Realizations in Biostatistics

I’ve been taking several classes through Coursera (nothing against the other platforms; I took two of the original three classes via Stanford and just stuck with the platform). The latest one is Social Network Analysis, which has a programming project. Here is what I have posted as a proposal:

Ok, I've been thinking about the programming project idea some, and at first I was thinking of analyzing the statistics blogging community, mostly because I belong to it and I wanted to see what comes out. The analysis below can be done for any sort of community. I've developed this idea a little further and wanted to record it here for two reasons. First, I simply need to write it down to get it out of my head and in such a way that the public can understand it. Second, I'd like feedback.

As it turns out, I took the NLP class in the spring and think there's some overlap that can be exploited. (This comes up nicely in the Mining the Social Web and Programming Collective Intelligence books.) There are measures of content similarity, such as cosine similarity, which are simple to compute and reasonably work well to see how similar content is. Content can then be clustered based on similarity. So, then, I have the following questions:

• What are the communities, and do they relate to clusters of content similarity?
• If so, who are the "brokers" between different communities, and what do they blog about? There are a couple of aggregators, such as StatBlogs and R-Bloggers, that I imagine would glue together several communities (that's their purpose and value), but I imagine there are a few others that are aggregator-like + commentary as well. Original content generators, like mine, will probably be on the edges.
• Is it better to threshold edges based on a number of mentions, or use an edge weight based on the number of mentions?
• If I have time, I may try to do some sort of topic or named entity extraction, and get an automated way of seeing what these different communities are talking about.

A revolution is taking place in education. Last fall, Stanford University premiered three online classes in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Introduction to Databases. I took Machine Learning and Intro to Databases, and this spring I’m taking Probabilistic Graphical Models, Natural Language Processing, and Model Thinking.

This winter and spring, that effort has evolved into Coursera, and the course offering has expanded to about 30 courses across disciplines and difficulties. Other universities, such as the University of Michigan, UPenn, and Princeton have gotten in on the action. Other professors have their own effort called Udacity (which concentrates on computer science and artificial intelligence after the primary interest of Sebastian Thrun of the Google robotic car), and MIT has developed their own platform.

So far all my classes have been through have been high quality. There are a few glitches as Coursera is blazing trails here, but overall I’m happy to take a small part in this revolution.