Thursday, May 8, 2025

Getting Back into Blogging

 It has only been 15 years or so since my last post. 


I am in search of useful platform for journaling and sharing my photographs. Evernote works for journaling but is not useful for sharing photos. Facebook has become so cumbersome

This photo appeared in a random place on the page. Let's try another photo
Here's an mermaid mural on a wall in Princeton Harbor

Can I even paste an image from Techsmith?



Thursday, January 19, 2012

Stanford University free online Machine Learning course

As an instructional designer and technical instructor I have a vested interest in robust, effective online learning environments. Recently, I completed free Stanford online class Machine Learning taught by Dr. Andrew Ng. Several elements made this course multiple week course an very engaging learning experience. The lectures are generally short. Dr. Andrew Ng introduces each lectures talking informally to the camera. We watch him turn to the laptop behind him and the lecture flows seamlessly into voice over slides with annotation. Dr. Andrew Ng has a real knack for presenting just the right amount of mathematics at the heart of an algorithm. He strives to impact an intuitive grasp. As he lectures Dr. Ng annotates the slides freely with reinforces the informal setting.

Another effective element are the brief self-test quizzes. These one slide multiple choice quizzes occur several times during a lecture and can really snap you into back into focus. They are optional.

The course schedule is well structured with weekly assignments to watch one or more lectures, complete a multiple choice review test, and complete the programming exercise. You are encouraged to retake the review test until you get all the answers right. All review question appear to be randomly drawn from a large pool of questions, with possible answers scrambled.
Some review question appear to be algorithmically generated.

The programming exercises use Octave, which is a free, open-source version of MATLAB. The typical programming exercise calls for completing a small number of Octave functions which fit neatly into some incredible applications. The course provided a submission script for each solution as you work thru the programming exercise. Behind the scenes, some infrastructure automatically tested the solutions and accumulates your score accordingly.

Yet another component is the Q&A Forum which allows to you follow posts of interest.

I used Evernote to screen capture the slides at key moments and to document my programming exercises.

At the end of the course, I received a Statement of Accomplishment.

December 31, 2011 

Dear Jan Alden Cornish (janaldencornish@gmail.com),


Congratulations! You have successfully completed the online Machine Learning course (ml-class.org), offered October through December, 2011. To successfully complete this online course, students were required to watch lectures, complete review questions, and work through programming exercises. Your score on these components were as follows:

  • Review Questions: 80 out of a maximum of 80 
  • Programming Exercises: 800 out of a maximum of 800

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Exploring Data Visualizations with Tableau Public

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Evaluating Kindle reader for the MacBook and a Window XP Netbook

I have to say there's some promise here with the Kindle reader for the MacBook and also for a Window XP machine, but I am disappointed with them for reading technical material. I am reading a book on business analytics for the Web Analytics Book Club. We meet weekly to discuss the current chapter. The eBook has no page numbers which makes it impossible to quickly let people know what "page" I am referring to. We are using an audio conference call, not a web conference, so there's no screen sharing. The book itself has very minimal section numbering. Also, I am reading the same book on both platforms, one platform in my office and one platform in our den. This caused the reader for the MacBook to crash repeatedly.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Scheme Lives on in the R Language

Today I made an interesting discovery while continuing to work my way thru "R in a Nutshell" by Joseph Adler. R is an open source interactive language, very widely for statistical analytics and data mining. R is derived from S, one of several statistical computing languages from Bell Laboratories. The more I read, the more R strongly reminded me of Scheme, a modern dialect of Lisp. I wasn't totally surprised when I did a Google search and found

The initial authors of R said¹, "...we implemented the language by
first writing an interpreter for a Scheme subset and then
progressively mutating it to resemble S."

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Grading My Blog

I've discovered Hubspot's Blog Grader. But I noticed a statement in the generated report that that's clearly false. The blog janaldencornish.blogspot.com is estimated to have approximately 49,059,023 unique visitors last month.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Learning Web Analytics through Helping Non-Profit Organizations

Founded in 2010 by the Web Analytics Demystified partners, The Analysis Exchange is the world's only educational network connecting nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations with motivated individuals trying to get hands-on experience doing web analytics. Open to all regardless of geography, association, or ability to pay, the Analysis Exchange has been described as a profound innovation in the digital measurement sector.

View my Analysis Exchange profile which summarizes my completed projects.