Category: statistics
-
Gauss is my shepherd
So this happened: I said this over on Twitter, but it’s too good not to record again here: The alt-text suggests that Munroe’s EM draws Gods from a normal distribution. (A Gaussian!) (did you know there’s an entire website dedicated to explaining XKCD to the great unwashed? I think if you have to explain it, it’s…
-
Chomsky and “walks like a duck” empiricism
Replicated Typo and @jasonbaldridge inter alia have been discussing a recent forum where Chomsky and Minsky and Labov (among others) met to discuss the past and future of artificial intelligence. Replicated Typo points out the most interesting contribution from Chomsky: Chomsky derided researchers in machine learning who use purely statistical methods to produce behavior that…
-
sentence fragments will not save us
Thomas Baekdal’s post on using passphrases (from 2007) came up again two weeks back. In that post, Baekdal maintained the following thesis (I paraphrase): Passphrases are better than passwords, because they are easier to remember and (because they are longer) they are “mathematically” harder to crack. A series of security articles last week pointed to…