The Free Variable

Digging through the videos from last year’s conference, my personal favourite is another talk in the “what can we learn from x” genre, this time with John A. Fredrickson from Innocentive:  As I’ve previously mentioned on Quora, Fredrickson listed what they found were the major sucess factors in getting a crowdsourcing project to work. When in [...]

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StatoilHydro, the major oil company in Norway, unveiled their new surprising logo today.

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Any prediction of the future carries some uncertainty. As if prediction wasn’t hard enough, estimating this uncertainty and presenting it in a way that makes sense is surprisingly hard too. No one gets more attention drawn to their mistaken predictions than weather forecasters, so it might be interesting to see how they’r tackling uncertainty.

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Balancing risk is a difficult discipline. The standard definition of risk is that: Risk = Probability of an accident  * impact of  the accident. A discussion of risk often starts with this definition, then goes on to show that the definition is wrong or meaningless. When an uncertain but very small number is multiplied by [...]

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Yahoo wrote up their key scientific challenges recently. It’s interesting to compare  their machine learning challenges with those facing data mining and machine learning efforts in oil well drilling.  The list was made by John Langford, which comment that the challenges are general enough to have applications outside Yahoo. And indeed, three of the  five [...]

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