In Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It, Language learning enthusiast Gabriel Wyner deconstructs the language learning process, revealing how to build a foreign language in your mind from the ground up. Wyner emphasized starting with pronunciation, rewiring your ears for the sounds of the new language while sharing strategies and resources such as spaced-repetition techniques, flashcards, online resources and other insights learned through his learned experience.
“There is no such thing as a “hard” language; any idiot can speak whatever language his parents spoke when he was a child. The real challenge lies in finding a path that conforms to the demands of a busy life.”
“Language learning is one of the most intensely personal journeys you can undertake. You are going into your own mind and altering the way you think. If you’re going to spend months or years working at that goal, you’ll need to believe in these methods and make them your own. If you know how to approach the language game, you can beat it.”
AWS Educate recently announced the release of five new learning resources and badges for students to jump-start their learning goals and for educators to teach in a virtual or blended environment. The resources focus on robotics, innovation, and Amazon Honeycode.
AWS Educate provides students, educators, and U.S. veterans with no-cost access to self-paced cloud content, training, collaboration tools, and the AWS Educate Job Board. Students who use AWS Educate get access to hands-on learning experiences for the most in-demand cloud jobs through 13 specialty badges and 12 AWS Educate Cloud Career Pathways.
Each badge takes participants through about 10 hours of learning content and focuses on specialty areas of the cloud-like gaming, Internet of Things (IoT), or startups. Each pathway maps back to an in-demand job role like software development engineer or data scientist and includes 30-50 hours of learning per pathway. Badges and pathways feature quizzes, knowledge checks, and projects to ensure students are on the right track.
Upon completion of an AWS Educate pathway or badge, students earn a digital credential in their portfolio. Then, they can check out the AWS Educate Job Board to explore job and internship opportunities from Amazon and its customers around the world.
Upon completion of an AWS Educate pathway or badge, students earn a digital credential in their portfolio. Then, they can check out the AWS Educate Job Board to explore job and internship opportunities from Amazon and its customers around the world.
New AWS Educate badges include:
AWS RoboMaker Badge Series: Introductory cloud robotics courses designed to help students, educators, and entry-level developers build robotics applications with robot operating system (ROS) and AWS RoboMaker. There are currently three courses in the series:
Course 0: Fundamentals of Robotics – In this course, learn how robots work, what problems they need to solve, and how they’re controlled.
Course 1a: Getting Started with Ubuntu – In this course, learn which development environments robots use, how to set up the environment to run the ROS, and everything you need to write programs for robots in ROS.
Course 1b: Getting Started with AWS – In this course, get started setting up the development environment on the cloud using AWS RoboMaker.
Innovation Badge: Designed for students and educators to help build innovation skills to augment and amplify innovation around the world using Amazon’s innovation process. In this badge, you’ll learn the phases of design thinking, the culture of innovation at Amazon and the Amazon Leadership Principles, organizational criteria for application of innovative thinking, and major mechanisms used to innovate.
Honeycode Badge:Amazon Honeycode can transform the way teams and businesses track and monitor the work being done. In this badge, you’ll learn to build your own productivity app and improve it using Amazon Honeycode’s feature-rich interface. As you move through this badge, you’ll be introduced to prerequisite information you should know to be successful with Amazon Honeycode and knowledge and activities for creating apps.
AWS Educate provides its members with free access to learning content and AWS services designed to build knowledge and skills in cloud computing. It is available globally to students who are 14 or older, with the exceptions of China, Switzerland, and European Economic Area countries (16 or older); and Algeria, Lebanon, and Portugal (18 or older). The AWS Educate Terms & Conditions govern participation in the AWS Educate Program. Use of AWS Promotional Credits are subject to the AWS Promotional Credit Terms & Conditions.
To enroll in an AWS Educate badge or pathway, sign up today.
In line with Microsoft’s effort to support their customer’s cloud journey, Microsoft has announced the launch of the Azure Enablement show. It is a series of technical conversations with a community of Microsoft experts, addressing common questions and challenges in your cloud adoption journey.
A collection of technical conversations addressing common cloud adoption challenges.
This module will help you prepare your cloud environment with the necessary governance, compliance, and operational requirements specific to your organization’s needs.
The third module in this debut version of the show focuses on the governance methodology of the Cloud Adoption Framework which guides you through the process of striking a balance between control and compliance on one side, and delivering speed and agility on the other, while you adopt the cloud.
