Fall Begins in Seattle! After Week Eight
Hey everyone! This is Aaron W Chen from Composed and Focused Studios here again with another #vlog from #Seattle! If you've seen my videos before, you know me and what my channel is about, but if you haven't, welcome! I'm a photographer and chemical engineer turned budding data scientist and I moved up to Seattle to attend Flatiron School's Data Science Bootcamp!
Every vlog, I go over a few of my favorite photos from the previous week. Unfortunately and also fortunately, I didn't take that many photos for week seven, so I didn't have to think that hard about which I liked.
For photo one, I like this black and white photo looking up at some power lines. I walk by this scene almost every morning, and I just am drawn to the simple silhouette that it creates. I keep hoping to catch birds in flight here but so far, not much luck. It's happened maybe two or three times when I'm nearby, but never when I'm in the right spot to get the composition I like.
For photo two, I liked this bike rack diorama in front of a convenience store in Capitol Hill. I liked seeing the different transportation options that are so popular here with the bike, scooter, and person walking in the background, but I really liked the completely warped bike wheel in the center. I would've wanted to shoot this a bit more, maybe with a shallower depth of field, but I got this in Capitol Hill in the evening and as I was getting photos, some sketchy people started getting closer to me so I left. I don't know if you remember, but street people keep threatening to fight me for no obvious reason and I'm doing my best to avoid those situations.
Last photo from week seven! This was my favorite. It's of a former public phone booth, also in Capitol Hill, and I liked the strong framing and geometry formed by the phone booth, as well as the juxtaposition of colors and of a request for someone to call home from a place that obviously doesn't have a phone. I do hope that the Jersey mentioned in the photo is ok though.
What did we do in the boot camp this week? Well, to be honest, this was a bit of a boring week for me. The lecture material was mostly a review of math concepts. Essentially, we were taught a lightning round of important parts of calculus, multivariable calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra in about 3 days. Why? Some of the mechanisms that machine learning models work on actually use some pretty basic theory/ideals from math. For example, we may be using the code to find best fit predictions and when we go to multidimensional space, we end up trying to minimize the error from our best fit hyperplane upon real information. We can do that by finding the minimum of an error function, or where the derivative equals zero. Actually, there's not much more math than that. I took years of this stuff when I was in undergrad and grad school, but it turns out that the longer, more difficult parts of learning that material were the analytical solving of the problems and essentially memorizing different derivatives and integrals. Here, the computer numerically solves. Towards the end of the week, we started working with time series data, which is what the project actually tested us on. But that's week nine!
For exploration, you can check out these short clips I put together from this week!
However, I did manage to hike Mt Teneriffe to Teneriffe Falls and I'll actually put up a separate video for that.
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