gwern comments on LessWrong Help Desk - free paper downloads and more (2014) - Less Wrong

30 Post author: jsalvatier 16 January 2014 05:51AM

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Comment author: gwern 04 October 2015 11:01:51PM *  2 points [-]

Applied Statistical Decision Theory, Raiffa & Schlaifer 1961 (not to be confused with their 1995 or 1959 decision theory textbooks).

Not on Libgen, Google Books, Google Scholar, the Chinese library site, or in any of the Google hits I found despite all the book review PDFs. I found a table of contents for it, and googled some chapter titles in quotes, but only turned up the same table of contents, so it really doesn't seem to be online in the clear. Betawolf discovered that an online copy does seem to exist at HathiTrust, which seems to think that the book is somehow in the public domain as unlikely as that may sound, and can be downloaded by people at a variety of institutions such as UMich, UWash, etc, but in this case, my UWash proxy doesn't work (it gets me IP-based access to stuff, but not account-login-based access, which HathiTrust seems to be.) Can anyone download it? (EDIT: the 1-page-at-a-time PDF download does work so I am scripting that right now as for i in {1..394}; do sleep 60s; wget "<http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/download/pdf?id=mdp.39015022416351;orient=0;size=100;seq=$i;attachment=0>" -O $i.pdf; done, but if someone can get the whole PDF, that'd be better since then I know nothing was left out and all the metadata will be intact.)

If not, I will buy a used copy ($16-25 on Amazon & AbeBooks) and try out 1DollarScan.


On a historical note, besides compiling many results and being one of the key texts of the 1960s Bayesian revolution, apparently this is the book which introduced the general concept of conjugate distributions into Bayesian statistics, which I had always assumed had been introduced by Laplace or someone early on like that since they are so critical to pre-MCMC analyses.

Comment author: VincentYu 05 October 2015 04:04:30AM 3 points [-]

Got the whole PDF from HathiTrust. I think Chart I is missing from the scan.

Comment author: gwern 05 October 2015 04:39:38PM *  0 points [-]

Thanks. I added some metadata and it blew up to 14M, which is unfortunate. Chart I does seem to be missing in both the PDF and the online version; I suspect that it's missing from the physical copy at UMich ('pocket' sounds like something that might go missing).

Comment author: VincentYu 06 October 2015 08:20:55AM 2 points [-]

it blew up to 14M

The object streams for indirect objects have been unpacked and stripped away, leaving their contents uncompressed. Use qpdf to regenerate compressed object streams:

qpdf --object-streams=generate in.pdf out.pdf

(The --stream-data=compress option is already set by default.)

While you are at it, might as well re-linearize the PDF for online readers with low bandwidth:

qpdf --object-streams=generate --linearize in.pdf out.pdf
Comment author: gwern 06 October 2015 04:01:49PM 0 points [-]

That seems to work. I tried gs, Gscan2pdf, and pdf2djvu but they all either didn't reduce size or segfaulted.