…unless you saddle yourself with all the problems of making a concrete agent take care of itself in the real world, you will tend to overlook, underestimate, or misconstrue the deepest problems of design
-Dan Dennett on the unreliability of simulations and imagination, and hence the need for (a theory-motivated?) robotics (via Tom Stafford, via Tom Walton)
These are my links for June 30th from 10:03 to 13:45:
Statistical Resources on the Web/Environment –
Data Mining Community’s Top Resource – Data Mining Community's Top Resource Since 1997 for Data Mining and Analytics Software, Jobs, Consulting, Courses, Education, News, and more.
Time Series Analysis – In the following topics, we will first review techniques used to identify patterns in time series data (such as smoothing and curve fitting techniques and autocorrelations), then we will introduce a general class of models that can be used to represent time series data and generate predictions (autoregressive and moving average models). Finally, we will review some simple but commonly used modeling and forecasting techniques based on linear regression.
Free Online Course Materials | MIT OpenCourseWare – Free lecture notes, exams, and videos from MIT.
No registration required.
NIST/SEMATECH e-Handbook of Statistical Methods –
These are my links for June 28th through June 30th:
Time Series Analysis for Business Forecasting – Realization of the fact that "Time is Money" in business activities, the dynamic decision technologies presented here, have been a necessary tool for applying to a wide range of managerial decisions successfully where time and money are directly related. In making strategic decisions under uncertainty, we all make forecasts. We may not think that we are forecasting, but our choices will be directed by our anticipation of results of our actions or inactions.
Indecision and delays are the parents of failure. This site is intended to help managers and administrators do a better job of anticipating, and hence a better job of managing uncertainty, by using effective forecasting and other predictive techniques.
predict.i2pi csv upload – predict.i2pi lets you upload a CSV file with observations and will try to come up with predictions for the data.
NetMBA Business Knowledge Center – ICMBA's mission is to provide quality business knowledge resources to a geographically dispersed audience via the Internet. Via this web site, ICMBA publishes articles covering a range of topics in the various subjects of business administration. Over time, the articles will cover both basic and advanced topics, and include frameworks and theories that are useful for solving the more challenging problems of business administration.
The content of this site is designed to be beneficial to both students of business and practicing professionals. Students will find it useful for deepening their understanding of key course topics. We hope that business professionals will find it to be a good reference source, particularly when their library of business books is not easily accessible.
Netflix Prize: Home – The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences. Improve it enough and you win one (or more) Prizes. Winning the Netflix Prize improves our ability to connect people to the movies they love.
Math Magic – Math Magic is a web site devoted
to original mathematical recreations.
If you have a math puzzle,
discovery, or observation, please
e-mail me about it.
These are my links for June 21st through June 28th:
Netflix Prize: Home – The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences. Improve it enough and you win one (or more) Prizes. Winning the Netflix Prize improves our ability to connect people to the movies they love.
Math Magic – Math Magic is a web site devoted
to original mathematical recreations.
If you have a math puzzle,
discovery, or observation, please
e-mail me about it.
MathPuzzle.com – The puzzling weblog of recreational mathematics.
Batch processing with R « Andrej Kastrin’s Blog – According to Wikipedia batch processing is execution of a series of programs (”jobs”) without human interaction. Batch job can run non-interactively, so all input data is preselected through scripts or command-line parameters.
R provides you a simple way to run a script non-interactively with input file from “infile” and send output to “outfile”. You can also pass arguments to batch job.
Academic Earth – Video lectures from the world’s top scholars – Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world class education.
Electronic Frontier Foundation | Defending Freedom in the Digital World – From the Internet to the iPod, technologies are transforming our society and empowering us as speakers, citizens, creators, and consumers. When our freedoms in the networked world come under attack, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the first line of defense. EFF broke new ground when it was founded in 1990 — well before the Internet was on most people's radar — and continues to confront cutting-edge issues defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights today. From the beginning, EFF has championed the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights.
Public Library of Science – The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource.
