How to be a better writer
- Write 50 words . That’s a paragraph.
- Write 400 words . That’s a page.
- Write 300 pages. That’s a manuscript.
- Write everyday. That’s a habit.
- Edit and Rewrite. That’s how you get better.
- Spread your writing for people to comment. That’s called feedback.
- Dont worry about rejection or publication. That’s a writer.
- When not writing, read. Read from writers better than you. Read and Perceive.
But overall, just write more to get better.
1000+ votes on Quora!!
Probably my most viewed content ever (besides my Poem on Michael Jackson)
Writing on APIs for Programmable Web
I have been writing free lance on APIs for Programmable Web. Here is an updated list of the articles, many of these would be of interest to analytics users. Note- some of these are interviews and they are in bold.
PW Interview: Jeh Daruwala CEO Yactraq API, Behavorial Targeting for videos
PW Interview: Michael Schonfield of Dwolla API on Innovation Meeting the Payment Web 2013/05/02
PW Interview: Stephen Balaban of Lamda Labs on the Face Recognition API 2013/04/29
PW Interview: Amber Feng, Stripe API, The Payment Web 2013/04/24
PW Interview: Greg Lamp and Austin Ogilvie of Yhat on Shipping Predictive Models via API 2013/04/22
Google Mirror API documentation is open for developers 2013/04/18
PW Interview: Ricky Robinett, Ordr.in API, Ordering Food meets API 2013/04/16
PW Interview: Jacob Perkins, Text Processing API, NLP meets API 2013/04/10
Amazon EC2 On Demand Windows Instances -Prices reduced by 20% 2013/04/08
Amazon S3 API Requests prices slashed by half 2013/04/02
PW Interview: Stuart Battersby, Chatterbox API, Machine Learning meets Social 2013/04/02
PW Interview: Karthik Ram, rOpenSci, Wrapping all science APIs 2013/03/20
Viralheat Human Intent API- To buy or not to buy 2013/03/13
Interview Tammer Kamel CEO and Founder Quandl 2013/03/07
YHatHQ API: Calling Hosted Statistical Models 2013/03/04
Quandl API: A Wikipedia for Numerical Data 2013/02/25
Amazon Redshift API is out of limited preview and available! 2013/02/18
Windows Azure Media Services REST API 2013/02/14
Data Science Toolkit Wraps Many Data Services in One API 2013/02/11
Diving into Codeacademy’s API Lessons 2013/01/31
Google APIs finetuning Cloud Storage JSON API 2013/01/29
Springer APIs- Fostering Innovation via API Contests 2012/11/20
Statistically programming the web – Shiny,HttR and RevoDeploy API 2012/11/19
Google Cloud SQL API- Bigger ,Faster and now Free 2012/11/12
A Look at the Web’s Most Popular API -Google Maps API 2012/10/09
Cloud Storage APIs for the next generation Enterprise 2012/09/26
Last.fm API: Sultan of Musical APIs 2012/09/12
Socrata Data API: Keeping Government Open 2012/08/29
BigML API Gets Bigger 2012/08/22
Bing APIs: the Empire Strikes Back 2012/08/15
Google Cloud SQL: Relational Database on the Cloud 2012/08/13
Google BigQuery API Makes Big Data Analytics Easy 2012/08/05
Your Store in The Cloud -Google Cloud Storage API 2012/08/01
Predict the future with Google Prediction API 2012/07/30
The Romney vs Obama API 2012/07/27
Related articles
- API Evangelist (programmableweb.com)
How to make inforgraphics easily- Use Infogr.am
What is an Infographic?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infographic
Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge intended to present complex information quickly and clearly.[1][2] They can improve cognition by utilizing graphics to enhance the human visual system’s ability to see patterns and trends.[3][4] The process of creating infographics can be referred to as data visualization, information design, or information architecture.[2]
What is Infogr.am?
It Create infographics and interactive online charts. It’s free and super-easy!
How?
Step 1
Login using Twitter or Facebook
Step 2
Step 3
Choose New Infographic or New Chart?
Step 4
Create using options-you can edit the table, figures, text, colors etc
That’s it
Use Infogr.am to make inforgraphics easily!
Coursera gets cluttered
I am a big fan of Coursera, but I really think they should organize the Courses along tracks for people wanting to gain multiple skills for a domain or a career.
Their current system of tracks is a signature track that at 39/69$ offers a certificate. Can’t this be upgraded to something like a Data Scientist certification – say if you complete 5-6 courses that are specified.
Also there needs to be much more external social (rather than internal social /forums discussion) as well as some gamification like Codeacademy does (points, badges, leaderboard) to make it more fun.
Lastly- I wish there was a way to read the transcripts fast or at least some way for professionals who are busy to change the rate of learning (the video speed can be changed but its not that effective)
See this- with 370 courses I think Coursera should really build a layer of certifications for multiple courses along a single industry/domain.
Goa Goa Gone Review
Go Goa Gone, is both a stoner movie combined with a zombies attack setting in the scenic heaven of Goa, India. As such it is a sharp, taut comedy with nice acting and crisp direction . The humor is bawdy but some dialogues have potential to be classic. A small budget movie- this is one nice production and shows Bollywood innovating global storylines and adding some desi masala to it. The newbie Puja Gupta looks hot, Saif Ali Khan lampoons the tough guy with a gun image, and Kunal Khemu and Vir Das are great in comic timing.
Watch it for laughs, though it is probably unsuitable for a family outing or with kids. Clearly inspired the cult Hollywood Movie, Zombieland- it has its own desi spin on it. Spicy and Delicious!
Star Trek Movie Review Descending Into Darkness to go where no one has descended before
JJ Abrahams confronts age old questions of morality and ethics in a recent context ( should dangerous war criminals face trial or be executed?). The bromance between Kirk and Spock grows, we see Mr Spock showing more emotions here than he did in the entire Series (including a hilarious domestic incident). This is an awesome feast of a movie and straight in the summer’s must watch list. I liked it better than Iron Man 3 ( and I liked Iron Man a lot!!). The 3D and CGI enhances rather than distracts the movie story, which is how it should be. A satisfying Star Trek, and lots of potential!
But Benedict Cumberbatch is the real bully. This guy is an awesome and incredible actor! Trekkies should remember the original Khan! With some roles swapped
Hallelujah! If you cant find time to watch this edition of Star Trek- it is time to turn that geek badge in!!
1-click Random Decision Forests
Reblogged from The Official Blog of BigML.com:
One of the pitfalls of machine learning is that creating a single predictive model has the potential to overfit your data. That is, the performance on your training data might be very good, but the model does not generalize well to new data. Ensemble learning of decision trees, also referred to as forests or simply ensembles, is a tried-and-true technique for reducing the error of single machine-learned models.










