ameasure
Joined 15 years ago
Joined 15 years ago
Japan is a series of volcanic islands with, historically, a very limited indigenous supply of large poop producing creatures like like cows, horses, and pigs. The result is that there was a great scarcity of fertile soil. To supplement their soil they instead relied on human feces. So valuable was it that back in the day you could sell your poop to professional manure collectors who walked around town with large pots.
The cultural legacy extends well beyond toilets. You may have seen recent articles about people creating meat from poop, and poop powered motorcycles. It's no coincide that those are Japanese inventions. Funny how a thing like geography affects things.
There have been some huge developments in neural networks in the last few years, particularly with respect to deep learning. If you missed out on that you might want to try this class. Hinton has been involved in many of these advances.
The second half of the course appears to focus on deep learning topics so you might want to start there if you already know the basics.
The syllabus, draft though it is, indicates the second half of the class will focus on deep learning, a field of machine learning that has demonstrated huge potential.
Reminds me of Eastman Kodak circa 1975 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Kodak#Shift_to_digital.
That said, this is pretty weak evidence of collusion.