Probabilistic Graphical Models About the Course What are Probabilistic Graphical Models? Uncertainty is unavoidable in real-world applications: we can almost never predict with certainty what will happen in the future, and even in the present and the past, many important aspects of the world are not observed with certainty. Probability theory gives us the basic foundation to model our beliefs about the different possible states of the world, and to update these beliefs as new evidence is obtained. These beliefs can be combined with individual preferences to help guide our actions, and even in selecting which observations to make. While probability theory has existed since the 17th century, our ability to use it effectively on large problems involving many inter-related variables is fairly recent, and is due largely to the development of a framework known as Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGMs). Course Syllabus Topics covered include: Introduction and Overview. The slides for the whole class can be found here.
Machine Learning The Best Way to Learn Rails I come from a PHP background, but these days, I'm a full-time Rails developer. The difficulty for most people who make the switch lies in the learning curve that’s involved. Once you've become proficient in a language or framework, switching to a new one feels like an unnecessary (and time-consuming) challenge. However, learning Ruby and Rails is actually pretty easy! It's an incredibly powerful framework, and has a huge community pushing it along. So that begs the question: what's the best way to learn Rails? This article details a full lesson plan that will get you up and running in no time! You might think learning Ruby is the most important step, and this is probably the part where everyone stops learning and just sticks with their current framework. Work through the Try Ruby exercises. The most recommended tool for dipping into Ruby's syntax is the Try Ruby website. Once you’ve worked through these exercises a couple of times, you'll have a solid base. Great! Railscasts: A must!
Information Theory Python for the Web The theme music for this blog post is: Air - Playground Love. Python is the best language in the world for interacting with the web, and I'm going to show you why. This article will give an extremely high level overview of how to use python for the web. There are many ways you can interact with the web using python, and this post will cover all of them. This includes python web scraping, interacting with APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and running your own python web site using python server software. There are many ways to do all these things in python, but I'm going to show you how to do it the right way using the most modern techniques. Interacting with Websites and APIs Using Python The single best package for interacting with the web using Python is 'Requests' by Kenneth Reitz. First, you'll need to install it. Once you have pip installed, run: pip install requests And now you have Requests installed! The two methods you'll need the most are GET and POST. That's it! Hooray!
Computer Science 101 UPDATE: we're doing a live, updated MOOC of this course at stanford-online July-2014 (not this Coursera version). See here: CS101 teaches the essential ideas of Computer Science for a zero-prior-experience audience. Computers can appear very complicated, but in reality, computers work within just a few, simple patterns. CS101 demystifies and brings those patterns to life, which is useful for anyone using computers today. In CS101, students play and experiment with short bits of "computer code" to bring to life to the power and limitations of computers. Here is another video Nick created for this class.
Efficient JavaScript Traditionally, a Web page would not contain much scripting, or at least, not much that would affect the performance of that Web page. However, as Web pages become more like applications, the performance of scripts is having a bigger effect. With more and more applications being developed using Web technologies, improving the performance of scripts is becoming increasingly important. With a desktop application, a compiler is normally used to convert the source into the final binary. Browsers are fairly good at achieving this, and Opera has one of the fastest scripting engines of any current browser. This article will show several simple changes that can be made to improve the performance of your Web applications. Quick Tips ECMAScript Document loading ECMAScript Avoid using eval or the Function constructor Each time eval or the Function constructor is called on a string representing source code, the script engine must start the machinery that converts the source code to executable code.
Computer Security YUI3 « Triptych YUI3 is a modern javascript library that allows you to build cross-browser applications without having to worry about all of the issues you might run into with low level javascript coding. It provides a library of utilities as well as a host of best practices for web development. Needless to say I’m a big fan of YUI and I’ve written several articles about it over the past year or so. Here’s a list of those for your reference.Introduction to YUI: YUI Hidden Gems: Make it with YUI: Build a Simple Ticker in YUI Other YUI Articles: YUI Articles from around the web: YUI3 Quick Tip: Adding Your Own Awesome There are still many articles even of my own blog I’ve not listed here as of yet (so busy!)
Game Theory PHP for Beginners: Building Your First Simple CMS By Jason Lengstorf On CMS, php #The Magic of PHP + MySQL It's safe to say that nearly every website that's up-to-date these days is using some form of content management system (CMS). To get our feet wet as back-end developers, we'll be creating a simple PHP class that will: Create a databaseConnect to a databaseDisplay a form with two fieldsSave the form data in the databaseDisplay the saved data from the database Download Files This class is intended to give you a feel for how PHP and MySQL interact together, and to show the basics of a CMS. #Building the Class Our first step is to simply lay out the class in a file named 'simpleCMS.php' so we have a road map to work with. As you can see, we're creating one class with four variables and five methods. #The Variables In this case, all four variables are for connecting to the database: $host, $username, $password, and $table provide a path and access to our database on the server. #Build the Database #Connect to the Database #Build the Form <! <?
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