Imperative vs functional programming. It's a debate that goes back to the birth of high level languages---Fortran vs Lisp. In later years, it was retreaded as object-oriented vs function programming (OOP vs FP)---OOP having become the (massively) dominant software development paradigm. And, I'm a fully paid up member. I embraced Object Pascal via Delphi 1 on 1995 and have been on the train ever … [Read more...]
Assumptions can ruin your k-means clusters
Assumptions can ruin your k-means clusters Clustering is one of the most powerful and widely used of the machine learning techniques. It's very seductive. Throw some data into the algorithm and let it discover hitherto unknown relationships and patterns. k-means is the most popular of all the cluster algorithms. It's easy to understand---and therefore implement---so it's available in almost all … [Read more...]
The Forer effect
Psychologist Bertram Forer gave 39 of his students a personality test. Each was given a personalised profile based on their answers. Except they were all given the same profile...taken from an astrology book. When asked to assess how well it described them, on a 0-5 scale, the students reported an average of 4.3. Wikipedia describes the Forer effect as ...a common psychological phenomenon … [Read more...]
Faith in technology
"AI" has been confusing people for over a century. Nineteenth century British politicians demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of Charles Baggage's difference engine, leaving him to comment, On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly … [Read more...]
Digital transformation
Digital transformation. Yet another pretentious term that obscures more than it reveals. Every time it's uttered it's immediately followed by an attempt at a definition. My favourite by far is Unfucking your terrible use of computers. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the source. … [Read more...]