tdpeek3

Lab 10

2007-04-13T12:34:00.000-05:00

Flow Chart

Blog Post: Also comment on your blog what is the difference between the Hartley and Shannon measures of information and how do they measure information.

"Shannon's method factors in probability, Hartley's does not. Hartley takes log base 2 of all the numbers. Shannon's method is more efficient than Hartley's because of this. As far as how they measure information; the amount of uncertainty associated with a set of alternatives is measured by the amount of information needed to remove the uncertainty "

Question 1:

In which professor's class (Matic, Chruchil, and Mussolini) is the final grade more uncertain? Which one is more certain?

"It is less certain in Matic's and it is more certain in Mussolini's!"

Question 2:

Does the Shannon entropy help in deciding which of the three courses to take? How?

"It could help if you know the grade distribution. If there is more variability than it is possible that there is a higher curve."

Lab9: Linear Regression

2007-03-30T12:28:00.000-05:00

In this lab I did not really learn that much, rather just reinforced things that i had already learned.

Some of these thigns being dependent and indepedent variables, how to create charts with data within excel, how to use the data analysis toolpak to save time by automatically analyzing data instead of putting in all of the formulas manually and creating a chart. Some important functions used in this lab were SUM and COUNT. Another important time saving feature in Excel is the drag down option. The dragdown option will apply formulas to an entire row/column of cells. This saves times by not having to manually type in the formuals.

I feel that knowing how to use Excel efficiently is important because it is a powerful tool that can used to easily manipulate nearly any type of digital data. Analyzing data is important to nearly every type of business and organization, especially sales and marketing. For example, in the above chart created during this lab, COMPANY X could use this information to know how many pairs of a certain size shoe to manufacture.

Lab 8: Intro to Statistical Analysis using Excel

2007-03-29T11:27:00.000-05:00

Histogram

This lab was very entertaining. Oh, how I love M$ Excel...

LAB 7: Truth Tables & Logic

2007-03-09T21:33:00.000-05:00

This is the Simple Circuit Simulation:

This is the set of Truth Tables for the above Simulation:

This simulation gives a 1 when A = B. When A =/ B then it displays a zero. As the above table shows.

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This is the De Morgans Law Simulation:

This is the Truth Table for De Morgan's Law Simulation:

This shows that De Morgan's Law is true since both of the Examples equal each other when running the same simulation!

Lab 6: Decimal Conversion

2007-02-16T15:24:00.000-05:00

The binary number 110010101 is 405 in decimal.

Here is how you do it:

Solution!

The decimal number 529 is 1000010001.

Here is how you do it:

Solution!

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The Number System
===================

Difference between positional and non positional number system is as follows:

Positional:
The value of each digit is determined by its position. Example: 382 is different from 283. The lowest place value is the rightmost position, and each successive position to the left has a higher place value.

Non Positional:
The value of each digit is not affected by its position, i.e. numbers represented by pictures.

(pictures made by me)

Lab 5: Global Swarming / Unix Commands

2007-02-16T12:44:00.000-05:00

Chapter 6 of Andy Clark's book, "Natural-Born Cyborgs", explains how nearly everything we do online is tracked and recorded for data mining purposes. This is something that we do not often consider while browsing webpages, reading online journals, or making purchases from Amazon.com. I feel that it is important for us, users of the internet, to be able to use what others have done online and build off of it. At the same time i feel that we should offer anonymity if requested.

I enjoyed Andy's comparison slugs behavior while traveling to humans while online. I thought that it perfectly described our, everyone's, actions on the internet. I feel that using the data from everyones use on the internet to help aid other online users is a very beneficial and smart way of using the internet. I remember how brilliant it was when i first discovered Amazon's unique way of advertising items to its users. The "Customers who bought this item also bought" feature is an amazing way to find and purchase things that you may not even know exsited before. For example, I purchased a CD from Amazon a few years back titled, "Ágætis Byrjun" by Sigur Rós, and noticed that customers who bought that CD also purchased a music from a band known as Mum. I had never heard of this band until i decided to buy the CD from Amazon.com. I later ended up listening to a few of their songs on Amazon and decided to buy that CD as well. I think that, from a business standpoint, this idea works very well because Amazon will sell, as we can see in my example, more products by advertising to their customers likings, instead of from the usual banner advertisements that are meant for general audiences. I think that this adds benefits to the customers as well by bringing them products that they may or may not have known about, we can also see this from my example.

