brains 'n' balancing training data

- Martin points us to a nice article over on Developing Intelligence: 10 Important Differences Between Brains and Computers. Your computational metaphor just breaks down eventually, y'know? The brain is not very much like a Von Neumann computer. It's a lot squishier.

If building classifiers is your thing, you may be interested to take a look at these articles:

- Gustavo E. A. P. A. Batista , Ana L. C. Bazzan, and Maria Carolina Monard: Balancing Training Data for Automated Annotation of Keywords: a Case Study.
Three researchers, seven middle names, one novel technique for building balanced data sets out of unbalanced ones for training classifiers: generate new instances of your minority class by interpolating between examples actually in your dataset. I'm still trying to decide whether this approach should work for the general case -- does it make too many assumptions about the shape of the space? Particularly: can you arbitrarily draw lines (in higher-dimensional space) between positive instances? What if there are negative instances between those two? Which dimensions do you look at first, and how is this better than just adding some noise or weighting positive examples higher? (is that last option the same as simply counting them several times?)

- Foster Provost: Machine Learning from Imbalanced Data Sets 101.
A basic overview of the problem, examining the motivation for building classifiers at all and some different approaches to sampling. The award for Best Name Ever goes to Dr. Foster Provost.

Possibly interesting, but almost definitely not useful!

- My aunt, years ago, had a Newton eMate 300, and I recently found a Newton PDA while cleaning out the space behind an A/C unit -- in any case, I've had this weird fascination with Newtons for years. Now, you can relive the Newton Magic that you probably never experienced in the first place, under emulation! The Einstein Platform is a Newton emulator that works pretty well -- and you can find Newton ROM images here. It's kinda interesting. (Although I got stuck in fullscreen mode once, careful!)

- Self. It's been ported to Linux. It's one of those languages that one feels like one should learn more about. It has interesting family relationships with SmallTalk and Dylan and JavaScript...

- Thinking Meat celebrates the holidays. I just found this blog, but over at the Thinking Meat Project, she has a lovely article about taking part in the culture around the holidays and coming to terms with the cognitive dissonance from enjoying good Bach choral music while feeling like one shouldn't be participating in religious rites, for consistency's sake. It can hard to balance these things, particularly soon after giving up a faith.

Beautiful educational software :)

So many of you are probably aware that my job (ie: research assistantship, ie: how I'm getting gradschool paid for) is to work on JES, the Jython Environment for Students -- it's the little IDE that we use at Georgia Tech to teach introductory CS classes to non-majors and for summer camps as part of our "media computation" effort. A number of other schools use our stuff too, which makes me pretty happy. We're releasing a new version soon, and it's going to rock hard and be faster and include LOGO-style turtles! I'll put up links when it's out.

But speaking of LOGO-style turtles and media computation:
- The KDE Project has KTurtle out now, which looks pretty cool. It's part of their bigger KDE Edutainment effort.
- TuxPaint is also pretty cool! My friend (and noted cartoonist) Brett finds it pretty amusing. It reminds me of KidPix, which you might remember from your childhood if you're about as old as me -- and that's still out there, apparently?
- Tux Paint comes to us from New Breed Software, which has a bunch of other cool educational products.
- And if you only click one link on this post: Pictures Kids Made With TuxPaint

And, for completeness:
- Alice is a programmable 3D environment up outta CMU that rocks harder than I can describe in a quick blog post. As they put it on their site, "Alice will make programming a means to an exciting end." That exciting end is really easy 3D storytelling.

link-o-rama

It's funny, starting up blogging in a new place. I'm not sure what my voice is going to be like here, so I usually write about my thoughts about the medium for a little bit first. In fact, almost every time I've started writing in a new place, I've done this. I think this blog is going to be a little more of a public version of my earlier Penguin Parens blog, which had lived on hackmode.org, and on which I would semi-occasionally put up little howtos and technical discussions. I'll still try to do that here, but I'd also like to expand out to talking about philosophy and also just linking to techie things. My more personal stuff lives on LJ, and I'll try to keep the personal and techie/professional/pseudointellectual more segmented...

We'll see if anybody reads this, heh.

Today is about buttons and games!!

Links:
- On Saturday, I participated in Out Of Hand Theater's production of The Game. It was a large-scale scavenger hunt and puzzle-solving game, run through the few miles surrounding the Little Five Points area. It involved a lot of puzzle solving, clue-finding, and confusion as to what was a clue on the part of our team. (We came in a very respectable fifth-out-of-dozens.)

- History of the Button has been making its way around the Internets recently, but it's a super-interesting site. What could possibly be more integral to today's technology than buttons? And they're fairly new -- as you'll see if you look at their very nice presentation on the subject.

- AVANT GAME is Jane McGonigal's site about all of the interesting stuff that she does, which largely includes research on games, computer and otherwise! She travels to different universities and teaches classes about game design. Also, Jane's been known to work with Ian Bogost from the EGL, and recently, they produced Cruel 2 B Kind, "a game of benevolent assassination". It's sort of like water-gun assassination games that some of you may be familiar with, although probably much funnier for uninformed bystanders. Because you can kill people by complimenting them on their shoes, and you have no idea which ones. (or even who's playing).

- Come Out And Play -- the last day of the festival is today! But it's about all sorts of wild outdoor games, including large, real-life versions of classic video games, such as Space Invaders, and apparently a version of the well-blogged Pac Man played outside.