Finally,

3.) I have a basic disagreement with your statement: “… the physicists and chemists who defined the the International System of Units overlooked [angles].” SI was intended to define units and relationships unambiguously to replace the hodge-podge of units and measurements that existed in different locations prior to the French Revolution. The radian was an SI supplemental dimensionless unit until 1995, after which it was relegated to a derived unit. Same goes for the steridian.

Dave Mark’s post on Why Not More Simulation in Game AI?and the comments it elicited are right …

I’d like to respond to a few points in your article for clarity.

First, we will be releasing an API in the next few months allowing you to access our semantic ontology and much of the data that we are gathering. This will include a similar API to delicious’, which will allow you to get information on your bookmarks, tags, groups, etc., but it will also allow access to our ontology. Whether or not the API will use OWL as its format is to be decided, but if there is a market demand for OWL export, we will be happy to provide that.

One of our goals with this API is to develop a platform for others to use our ontology in their applications. For example, we’re considering having the first application built on this platform be a wordpress plugin that would allow people to tag their blog articles semantically. If anybody has any other cool ideas for us to develop for our API, please contact us.

In terms of opening our ontology, we will also be providing a way for users to add, edit, and delete defined tags. Initially, this will be limited to trusted users, but eventually we’d like to expand it into a wikipedia-like community process.

As for recommendations, we have just (as of yesterday) implemented friend recommendations, and group recommendations are coming soon - great idea Paul! Our tag recommendation system is continually improving both algorithmically and with the number of bookmarks in the system, as we want to make adding tags as easy as possible.

We’re trying hard to build a powerful next-generation tool that everyone will use, so if you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to contact us (contact at zigtag.com).

The statistical models are vulnerable to the “black swan” events as a very timely Nasim Taleb’s book has pointed out. It is a bit ironic, that the people putting “past performance” clause into all the fine print, could not apply the same principle to the statistical models that always look at the back mirror. It is too much to expect that FICO score, solely based on individual’s credit behaviour, could predict housing market meltdown, that happened a few years after the most of the subjects happily granted and received their motgages, packaged it and sold to investors as the “the bulletproof” instrument. Last year Goldman and otehr were explaining their losses, as caused by 25-sigma event. Anyone with a slightest bit of statistical knowledge can judge this statement, as being either admission of using the low-touch-with-reality model, or even worse, not understanding it.

Yep, Vantage is a nasty, effective move by the credit agencies against Fair Isaac’s prior monopoly. I feel for Fair Isaac on that one. But Dr. Greene, FICO CEO, explicitly acknowledged the continuing negative impact of Vantage on revenues.

So, I think my facts are in order, I’m afraid. But I truly understand how upsetting the recent wounds from sloppy lending practices and unfair competition are to those who have enjoyed working with Fair Isaac.

As for Ilog’s announcement, I was going to blog on that today! I’ll pass now that you’ve covered it.

Respectfully, Paul

I do agree that there is a huge gap in the analytics world figuring out how to bring non-technical (in this case non-statistical) people into the process to enable effective collaboration. The rules community has done a lot here, the process community a little, the analytic community almost nothing. This needs to change.

I actually started the comment simply to point out that ILOG’s recent release of a scorecard modeler (blogged about here) is another sign of convergence but you had made some unusually sloppy statements that I felt needed correction.

They are, so to speak, the yin and yang of decisions, one representing explicit knowledge (rules) and the other one representing implicit knowledge which is “hidden” in your data and can be discovered by statistical algorithms.

I am sure we will see a broader adoption of predictive analytics as part of EDM (or ADM) as the industry makes it easier to deploy and manage such complex decision systems.