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For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word - Statistics - NYTimes.com
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In another sign of the growing interest in the field, an estimated 6,400 people
are attending the statistics profession’s annual conference in Washington this
week, up from around 5,400 in recent years, according to the American
Statistical Association.
The
attendees, men and women, young and graying, looked much like any other
crowd of tourists in the nation’s capital. But -
The attendees, men and women, young and graying, looked much like any other
crowd of tourists in the nation’s capital. But their rapt exchanges were filled
with talk of randomization, parameters, regressions and data clusters. The data
surge is elevating a profession that traditionally tackled less visible and less
lucrative work, like figuring out life expectancy rates for insurance companies. - 2 more annotations...
Probability for Data Miners
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Tutorial Slides by Andrew
MooreThis tutorial reviews Probability starting right at ground level. It is,
arguably, a useful investment to be completely happy with probability before
venturing into advanced algorithms from data mining, machine learning or applied
statistics. In addition to setting the stage for techniques to be used over and
over again throughout the remaining tutorials, this tutorial introduces the
notion of Density Estimation as an important operation, and then introduces
Bayesian Classifiers such as the overfitting-prone Joint-Density Bayes
Classifier, and the over-fitting-resistant Naive Bayes Classifier.Download Tutorial Slides (PDF format)
Las Vegas algorithm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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In computing, a Las Vegas
algorithm is a randomized algorithm that always gives correct results; that is, it
always produces the correct result or it informs about the failure. In other
words, a Las
Vegas algorithm does not gamble with the verity of the result; it only
gambles with the resources used for the computation. A simple example is
randomized quicksort, where the
pivot is chosen randomly, but the result is always sorted. The usual definition
of a Las Vegas algorithm includes the restriction that the expected run
time always be finite, when the expectation is carried out over the space of
random information, or entropy, used in the algorithm.The name comes from the fact that in Las Vegas, "the house always wins".[citation needed] Las Vegas
algorithms can be used in situations where the number of possible solutions is
relatively limited, and where verifying the correctness of a candidate solution
is relatively easy while actually calculating the solution is complex. -
Las Vegas algorithms can be contrasted with Monte Carlo algorithms, in which the
resources used are bounded but the answer is not guaranteed to be correct 100%
of the time. By an application of Markov's inequality, a Las Vegas
algorithm can be converted into a Monte Carlo algorithm via early termination
(assuming the algorithm structure provides for such a mechanism).
How technology lifts Pixar's 'Up' - CNN.com
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try thinking of the algorithms required to animate more than 10,000 helium
balloons, each with its own string, but each also interdependent on the rest,
which are collectively hoisting aloft a small house. -
These are relatively simple physical equations, so you program them into the
computer and therefore kind of let the computer animate things for you, using
those physics," said May. "So in every frame of the animation, (the computer
can) literally compute the forces acting on those balloons, (so) that they're
buoyant, that their strings are attached, that wind is blowing through them. And
based on those forces, we can compute how the balloon should move." - 4 more annotations...
Hacking Primes in Mathematica - O'Reilly Radar
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This morning, Tim
Bray tweeted about a post on prime numbers and Benford's law. To cut the esoterica short,
one of the big problems in prime numbers is that people don't know how they're
distributed. This post suggests that Benford's Law describes the distribution of
the first digit of prime numbers. One of the comments asked an important
question: is this really just an artifact of base 10? Math really doesn't "know
anything" about bases, so if this idea doesn't generalize to bases other than
10, it doesn't mean much.That challenge was a bit hard to ignore. A bit of futzing with Mathematica
later, I got it. Here's a graph of the distribution of prime numbers in base 36,
for primes less than 36^5 (about 60 million, 3.5 million primes): primes.tiff -
This certainly isn't rigorous math, from the standpoint of proving anything
about the distribution of prime numbers. Just some fun hacking--it's great to
have a mathematical language in which you can say "Give me all the primes less
than 32^5 and sort them by their first digits in base 36"--in about that much
space.
Wolfram|Alpha Blog : The Secret behind the Computational Engine in Wolfram|Alpha
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every school child has at one time or another written a report on the moon, and
they probably included the wrong figure for how far the moon is from the earth.
