Revising Zipf’s law [From PNAS]

From the Abstract: “We demonstrate a substantial improvement on one of the most celebrated empirical laws in the study of language, Zipf’s 75-y-old theory that word length is primarily determined by frequency of use. In accord with rational theories of communication, we show across 10 languages that average information content is a much better predictor of word length than frequency. This indicates that human lexicons are efficiently structured for communication by taking into account interword statistical dependencies. Lexical systems result from an optimization of communicative pressures, coding meanings efficiently given the complex statistics of natural language use.”

[ HT to Paul Kedrosky ]

IBM Watson on Jeopardy – Scoreboard: Watson 2, Humans 0 [via CNN]

Update: For his thoughts on possible implications in the market for legal services, check out Larry Ribstein’s post “Lawyer’s in Jeopardy” over at Truth on the Market. In a related vein, check out today’s WSJ Is Your Job an Endangered Species? The subtitle reads: “Technology is eating jobs—and not just obvious ones like toll takers and phone operators. Lawyers and doctors are at risk as well.”

Academic Universe: University Instruction from Some of the World’s Top Scholars

I have been a huge fan of Academic Earth for quite some time. For those not familiar with the page, I wanted to highlight some of my favorite material from the site. Academic Earth features full length video for a number of useful/interesting courses. If you simply are interested in absorbing the content, it is a great way to learn. It is arguably better than site such as MIT Opencourseware as it has the full video (MIT Opencourseware often just has lecture notes).

Thomas Goetz: It’s Time to Redesign Medical Data [TEDMed]


Thomas Goetz is the executive editor of Wired and author of “The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine.  From the Talk Abstract “Your medical chart: it’s hard to access, impossible to read — and full of information that could make you healthier if you just knew how to use it. At TEDMED, Thomas Goetz looks at medical data, making a bold call to redesign it and get more insight from it.”

Modeling the Financial Crisis [ From Nature ]

This week’s issue of Nature offers two brief but meaningful articles on the financial crisis. Here are the abstracts:

Financial Systems: Ecology and Economics (By Neil Johnson & Thomas Lux): “In the run-up to the recent financial crisis, an increasingly elaborate set of financial instruments emerged, intended to optimize returns to individual institutions with seemingly minimal risk. Essentially no attention was given to their possible effects on the stability of the system as a whole. Drawing analogies with the dynamics of ecological food webs and with networks within which infectious diseases spread, we explore the interplay between complexity and stability in deliberately simplified models of financial networks. We suggest some policy lessons that can be drawn from such models, with the explicit aim of minimizing systemic risk.”

Systemic Risk in Banking Ecosystems (By Andrew G. Haldane & Robert M. May): “In the run-up to the recent financial crisis, an increasingly elaborate set of financial instruments emerged, intended to optimize returns to individual institutions with seemingly minimal risk. Essentially no attention was given to their possible effects on the stability of the system as a whole. Drawing analogies with the dynamics of ecological food webs and with networks within which infectious diseases spread, we explore the interplay between complexity and stability in deliberately simplified models of financial networks. We suggest some policy lessons that can be drawn from such models, with the explicit aim of minimizing systemic risk.”

 

Yesterday’s Fast is Today’s Slow – The 2011 Season Starts Today!

Well my Ducks did not quite get it done last night in the BCS National Championship Game. Despite the loss, I think that it is important to emphasize that innovation on a variety of fronts is responsible for bringing Oregon to the title game. Simply put, Oregon has redefined the game and there is no doubt that copycats will soon begin to follow their model. The Ducks still have one more big step to take but they will be one of the favorites in 2011 — that season begins today.

The AI Revolution Is On [ Via Wired Magazine ]

From the Full Article: “AI researchers began to devise a raft of new techniques that were decidedly not modeled on human intelligence. By using probability-based algorithms to derive meaning from huge amounts of data, researchers discovered that they didn’t need to teach a computer how to accomplish a task; they could just show it what people did and let the machine figure out how to emulate that behavior under similar circumstances. … They don’t possess anything like human intelligence and certainly couldn’t pass a Turing test. But they represent a new forefront in the field of artificial intelligence. Today’s AI doesn’t try to re-create the brain. Instead, it uses machine learning, massive data sets, sophisticated sensors, and clever algorithms to master discrete tasks. Examples can be found everywhere …”