Back2School@45

I knew that my knowledge of statistics, math and machine learning would improve after joining this course. But I never thought that I had to work equally hard on my vocabulary. The course has introduced me to words, some of which I find difficult to spell, pronounce and understand. Stochastic, Lambda, Vector, Kurtosis. And I believe by the time I say Heteroscedasticity correctly, I will miss my bus #878 for the university and the next one comes after half an hour. Auckland public transport is not very good. Besides myself, I feel sorry for Hypothesis. He has a split personality, Null and Alternative, which I thought is cool. But then I saw the way everyone was after rejecting the Null. Derivative comes to scare me and succeeds somewhat. It simply means ‘slope’ but look at the swag – D E R I V A T I V E. And why do we call normal distribution Gaussian? It is a sure way to put me off center. It doesn’t help th...

One Friday I am too exhausted with the classes and think of going out with Cody for a drink. I haven’t seen him at the campus or at the café where he works for more than a week. I reach out to him and he sounds tensed. As it turns out, he is thinking of leaving the country. Why Cody? Well, you see this virus thing… I might as well go to my country man. But US is not safe either. Plus you will have to pass through busy airports. You are safe here. Ya maybe but you know what happened at the café? I was about to ask you that. I haven’t seen you there for the last few days. So I worked there for 3 weeks. I had applied for my IRD number (PAN equivalent of NZ. You can’t get paid in NZ if you don’t have a IRD number) and after three weeks I got a rejection.  Apparently, I can’t work here. Why? I thought you told me you could work for 20 hours and your student visa allowed that. Ya man, even I thought so and so did those café people. But I am not allowed...

Indians from my era would know we rarely had assignments in college as a form of evaluation. Apparently, here, as you move up to Masters, there are more of assignments and less of 'exams'. Between four courses this semester, I have 15 assignments that range as under: - Python led data cleaning and time series analysis on NZ demographic data. (the sweet professor has taken the effort of extra pain to tamper the data) - SAS Enterprise Guide led analysis on PCA, MDS and Factor Analysis on Pizza and Crime data - SAS EG led multiple regression on AIRBNB data - SAS Miner led analysis on Decision Trees and Neural Networks - A group project from a local client (ESPNZ - curtailing energy wastage) on their own data trying to fill the missing values with whatever technique one wants to use. Client is expecting, as usual, that we, data scientists, will be using our wands to write spells! While these are mostly approach and somewhat coding led assignments, there is a strong plagi...

This was the most bizarre thing I ever came across up to now in Massey. The students union organized a sex quiz! Posters were put up across the college promoting the event. And where was it organized? Well, of course at the Ferguson bar (which, by the way is in the campus for those who have not read my previous blogs) I was well expecting a ‘sex’ quiz and I was amazed at what I experienced. There was a crowd of about 60-70 people, mostly girls. Everyone was participating, well almost. As people entered they were encouraged to form their own team or join others. Team sizes did not matter. So there were teams of just two people and then there were a bunch of girls – may be a dozen – who were also a team. Every team was given one set of answer sheets with questions projected on the screen. The organisers were mostly girls. Crowd was drinking and having fun but no one was misbehaving. Now the quiz. There were questions around ‘sex’ of course (average time a man takes to cum,...

28th Feb I bump into Cody at the Univ again. I first met him on the orientation day and we started chatting. He was very happy that he landed up with a decent homestay, a car and a job at a pub within three days of landing into NZ. Cody, 22, is from a small hilly town in Colorado, US and is in NZ to do a short-term course in psychology. He travelled to Jamaica, Thailand, Indonesia and Ukraine before landing here. As we chat, I checked on his job at the pub and he cursed saying those guys wanted someone who will be staying longer and not for just a few months and therefore turned him down. Meanwhile he landed another job at one of the Univ cafes. We make plans and decide to meet on Friday evening. He plans to take me to a nice little pub downtown with a pool table. On Friday, Cody checks with me if the plan is still on. I have nothing to do (as usual) and the prospect of visiting downdown pub sounds interesting. It also helps that I am fried after two days of intense lect...

27th Feb This is an interesting event organized by a couple of Samaritans (ex-students of my course from Massey) to get together people from the data analytics industry every month to present their work and to network.  This even is organised at the offices of Datamine, a company into data analytics, near downtown NZ. I was keen on attending it for learning and networking.  The first presentation is from Datamine itself and the next three are from the just passed out batch of students from Massey who are presenting their final project work. Most of the work looks good to me and in a year's time, I should be able to appreciate and present this kind of work. Students talk about the challenges of working in real life scenarios where there are issues related to resistance, computing capability, data accessibility - things not taught at masters!  Met a few people from the industry and some ex-students to get a sense of the course and the teachers. All t...

27th Feb After a long foreplay of welcomes and orientations, classes finally begin. And they come like a hurricane. The course, Intro to Analytics, deals with Python, SQL and Ethics in Big Data. What will be done over the first three days is just Python. Our course instructor, Teo, has a smooth manner and soft voice. When asked who has done Python before, no one raises their hands. This somewhat relives me. “Things will move swiftly over the next three days and we expect you to retain only 15-20% of what is taught!”. The last part sticks with most of us as a morphine post a gun wound.   Teo has two assistants who keep circling the class helping those stuck on codes. There are about 20 of us who can be classified into three cohorts – Indians, Chinese and the rest! Half of the class is  pursuing this course as part-time. These are domestic students who will complete the masters in four to five years. Rest of us are from all walks of life – an Indian guy from the auto...