Do I hate her for this or do I love her for this?
Students,
For a variety of reasons I’ve decided to cancel class Tuesday Nov 24. Since I don’t want you to have to come in just to hand HW 10, this will be due Dec 1 in class. To do part of problem 2 in HW11 you need to know about support vector machines which is what I’ll cover on Dec 1. So you may hand in HW11 Dec 3 in class. If you want to get it done early, you can look ahead at my example in the notes. The suggested library is “e1071”. I understand that there now are 2 other options (svmpath and kernlab) as well.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Kathryn
Addendum:
Definitely love her no matter what. She’s writing recs for me!
The How and The Why
Min had a super amazingly correct analogy for undergrad and grad school. It went like this: “Undergrad is like point estimation, and graduate school is like hypothesis testing.”
It’s really true. We figure out what we are interested in and we really put that interest to the test in graduate school. Rand idealized internal motivation as the holy in man so, though I’m a skeptical analyst of her philosophies, I’ve been assessing why I am so anxious to understand things and why it brings me so much satisfaction. I suppose it must be because I find reflections of the things I learn in formal lectures in my day to day life. The concept of classification risk becomes a parallel to my accuracy in determining good or bad and friend or foe. My training data is my past history. So on and so forth.
I didn’t realize how much of the “why” of things is left out in undergraduate classes, even if the “how” is drilled into us. Though this makes sense (time constraints, limited teachers, varying ranges of student understanding and skill level, etc), I find it to be a tragic practicality. If I could set things up differently, I would do undergrad a single class at a time and learn everything in a more rigorous and complete manner. But our lifespans don’t stretch into infinity, and there’s just so much to know before contribution is possible.
So here I float. Because I want to be a thinker and a doer, both.
Hoarding textbooks, absorbing. Making statistical magic with my hand-waving. (For now.)
Welcome to my world. (Magic!)
Such a good night! Sleeping contentedly.
Photo: November 2009
She is so fucking amazing. In-fucking-credible.
Time After Time - Cyndi Lauper
Classic 80’s.
It goes like this:
Leaving is easy, staying is harder.
Staying is easy, leaving is harder.
Photos: July 2009
The prodigal son and his brother.
Photo: August 2009
