How to be a better writer

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Background- I wrote this as an accident while trolling on Quora. I was not confident of what I wrote- in fact I wrote it anonymous except people kept asking me why! It was pure serendipity- I wrote it less than 4 minutes and submitted without thinking. Then edited once based on feedback.

Some one clearly more smarter than me made my tips for writing into a picture http://amandaonwriting.tumblr.com/post/54265230509

and it went popular on Tumblr just like it did on Quora!

Apparently if some guy like Wil Wheaton likes your words, it can go viral!  It has 41799 notes ( reblogs+hearts) on Tumblr as of now.

http://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/54699823961/torteen-great-advice-to-writers

Words . Reposted by a member of STAR TREK:NG. I can now die a happy Geek! The Internet is a funny thing!

Thank you everyone! Now if only Google learnt to include OCR for Images as part of text search!

  1. Write 50 words . That’s  a paragraph.
  2. Write 400 words . That’s a page.
  3. Write 300 pages. That’s a manuscript.
  4. Write everyday. That’s a habit.
  5. Edit and Rewrite. That’s how you get better.
  6. Spread your writing for people to comment. That’s called feedback.
  7. Dont worry about rejection or publication. That’s a writer.
  8. When not writing, read. Read from writers better than you. Read and Perceive.

But overall, just write more to get better.

1887+ votes on Quora!! 🙂 Probably my most viewed content ever- !

61036 people  have viewed this answer!

https://www.quora.com/Writing/How-can-we-improve-our-writing-skill/answers/2048810?__snids__=94784810&__nsrc__=1

Also it got a mention here-

Ajay Ohri: The 8 Rules of Writing

Now I think I should take some of my own advice and get back to writing

Using ifelse in R for creating new variables #rstats #data #manipulation

The ifelse function is simple and powerful and can help in data manipulation within R. Here I create a categoric variable from specific values in a numeric variable

> data(iris)

> iris$Type=ifelse(iris$Sepal.Length<5.8,”Small Flower”,”Big Flower”)
> table(iris$Type)
Big Flower Small Flower
77           73

The parameters  of ifelse is quite simple

Usage

ifelse(test, yes, no)
Arguments

test
an object which can be coerced to logical mode.

yes
return values for true elements of test.

no
return values for false elements of tes

 

Summer Reading :NBER

Some of the things I like to read to stay sharp as I grow old.

NBER

For example this paper says how foreign born PHDs do location choices.

Graduates with stronger academic ability, measured by whether they received university support for a research or a teaching assistantship, had a 6.8 percent higher stay rate. Assistantships were the primary means of support for 52 percent of the sample; 11 percent of the sample was supported by a university fellowship or scholarship, which was associated with a 2.7 percent higher stay rate. Students supported by foreign funding, 4 percent of the sample, had an intent to stay that was 26.7 points lower.

As one would expect, ties to the United States are also important. Foreign-born U.S. citizens have a 19.5 percent higher stay rate; green card holders have a 15.3 percent higher stay rate; and U.S. college graduates have a 3.6 percent higher stay rate.

FOAS becomes hottest thing in open source data science #rstats

Within a short time FOAS has lined up an interesting list of projects for Data Science statups and projects for open access and open source.  FOAS accreditation provides the ultimate halmark of open in word and spirit for data science projects.

See it yourself at http://www.foastat.org/projects.html

Screenshot from 2013-07-30 19:42:26

How Geeks Become Hackers in China

The Path-

 

How?

f1f2

Why?

t1t2

Source-

routine activity theory5 (RAT), social learning theory1 (SLT), and situational action theory27 (SAT).

While RAT helps explain how hacking begins, SAT explains why talented young people take the road toward computer hacking, even when presented with many alternatives, and SLT calls for attention to environments that sustain hacking behavior and subculture. However, none of these theories explains the evolution of certain critical elements in the hacker process: motivation, knowledge and skill, opportunity, moral values and judgment, and the environment.

Based on our case evidence and the literature, we developed a framework for understanding and managing hackers and hacking behavior from an evolutionary perspective. The framework’s most significant contribution is its explication of the enablers and constraints influencing hackers, providing guidance for managing the hacking epidemic by schools, universities, and throughout society. This framework calls for zero tolerance for hacking in schools and early intervention (such as through courses in computer ethics in middle and high schools, supervised competitions in defending computer security, and organizing computer security services for organizations) to strengthen the moral values of students against hacking and channel their interest in computers in a positive direction.

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/4/162513-why-computer-talents-become-computer-hackers/fulltext

DataMind – A New Effort to Teach R online for free #rstats

Bringing CodeAcademy gamification(?) to the world of Online Training especially for R- DataMind is an interesting concept.

Will the rest of R community donate teaching courses for free? Watch this space

http://www.datamind.org/#/courses/1

It is created by these excellent gentlemen

Screenshot from 2013-07-18 19:22:36

 

A short science fiction story by The Writer

My attempts at science fiction. Aww shucks!

Ajay Ohri's avatarR for Business Analytics

The Shortest Science Fiction story ever written was not based on science and was not fictional. It was categorized as science-fiction by The Writer, to save himself an explanation or give him – what people call- plausible deniability in case the story became too popular or was taken too seriously by the rest of the humans. Have you ever wondered why sometimes they appear to be gremlins in your computer or on the Internet.

Why your computer sometimes works fast or slow.

. Why some people believe in conspiracy theories and some people believe that Jesus came back to Life after he was born to a Virgin. Some people believe that their government is totally bad . Some believe that government of other countries is totally bad.

People like to approximate their guesses to extremes while taking judgement calls.

Just as intelligence is normally distributed in an average population, so…

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