Archive for December, 2007
Sunday, December 30th, 2007Keith is getting ready to begin a masters program with an advisor who is interested in data mining, and this got me interested in Padhraic Smyth’s book on the subject. Dr. Smyth is one of my favorite people at UCI, and he knows from statistical machine learning, so I expected the book to be good. Glancing at the reviews, I noticed that they show an interesting structure: there are a lot of 5-star reviews, and a few 1-star reviews, and a smattering in the middle. Clearly it’s a divisive book: some people think it’s a great survey of important techniques, and some people wish it was more oriented toward producing working code for large-scale business systems.
And then there’s “Mustafa,” who just thinks it sucks. And, while I haven’t read the book, I imagine that most of his criticism is valid:
Finally .. I recevie the book .. I read the list of content and I surprised about it .. and now I know why they dont write the contents here to read before bying the book ..
This is a bad statistics book, you can read any thing in it except about Data Mining … No Cluster Analysis .. No Nural Networks .. No Rule induction No Dicecion Trees .. Nothing and nothing and nothing …
And I want to sell this bad book which Name is Data Mining … for the three lier writers.
The omission of “Nural Networks” does seem to be a glaring mistake, but surely most of that important material is made up for by the inclusion of neural networks on page 173. And don’t get me started on the authors’ decision to exclude “Dicecion Trees.” There’s simply no excuse for that.
Who are the “9 of 44 people” who found this review helpful? More importantly, how can one avoid ever having to deal with them professionally?
That’s right, it’s this year’s edition of everyone’s favorite tradition: Todd is an atheist, loves Christmas, thinks thoughts. This time we’ve got a link to Dinosaur Comics, though, so there’s something to anticipate.
Did you know that the Wikipedia page for Santa Claus has an entire section entitled Santa as a lie told to children. It’s true! Also true is that the footnotes for that section are just a link or two away from an About.com review of a book called The Trouble with Christmas. The first paragraph of this review is as follows:
How can you tell that I’m never going to make it as a scientist? One clue is that my favorite part of Nature is “Sidelines,” a feature which runs alongside their news section and includes random bits of information such as
11,000 is the number of potential names suggested for the migrating whales being tracked as part of Greenpeace International’s campaign to save them. Supporters can vote online for their favourites.
75% is the proportion of voters who chose ‘Mister Splashy Pants’ as their preferred name.
It turns out that boingboing has already covered this bit of Internet awesomeness, and there are no fewer than five Facebook groups devoted to the aquatic hero. Greenpeace owes the person who submitted this name to the contest big, because it clearly raised the profile of this conservation effort tremendously. The only question is, how many people who clicked the button to vote for this name also bothered to find out what the campaign is about?
Actually, with advertising this good, I think every candidate has reason to be scared.
(Via this article in the New Yorker)
Kant Attack Ad
(via Crooked Timber)
A discussion in my Torts class this week brought back, in a roundabout way, to the work I was doing in my Agency course last Spring. Our final topic in Torts is product liability, and our professor asked us to consider how the duty to warn and plaintiff’s conduct principles would apply in a wrongful death action over injuries resulting from cigarette smoke. Obviously, cigarettes come in packaging with a warning to protect against just this sort of suit, but the interesting problem raised by cigarettes in particular is their addictive properties. Let’s say our hypothetical smoker started when there were no warnings, developed cancer over years of smoking, and eventually died from it. Should we let the cigarette companies because they continued to smoke in spite of the warnings? Two types of case come to mind:
- The pleasure smoker learns of the health risks after many years of smoking, but decides that he likes smoking so much that it isn’t worth quitting.
- The addict learns of the risks after many years of smoking, and immediately decides he should quit. Unfortunately, he finds that all his years of smoking have made him an addict, and fails time and again to kick the habit.
Although I hope everyone has heard about this internet phenomenon already, it’s too good to risk not sharing it, especially now that Todd has revamped the blog. So whether this is a friendly reminder or an earthbreaking revelation, get yourself over to Blogotheque for the Final Fantasy (aka Owen Pallett) running through the streets of Paris with his violin, or Beirut cramming their ensemble into a dimly lit cafe. Just go to the full listing and check out the episode with your favorite band. My personal favorites:
- Arcade Fire play a very soothing version of Neon Bible in a service elevator in the performance space, before kicking off the real show with Wake Up in the middle of the audience
- Sufjan Stevens is convinced to break out his banjo on the rooftop of Memorial Hall (from a series of backstage sets at the MusicNow Festival in Cincinatti)
Let me know your favorites in the comments – there are far more videos than I’ve had time to sift through myself.
The “Pencils2MediaMoguls” campaign is one Writer’s Guild tactic that I never really understood. To recap, the idea is that fans each donate a dollar, and that dollar goes to sending a box of pencils to a media mogul. And then, I suppose, the moguls look at the huge stacks of pencils stacked inconveniently in their offices, recognize great fan support for the writers, and give up millions of dollars in future revenue. Because of the pencils.
Like I said, I personally don’t get it. But the WGA seems to be really into it, and now they’re raffling off show-related prizes to people who buy the pencils. Supposedly the one generating all of the interest is Battlestar Galactica’s Jamie Bamber’s towel:
We’ve recently gotten into BSG (thanks, Scott!), but I’m not really sure I’d want that towel if you offered it to me. Much more exciting is the Lost raffle’s grand prize:
GRAND PRIZE: A personal thank-you call from us (Carlton [Cuse] and Damon [Lindelof]) AND Matthew Fox where we shall do our bestest to answer your questions about the show’s mysteries AND a Season 3 DVD set.
Presumably there’s no way you could get them to tell you what the deal with the smoke monster is, but maybe they’d give up something small, like how a 250-pound man can live on mangoes for three months and not drop a pound or two. So, if you think the pencils thing makes any sense, or if you’d like a chance to see a hockey game with The Chief, give a buck.