2011年3月18日 星期五

Simon 的 "自學"數學方式 vs Reasoning Mind

這份數學學習的報導 讓我想起 中國實驗過的 根據Simon 的 "自學"方式來自己做練習
從其中來學數學 (教師不教 只當輔導員)

WEB-BASED RUSSIAN MATH CURRICULUM SHOWS POSITIVE RESULTS
Reasoning Mind is the brainchild of Alex Khachatryan, a Russian mathematician and scientist who created Reasoning Mind in 2002 after finding his son’s math education disappointing when the family immigrated to the United States. With the help of others, Khachatryan adapted a pencil-and-paper Russian math curriculum into an interactive Web-based program for American students. The program, which starts introducing some algebra and geometry concepts as early as 2nd grade, is designed to teach students in ways that the best teachers teach: adjusting content based on how students respond to the material in real time, and building on knowledge from the previous year’s studies. “To really learn math, it’s not enough to solve simple, routine problems,” Khachatryan says. “The reason why Reasoning Mind works so well,” he adds, “is that it brings together several important things: nonstandard problems to develop thinking skills, lots of interaction between students, individual attention from the teacher, and a solid, coherent curriculum.” The article is in Education Week’s Technology Counts.

2011年3月15日 星期二

Models of Man: Social and Rational (Herbert A. Simon)

Models of Man: Social and Rational (Herbert A. Simon) 以前政治大學公企中心等的圖書館有藏

此書是Herbert A. Simon重要的論文集 (包括 satisficing 準則的探討等等)...

很不幸的是 某社會學家後來也用此當書名 Herbert A. Simon當然曉得此人此事
不過他與我通信的當時已不記得該書之要點

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Conflict Research Consortium BOOK SUMMARY

Models of Man: Social and Rational

by

Herbert A. Simon

Citation:

Herbert A. Simon. Models of Man: Social and Rational. New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1957, 279 pp.


This book summary written by: Conflict Research Consortium Staff.

Models of Man: Social and Rational is, according to the author, a collection of mathematical essays on rational human behaviour in a social setting. The work employs mathematical formulae in support of the authors assertions regarding human behaviour.

Models of Man: Social and Rational will be of interest to those who desire an understanding of the human component of environmental problems and solutions. Simon divides his essays into four sections, each dealing with an overarching topic. The first part is concerned with causation and influence relationships. The author offers a philosophical discussion of the causal relation and examines; causal ordering and identifiability, and spurious correlations. He concludes the first section with notes on the observation and measurement of political power and the bandwagon and under-dog effects of election predictions.

The second section of the book addresses social processes. It begins with the presentation of a formal theory of interaction in social groups. This section considers the mechanisms involved in pressures both; toward uniformity and upon deviate members. The section is concluded with an examination of skew distribution functions. The brief third section is devoted to motivation which is comprised of two essays. The first of these is a comparison of organisation theories. The second essay is a formal theory of the employment relation.

The final section of the book concerns rationality and administrative decision-making. The first three essays offer an economic perspective while the last two offer a psychological perspective. In the former category is the first essay which examines productivity and the urban/rural population balance. The author discusses the application of servomechanism theor to production control. The final essay from an economic perspective is a behaviour model of rational choice. The last essay save one examines rational choice and the structure of the environment. The final essay is a comparison of game theory and learning theory.

Models of Man: Social and Rational combines multiple perspectives, primarily philosophical, economic and psychological, to create a model for rational human behaviour in a social setting.

2011年3月14日 星期一

Another Win for Artificial Intelligence: the Turing Award

沒有什麼恰當的好文張 此篇權當先鋒



a banner year or so
March 9, 2011, 10:00 pm

Another Win for Artificial Intelligence: the Turing Award

Leslie G. Valiant, the winner of the 2010 Turing Award. Leslie G. Valiant, the winner of the 2010 Turing Award.

It’s been a banner year or so for artificial intelligence, from the recent triumph of I.B.M.’s Jeopardy-winning supercomputer to a wave of news coverage of the field, like the “Smarter Than You Think” series in The Times, but also coverage elsewhere, including The Atlantic’s March cover story.

So perhaps it is hardly surprising that the 2010 Turing Award, announced on Wednesday, went to Leslie G. Valiant, a Harvard professor whose work laid the theoretical foundations for machine learning. The Turing Award, sometimes called the Nobel of computer science, tends to highlight the two sides of computing — the here-and-now impact of the technology, and its deep roots in research.

Much of Mr. Valiant’s pioneering research in machine learning was done in the 1980s. “He certainly could have gotten the award a decade ago, but this was his moment,” observed Jonathan Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University.

In machine learning, the computer scans vast stores of data, uncovers patterns and generates rules for predicting results with increasing accuracy. Machine learning is a vital computing ingredient in modern applications like spam filters, Internet search, speech recognition and computer vision.

The prize, named for Alan Turing, the British mathematician and World War II code breaker, carries a prize of $250,000. It is underwritten by Intel and Google, and administered by the Association for Computing Machinery..

Here is a list of the award winners, dating to 1966, and their citations.