Why did I donate to Wikipedia ?

Very few things are free in this world. Wikipedia is one of the free websites. You can increase your knowledge or write articles to share with others for FREE.

Most of the websites you visit contain advertisement by which they receive money and survive. Have you ever noticed such ads in Wikipedia ? Absolutely not ! It's ads free and totally free. Then, how come the website is surviving ? The answer is here:

To do this without resorting to advertising, we need you. It is you who keep this dream alive. It is you who have created Wikipedia. It is you who believe that a place of calm reflection and learning is worth having. - Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales

It is worth-mentioning to tell you that Wikipedia is in top 10 MOST VISITED WEBSITES in this world. In average, I visit this website 5 times a day. You can even download all the Wikipedia in your computer if you wish. My friend did it and he said it was 28 Gb as of Nov, 2010.

I love this so much coz I receive a lot of information from it. I want to protect it. Thus, I donated $10 to keep it surviving. Here is the email I got once I donated to the Wikipedia Foundation:

Dear NOBAL BIKRAM NIRAULA,

Thank you for your gift of USD 10.00 to the Wikimedia Foundation, received on December 22, 2010. I’m very grateful for your support.

Your donation celebrates everything Wikipedia and its sister sites stand for: the power of information to help people live better lives, and the importance of sharing, freedom, learning and discovery. Thank you so much for helping to keep these projects freely available for their more than 400 million monthly readers around the world.

Your money supports technology and people. The Wikimedia Foundation develops and improves the technology behind Wikipedia and nine other projects, and sustains the infrastructure that keeps them up and running. The Foundation has a staff of about fifty, which provides technical, administrative, legal and outreach support for the global community of volunteers who write and edit Wikipedia.

Many people love Wikipedia, but a surprising number don't know it's run by a non-profit. Please help us spread the word by telling a few of your friends.

And again, thank you for supporting free knowledge.

Sincerely Yours,
Sue Gardner
Executive Director

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Interesting Finding in Temporal Analysis of text

I found the following graph very interesting. The graph shows usage pattern of two English words "however" and "However" from 1800 to 2000. Note that "however" (small h) is used in the middle of sentence where as "However" (Capital H) is used at the beginning of a sentence.

Source: datamining.typepad.com

datamining.typepad.com : How do we interpret this? The most obvious interpretation might be that 'however' at the beginning of a sentence is becoming more frequent. We could also conclude that 'however' in general is becoming more frequent (imagine if we could combine the lines). Alternatively, it could mean that sentence length in the corpus is shifting. Given that we don't know the exact cultural mix of the 'British English' corpus, it could be somehow related to the mixture of American and British content. Finally, it could be due to the mix of fiction and non-fiction. Interestingly, the 'American English' corpus has quite a different signal.

Support Vector Machine (SVM) - A Practical Guide

Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a very popular classification method. Following is a useful documents if you are new to  SVM. Note that recent and good document for the following presentation slides is here.

A Practical Guide to Support Vector Classification