linhir

I would look at http://datawithoutborders.cc/ if you want a data science element or http://codeforamerica.org if you want a more development angle.

Fun fact, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs is the largest cultural funding agency in the nation, with an expense budget in Fiscal Year 2012 of $152 million, larger than NEA.

I went through the Codeacademy exercises even though I can program reasonably well (i.e. I can do everything I need to, but I would never call myself a software engineer). I did this partially because I do not know js and partially because I wanted to see how the systems work. The “Oops, try again.” message can be very frustrating because, as the author points out, often the output they want is opaque. They have a great idea, but it seems that they sometimes prefer brevity in their instructions over specificity.

Totally agree, R studio has made my life much easier.

I do a good bit of R programming, and R in a Nutshell has been the best quick reference guide I have found.

The Boston Globe is owned by the NYTimes company, I wonder if this design might be a preface to a more fluid design of that site.

I've been using TileMill recently and their focus is mainly web/html. The static maps (PNGs) are pretty, but there is also some frustrating aspects. For example, PNG/PDF exports don't include legends and they don't have plans to implement that feature presently.

I would suggest Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning by Bishop.

I am most excited about the machine learning course, since I could use the structure to go through Andrew Ng's lectures; also the ones from 2008 are already out of date.

As for the AI course, I'm skeptical, frankly. Sign-up right now has meant putting your name and email address. There is a big difference between spending 2 second to fill that in, and spending the amount of time necessary to finish the course. You come to a website that sounds like making robots and turns out the class is about developing pruning heuristics for search trees, do you stick with it? Maybe...but I'm going to save my awe for how many people complete.

I praise Stanford (CS) for thinking up this idea. Like Khan, they are going to reach a lot of people, and I think its particularly useful for motivated learners who, for whatever reason, are stuck in a place that you can't take a good AI course or can't afford one. Ultimately, though, the course is going to require drive that a lot fewer than 65,000 have.

By that metric, I think the choice is pretty clear. The quality of the discussion has gone up since the scores haven't been displayed. In an ideal world we could all be adults, and there would not be people trying to score points through fights (I would make semantic case for "arguments" being good, "fights" being bad), but that has not been the case as the community has gotten larger and larger.

The article reminded me of this quotation from JFK: "We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."

I've always been annoyed that the list doesn't include one of the foundational books of modern statistics/casual inference, such as Ronald A. Fisher's The Design of Experiments (1935). What do people think are some books from 2000-2010 that might make such a list in 2100?