educational websites

Favourite educational websites (in no particular order):

(1) http://videolectures.net/
(2) https://www.coursera.org/
(3) http://www.khanacademy.org/
(4) http://www.ted.com/

LMNN

Distance Metric Learning for Large Margin Nearest Neighbor Classification (Journal of Machine Learning Research, 2009) -- Weinberger, K. and Saul, L.


A very nice paper with a clear overview of distance metric learning, and describing a method which is "the logical counterpart to SVMs in which kNN classification replaces linear classification"

TTC stress experiment

An experiment I would love to run: 

(1) Measure the amount of stress hormone released on average by a single person when experiencing a subway delay for some small fixed amount of time;

(2) Integrate over the length of the delay;

(3) In total, end up approximating the total amount of stress hormones released over the course of a subway delay, by all the angry commuters;

(4) Include statistics about the frequency of occurrence of subway delays.

(5) Calculate total stress hormone secretions (sum over all commuters) caused by subway problems over the course of a year;

(6) Find correlations with health problems and life expectancy;

(7) Present documents to TTC to demonstrate negative impacts of TTC on the lives of Toronto citizens.

drift

Why, when walking with another person, does one continuously drift in the direction of one's companion (to the point of continuous embarrassing collisions)?

why I need blogger

Well, I just realized how much I've been missing (cliche, I know). From now on, blogger will house the websites I like, nice quotations I stumble upon, and random ideas that pop into my head. It won't be my diary, but it WILL be my storehouse of things I want to remember, incorporate into conversations, and otherwise make use of at some point in the future. I now declare that this blog will be an extension of my brain.

mind/brain quote

"Mind as a secretion of the brain." (Ambrose Bierce)

wikihow

I have yet to explore the full usefulness of this website: www.wikihow.com/, but so far, I'm very happy with the step-by-step (with picture) recipes that it contains! In fact: with many things you may want to learn how to do, the approach of 'K simple steps' and guided pictures, is the fool-proof way to do it :)