Addendum To Statement Of Work: Fill & Download for Free

You mentioned you'd have 15 to 20 hours per week for career development. You're fortunate; that is a wealth of time if used properly. I would recommend several things to accelerate your skills over the next one to two years, listed in order of priority but done in parallel:1) Go the UCI Machine Learning Database (Google that title) and try lots of the problems. Set a goal to produce reasonable results on 100 data sets in two years. At first you'll take longer than the requisite one week per data set, but you'll get faster as you learn, and as you develop your own tools to automate some tasks. Start with regressions in Excel as a baseline, and to learn the limitations most people face, then focus on R and any add-ons you'd like to try.2) Get a mentor who'll sit with you for lunch two or three times a month. This mentor should be a data scientist, a statistician, or an engineer with significant machine learning experience. Talk about problems and what it takes to solve them. Show your mentor your UCI project results and your methods, and get feedback.3) Read like hell. Academic machine learning papers, Wikipedia pages on concepts and phrases you haven't heard, books on everything reasonably related to the theory and practice of data science.4) Take online courses in related subjects.Move fast, don't get caught up in making tiny incremental improvements or trying to beat published results. Just do this large number of projects on UCI's relatively small data sets so that you're exposed to a wide variety of problems. Forget the "big" in "big data" until later. Right now you need to build your intuitive feel for solving problems, and how the various machine learning and statistical methods differ in both approach and results. Don't get caught up in academic theory, religious adherence to a single method, or the latest shiny new thing. Just solve problems and pay attention to how different measures of success have implications for practical use of the results.For the next two years, minimize the amount of algorithms and approaches that you develop for yourself -- the only development you should do is scripts for pre-processing data and automating repetitive tasks. After the two years, you'll know whether you should invent and development something. Be patient; build your foundation first.And always write yourself a little problem statement at the beginning of each project, and a statement at the end about how this could benefit someone -- and calculate the magnitude of the benefit and how many people worldwide would experience that benefit versus standard regression. As mental exercise, ask yourself how much you could charge for that benefit if people bought your model. This process will help you stay focused on the practical aspects of your skills. It'll also help you learn to define success metrics properly for any data set.Do this for two years and you will advance your data science skills faster than 99% of new practitioners, and you will have a killer body of work as an addendum to your resume.You've made a great career choice. Now outrun your peers. Good luck.

Yes.Oh, you want more a detailed answer, right? :-)The point of your graduate application is to show that you know what kinds of the questions are interesting to the particular program to which you are applying, that you have already started looking at the relevant literature, and (if appropriate) that you've already starting doing work in the field. So any evidence you can provide helps your application.Yes, you do need to learn to present this information concisely, and so sometimes you might want to have a separate addendum to your CV with details about specific projects. But learning to present your work clearly and concisely is a key element of success (in life as well as in graduate school), so try to get it onto your CV or into your application statement.BTW, notice the point I made above about the PARTICULAR program to which you are applying. Graduate programs look for students whose interests match their own. Not all CS programs focus on the same areas, nor sociology programs nor history programs nor anything else. Tailor your application to the interests of the specific program.

There are plenty of good answers about this particular question on private, paid fire services. Read the one posted by David Wayne. The bottom line is that one way or another, you have to pay upfront for services like that.After reading those, I saw this situation as a good lesson for those conservatives in rural counties that vote red and who love to say they hate government.It turns out that the government is a really good idea.And, to answer your question right now: No! Americans are not entitled to publicly-owned tax-supported services unless they pay for those services!And, for most people, they pay up front for government-provided first responder services—but even government-funded services are not always as simple as you might think.Oh, by the way: No. You’re not entitled at all! You have to pay.A LITTLE RANT, THEN A GREAT EXAMPLEThese services—whether provided by a government system or a private system—are funded on the same basis as private insurance.These rural voters like to rebel against paying taxes but then have no difficulty understanding their own private insurance. If they were to refuse to buy car insurance, and they were to total their car, they would understand that no insurance company is going to issue them a policy after the wreck that will cover the damage.But they are, clearly, surprised that other services work the same way.NOW THE EXAMPLEThere are disputes still today along the boundary between my home state of Virginia and neighboring West Virginia. West Virginia seceded from Virginia in 1861 because they opposed slavery. They took 38 percent of Virginia’s land and formed a new state in the Union.But not many people know that there was a move to form three states, with the third one lying between West Virginia and Virginia, to be called Kanawha.The counties that would have formed Kanawha are up along the mountain ridge and no one was really sure where the boundaries were, and those folks wanted out of the whole state thing anyway. If you’ve driven through there, you’ll see why—even today. But if you go, take an SUV.The brown counties are in Virginia. The yellow and green counties are in West Virginia. The green counties contain indistinct, very back-woods regions along the mountain ridge that wanted to form the state of Kanawha.Virginia-West Virginia BoundaryState of Kanawha - WikipediaBack in those days the layout of the counties was not strictly established and there were squabbles between people who lived there over which county they were in.Believe it or not, those ridge boundaries are still in dispute.The people who live in those green counties still have problems when they need first responders: which fire department will come, which ambulance, which police department. And sometimes it’s a stand-off and no one comes. And houses have burned down. And people have died.ADDENDUMAfter a few comments built upon this, I decided to insert this little sidebar to clarify the unbelievable problems where the green counties and brown counties touch.There are people on the eastern edge of the green, and the western edge of the brown that dispute which state they live in! They resist paying WV taxes and fees because they claim they’re in VA. Of course, when the VA folks come around, they say they’re in WV. The legal borders were defined by the ridge line and when you’re up there, where, exactly is that line?Because one commenter made the wise and logical statement that the state should fix this, I had to toss in this addendum to point out: which state?It turns out you cannot hate government—and protest and rant and rave about paying taxes—but then when you need a first responder still expect someone to come just because it’s an emergency.How many cliches on this come to mind? Duhhhh!So, the counties that at one point wanted to form the state of Kanawha give us a good lesson today that well-funded, well-organized government is not quite the bad guy that a lot of rural folks think it is.AND, THERE’S MOREIf you want another example, do some research on the failed bid to form the Free Republic of Franklin in some counties that are between Tennessee and North Carolina. Same mountain ridge. Same kind of people. Same feelings toward government.State of Franklin - WikipediaBy our Constitution everyone has the right to publicly hate the government—but if you do, and you refuse to pay for the services that governments provide—then if your house burns down you have to just get out, stand back, and think, Well, I love to live this way, I chose to live way, so this is on me!And you’ll have plenty of time to rethink your hatred of government while you rebuild your house.