My only problem with the idea of mining our data is when it comes to invading individuals rights. I do not feel that EVERYTHING that we do should be recorded for mining purposes, especially when users may not know that what they are doing is being recorded. If someone wanted to browse or purchase itmes online anonymously, i feel that they should have that right. I think that businesses that use the data mining technique should have some sort of caveat alerting the user that what they are doing is being monitored.

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UNIX COMMANDS
lab5
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Friday in lab I learned how to use steel. A few important commands that I used during my lab were followed by their MSDOS (which it turns out many are the same) counterpart are:

ls----------------------dir

mkdir-----------------mkdir

rmdir-----------------rmdir

cal-------------------(have not found one as of now, only thing that is close is TIME & DATE)

cd--------------------cd & cd..

clear------------------cls

exit--------------------exit

"Modeling the World"

2007-02-09T13:16:00.000-05:00

Lab 4

"Modeling the World" was a good read. I find it very interesting to view the world in a way, very similar to the movie "Pi", that nearly everything around you can, and sometimes should, be modeled. This is something that seems so obvious but most people dont think of. I think that it is important to model the world around us because it makes us more aware of our surroundings and gives us the ability to find constants within our world. These constants can be used to predict what will happen in our environment, for example, a very basic view of this could be when dropping a rock it will fall to the ground. This is known as the law of gravity. Since we know that gravity will pull the rock to the earth, we can predict with almost 100% certainty that when dropping a rock it will fall to the ground. Although this is a very basic example it shows how modeling can help us better understand our surroundings.

My thoughts: I have always wondered how possible it would be model our world completely. Since nearly everything in our world can be modeled, that is, interpreted by numbers along with a corresponding equation, we could in theory model our world. If this were possible then predicting the future could, in fact, be very possible. To go about this one would need to model every aspect of our environment, this would include all people, plants, animals, air, and most importantly the earth and space. Now, not only would we need to model EVERYTHING we would also need to model how everything REACTS in relationship with EVERYTHING, for example how a bug would interact with a specific tree, say a tulip tree, versus another tree, a redwood tree. However, these two things are not all we would need to predict the future of the earth. If we could in fact model everything in relationship to everything else we would still need to factor in time, and not just any time but the present time. This would require some type of technology that could map everything on earth all at a specific time, for example, the location of EVERYTHING on Jan 1, 20XX.

Review: To model our earth we would need to do the following;

1. Model everything, humans, animals, air, earth, space, etc.

2. Model the relationship of everything with everything, bug with tree example.

3. Model the above with respect to time

4. Map everything in the world at a specific time, (not sure how we could do this, freeze time?)

5. Put all of these variables and equations into an environment that could have the ability to model, and adapt with change.

Long story short, this will not be happening any time soon.

Lab 2: "Technologies to Bond with"

2007-01-19T14:15:00.000-05:00

Lab 2

"Technologies to Bond with", explained how existing technologies are transparent, that is we as the user do not even realize their existance, we simply use them to solve our problems. For example, the author talked about how a pen and paper are used by a writer to create his or her stories. The author does not see the pen and paper as a technology, they use it transparently with their thoughts to create the stories. The author told of many new technologies that are currently in development that will be used as transparent technologies.

One example of a new technology in development was a set of glasses that would display digital information in conjunction with the real world. This device could be used when building complicated machinery; the device would display the instructions for these complicated procedures.

Infoport

Library of Babel

2007-01-12T13:47:00.000-05:00

The library of Babel is an interesting yet difficult read. The Library of Babel is said to hold every book every published ever. It is a plethora of knowledge. The only problem is that this knowledge, or information, is written in an undecipherable language. Many scholars have spent their entire lives trying to figure out the mysteries of the Library. The story ends with the author expressing his wishes of someone, somewhere during sometime to unlock the secret of this library.

Infoport

I101

2007-01-12T13:35:00.000-05:00

This is my first blog.......wow...........