Statistical Mechanics and Personal Stories (On the Same Page!) Yikes! It’s Thursday morning already. I haven’t written to you for three weeks. That’s long enough that I have to pause and search my memory for my username to get into the website. Thanksgiving was lovely. The Thursday after that was grading, all day – and for several days before and after. By now, I (and most of you) have had a few days of recovery, from what has been…
Making Sense: Extracting Meaning from Text by Matching Terms and Entities to Ontologies and Concepts Text analytics is the means by which computer algorithms can extract meaning and useful insights from raw text sources. This can have enormous impact in realms such as marketing, business intelligence, and political campaigns. However, text analytics is one of the toughest challenges in predictive analytics. The reason why this is so hard? It’s because – when done right – text analytics must effectively connect…
GPUs, CPUs, MIPS, and Brain-Based Computation Quick links to useful diagrams: Michael Galloy has produced a good chart showing increase in GPU vs CPU processing over this past decade; nicely continues the line of thought about nonlinear increases in processing power. Look at: http://michaelgalloy.com/2013/06/11/cpu-vs-gpu-performance.html See also post by Karl Rupp: http://www.karlrupp.net/2013/06/cpu-gpu-and-mic-hardware-characteristics-over-time/ Also, this post by NVIDIA: http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter29.html For detailed discussion (including appropriate algorithms/methods), but NOT figures, see: http://pcl.intel-research.net/publications/isca319-lee.pdf Debunking the 100X GPU vs. CPU Myth: An Evaluation of Throughput Computing…
Correspondence Between Free Energy, Belief Propagation, and Markov Random Field Models As a slight digression from previous posts – re-reading the paper by Yedidia et al. on this morning on Understanding Belief Propagation and its Generalizations – which explains the close connection between Belief Propagation (BP) methods and the Bethe approximation (a more generalized version of the simple bistate Ising model that I’ve been using) in statistical thermodynamics. The important point that Yedidia et al. make is that their work…
Metastable States – the Meltdown Precursors I’ve just read a recent column by JL, one of the editors from Taipan Daily. He states, in his column “There Will Be Blood in Europe”: Stepping back a bit: What is so frightening right now, not just in Europe but China and America and Japan too, is the presence of fraud-fueled “Lehman 2.0” catalysts threatening to explode. One could say that the 2008 financial crisis was the mother of all wake-up calls. But…
Modeling Nonlinear Phenomena – What is “X”? Many of us grew up hating word problems in algebra. (Some of us found them interesting, sometimes easy, and sometimes fun. We were the minority.) For most of us, even if we understood the mathematical formulas, there was a big “gap” in our understanding and intuition when it came to applying the formulas to some real-world situation. In the problem, we’d be given a set of statements, and then told to find “something.”…
The Origin of Wealth – and Phase Transitions in Complex, Nonlinear Systems Once again, after a nearly two-year hiatus (off by only a week from my first posting on this in May of 2010), I’m getting back to one of my great passions in life – emergent behavior in complex, adaptive systems. And I’m once again starting a discussion/blog-theme referencing Eric Beinhocker’s work, The Origin of Wealth. Since this book was originally published (in 2006), we’ve seen an ongoing series…
Phase Spaces: Mapping Complex Systems I’ve spent the day on cloud computing. Yes, there will be a course on it at GMU this Fall of 2010. And cloud computing is simply a technology; a means of getting stuff done. In and of itself, I think there are more exciting things in the world — such as phase spaces. One of the classic nonlinear systems is the Ising spin glass model. This system is composed of only two kind of particles;…
Over the last few months, questions of not only wealth and finances, but the underpinnings of our entire financial structure, have become paramount in many of our minds. We — that usually means you and me — and right now means the world collectively — have largely misunderstood the world’s financial structure over recent years. (Those who HAVE accurately understood are not only more secure, but substantially richer by now.) Most of us are current on “what went wrong.” Most…