Hey guys,
a thought just crossed my mind: All of us not in-person participants, let’s honor @Jeremy’s and @Rachel’s hard work by donating and talking about it. I created this thread, so we can motivate each other to donate.
I just started with $250.
Perhaps we could even create a nifty little bar chart summarizing our efforts so far as a web application.
This might make for a pretty simple NLP-related side-project (OK, almost too simple for real NLP, just parse for dollar signs), cause we are data scientists, right?
That’s such a nice idea! Here’s where you can donate to save some people’s sight: https://www.hollows.org/au/donate . (You’ll need to use the ‘donate with paypal’ button unless you are in Australia).
I tried paypal, but that did not go through after filling up paypal. I paid via credit card although I am not in Australia. As someone who was temporarily blind few years ago, I can personally vouch that this is a great gift.
It was a mountaineering accident and largely self inflicted due to arrogance. (I come from a hot country and I have seen more sun than anyone… losing a sunglass will not kill me. let’s climb… kinda arrogance ).
Luckily I knew what was happening and that it was transient; so I didn’t panic. But I had to stay in pitch dark environment for a week as I was extremely light sensitive. It sure did teach me the importance of eyes and how disorienting life without it is. I couldn’t even pause a audio player on my bed without seeing.
Writing all that makes me want to try densenets on the diabetic retinopathy kaggle contest. Since it is a small(ish) dataset, perhaps we would be better than VGG + finetuning (which is what Google did, albeit with 4x more data)?
I’m just starting the 2018 class. I remember the Fred Hollows organization being mentioned in the previous version of the class and just made a small donation. @jeremy If this is still the preferred place to donate while learning computer vision it might be nice to have a little link and explanation to it in the course materials! Perhaps with any suggestions from @rachel for her charity if it differs.
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! Thank you! 
