Software Spots Key Community Participants

Researchers from Cornell and Microsoft did some interesting research on detecting key players in online communities.

Welser's group found that the most informative individuals – dubbed "answer people" – are also relatively taciturn, rarely participating in discussions heavily. They also tend to shy away from the "discussion artists" who dominate most threads.

Link (New Scientist)

National Geographic: Swarm Behavior

The classic magazine National Geographic is hosting an article about swarm behavior, ants in particular, and describe applications of swarm theory to human problems, such as that of business optimization.

Link

Jesus Action Figures

Got to love this: Jesus action figures. Hallelujah.

If you work in a cubicle office environment, you are going to love the cubicle actions figures - "The Cubes(TM) - In this office, you're the boss!".

Link: Jesus (From Digg)

Link: The Cubes (Thank you, Damien)

Digg: Are You Human?

When signing up for Digg, you get to ask yourself the question: Am I human? Well, are you?

Machine Learning and Data Mining Tutorials

Andrew Moore, a machine learning and data mining academic that has inspired me a lot, has put together a tutorial on key topics in his area. The topics have titles such as "Decision Trees", "Probability for Data Miners", "Bayesian Networks" and "Non-zero-sum Game Theory".

One important area that is left out is that of ensemble methods, bagging and boosting. Machinelearning.net has a list of references to good papers on that subject.

Link (Tutorial)

Link (Ensembles)