Statistical Data Mining Tutorials Advertisment: In 2006 I joined Google. We are growing a Google Pittsburgh office on CMU's campus. We are hiring creative computer scientists who love programming, and Machine Learning is one the focus areas of the office. We're also currently accepting resumes for Fall 2008 intenships. The following links point to a set of tutorials on many aspects of statistical data mining, including the foundations of probability, the foundations of statistical data analysis, and most of the classic machine learning and data mining algorithms. These include classification algorithms such as decision trees, neural nets, Bayesian classifiers, Support Vector Machines and cased-based (aka non-parametric) learning. I hope they're useful (and please let me know if they are, or if you have suggestions or error-corrections).
Antihydrogen could lead to antigravity - National Technology The Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) at the CERN particle physics laboratory announced that they have been able to hold 309 atoms of antihydrogen in a magnetic trap for 1000 seconds, approximately 10,000 times longer than before. When they experimented with the anti-atoms last year they verified that they were in fact antihydrogen atoms by releasing them from the trap and observing them being annihilated by hydrogen atoms. During that experiment they were only able to contain the atoms for 170 milliseconds. They have repeated this experiment, but have made a few changes. Scientist also want to find out if the anti-atoms exhibit antigravity effects. If these atoms did display antigravity effects it could explain why we are having issues finding the massive amount of theoretical antimatter that exists in our universe. Experiments for these and many other theories should start taking place over the next couple months. For more info: Cornell
List of unsolved problems in physics Some of the major unsolved problems in physics are theoretical, meaning that existing theories seem incapable of explaining a certain observed phenomenon or experimental result. The others are experimental, meaning that there is a difficulty in creating an experiment to test a proposed theory or investigate a phenomenon in greater detail. Unsolved problems by subfield[edit] The following is a list of unsolved problems grouped into broad area of physics.[1] Cosmology, and general relativity[edit] Cosmic inflation Is the theory of cosmic inflation correct, and if so, what are the details of this epoch? Horizon problem Electroweak Horizon Problem Why aren't there obvious large-scale discontinuities in the electroweak vacuum, if distant parts of the observable universe were causally separate when the electroweak epoch ended? Future of the universe Is the universe heading towards a Big Freeze, a Big Rip, a Big Crunch or a Big Bounce? Gravitational wave Can gravitational waves be directly detected? .
Forget WiFi, Connect to the Internet Through Lightbulbs - Technology Whether you’re using wireless internet in a coffee shop, stealing it from the guy next door, or competing for bandwidth at a conference, you’ve probably gotten frustrated at the slow speeds you face when more than one device is tapped into the network. As more and more people—and their many devices—access wireless internet, clogged airwaves are going to make it increasingly difficult to latch onto a reliable signal. But radio waves are just one part of the spectrum that can carry our data. What if we could use other waves to surf the internet? One German physicist, Harald Haas, has come up with a solution he calls “data through illumination”—taking the fiber out of fiber optics by sending data through an LED lightbulb that varies in intensity faster than the human eye can follow. Haas says his invention, which he calls D-Light, can produce data rates faster than 10 megabits per second, which is speedier than your average broadband connection. Photo (cc) via otto-otto.com
Play framework - Home Magnetic memory and logic could achieve ultimate energy efficiency Future computers may rely on magnetic microprocessors that consume the least amount of energy allowed by the laws of physics, according to an analysis by University of California, Berkeley, electrical engineers. Today’s silicon-based microprocessor chips rely on electric currents, or moving electrons, that generate a lot of waste heat. But microprocessors employing nanometer-sized bar magnets – like tiny refrigerator magnets – for memory, logic and switching operations theoretically would require no moving electrons. Nanomagnetic computers use tiny bar magnets to store and process information. Such chips would dissipate only 18 millielectron volts of energy per operation at room temperature, the minimum allowed by the second law of thermodynamics and called the Landauer limit. Lambson is working with Jeffrey Bokor, UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, to develop magnetic computers. Landauer limit Other obstacles remain as well. For more information:
Amazing Scanning Electron Microscope Photos Amazing Scanning Electron Microscope Photos All these pictures are from the book 'Microcosmos,' created by Brandon Brill from London. This book includes many scanning electron microscope (SEM) images of insects, humanbody parts and household items. These are the most amazing images of what is too small tosee with the naked eye. 2-2-11 An ant, Formica fusca, holding a microchip Surface of an Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory silicon microchip Eyelash hairs growing from the surface of human skin The surface of a strawberry Bacteria on the surface of a human tongue Human sperm (spermatozoa) Nylon hooks and loops of Velcro Household dust: includes long hairs of cat fur, twisted synthetic and woolen fibers, serrated insect scales, a pollen grain, and plant and insect remains The weave of nylon stocking fibers The head of a mosquito Head louse clinging to a human hair Eight eyes (two groups of four) on the head of a tarantula Cut human hairs and shaving foam between two razor blades Mushrooms spores
