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Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

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Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#121
post #23

Okay, here's a view of what appears to be part of the course: We have a course (right a school application of stuff taught in school!) with two teachers, that is, two sections of the course, each section with its own teacher and its own students. At the end of the two courses, that is, the two sections, we want to compare the teachers. So we give the same test to all of the students from both courses. Suppose one sec…

What you are describing is known as bootstrapping (if sampling with replacement) jackknifing (if sampling without replacement), or (in the case you want to run a significance test, and not simply create a distribution or stats like confidence intervals) a permutation test. I think you already know that; I'm just mentioning in case others want to look these up by name. Also while they can be called 'distribution free' it only means you are not assuming a prefab distribution. If you want to perform a significance test you'll be creating (explicitly or implicitly) a distribution of your calculated statistic (known as the empirical distribution). If you want to be very explicit about this, you can plot a PDF or CDF of your sampled stats just like you could with a gaussian, exponential, poisson, etc., distribution.

We teach these methods to our students in intro stats at UC San Diego. Have been for as long as I've been here (5 years). Last year a data science program was also created here at UCSD. I've TA'd a flagship course in that program too. It's almost exactly the same content; the major difference is imo are the faculty personalities. The stats profs are smug, while the data science profs are energetically self-important. They teach the same shit. Self motivated students with a STEMy personality tend to learn more in the stats courses because the profs drive on hard core theory; on average though, students do better in the data science course because the profs are so bombastic the kids walk out of each class thinking they are basically ready to join the fellas over at Waymo on some machine learning projects - maybe even show 'em a thing or two, cutting edge tricks learned back at the ol' uni.

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#123
post #115

I find it curious that there are so many courses for data-science related subjects, which superficially seem to cover the same material, and relatively few courses covering more traditional CS topics such as computer systems, networks, OS. I suppose it has to do with the market, but also feels like colleges are skating to where the puck is, rather than where it will be (or perhaps, where it could be).

This is a general issue i have seen as well. We live in 2018 and there is no open source course for everything. Instead there are probably 10-30k universities who have similar courses and professors who give the same lecture every year. They get paid often enough by countries to create and do those courses. In germany most of our unversities are paid by all of us germans anyway. And what do you find online? Always th…

Have you seen this? Does this meet your criteria/have enough sufficient resources/curriculum?

> http://datasciencemasters.org/

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#124
post #115

I find it curious that there are so many courses for data-science related subjects, which superficially seem to cover the same material, and relatively few courses covering more traditional CS topics such as computer systems, networks, OS. I suppose it has to do with the market, but also feels like colleges are skating to where the puck is, rather than where it will be (or perhaps, where it could be).

This is a general issue i have seen as well. We live in 2018 and there is no open source course for everything. Instead there are probably 10-30k universities who have similar courses and professors who give the same lecture every year. They get paid often enough by countries to create and do those courses. In germany most of our unversities are paid by all of us germans anyway. And what do you find online? Always th…

I forget if its the Verge or some other popular podcast but they are always suggesting Apple just put together a fully open and accredited online university.

The problem is that there are a lot of people getting paid a lot of money all over the world to work in post-secondary education whom control the keys to accreditation and whom have proven very resilient at resisting any optimization efforts.

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#125
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawyers can commission directly as captains in the USAF (and probably other branches) as long as they are not too old and can pass the fitness test. I think they also have to have passed a bar exam in one state, but it doesn't matter which one. They can get up to $65k of student loans repaid and don't even have to go through the same basic training as everyone else. So (b) is slightly less trivial than saying a succe…

Did you actually do any recruiting? Or are you like me and just sort of started inadvertently talking this way after a certain number of years?

No recruiting, I started off by wanting to point out that military lawyers don't "make" captain, they are given that rank to start. Then I realized it sounded like a little like a recruitment talk so I decided to go all in.

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#126

I find it curious that there are so many courses for data-science related subjects, which superficially seem to cover the same material, and relatively few courses covering more traditional CS topics such as computer systems, networks, OS. I suppose it has to do with the market, but also feels like colleges are skating to where the puck is, rather than where it will be (or perhaps, where it could be).

All these courses in data science ain't gonna solve science biggest mystery, that is consciousness. Too bad we don't focus on that. /Cognitive scientist

That's why it's called data science not cognitive science. Duh!

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#127
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every job that involves data in any way is being relabeled a data science job. Most of them are just generating dashboards and posters in Excel or Tableau for people who are data illiterate. I know many people with maths/stats/comp-sci backgrounds who end up in these sorts of jobs. “Just add a bunch of green up arrows and red down arrows, your manager will love it” was advice from a co-worker of mine. Sadly, she was…

It's actually become somewhat hilarious to me. Like you said, the data science label is being applied quite liberally (no judgment, I'm not the world's authority on how it should be applied), so here you have companies paying $100k or more to have people do Excel work or Tableau visualizations.

"Data scientist" is the new "business analyst".

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#128
post #124
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a general issue i have seen as well. We live in 2018 and there is no open source course for everything. Instead there are probably 10-30k universities who have similar courses and professors who give the same lecture every year. They get paid often enough by countries to create and do those courses. In germany most of our unversities are paid by all of us germans anyway. And what do you find online? Always th…

I forget if its the Verge or some other popular podcast but they are always suggesting Apple just put together a fully open and accredited online university. The problem is that there are a lot of people getting paid a lot of money all over the world to work in post-secondary education whom control the keys to accreditation and whom have proven very resilient at resisting any optimization efforts.

Apple isn't open. Their stuff has tended to not work on Linux.

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#129

I'm a UC Berkeley alum. When I was there this was a course taken by humanity majors to learn some programming so that their Resume looks cooler. majority of STEM majors take CS 61A (SICP) or E7 (Programming in MATLAB). Just noting this as a context, this is not the class intended for CS majors; this : https://cs61a.org/ one is.

Or if you want to get experience with data science: Stats 134 (easy), CS188 (medium), CS189 (hard).

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#130
I think this is a bad trend. These university make basic courses free to gain popularity and then ask for big money for their real courses.

This is bad in two ways:

1) The people taking these courses do not learn much for the effort and time they spend. Also it gives them illusion that they know enough as they take course from big university.

2) Industry is already so confused in hiring, they hire by name. So even you take these courses and study in depth on your own you can't get hired. Someone more qualified can not get hired just because they can't pay 100k to get a degree in machine learning from one of these big university.

This is really a bad trend and we should spend time on real courses. Everyone knows that TV series are waste of time, these courses are like TV series. Stop watching them.

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