Maths Blogs

I just found a really cool list of mathematical blogs by academics on Hacker News. I apologize for the several week lull since my last post.

Programs I Use To Automate Stuff: I – Autohotkey

Autohotkey is an incredibly useful programmable hotkey utility for Windows. When you hear the term ‘hotkey’ you probably think of something like using ctrl + a to highlight text, or win + d to show your desktop. Now, true, these kinds of shortcuts are useful, and speed you up no end, but Autohotkey allows you to take the humble hotkey to a whole new level. Almost anything you can think of can be assigned to a hotkey. You could:

• Create simple programs to carry out repetitive tasks while you relax.
• Create a program to automate tedious game sections, or allow you to achieve a bragably high score.
• Reconfigure the buttons on programs that don’t have this functionality built in, to make life easier for yourself.
• Create your own personalised set of shortcuts to do the things you do daily. (You could press shift + e, say, to check all your email and social networking accounts).

Clearly I could go on. Because Autohotkey is somewhere between simple hotkey utility and powerful programming language, there is little limit to what you can do, whilst at the same time the learning curve isn’t very steep at all. Especially if you have any previous programming experience. Two final things, although I’m using it on Windows right now, I think you can also run it on Linux using WINE, and lastly, Autohotkey also enables you to create GUIs, so the world really is your oyster.

Go download it here.

Learn Maths Online

I have spoken to a lot of people who’d like to be able to improve their maths skills from home online, and have decided to try and create a pool of useful free online maths education resources. Here we go:

• MathTV.com – This site has lots of helpful short video lessons split into 4 main sections: basic maths, algebra, trigonometry and calculus. It also has a ‘textbook’ feature, essentially a sequence of videos for learning a given area. For example, an algebra ‘textbook’  is a series of progressive videos, which build on each other and attempt to slowly increase your algebraic ability.
• MathForum.org – Ask Dr Math on The Math Forum has a large archive of educational maths materials. For example, doing a quick search for “fractions” led me to a great “Converting Fractions, Decimals, and Percents” explanation.
• That Quiz – Although this site isn’t solely for maths, (it has small amounts of vocabulary, geography and science educational material too), it does mainly focus on maths, and provides good interactive tests for 20 basic maths topics.
• Jimmy R’s Speed Math Trainer – This site allows you to give your mental arithmetic skills a serious boost. Perhaps the main attraction is the Speed Maths flash application, which manages to make mental arithmetic strangely addictive. There is also a list of tips and tricks for increasing the speed and complexity of mental calculations you can perform.
• Standard Google Plug – You probably hear it about eighteen times a day, and you certainly already know, but Google is great for finding stuff. Maths resources are no exception, and if you know what you want to learn you can make your search terms pretty specific. Just try searching for something like ‘fraction tutorials’ or ‘free online algebra lessons’ and I’m sure you’ll find something. If you find anything really good, let me know.

This list is more than likely work in progress. Hope it’s helpful.

Two Lists of Recommended Computer Science Papers

Very short post, just two links to loads of recommended computer science papers:

• Wikipedia’s “List of important publications in computer science”
• List of papers recommended by people on Reddit.

Web Directory Searches For Artificial Intelligence

Today I had a look at some online directories for artificial intelligence resources and information, here are the results:

• dmoz – hand sorted directory containing over 1400 links.
• Google directory – The A.I. section from the Google directory, with over 1600 links.
• Librarian’s Internet Index – “Websites you can trust”, has a massive 8 links, although each one is selected, described and organised by a team of librarians, which is bragable.
• Yahoo directory – The A.I.section from the Yahoo directory, with 173 links.
• All the internet – More artificial intelligence links.
• TekGuide – “The Internet’s IT directory.” Seems to have a good selection of links.
• internet-web-directory – over 400 links.

I also came across this Artificial Intellegence on the Internet PDF, and as a result, AIResources, both created by Marcus P. Zillman, and both containing loads of useful resources.

Hopefully you will find this resource pool useful. I guess it might function as a fairly good list of web directories too. As usual, if there is anything that you think I should add to the list, let me know in the comments.

10 Free Online Document Sources

7 high quality free online  document sources / resources:

• wePapers – Specifically for students, and as a result, the site features mainly academic papers.
• Scribd – Millions of documents including books, maps and sheet music spanning thousands of topics.
• Issuu – “Issuu turns your documents into beautiful online publications.” Tons of people have used this site, so now it’s also a fantastic document resource.
• Calaméo – Another online publication creation utility, again with a reasonable number of searchable past publications.
• Docstoc – “Search over 5 million public documents.” Lots of documents, mainly professional / legal etc.
• Slashdoc – “Slashdoc is essentially a generic content submission system.” the site currently has over 62,000 documents.
• Yudu – Aesthetically pleasing site that has loads of magazines and generally image heavy documents.

3 other sites worth checking out:

• slideshare – Specialises in PowerPoint presentation sharing, allows adding of audio to create ‘webinars’.
• edocr – Has around 3,000 mainly business orientated documents.
• wowio – Looks like it could be good, but currently I can’t seem to get this to work.

If I have missed anything out that you think I should include, please let me know in the comments section, and if you discover any especially interesting documents, you could let me know about those too.

Free Stanford Engineering Courses

“For the first time in its history, Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world.” It just so happens that three of the courses currently available are on areas of artificial intelligence:

• Introduction to Robotics
• Natural Language Processing
• Machine Learning

There is lots of other good stuff as well, for example I have been watching a great course on Linear Dynamical Systems. Each of the courses is a set of 20 75 minute lectures (that’s a total of 25 hours per course), so there is a LOT of material here. All of the lectures I have watched so far have been well presented, and expertly explained, so this really is a great source of information. Check out the main page here.

This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics

This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics is a not quite weekly column on mathematical physics by John Baez. It is currently on week 276, and so there’s a massive back catalogue of interesting articles available to read. If you are not overly into maths and/or physics then a) you should be, and b) you can be, as his site has a guide for those who want to know how to learn maths and physics. If you would rather turn your computer off and throw it out the window than learn any maths, you can still check out John’s fun stuff page, which contains some interesting material about neither maths nor physics.

If you are still not satisfied, John Baez has also produced the crackpot index, “A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics” which is somewhere inbetween the two extreams.

Video Lecture Search Engine

A little while ago I attempted to use the ‘custom search engine’ feature on Google to create a tool specifically for finding free on-line talks and lectures, focusing mainly on academic subjects. It’s ‘kind of works’ at the moment, and currently searches around 30 sites. Here’s the link:

I will try to improve it over the next few days or so; refining and expanding the sites it searches etc. In the mean time, search away!

Also, I might try to compile some kind of list of other good custom search engines out there, and then post that up here too, so if you know any, let me know.

Videolectures.net

I recently discovered videolectures.net, a site which provides access to an exceptional number of very high quality video lectures, talks and discussions. The site has content on a huge range of topics, but has an especially large amount of videos relating to computer science. I definitely recommend that you check it out, and although I’m sure you will be able do find loads of videos of particular interest to you, I can currently personally recommend:

Why only Atheists can truly believe? – Professor Slavoj Zizek  (runtime: 90 minutes) (T?)