Finally finished (and passed!) the Machine Learning course from Stanford on Coursera. Being plural makes it easier to find time to invest in personal development of that kind. Even as someone who has been on the client end of data science for a long time, there was plenty to learn from the course and nerding out doing the programming assignments was great fun. A technical course like that isn’t for everyone, but I can’t help thinking that there needs to be some kind of ‘what business leaders need to know about machine learning’ introduction – too many decisions about data and data science are being made right now by boardrooms full of people who don’t really understand what’s being discussed. It wouldn’t be acceptable for a senior leader to confess that he or she couldn’t do maths or read. I suspect in a very few years it will be equally unacceptable to confess that you don’t understand data science or digital technology. There’s a great training opportunity for someone there, I think. Does anyone offer that already?