“Christmas is the spirit of giving without a thought of getting. It is happiness because we see joy in people. It is forgetting self and finding time for others. It is discarding the meaningless and stressing the true values.” Thomas S. Monson.
Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas everyone! Wishing you lots of love, joy and happiness.
Video of Andrew Ng, Chief Scientist at Baidu, talk at the Extract 2015 conference.
“You can create the most perfect code in technological existence — but if all it’s used for is to relentlessly demean, bully, assault, torment, pick on, trample, bicker with, shout at people, well, it’s a pretty good sign that people aren’t using it for much of value. And that is a central point. When a technology is used to shrink people’s possibilities, more than to expand them, it cannot create value for them. And so people will simply tune it out, ignore it, walk away from it if they can. For the simple fact is that technologies which devalue us do not create value for us. When the social interactions that it creates are little violences, then we can say that quality has fallen below the level that people will find much benefit in it. Such interactions become toxic.”
Extracted from Umair Haque’s latest essay “Why Twitter’s Dying”.
Source: Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn From It)
“Like most digital technologies, Machine Learning is in the process of becoming automated and commoditized with BigML, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google leading the charge.” Mike Cossy, Chief Customer Officer at BigML
Source: From Big Blue’s Predictive Analytics to Machine Learning with BigML
“Assume you are a turkey and it’s the first day of your life. A man comes in and you believe, “He kills me.” But he feeds you. Next day, he comes again and you fear, “He kills me,” but he feeds you. Third day, the same thing. By any standard model, the probability that he will feed you and not kill you increases day by day, and on day 100, it is higher than any before. And it’s the day before Thanksgiving, and you are dead meat. So the turkey confused the world of uncertainty with one of calculated risk. And the turkey illusion is probably not so often in turkeys, but mostly in people.” Gerd Gigerenzer
Source: Harvard Business Review https://hbr.org/2014/06/instinct-can-beat-analytical-thinking
Not everyone needs to become a data scientist. But it is worth brushing up on the basics of data analysis and machine learning, so as to understand and improve the use of data in your business.
“If the machine learning community does create a human-level intelligence, it may not be any one person who had the “aha!” idea that allowed it to happen. It might be more like Minsky envisioned in “Society of Mind“; not a single trick but a collection of specialized processes, intelligent only in combination.”
Have you ever had an idea about how the human mind works? Douglas Hofstadter has had that idea. He’s also thought of all of the arguments against it and all of the counter arguments to those arguments. He’s refined it, polished it, and if it was really special, it’s in one of his books, expressed with impeccable clarity and sparkling wit. If you haven’t attempted to read his book Gödel, Escher, Bach, try now. For sheer intellectual scope, it’s a singular experience.
A few months ago, there was an article in the Atlantic profiling Dr. Hofstadter and his approach to AI research. It was well written and I thought it gave unfamiliar readers a reasonable sense of Hofstadter’s work. It contrasted this work with machine learning research, however, in a way that minimized the scope and quality of the work being done in that area.
In this little riposte…
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How to Create an Effective Data Science Department – Talk by Kim Stedman. “Data scientists needs to level up–both our function and our branding. Data science is in danger of being a fad. Data scientists need to build a reputation for providing actual value. We…
The true nature of data science consists of asking a series of questions – and accepting analytic failures, which ultimately lead to the bigger questions, the better insights, and the more valuable decisions.
em·pa·thy [em–puh–thee] – The intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. Feeling that you understand and share another person’s experiences and emotions : the ability to share someone else’s feelings.
Piece of Insight. 