One of the most exciting things about living in the west is the access to a good, functional public library and the reading culture in general. Growing up in sub-Saharan Africa/Nigeria, I did not have access to the luxury of being able to borrow 50 books from the library every 3 weeks, borrow 10 audiobooks every month, get access to a multitude of magazines such as Entrepreneur, Wired, Times, Fast Company, The Economist, all for free,.
The public library allows users to borrow digital versions of popular magazines such as Times, Wired et al through platforms such as RB Digital,Flipster, BookMyne, and others. The technology world is filled with stories of great entrepreneurs that founded their corporations through insights from a magazine article or a report.
Bill Gates
In 1974, Paul Allen showed Bill Gates a magazine article about Altair 8800, the world’s first Microcomputer. Recognizing a huge opportunity, Bill Gates and Paul Allen called the ManufacturerMicro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and convinced the president they had written a version of BASIC, a popular computer programming language for Altair. That was the beginning of one of the most successful corporations of the 20th century, Microsoft. It all started from insight garnered from a magazine article.
Jeff Bezos: Founding of Amazon
After graduation, Bezos went to New York to apply his computer skills to the financial industry. He ended up at a hedge fund run by David E. Shaw, which used computer algorithms to discover pricing disparities in the financial markets. Bezos took to the work with a disciplined zeal. Foreshadowing the workplace fanaticism he would later try to instill at Amazon, he kept a sleeping bag in his office in case he wanted to sleep there after a late night of work.
While working at the hedge fund in 1994,
Bezos came across the statistic that the web had been growing by more than 2,300 percent each year. He decided that he wanted to get aboard that rocket, and he came up with the idea of opening a retail store online, sort of a Sears catalogue for the digital age.
Steve Jobs on Computers
I remember reading an article when I was about twelve years old. I think it might have been Scientific American where they measured the efficiency of locomotion for all these species on planet earth. How many kilocalories did they expend to get from point A to point B? And the Condor 1 came in at the top of the list, surpassed everything else. And humans came in about a third of the way down the list which was not such a great showing for the crown of creation. And — but somebody there had the imagination to test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle. A human riding a bicycle blew away the Condor, all the way off the top of the list. And it made a really big impression on me that we humans are tool builders. And that we can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes.And so for me, a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind.Something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities.
And I think we’re just at the early stages of this tool. Very early stages.And we’ve come only a very short distance. And it’s still in its formation, but already we’ve seen enormous changes. I think that’s nothing compared to what’s coming in the next hundred years.
I stopped reading the daily newspaper, listening to the news and I am kind of not on social media, I try to regulate the kind of information I consume. The magazine format is one of my favorite ways to learn what is going on in the world.
Goal: Read 50 digital magazines by December 31st, 2021.
Strategy: Borrow from the public library through platforms such as RB Digital and Flipster,
Goal: Learn the Python Programming Language at Intermediate level by December 31st 2021.
My Widely Important learning goal for 2021 is to learn the Python Programming language at the intermediate level by December 31st, 2021. I intend to commit at least 1 hour a day/ 365 hours of study time (Video tutorials, books, libraries, projects) to learn Python in 2021.
Python is an interpreted, high-level and general-purpose programming language. As of December 2020 Python ranked third in TIOBE’s index of most popular programming languages, behind C and Java.
Will it be easy? Certainly not. I had tried to learn python through a Data Science Bootcamp in 2019 but could not keep up as the classroom setup did not align with my personal goals; I had to stop the class and forfeit the initial payment. It is going to require a lot of commitment, routine, and dedication. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I would be updating my progress here; let the coding begin.
In his Autobiography, Steel Magnate and Philanthropist Andrew Carnegie writes a glowing tribute about Colonel James Anderson, the man who opened his library to young boys in the community and in the process encouraged young Andrew to become a life long learner.
“As the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.” The treasures of the world which books contain were opened to me at the right moment. The fundamental advantage of a library is that it gives nothing for nothing. Youths must acquire knowledge themselves. There is no escape from this.
With all their pleasures the messenger boys were hard worked. Every other evening they were required to be on duty until the office closed, and on these nights it was seldom that I reached home before eleven o’clock. On the alternating nights we were relieved at six. This did not leave much time for self-improvement, nor did the wants of the family leave any money to spend on books. There came, however, like a blessing from above, a means by which the treasures of literature were unfolded to me.
