FM Waves

Here I leave a link to one of the blogs I follow. The post below is from Javier Llinares’ governance.

    http://www.javierllinares.es/?p=518

Here, Javier tells us about one of his friends gatherings, where one of his old fellows suggests he’s an artists. Why?: because he is applying "his art" to increase the performance of the warehousing unit he works in. That’s OR mate!.

Funny I never thought of it as an art, but most probably because I’ve never thought of me as an artist neither. However, let’s have a thorough read to these excerpts from Wikipedia:

_"Art refers to a diverse range of human activities and artifacts, and may be used to cover all or any of the arts, including music, literature and other forms."

        Not so clear.

_"Traditionally the term art was used to refer to any skill or mastery…"

       Probably approaching to the concept.

_"From a more anthropological perspective, art is often a way of passing ideas and concepts on to later generations in a (somewhat) universal language."

       Maybe yes, maybe not.

However, for definite, I stick to the artist definition by Princeton University’s Wordnet 1.7.1:

A person whose creative work shows sensitivity and imagination.

Some of us have been commenting on our posts about Numb3rs getting excited because of the nature of the series, a mathematician that uses their knowledge to solve criminal cases. Well, we’ll be advocating now for another TV series OR-er that has been neglected over the last years: Dr House (yes, he’s a Dr rather than Charlie’s PhD).

Just let me know your comments, since I’m considering House as a good example of soft O.R. application.

While I’m trying to juggle around with the data set offered by Netflix for the quest of improving their Cinematch algorithm I’m in my own quest for getting the theory behind the real model, the structure that resides behind those 2GB of user and movie ids, dates and so on.

Years ago I co-authored a paper about tastes and preferences, so I liked to carry on with this research, in order to give light to the matter (i.e. 40 movie features can be resumed in just one, “the rating”; people’s ratings are inconsistent; blah blah blah); by the way, it’s because, at the end of the day, ratings are just a set of preferences (ordinal, transitive, reflexive, but are they complete?). This doesn’t mean I’ll stop researching through machine learning, but that I’m opening two fronts.

For those fighting along my side, I’d recommend the following readings:

_Varian, H. (1992). Microeconomic Analysis. W. W. Norton & Company; 3rd edition.

                 Chapters: 7 (Utility Maximization), 8 (Choice), 19 (Time).

_Rabin, M. (1998). “Psychology and Economics”. Journal of Economic Literature, Vol.XXXVI, pp.11-46.

_Rieskamp et al. (2006). “Extending the Bounds of Rationality: Evidence and Theories of Preferential Choice”. Journal of Economic Literature, Vol.XLIV, pp.631-661.

It doesn’t mean these articles are going to help solve the problem, however are going to help understand why when we do this this and that, the result is such a given RSME.

If you’re an A+ dummy (aka almost-not-a-dummy) you can try with this software (Varozhka), created by Eugene Rymski, to play around with the Netflix Prize dataset.

Brilliant!

Mr Smith, XVIII century’s great grand-father of modern economics, devised the power of the market as the main driver (anyone for the “invisible hand”?). As in “A Beautiful Mind” we can hear: “every man for himself”, because the own interest will tend to get the main group’s interest. Following Mr Nash’s intervention, in fact, prior group negotiation is needed in order to obtain individual interest (this is the basis for collaborative games which it was thought to be the foundations for cutting edge game theory, however, later on, John Nash demonstrated that it really was non-collaborative ones). Let’s watch it: