March 17, 2018
Briefly
- “Bus Lane Blocked, He Trained His Computer to Catch Scofflaws” from the New York Times. It would be hard for this to be more relevant to my interests.
- NZ ‘citizen science’ analyses suggesting the larger-battery versions of the Nissan Leaf have battery life problems. Peter Griffin at Noted.co.nz
- Wikipedia has the best data on US historical city/town populations, thanks to the work of one person who has entered the data by hand. Here’s a visualisation of it.
- A bit more technical than usual: how to understand what a neural network is doing when it classifies images (from distill.pub)
- From Source, “How We Found New Patterns in LA’s Homeless Arrest Data”
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
Interesting use of the words ‘trained his computer to catch scofflaws’
When the story indicates he used over 2000 images of cars, trucks, buses etc and ‘programmed’ his computer to match those of vehicles which werent supposed to be in the designated lane. Surely the NY Times has writers who dont think computers are capable of independent thought and are also ‘trainable’
6 years ago
Eh. It’s standard terminology in the field, and doesn’t seem like an unreasonable metaphor. The OED has it attested back to 1958 — and has ‘training’ applied to plants since the 17th century and animals since the 16th.
6 years ago