It’s 2012 and we have big things underway! Plans for the wave tank and the new data collection tools are taking shape.
In the broader world of education, MIT’s new online learning initiative, MITx, is set to launch this year. Here’s a post from Rhett Allain at Wired with his take on what MITx means for university classes. What do you think it means for free-choice learning?
Here’s a fascinating piece from Scientific American by Larry Greenemeier. It concerns data-mining software developed by Harvard University and the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard. The software in question is a component of the Maximal Information-based Nonparametric Exploration (MINE) program.
“The software teases out relationships among data points (potentially millions of them) and measures the strength of these connections. As the researchers report in a paper appearing in the December 16 issue of the journal Science, most data-mining tools used today can either find correlations between data or determine how solid those connections are—few can do both.” [Link in original]
Greenemeier summarizes the results of the program’s initial runs on World Health Organization and Major League Baseball data. Check it out.