Writing

Data science
Organising knowledge
Startups
Dreaming about the future
Recommendation engines
Brain-scanning
My favourite findings from psychology
On writing and thinking
Philosophy
Software/technical recommendations
Misc
AI & analogy-making
...

Author of the Making data mistakes newsletter, and co-host of the Data Dig podcast.

Data science

See: data science posts on Making Data Mistakes.

Organising knowledge

A long time ago, I wrote my own note-taking software. This got me thinking a lot about how we organise knowledge on computers.

We want to tag things, and for those tags to have their own hierarchy. (also)
Wouldn't it be great if our filesystem was tag-based?
Wikis should automatically create links for you as you type.
How documentation software should work.

Startups

Co-founding Memrise was a really rich experience, and threw up a host of ideas. I also depended heavily on others with more experience - here are some pointers.

Sometimes the simplest ways of soliciting feedback from users work best.
Useful reading if you're thinking about a startup.
Paul Graham, Joel Spolsky and Steve Yegge and the Law of Increasing Returns (2006)

Dreaming about the future

How publishing your writing on the internet should work.
An alarm for space instead of time - tell me when I get somewhere, instead of somewhen.
Using space to help us learn.
Meaningful employment through Mechanical Turk.
How can your iPhone make you even more entertaining and interesting than you already are?

Recommendation engines

Recommendation engines will fuel consumption.
Discover what's going to be popular next year by crowd-sourcing canaries in the coalmine.

Brain-scanning

I spent much of my PhD working on algorithms for making sense of gigabytes of brain data from fMRI scanners.

This is what Multi-variate Pattern Analysis (MVPA) algorithms are for.
How to beat an fMRI lie-detector. [they don't exist yet, but they probably will]
The DARPA competition to read minds with fMRI

My favourite findings from psychology

Luck is an attitude.

On writing and thinking

Philosophy

What I think I learned from being a philosophy undergraduate.
Understanding why you disagree philosophically is a bit like debugging a computer program.
Is a naturalistic account of reason compatible with its objectivity? - undergraduate philosophy thesis (notes)
Platonic dialogue on whether to take the red pill or the blue pill.

Software/technical recommendations

Setting up your own domain name and website (2010).
iPhone app recommendations (2011).
Daisy Disk - where has all my disk space gone? [Mac]

Misc

When I am famous, I will decline interviews.
My two favourite music videos of all time

AI & analogy-making

Learning by analogy - making Copycat curious - treatise for the Curious machines class on possible future directions for Hofstadter et al.'s Copycat family
Causes & clauses and The Model Six - for Marvin Minsky's class, 'Society of Mind', written with Stephen Larson

...

see also: miscellany; old stuff