New Shows On Network TV

It seems like Hollywood is going stale with lackluster movie productions while the network TV is going strong with an array of variety drama depicting the many social interactions. A few shows to note:

Person of Interest
Trophy Wife
Mom
Back in the Game
The Blacklist
Mr Selfridge
The Michael J Fox Show

Web TV and sites like Netflix are ultimately the next trend for the future as more and more entertainment is becoming socially connected and internet is becoming the more intricate part of daily life for many.

Learning for Free

There are immense ways to learn online. However, at times, the options can be quite overwhelming if not dubious. Some options have arisen through university and publishing initiatives that are quite worthy of note. It seems online learning is an emerging growth market and with semantic web it can provide even more options. Virtual learning is on the rise to meet busy lives and to reach out globally. Some interesting learning sites are able to provide even full degrees through the online process. The following links are a few options that appear to be available from noteworthy institutions. Also, one of the more rather flexible and obvious choice is via youtube.

Online Learning

Machine Learning

Machine Learning is a branch of Artificial Intelligence which studies systems which are able to learn from a given set of data as examples. It can be split into two main strands supervised learning (classification) and unsupervised learning (clustering) and in some cases semi-supervised. Some algorithms don't fit into either category explicitly. For most applications learning algorithms need to be carefully tested against customized data for each specific context. Also, the choice of a learning algorithm is important as they all have merits and drawbacks. However, hybrid approaches are seen to generally work the best as they are able to reflect off each other in the reduction of error margins and increased accuracy of learning. Or, perhaps, one can head in the direction of deep learning. The following is a list of some useful books, tools, and free courses in the area.

Books:

An Introduction to Support Vector Machines

Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction

Bayesian Reasoning and Machine Learning

The Elements of Statistical Learning, Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction

Gaussian Processes for Machine Learning

Introduction to Machine Learning

Introduction to Machine Learning

Introduction to Machine Learning

Machine Learning

Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms

Pattern Classification

Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Machine Learning in Action

Machine Learning for Hackers

Data Mining: Practical Learning Tools and Techniques

Online Courses:

Coursera

Stanford ML

MIT Courseware

Free Tools/Libraries:
Factorie
Octave

Scikit-Learn

Orange

Weka

R

Mahout/Hadoop

GraphLab

Libsvm
Elefant
shogun

RapidMiner
Vowpal Wabbit
Encog
Pylearn2 (lots of Python ML related libraries out there)

....and more, check out mloss.org

Alternative Tools (Not Free)

Pentaho 

BigML

Precog

Skytree

Google Predictions API

Wise.io

Algorithms.io

....and others.

Repositories of Datasets:
kdnuggets

Journal/Conference Communities:
AAAI Topics
ACM SIGKDD/IR
AITopicsResearch
OpenAccess

E-Commerce and Subscriptions

E-Commerce is big business on the web with more and more software as a service options cropping up daily in a multitude of offerings and points of integration. It seems flexibility to integrate is core to business functionality and speed to delivery. Restful services are making strides towards building a more resourceful and accessible web. However, the web is still a very disenchanted place with a lot to be done in terms of linking and connecting concepts and things in a meaningful way. GoodRelations is a vocabulary that takes ontologies for E-Commerce a step further towards knowledge discovery and metarepresentation. 

Online subscription services are starting to make inroads towards a more barrier free integration for E-Commerce businesses with more flexible options for billing and transaction processing. One key aspect to note towards deciding on a integration provider is to always try to check their security policies and how PCI compliant are their services. A few key players that have sprung up with interesting options are below:

Stripe - very simple pricing model with no added fees making it cost-effective and easy to use
Zuora - providing added support for taxation, metrics, currencies and salesforce integration
Chargify - added benefits for coupons, free-trial periods, recurring/one-time transactions and refunds
Spreedly - payments platform with comprehensive services also provided with heroku add-on
Recurly - providing a full subscription commerce with analytics and a fast integration process
Braintree - easy to manage API with reasonable pricing with international payments support