mariuskempe

I honestly can't recommend a book for this. The best resource I've found is MathWorld. I've picked up a bunch of very helpful intuitions from it, including:

- Cauchy: the horizontal distance from the origin at which an arrow shot at a random angle from a point below the origin hits the x-axis

- Gamma: how long you have to wait for the nth event in a Poisson process

I'm sure these must be books that I haven't read.

I'm sorry! I misread your question as 'Would this be a good book for my level?'.

You'll have no trouble.

That's a good question and I was asking myself that I after I wrote that comment. I think my objection is more to the 'Bayesian' and less to the 'methods', if that makes sense. That is, I think constructing and updating models using Bayes' theorem can be (as people doing spam-filtering have shown) a good way of making predictions, but that it is the frequentist properties of the models that actually matter (cf. the ubiquity of cross-validation: 'the proof of the pudding is in the eating'), not the fact that they let you maintain a probability distribution over parameters.

Well, no, because I don't know any good reasons for using Bayesian methods (except when prior probability distributions can be found objectively through some previous experiment etc).

I should like to give a contrarian comment about this, because it is on top of the front page and seems to be being received positively. This book is probably not a good way to learn about statistical inference. It has quite confused explanations of both Bayesian and frequentist approaches. The preface seems to imply that programmers, by virtue of being able to use computers, don't need to take a rigorous mathematical course in Bayesian methods. However the text actually uses mathematical notation throughout, and as far as I could tell it is often not explained. I noticed at least one case where a probability distribution (gamma) was described only through plots i.e. without specifying its pdf or how you could derive the pdf. I think the kind of discourse that this book exemplifies is halfway to cargo cult 'statistics'.

That's an interesting point. In fact, the expectation of the random walk is always the same as its starting value, because, although most of the walks go to 0 like you observed, there are very occasionally walks that drift upward to astronomical values.

As for the usefulness of this kind of walk: the process we're modelling is an evolutionary one, where the rate of change is fixed (in this case within the species) and we'd like to detect 'random' (non-selected) evolutionary paths by comparing simulations to historical data.

I visited the site during the affected time on Mac OS X 10.7, with Safari - I'm worried I might be infected. How can I check?

Does anyone have any examples of Google lobbying against clearer legal documents? I would love to see this.

Yeah, exactly. I've used the mobile apps of both, and Rdio's has 9 confusing icons and requires you to learn a complicated mental model of your music library will work, whereas Spotify just has 'Playlists', 'Search', and 'What's New' - couldn't be simpler.

Could you all send a similar letter for the patent reforms?