This Week at Udacity, July 7 Edition
Courtesy of Tuesday’s holiday, we’re running a day short this week, but all the same, there were certainly some interesting things afoot!
The Drawing Board, a new podcast from Udacity!
The highlight of our week came on Thursday, when we announced The Drawing Board, our new podcast! In less than 24 hours, we’re already the #3 podcast among all technology podcasts, one slot ahead of The Wall Street Journal!
With our podcast name, we take some inspiration from none other than Neil deGrasse Tyson himself …
“If you’re not at the drawing board, you’re not making discoveries.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson
… and we encourage everyone who wants to discover what the future holds, to go back to The Drawing Board!
This Week in Machine Learning
We started the week with the latest edition of This Week in Machine Learning, which is a curated set of recommended articles by David Joyner, who, as a Udacity Project Lead, heads up the Georgia Tech Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) project. He’s a tremendous source for everything happening in this fascinating space, and he surfaced some pretty remarkable stories this week, including this one:
A study from Cardiff University finds that analysis of postings to Twitter can identify riots and other violent events significantly faster than traditional police reports.
Amazing, right?
Independence Day
In honor of the holiday, we took some time on Tuesday to ponder the underlying meaning of “independence,” particularly as it applies to education. We published “Independence Day,” a post which considers this idea: if “independence” is relational, and requires an “other” for its definition (i.e. what are you independent of?), then what is the “other” when discussing education?
If embracing self-empowerment through learning is an act of independence, then it must be asked — who or what is the “other” we declare ourselves free of? Our un-empowered selves? Our less educated selves? It was George Washington Carver who said that, “Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.” This powerful observation gives us our answer to what the “other” is then — it is the absence of freedom.
Self-Driving Cars: Term 3 Curriculum
One of the most exciting things that happened this week was that we announced the Term 3 curriculum for our Self-Driving Car program! To say this was a highly anticipated announcement is a bit of an understatement; after all, this is the term when students get to actually run their code on a real self-driving car! You can see all the curriculum details here.
Tweet of the Week
In conclusion, what was our favorite Tweet of the Week? Well, this week is pretty special, as we’re getting ready to celebrate our first graduates from our Artificial Intelligence Nanodegree program, so it was especially nice to be reminded that even as our first students are moving on to their careers, new learners are joining us! And what better way to be reminded of this, than with a dancing Wonder Woman?
And THAT … is This Week at Udacity!
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This post was written by Christopher Watkins, Senior Writer and Chief Words Officer, Udacity
