Blogs

Tags > modeling

Nate Silver confuses cause and effect, ends up defending corruption

This piece originally appeared on Mathbabe. It’s republished with permission. I just finished reading Nate Silver’s newish book, The Signal and the Noise: Why so many predictions fail – but some don’t. The good news First off, let me say this: …

Using Python for Computer Vision

In this interview, Jan Erik Solem, author of the upcoming book "Programming Computer Vision with Python," describes the uses for some common operations, and choices programmers have.

Character-length restrictions, RPC, and choosing FriendFeed over Twitter

Database field-length silliness has haunted me throughout my career as an data/information architect, and I've never liked it. "VARCHAR(255)? What? Because in the lifetime of that data, which by the way you'd better be planning to exceed the lifetime of this miserable application, you're never going to need more than 255 characters?" ... So here comes Twitter with it's damned 140 characters.

Web 2.0 Expo Preview: Will Wright, Sims and Simulations

Will Wright has been the foundational genius behind a thirty year string of blockbuster games, from the early Raid on Bungeling Bay in 1984 to the first truly fun urban simulation, Sim City. From there he delved deeper into the lives of the individual inhabitants of those cities with the Sims, a game that let players actually shape how his simulated people interacted with one another (while making them increasingly life-like and sophisticated in their own actions). In 2008, he released Spore, where the simulations focused on the evolution of life in a massively parallel game system. Scheduled for June 2009, Wright will release the much awaited Sims 3, in which for the first time, the Sims can explore their world. Wright will be speaking on the Sims and games in general at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. O'Reilly editor Kurt Cagle caught up with Will Wright to ask a few questions.

Three Degrees of Conflagration: Dr. Andrew Weaver on Modeling Global Warming

Dr. Andrew Weaver may be one of the most famous people you've never heard of. Weaver, a professor at the University of Victoria's School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, is one of the world's leading experts on climate modeling. He was served as lead author for last year's ground-breaking report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and when the Discovery Channel needed someone to analyze the potential impact of their "Project Earth" geo-engineering schemes, they turned to Dr. Weaver for help. On the heels of the recent World Wildlife Federation report on vanishing sea ice, we thought it might be a good idea to chat with Dr. Weaver about the current state of the art in climate modeling, the political realities of effecting carbon reduction, and why certain proposed geoengineering ideas terrify him.

Document Design Matters

The classical approach to the data aspect of system design distinguishes conceptual, logical, and physical models. Models of each type or level are governed by metamodels that specify the kinds of concepts and constraints that can be used by each model; in most cases metamodels are accompanied by languages for describing models.