This page organizes my comments about the book, the lecture, and anything else. It's primary purpose is to highlight concepts that I feel are important and worth pointing out. I hope its helpful as a study tool. Check back frequently, because I hope to update it based on your comments. Also, when there are computed demos or supporting reading materials you might find helpful, I'll list them here.
DEMOS:
Some of the links under the "Comments" column of the outline contain interactive
games and demos. Most of these (okay, all of them) exist at sites
outside UCLA, and so you'll have to sometimes figure out how to use them.
But for the most part they are self explanatory, and sometimes even fun!
You'll need a "java enhanced browser", which is standard with most Netscape
or Microsoft browsers that you'll find on campus, and probably was automatically
set up on your computer at home, if you have bought one in the last two
years. I'll warn you that they run a little slow, so you might want
to save them for a time when you're on campus and can run them with a direct
internet connection. But play around with them to get a feel for
what's going on.
Currently there is a demo that allows you see the effects of changing
the bindwidth
on a histogram of the Old Faithful data. You'll notice that for
wide bins, you see a uni-modal distribution, but for smaller bins you'll
begin to see that its actually bi-modal.
Another demo gives you four scatterplots and asks you to match the correlations to the scatterplots. It keeps track of your score and compares you to a list of everyone who has ever played. Go ahead, try to beat the record!