Colonel James Anderson–I bless his name as I write–announced that he would open his library of four hundred volumes to boys, so that any young man could take out, each Saturday afternoon, a book which could be exchanged for another on the succeeding Saturday. My friend, Mr. Thomas N. Miller, reminded me recently that Colonel Anderson’s books were first opened to “working boys,” and the question arose whether messenger boys, clerks, and others, who did not work with their hands, were entitled to books. My first communication to the press was a note, written to the “Pittsburgh Dispatch,” urging that we should not be excluded; that although we did not now work with our hands, some of us had done so, and that we were really working boys. Dear Colonel Anderson promptly enlarged the classification. So my first appearance as a public writer was a success.
My dear friend, Tom Miller, one of the inner circle, lived near Colonel Anderson and introduced me to him, and in this way the windows were opened in the walls of my dungeon through which the light of knowledge streamed in. Every day’s toil and even the long hours of night service were lightened by the book which I carried about with me and read in the intervals that could be snatched from duty. And the future was made bright by the thought that when Saturday came a new volume could be obtained. In this way I became familiar with Macaulay’s essays and his history, and with Bancroft’s “History of the United States,” which I studied with more care than any other book I had then read. Lamb’s essays were my special delight, but I had at this time no knowledge of the great master of all, Shakespeare, beyond the selected pieces in the school books. My taste for him I acquired a little later at the old Pittsburgh Theater.
John Phipps, James R. Wilson, Thomas N. Miller, William Cowley–members of our circle–shared with me the invaluable privilege of the use of Colonel Anderson’s library. Books which it would have been impossible for me to obtain elsewhere were, by his wise generosity, placed within my reach; and to him I owe a taste for literature which I would not exchange for all the millions that were ever amassed by man. Life would be quite intolerable without it. Nothing contributed so much to keep my companions and myself clear of low fellowship and bad habits as the beneficence of the good Colonel. Later, when fortune smiled upon me, one of my first duties was the erection of a monument to my benefactor. It stands in front of the Hall and Library in Diamond Square, which I presented to Allegheny, and bears this inscription:
To Colonel James Anderson, Founder of Free Libraries in Western Pennsylvania. He opened his Library to working boys and upon Saturday afternoons acted as librarian, thus dedicating not only his books but himself to the noble work. This monument is erected in grateful remembrance by Andrew Carnegie, one of the “working boys” to whom were thus opened the precious treasures of knowledge and imagination through which youth may ascend.
This is but a slight tribute and gives only a faint idea of the depth of gratitude which I feel for what he did for me and my companions. It was from my own early experience that I decided there was no use to which money could be applied so productive of good to boys and girls who have good within them and ability and ambition to develop it, as the founding of a public library in a community which is willing to support it as a municipal institution. I am sure that the future of those libraries I have been privileged to found will prove the correctness of this opinion. For if one boy in each library district, by having access to one of these libraries, is half as much benefited as I was by having access to Colonel Anderson’s four hundred well-worn volumes, I shall consider they have not been established in vain.
Source: The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, 1920.
Learning is lifelong: It doesn’t end at graduation. It’s your responsibility; you have to do it consistently, all the time. I spend about 50-60% of my time learning.
Jamie Dimon (born March 13, 1956) is an American business executive. He is chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest of the big four American banks, and was previously on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Dimon was included in Time magazine’s 2006, 2008, 2009, and 2011 lists of the world’s 100 most influential people.
Dimon was born in New York City, one of three sons of Greek immigrants Theodore and Themis (née Kalos) Dimon, and attended The Browning School. His paternal grandfather was a Greek immigrant who changed the family name from Papademetriou to Dimon to make it sound more French
In his address to Harvard Business School MBA Class of 2009, Class Day, Jamie Dimon emphasized the value of life long learning and Self Awareness:
Learning is lifelong
It doesn’t end at graduation. It’s your responsibility; you have to do it consistently, all the time. I spend about 50-60% of my time learning. While reading is important, so is talking to other people. You also learn by observing other people and how they operate in very difficult circumstances. I’ve learned both what to do and what not do by watching others.
History is humbling and inspiring, It puts you in your place.
