Saturday, September 29, 2012

Andrew Ng vs Daphne Koller

I completed Machine Learning @ Coursera taught by Andrew Ng.

I am in the first week of Probabilistic Graphical Model taught by Daphne Koller. And I am feeling the heat! :)

Although the content and objective of the courses are different. But in my experience Andrew is a better teacher.

Andrew uses very simple sentences. He speaks at a consistent rate. After each class you will always feel like exploring the topic by yourself. Andrew gives you enough to build upon.

Daphne uses very very heavy sentences. Sometimes you will find her speaking at a good intelligent rate and the other times she speaks really fast. She rarely breaths between two sentences. Trust me if you haven't already studied the topic/chapter you won't understand the videos a bit. After going through her videos you won't have enough energy to explore the topic further. :P

One of my fave from Daphne is:
"So here the structure is actually a sparsity in the transition model as opposed to something that manifests at the level of the 2TBN structure which is fairly simple."

ha ha ha

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Javascript virtual machine as a standard

Was watching this video by Zed Shaw few months ago.

Well, all but one thoughts are totally forgotten.

But the one lingering is as follows:
The web browsers should be language(read Javascript) independent. They should support a common standardized bytecode engine to run things in them.
Let people choose their favorite languages to code and should not be forced to use Javascript. Those languages should generate a standardized bytecode.
People are anyway moving towards this goal with things like Coffeescript, Fay, Roy, Elm etc. But things could definitely improve beyond this code translation activities.

Thats it!



Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Reflections


i can see your clothes thrown on the floor with mine,
you must be somewhere close, very close.

i can see your bangles lying around,
your bare hands must be rubbing against mine.

i can smell your sweet breath riding the waves of your heart,
your face must be hovering over mine.

i can taste the moist and fading strawberry flavor on my lips,
you must have touched mine.

i can see your lost earring stuck in the troughs of morning bed sheet,
although you are pretending to be worried, that satisfied smile must be settling on your tired lips.

i feel totally lost and dazed,
you must have looked into my eyes for long.

i can see that red haze in the room,
you must have been here few moments ago.

my life is glowing,
you are rising somewhere in my soul...

I forgot something

I think it is a common experience when we know that we have forgotten something but can't recall what it was.

It implies that the consciousness engine is not fed with the complete content of a thought. The engine only gets access to a set of pointers/impression/reflection of thoughts. The thoughts themselves reside somewhere else. To process a thought the engine first accesses the pointer and then processes the complete thought via that pointer. When a pointer loses the contact with the original thought content it causes that feeling of have forgotten something.

Actually a lot of time I get another picture:
Thought/impulse pointers scrolling automatically and endlessly in front of my consciousness engine. The engine doesn't really respond to all of them and lets them go past. Based on some judgement it pauses the scroll every now and then and picks a few and processes/consumes them selectively.