Long-form notes on AI systems, therapy, and the places they meet.
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It’s been almost 10 years since I published my post on PCA 4 Dummies – by far the most popular entry on this blog. It’s is pretty much dormant here these days, but for old time’s sake I thought it’d be nice to dust off the cobwebs and revisit this topic from a different perspective. […]
‘The periphery of the circle of science has an infinite number of points, and while there is no telling how this circle can ever be completely measured, the noble person, before the middle of his life, inevitably comes into contact with those extreme points of the periphery where he stares at the inexplicable. When he […]
What is computer vision? Where has it come from? 20 years ago only a few esoteric Engineers were working on it, but now mass-market products like the Microsoft Kinect, Google’s driverless cars and facial recognition systems are using computer vision in a fast, cheap and effective way. What happened? One reason is that computer vision […]
I have recently delved into the world of cooking. But as an Engineer simply following recipes doesn’t quite fill my appetite for culinary knowledge. What happens to food when it’s cooking? Why does a steak need to rest? What happens when something is ‘aged’? Most people want to learn how to make a good meal […]
It seems like the quickest way to make a billion dollars at the moment is to create a successful internet platform. Companies like Facebook, eBay, Airbnb, Twitter and Paypal are platforms that have gone from obscurity to internet giants in a matter of years. So what are these platforms and how are they making so […]
Wavelets have recently migrated from Maths to Engineering, with Information Engineers starting to explore the potential of this field in signal processing, data compression and noise reduction. What’s interesting about wavelets is that they are starting to undermine a staple mathematical technique in Engineering: the Fourier Transform. In doing this they are opening up a […]
Fractal geometry is a field of maths born in the 1970’s and mainly developed by Benoit Mandelbrot. If you’ve already heard of fractals, you’ve probably seen the picture below. It’s called the Mandelbrot Set and is an example of a fractal shape. The geometry that you learnt in school was about how to make shapes; fractal […]
(I recently wrote a new post that you may also find interesting called Principal Component Analysis 4 Philosophers) Having been in the social sciences for a couple of weeks it seems like a large amount of quantitative analysis relies on Principal Component Analysis (PCA). This is usually referred to in tandem with eigenvalues, eigenvectors and […]
As part of a job application last month I wrote a draft blog post about DNA legislation. I thought I would put it here for posterity’s sake: Last month the United States Supreme Court made a ruling that was in direct opposition to the European Court of Human Rights. The ruling, bought by the case […]
Data compression is used everywhere. Mp3, mp4, rar, zip, jpg and png files (along with many others) all use compressed data. Without data compression a 3 minute song would be over 100Mb and a 10 minute video would easily be over 1Gb. Data compression condenses large files into much smaller ones. It does this by […]
Ever wondered how an Anti Aircraft Missile works? A plane can move at different speeds and altitudes, so how do you know when to fire your missile? Well you need to know two things: where the aircraft is now and where it will be a short time in the future. The reason you need to […]
In the last few years ‘Big Data’ and ‘Data Mining’ have become the buzzwords of the tech industry. It’s how Facebook knows what adverts to show you, it’s how iPhones correct your typing and, apparently, how the NSA decides whether you are a terrorist. But what do these buzzwords actually mean? What are computers doing […]
Is a lemonade stand actually a good way to make money? As a rookie entrepreneur I have recently been trying to think of viable business ideas, but that is easier said than done. Yesterday it was beautiful so I decided to go to Clapham Common in London to clear my head and think of new ideas. […]