My thirteenth week of @matkodurko's What did I learn yesterday? #learnandearn challenge, based on an idea by Tim Ferriss ('Tools of Titans' book).
Monday 18th - Herodotus (4th C BC) wasn't always talking rubbish.
Herodotus gets credit as being one of the world's first historians. However, he also gets pilloried for making a lot of stuff up, or believing the first story he hears about far-flung places. However, a boat recently excavated in the Nile exactly matches a description he gives of Egyptian boat-building. If you've not read Herodotus, he's worth a go. Trojan war, Assyrian wars, all sorts of weird myths... he's an inspiration on George RR Martin and any half-decent writer of fantasy fiction.Tuesday 19th - "Doing Data Science" (O'Neil & Schutt), published by O'Reilly: introduction to statistical modelling; Algorithms: Linear regression, K-Nearest Neighbours, K-Means, Naive Bayes... Really easy read, considering the topic. Not doing the exercises as I read on the train. Might go back soon and try to work it all through.
Wednesday 20th - Logistic Regression: Newtonian, Stochastic Gradient Descent; Financial modelling
Thursday 21st - Recommendation engines
Saturday 23rd - Data in medicine
Sunday 24th - Big Data: MapReduce etc.
At the end of a week reading this book, I feel I understand the concepts and arguments of data science, and it's changed how I'll look at 'big' data in the future and my own examinations of small data.