In the novel Death's End author Liu Cixin describes the difficulty of storing information that will last for a hundred million years. USB sticks and solid state drives would fail after a few decades at most - a CD not much longer. Papyrus and paper would rot or degrade after a fe … | Continue reading
One of the ways I like to look at Deep Neural Networks is as a series of filters. A filter removes some unwanted components from a signal by blocking its passage - a bit like a coffee paper prevents grinds from entering the final steaming morning cup of Java. ☕ To consider why th … | Continue reading
One of the most bizarre and archaic aspects of the Australian electoral system is ballot paper ordering. From the AEC website: The weaknesses of this system are obvious. In particular a small but significant proportion of the electorate chooses to vote 'down the line'. Known as a … | Continue reading
The entire map of Tamriel has been recreated using a laser cutter. | Continue reading
The CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 (Canadian Institute For Advanced Research) are two classic datasets for training and testing image recognition algorithms. They involve labelled images in 10 and 100 categories respectively, subsets of the 80 Million Tiny Images dataset. The Each of th … | Continue reading
On Friday I was invited to give a short presentation to UN Youth Australia on getting graduate positions. The slides are posted below. One point in particular is worth highlighting as it is relevant for many applicants undertaking interviews - the importance of hedging bets by pl … | Continue reading
Like many, I was disappointed with the Australian Government's decision to double tuition fees for students taking courses in humanities, including philosophy, international relations, and history. Maths, science, and language students will have their fees halved in the the same … | Continue reading
In January I attended a course on infectious disease modelling as part of the AMSI Summer School. The rapid spread of COVID-19 made this surprisingly timely. By the middle of the course only 500 infected individuals had been identified, all in mainland China. As of 1 Mar 2020, th … | Continue reading