten. Why?Well, it’s because getting ten heads in a row is what we consider “extreme behavior” of the random variable; it’s just not something you’d see happen regularly!So, since our fair coin has a fifty-fifty chance by default, it would be an extremely rare to observe ten heads in a row—and, as a result, we can be certain that once such an event occurs, it’s most likely that it will return back to normal behavior.In other words, the coin will “return” back to its average behavior, which is around the mean of our probability distribution.So, how does this work into Kahneman’s story?See, any student pilot that starts out is going to have some level of experience with flying planes. They would gradually be improving their skills with training, which means the change wouldn’t be instantly noticeable.Therefore, any exceptional or terrible performance would be based more on luck than actual skill. In the context of the above, this would be an instance of extreme behavior in an otherwise random variable.So after such an outlier performance, the pilot would naturally return back to their norm afterwards.If the outlier was positive, then they would be praised by their instructor; but, the regression would lead them to perform seemingly worse the next day. Conversely, if the outlier was negative, then they would be berated by their instructor; but, they would perform seemingly better the next day.Therefore, for the instructors, it appeared as if the following was going on:good performance → praise → worse performancebad performance → reprimand → better performanceThat would imply that negative reinforcement was leading to improvement.But in reality, this transition would have happened despite the instructor’s reaction because of regression towards the mean!This phenomenon, while based in statistics, has shocking implications in terms of bias, and how it distorts our reasoning and perception of reality.The issue with regression towards the mean is that, if it’s not carefully accounted for in scientific experimentation and data interpretation, then it can often mislead one to believe that there exists a causation where there is none.In truth, humans love the idea of patterns, and more often than not, our cognition is heavily influenced by a desire for order. But Kahneman’s work illustrates just how dangerous that desire can prove to be.