9 Implants that make human healthy body even more useful Here’s a list of 9 ways you can modify your body to be even more useful, from bionic implants to portable power generators. 1. RFID Chips – A nice and easy way to start out with body hacking is to implant an RFID chip into you. An RFID chip is just a passive antenna that’s pre-configured to transmit a specific code when it’s brought near an RFID reader. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Source Give Ps a chance - Stanford Medicine Magazine - Stanford University School... A Nobelist’s quest to open our eyes to the next DNA. It’s called Poly P By SPYROS ANDREOPOULOS For the past 15 years, Arthur Kornberg, MD, a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist at Stanford, has been deepening his relationship with one of biology’s wallflowers: a molecule he has nicknamed poly P. “It’s more important than I am,” he says, with a smile. It’s not just his love of a good biochemical mystery that keeps the emeritus professor working in the lab — though that’s certainly part of what drives him. Inorganic polyphosphate, the molecule Kornberg calls poly P, is older than the hills — literally. What exactly is poly P? Kornberg became fascinated by poly P in the 1950s. When Kornberg arrived at Stanford to lead the biochemistry department in the early ’60s, his work on DNA, for which he had received the Nobel Prize in 1959, had heated up. This underscored for him that the stationary phase of a microbial “bug” is anything but stationary. Promising. Comments? Back To Contents
The 10 Coolest Things we saw at CES 2012 - mirror.co.uk - (Private Browsing) The tech industry decamped to Las Vegas this week to grant the world’s press a sneak peek at what gadget freaks will be saving up for during the rest of the year. LG’s OLED TV and Cinema 3D technology Forget plasma vs LCD, there’s a new screen in town: OLED (or organic light emitting diodesm if you prefer). The clarity and colours of images produced by both Samsung and LG’s 55” were absolutely breathtaking and put many of the 4k2k (or quad HD) prototypes to shame. However, LG’s new Cinema 3D technology was the real star of the show. Set to be incorporated into around 60% of their 2012 TV sets, it literally had us ducking for cover when it showed footage of a football being kicked directly at the camera, it was the best thing we clapped eyes on all week. Samsung Smart TVs Nowadays, if your goggle box isn’t an all-singing, all-dancing online media hub then it might as well be a toaster.
Computer learns language by playing games Computers are great at treating words as data: Word-processing programs let you rearrange and format text however you like, and search engines can quickly find a word anywhere on the Web. But what would it mean for a computer to actually understand the meaning of a sentence written in ordinary English — or French, or Urdu, or Mandarin? One test might be whether the computer could analyze and follow a set of instructions for an unfamiliar task. And indeed, in the last few years, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab have begun designing machine-learning systems that do exactly that, with surprisingly good results. Starting from scratch “Games are used as a test bed for artificial-intelligence techniques simply because of their complexity,” says Branavan, who was first author on both ACL papers. Moreover, Barzilay says, game manuals have “very open text. So initially, its behavior is almost totally random. Proof of concept
Bitcoins: The Taxless Currency | Tax Break: The TurboTax Blog - (Private Browsing) In today’s economy, the value of the dollar is weaker than ever and the thought of a digital currency is becoming more of a reality with the recent introduction of bitcoins. Bitcoins can be compared to cash, but cash is limited to physical exchange, where as bitcoins can be sent throughout the Internet. Today there are more than 6.3 million bitcoins in existence and this number continues to grow. Embed the above image on your site using the code below: Free Tax Filing, Efile Taxes, Income Tax Returns – TurboTax.com John Holland, Emergence The Bactra Review: Occasional and eclectic book reviews by Cosma Shalizi 46 From Chaos to Order by John Holland Addison-Wesley, 1997 Game Rules, or, Emergence according to Holland, or, Confessions of a Creative Reductionist John Holland was one of the world's first Ph.D.s in computer science, and even before that one of the first workers in machine learning. One of the things Holland has been thinking about for a long time is the puzzle of building blocks, of re-usable categorical parts. The problem of emergence is, roughly speaking --- and half the trouble with it is that everything we say about it is only rough --- the flip side of the problem of building blocks. Like almost all working scientists, Holland assumes that a valid explanation of (any one of) these puzzles is a reductionist one, one that explains the behavior or properties of the larger entity from those of its components and their interactions. Emergence is not so broad or ambitious as its title and publicity may suggest.
11.19.2007 - New technique captures chemical reactions in a single living... UC Berkeley Press Release New technique captures chemical reactions in a single living cell for the first time By Sarah Yang, Media Relations | 19 November 2007 BERKELEY – Bioengineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered a technique that for the first time enables the detection of biomolecules' dynamic reactions in a single living cell. By taking advantage of the signature frequency by which organic and inorganic molecules absorb light, the team of researchers, led by Luke Lee, professor of bioengineering and director of UC Berkeley's Biomolecular Nanotechnology Center, can determine in real time whether specific enzymes are activated or particular genes are expressed, all with unprecedented resolution within a single living cell. The technique, described in the Nov. 18 issue of the journal Nature Methods, could lead to a new era in molecular imaging with implications for cell-based drug discovery and biomedical diagnostics.