The Phantom Pattern Problem

The Phantom Pattern Problem PDF Author: Gary Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192609688
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Pattern-recognition prowess served our ancestors well, but today we are confronted by a deluge of data that is far more abstract, complicated, and difficult to interpret. The number of possible patterns that can be identified relative to the number that are genuinely useful has grown exponentially - which means that the chances that a discovered pattern is useful is rapidly approaching zero. Patterns in data are often used as evidence, but how can you tell if that evidence is worth believing? We are hard-wired to notice patterns and to think that the patterns we notice are meaningful. Streaks, clusters, and correlations are the norm, not the exception. Our challenge is to overcome our inherited inclination to think that all patterns are significant, as in this age of Big Data patterns are inevitable and usually coincidental. Through countless examples, The Phantom Pattern Problem is an engaging read that helps us avoid being duped by data, tricked into worthless investing strategies, or scared out of getting vaccinations.

The Phantom Pattern Problem

The Phantom Pattern Problem PDF Author: Gary Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192609688
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
Pattern-recognition prowess served our ancestors well, but today we are confronted by a deluge of data that is far more abstract, complicated, and difficult to interpret. The number of possible patterns that can be identified relative to the number that are genuinely useful has grown exponentially - which means that the chances that a discovered pattern is useful is rapidly approaching zero. Patterns in data are often used as evidence, but how can you tell if that evidence is worth believing? We are hard-wired to notice patterns and to think that the patterns we notice are meaningful. Streaks, clusters, and correlations are the norm, not the exception. Our challenge is to overcome our inherited inclination to think that all patterns are significant, as in this age of Big Data patterns are inevitable and usually coincidental. Through countless examples, The Phantom Pattern Problem is an engaging read that helps us avoid being duped by data, tricked into worthless investing strategies, or scared out of getting vaccinations.

The Phantom Pattern Problem

The Phantom Pattern Problem PDF Author: Gary Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198864167
Category : Data mining
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Patterns in data are often used as evidence, but how can you tell if that evidence is worth believing? The Phantom Pattern Problem helps readers avoid being duped by data, tricked into worthless investing strategies, or scared out of getting vaccinations. Becoming a sceptical consumer of data is important in this age of Big Data.

The Phantom Tollbooth

The Phantom Tollbooth PDF Author: Norton Juster
Publisher: Yearling
ISBN: 0394820371
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
With almost 5 million copies sold 60 years after its original publication, generations of readers have now journeyed with Milo to the Lands Beyond in this beloved classic. Enriched by Jules Feiffer’s splendid illustrations, the wit, wisdom, and wordplay of Norton Juster’s offbeat fantasy are as beguiling as ever. “Comes up bright and new every time I read it . . . it will continue to charm and delight for a very long time yet. And teach us some wisdom, too.” --Phillip Pullman For Milo, everything’s a bore. When a tollbooth mysteriously appears in his room, he drives through only because he’s got nothing better to do. But on the other side, things seem different. Milo visits the Island of Conclusions (you get there by jumping), learns about time from a ticking watchdog named Tock, and even embarks on a quest to rescue Rhyme and Reason. Somewhere along the way, Milo realizes something astonishing. Life is far from dull. In fact, it’s exciting beyond his wildest dreams!

Phantom Limbs

Phantom Limbs PDF Author: Paula Garner
Publisher: Candlewick Press
ISBN: 0763691887
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
How do you move on from an irreplaceable loss? In a poignant debut, a sixteen-year-old boy must learn to swim against an undercurrent of grief—or be swept away by it. Otis and Meg were inseparable until her family abruptly moved away after the terrible accident that left Otis’s little brother dead and both of their families changed forever. Since then, it’s been three years of radio silence, during which time Otis has become the unlikely protégé of eighteen-year-old Dara—part drill sergeant, part friend—who’s hell-bent on transforming Otis into the Olympic swimmer she can no longer be. But when Otis learns that Meg is coming back to town, he must face some difficult truths about the girl he’s never forgotten and the brother he’s never stopped grieving. As it becomes achingly clear that he and Meg are not the same people they were, Otis must decide what to hold on to and what to leave behind. Quietly affecting, this compulsively readable debut novel captures all the confusion, heartbreak, and fragile hope of three teens struggling to accept profound absences in their lives.

Rat Rule 79

Rat Rule 79 PDF Author: Rivka Galchen
Publisher: Restless Books
ISBN: 163206099X
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
From the New Yorker “20 Under 40” author of Atmospheric Disturbances comes a brain-twisting adventure story of a girl named Fred on a quest through a world of fantastical creatures, strange logic, and a powerful prejudice against growing up. Fred and her math-teacher mom are always on the move, and Fred is getting sick of it. She’s about to have yet another birthday in a new place without friends. On the eve of turning thirteen, Fred sees something strange in the living room: her mother, dressed for a party, standing in front of an enormous paper lantern—which she steps into and disappears. Fred follows her and finds herself in the Land of Impossibility—a loopily illogical place where time is outlawed, words carry dire consequences, and her unlikely allies are a depressed white elephant and a pugnacious mongoose mother of seventeen. With her new friends, Fred sets off in search of her mom, braving dungeons, Insult Fish, Fearsome Ferlings, and a mad Rat Queen. To succeed, the trio must find the solution to an ageless riddle. Gorgeously illustrated and reminiscent of The Phantom Tollbooth and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Rivka Galchen’s Rat Rule 79 is an instant classic for curious readers of all ages.

