I've recently submitted a couple of talk proposals to upcoming conferences. Here are the abstracts.

Machine learning in (without loss of generality) Perl
London Perl Workshop, Saturday 24th November 2012. 25 minutes.If you read a book or take a course on machine learning, you'll probably spend a lot of time learning about how to implement standard ( Read more... )

I was pleasantly astonished to see Peter Norvig comment on my recent post about the Stanford online courses - with 160,000 students competing for his attention, that's dedication! I completely take his point that I'm only a small part of the intended audience, and what works best for me is probably not what works best for the students they really ( Read more... )

I've been doing Stanford's online Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning courses. Both have their good points and bad points: here are my comments so far.

[The Introduction to Databases course looks interesting too, but I only have a finite number of hours in the day ( Read more... )

I was recently delighted to receive an email from someone saying that he'd just started a PhD with my old supervisor, and did I have any advice for him? You'll be unsurprised to learn that I did; I thought I'd post it here in the hope that someone else might find it useful. Some of what follows is specific to my supervisor, my field, or my ( Read more... )

In the coffee room yesterday with michiexile, who has just started a postdoc in cloud-scale computational algebra:michiexile: ... so we thought "that sounds like a nice simple example, let's see if we can replicate their experimental results computationally". So we tried it, and ran out of memory. So we added more memory -
pozorvlak: - and ran out of some other system resource ( Read more... )

Occasionally, when I link to my post complex numbers made straightforward, people tell me "but students are used to extending the number line with fractions and surds and negatives already, you should just tell them that you're extending it again in an analogous way!"

So here's an example of someone who was hopelessly confused by complex numbers ( ( Read more... )

You've probably already heard of Rule 34 of the Internet:If it exists, there is porn of it on the Internet. No exceptions.
Now, as any mathematician can tell you, the statement "if X then Y" is equivalent to its contrapositive, "if not-Y then not-X". For instance, "if Socrates is human, then he is mortal" is equivalent to "if Socrates is not mortal ( Read more... )

A couple of days ago I saw a tweet from @TomCadwallader, claiming that 1 sperm has 37.5MB of DNA information in it. That means a normal ejaculation represents a data transfer of 1587GB in about 3 seconds.
That's cute, but there's a more interesting question lurking here: it may represent 1.5TB of data, but how much information is transferred? In ( Read more... )

[This post is basically a holding page for a discussion that started on Twitter but quickly spiralled beyond 140 characters per point.]

I think that the term "privilege", as used by feminists and other equality-campaigners, is unhelpful. I think the concept to which it refers (which I attempted to explain here) is extremely helpful and important; ( Read more... )

Most people are taught about complex numbers in the following way:"We all know that there's no square root of -1. But imagine there were...
This approach has precisely one thing going for it: it roughly parallels the historical development of the subject. Kinda. If you squint at it right. Unfortunately, it's also maximally confusing:"But Sir/Miss ( Read more... )