These are my links for June 19th through June 21st:
Electronic Frontier Foundation | Defending Freedom in the Digital World – From the Internet to the iPod, technologies are transforming our society and empowering us as speakers, citizens, creators, and consumers. When our freedoms in the networked world come under attack, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the first line of defense. EFF broke new ground when it was founded in 1990 — well before the Internet was on most people's radar — and continues to confront cutting-edge issues defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights today. From the beginning, EFF has championed the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights.
Public Library of Science – The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource.
The R Project for Statistical Computing – R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues. R can be considered as a different implementation of S. There are some important differences, but much code written for S runs unaltered under R.
R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, …) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. The S language is often the vehicle of choice for research in statistical methodology, and R provides an Open Source route to participation in that activity.
Google Scholar – Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.
Google Trends – With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.
Google Insights for Search – With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties
Google Squared – Google Squared takes a category and creates a starter 'square' of information, automatically fetching and organizing facts from across the web.
These are my links for June 18th through June 19th:
Blind Search – Welcome to BlindSearch, the search engine taste test.Type in a search query above, hit search then vote for the column which you believe best matches your query. The columns are randomised with every query.The goal of this site is simple, we want to see what happens when you remove the branding from search engines. How differently will you perceive the results?
Is There Reason to Be Theoretically Rational? (application/pdf Object) – An important advance in normativity research over the last decade is an increased understanding of the distinction, and difference, between normativity and rationality. Normativity concerns or picks out a broad set of concepts that have in common that they are, put loosely, guiding. For example, consider two commonly used normative concepts: that of a normative reason and that of ought. To have a normative reason to perform some action is for there to be something that counts in favour of performing that action. Likewise with ought, when there is sufficient evidence for something, one ought to believe it (at least under normal circumstances). Not all guidance need be directed towards a specific state or a specific action. Subject to the requirements of normativity, too, are relations. It is commonly believed, for example, that we ought not to hold contradictory beliefs.
Atlas Obscura | Wondrous, curious, and bizarre locations around the world – Welcome to the Atlas Obscura, a compendium of this age’s wonders, curiosities, and esoterica. The Atlas Obscura is a collaborative project with the goal of cataloging all of the singular, eccentric, bizarre, fantastical, and strange out-of-the-way places that get left out of traditional travel guidebooks and are ignored by the average tourist. If you’re looking for miniature cities, glass flowers, books bound in human skin, gigantic flaming holes in the ground, phallological museums, bone churches, balancing pagodas, or homes built entirely out of paper, the Atlas Obscura is where you’ll find them.
“Were they reborn into a modern university, Plato and Aristotle and Leibniz would most suitably take up appointments in the department of computer science.”
“Epistemology has traditionally been the study of Human knowledge and rational change of human belief. Android epistemology is the exploration of the space of possible machines and their capacities for knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, desires and for action in accord with their mental states.”
-Glymour, C., Hayes, P., and Ford, K. “The Pre-History of Android Epistemology,” in Ford, K., Glymour, C. and Hayes, P. 1995. Android Epistemology
These are my links for June 17th through June 18th:
Random Walk / Daniel A. Becker – RANDOM WALK asks this question and presents experiments in mathematics and physics, showing the mysterious interaction of chaos and order in randomness.
The project RANDOM WALK simulates randomness in visualizations, which are easy to understand. In this way, it delivers insight into a phenomenon, which has so far remained unexplained.
Nominal, Ordinal, Interval, and Ratio Typologies are Misleading (application/pdf Object) – In the following sections, we review Stevens’s taxonomy and provide definitions; many have used these terms without clarifying their exact meaning. We discuss their use in statistics and in applications, and consider some of the classical criticisms of this work. Throughout our account, we provide references for interested readers who may wish to learn more. We then describe some of the failures of Stevens’s taxonomy to classify data, and examine the nature of these failures. Similarly, we consider whether modern statistical methods can be classified according to the types of data appropriate for them. Finally, we consider what ideas from Stevens’s work are still useful for modern computer-based statistical analysis.
Clay Shirky: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history | Video on TED.com – While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.
Fundamental Statistical Concepts in Presenting Data (application/pdf Object) – Principles for Constructing Better Graphics
Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science – Andrew Gelman's Blog on the titular topics.