A Pattern Language

A Pattern Language PDF Author: Christopher Alexander
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190050357
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.

Phantoms in the Brain

Phantoms in the Brain PDF Author: V. S. Ramachandran
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0688172172
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran is internationally renowned for uncovering answers to the deep and quirky questions of human nature that few scientists have dared to address. His bold insights about the brain are matched only by the stunning simplicity of his experiments -- using such low-tech tools as cotton swabs, glasses of water and dime-store mirrors. In Phantoms in the Brain, Dr. Ramachandran recounts how his work with patients who have bizarre neurological disorders has shed new light on the deep architecture of the brain, and what these findings tell us about who we are, how we construct our body image, why we laugh or become depressed, why we may believe in God, how we make decisions, deceive ourselves and dream, perhaps even why we're so clever at philosophy, music and art. Some of his most notable cases: A woman paralyzed on the left side of her body who believes she is lifting a tray of drinks with both hands offers a unique opportunity to test Freud's theory of denial. A man who insists he is talking with God challenges us to ask: Could we be "wired" for religious experience? A woman who hallucinates cartoon characters illustrates how, in a sense, we are all hallucinating, all the time. Dr. Ramachandran's inspired medical detective work pushes the boundaries of medicine's last great frontier -- the human mind -- yielding new and provocative insights into the "big questions" about consciousness and the self.

Exploratory Data Analysis with MATLAB

Exploratory Data Analysis with MATLAB PDF Author: Wendy L. Martinez
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1315349841
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 686

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Book Description
Praise for the Second Edition: "The authors present an intuitive and easy-to-read book. ... accompanied by many examples, proposed exercises, good references, and comprehensive appendices that initiate the reader unfamiliar with MATLAB." —Adolfo Alvarez Pinto, International Statistical Review "Practitioners of EDA who use MATLAB will want a copy of this book. ... The authors have done a great service by bringing together so many EDA routines, but their main accomplishment in this dynamic text is providing the understanding and tools to do EDA. —David A Huckaby, MAA Reviews Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) is an important part of the data analysis process. The methods presented in this text are ones that should be in the toolkit of every data scientist. As computational sophistication has increased and data sets have grown in size and complexity, EDA has become an even more important process for visualizing and summarizing data before making assumptions to generate hypotheses and models. Exploratory Data Analysis with MATLAB, Third Edition presents EDA methods from a computational perspective and uses numerous examples and applications to show how the methods are used in practice. The authors use MATLAB code, pseudo-code, and algorithm descriptions to illustrate the concepts. The MATLAB code for examples, data sets, and the EDA Toolbox are available for download on the book’s website. New to the Third Edition Random projections and estimating local intrinsic dimensionality Deep learning autoencoders and stochastic neighbor embedding Minimum spanning tree and additional cluster validity indices Kernel density estimation Plots for visualizing data distributions, such as beanplots and violin plots A chapter on visualizing categorical data

The 9 Pitfalls of Data Science

The 9 Pitfalls of Data Science PDF Author: Jay Cordes
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198844395
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Data science has never had more influence on the world. Large companies are now seeing the benefit of employing data scientists to interpret the vast amounts of data that now exists. However, the field is so new and is evolving so rapidly that the analysis produced can be haphazard at best. The 9 Pitfalls of Data Science shows us real-world examples of what can go wrong. Written to be an entertaining read, this invaluable guide investigates the all too common mistakes of data scientists - who can be plagued by lazy thinking, whims, hunches, and prejudices - and indicates how they have been at the root of many disasters, including the Great Recession. Gary Smith and Jay Cordes emphasise how scientific rigor and critical thinking skills are indispensable in this age of Big Data, as machines often find meaningless patterns that can lead to dangerous false conclusions. The 9 Pitfalls of Data Science is loaded with entertaining tales of both successful and misguided approaches to interpreting data, both grand successes and epic failures. These cautionary tales will not only help data scientists be more effective, but also help the public distinguish between good and bad data science.

The AI Delusion

The AI Delusion PDF Author: Gary Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192557793
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
We live in an incredible period in history. The Computer Revolution may be even more life-changing than the Industrial Revolution. We can do things with computers that could never be done before, and computers can do things for us that could never be done before. But our love of computers should not cloud our thinking about their limitations. We are told that computers are smarter than humans and that data mining can identify previously unknown truths, or make discoveries that will revolutionize our lives. Our lives may well be changed, but not necessarily for the better. Computers are very good at discovering patterns, but are useless in judging whether the unearthed patterns are sensible because computers do not think the way humans think. We fear that super-intelligent machines will decide to protect themselves by enslaving or eliminating humans. But the real danger is not that computers are smarter than us, but that we think computers are smarter than us and, so, trust computers to make important decisions for us. The AI Delusion explains why we should not be intimidated into thinking that computers are infallible, that data-mining is knowledge discovery, and that black boxes should be trusted.