Author Archives: brendano

I laugh out loud every time I reread Cosma Shalizi’s review of “New Kind of Science” (2005).  I remember reading it back in college when everyone was talking about the book, when I was just losing my naivete about the … Continue reading →

I made this table a while ago and find it handy: for example, looking at a table of percentages and trying to figure out what’s meaningful or not. Why run a test if you can estimate it in your head? … Continue reading →

I keep learning new bits of linear algebra all the time, but I’m always hurting for a useful reference.  I probably should get a good book (which?), but in the meantime I’m collecting several nice online sources that ML researchers … Continue reading →

I’ve changed my website and blog URL from anyall.org to brenocon.com. The former was supposed to be a reference to first-order logic: the existential and universal quantifiers are fundamental to relational reasoning, and as testament to that, they are enshrined … Continue reading →

I’m tired of reading papers that use an SVM but don’t say which kernel they used.  (There’s tons of such papers in NLP and, I think, other areas that do applied machine learning.)  I suspect a lot of these papers … Continue reading →

I wrote an interactive visualization for Gaussian mixtures and some probability laws, using the excellent Protovis library.  It helped me build intuition for the law of total variance. Link

I love this Daily Show clip with Alan Greenspan.  On emotion and economic forecasting. From 2007. GREENSPAN: I’ve been dealing with these big mathematical models of forecasting the economy, and I’m looking at what’s going on in the last few … Continue reading →

Like everyone, I’ve been just starting to look at the new, tentative, proof that P != NP from Vinay Deolalikar.  After reading the intro, what’s most striking is that probabilistic graphical models and mathematical logic are at the core of the … Continue reading →

It’s been a good year. Last fall I started a master’s program in the Language Technologies department at CMU SCS, taking some great classes, hanging out with a cool lab, and writing two new papers (for ICWSM, involving Twitter: polls … Continue reading →

Quick note, reading this paper from their tweet. update this reaction might be totally wrong; in particular, the conll dependencies for at least some languages were done completely by hand. Malt and MSTParser were designed for the Yamada and Matsumodo … Continue reading →