Why wrong? Because the distance from the earth to the moon is not constant: it
changes by as much as a mile a minute. If you ask Wolfram|Alpha the distance to
the moon, it tells you not only the conventionally quoted average distance, but
also the actual distance right now, which can at times be well over ten
thousand miles off the average. The actual distance is a figure that can be
arrived at only by computation based on the moon’s known orbital parameters.
It’s rocket science, if you will. -
For a more down-to-earth example, consider the number of calories in a recipe.
The underlying data are the calories per gram of each of the ingredients. But
turning that generic information into the actual total calories for a specific
recipe requires computation, first unit conversions (cups of flour into grams of
flour, “one egg” into the default weight of a standard egg, etc.), then
computation to multiply out the calories per ingredient and add them up. It may
not be rocket science, but it sure is nice to have someone do the grunt work for
you. - 5 more annotations...
New OnLive service could turn the video game world upside down » VentureBeat
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Few startups have a chance to revolutionize an industry. But if entrepreneur
Steve Perlman’s OnLive lives up to its
goals, the company will disrupt the entire video game industry — to the delight
of both game publishers and gamers. -
Perlman (right), a serial entrepreneur whose startup credits include WebTV and Mova, says his Palo Alto, Calif.-based company
has developed a data compression technology and an accompanying online game
service that allows game computation to be done in distant servers, rather than
on game consoles or high-end computers. So rather than buying games at stores,
gamers could play them across the network — without downloading them. - 2 more annotations...
Robodance
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- Control your robot with your voice including remote control over the Web
using Skype’s free Video Call Service.
- Create interactive dialogues with your robot that will amaze your friends.
- Contains a complete, easy-to-use drag and drop based Script Editor for
creating scripts.
- Control your robot using the Nintendo WiiMote. Some robots can even be
controlled using arm gestures with the help of the WiiMote’s motion sensors.
Highlights
- Control your robot with your voice including remote control over the Web
Doug Lenat - I was positively impressed with Wolfram Alpha | Semantic Universe
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A better way to think of it is a DWIMM ("do what I might mean"), so if you type
in something like "gdp France / Germany", it calculates and returns a graph of
the relative fraction of France's annual GDP to Germany's GDP, over the last 30
years or so. -
For those who are familiar with and enamored by Mathematica's powerful theorem
prover, it should be mentioned that that is, for the moment, turned off, for
reasons having to do with computational cost -- i.e., response time -- and also
to prevent "explosions" of less and less relevant answers from being
produced. Cautiously, conditionally, at some time in the future, expect to
see that theorem prover come into play. - 2 more annotations...
Jacob T. Schwartz, 79, Mathematician Who Mastered Many Other Fields - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com
embedding problem
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Jacob T. Schwartz, a mathematician and computer scientist who did seminal
research in fields as diverse as molecular biology and robotics, died Monday at
his home in Manhattan. He was 79. -
Throughout his life, Dr. Schwartz, who was known as Jack, moved from one
scientific field to the next. He was not a dilettante, but mastered each field
in turn and then made significant contributions. - 5 more annotations...
Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro, Math Theorist Who Clashed With Soviets, Dies at 79 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com
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Working with James W. Cogdell, his main collaborator over a quarter-century,
starting in the mid-1970s, Dr. Piatetski-Shapiro shaped a proof of what is known
as the Converse Theorem, which finds some deep relationships between different
fields of mathematics. -
The mathematical constructs are “quite mysterious, even to mathematicians,” Dr.
Cogdell explained in an interview this week. But the theorem has wide
applications, including playing a small but important role in the proof of
Fermat’s Last Theorem that Andrew Wiles, a Princeton mathematician, completed in
1994. - 1 more annotations...
John R. Stallings Jr., 73, California Mathematician, Is Dead - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com
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The conjecture, proposed by Henri Poincaré in 1904, essentially says any shape
that does not have any holes and that fits within a finite space can be
stretched and deformed into a sphere. -
“That tells you more about the nature of the problem,” said Barry Mazur, a Harvard
mathematician. “This is a very, very deep geometric problem and every fact of it
is not only interesting, but has ramifications. Different proofs bring out
different aspects of a problem.” - 2 more annotations...
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