How about spam filtering? Granted, there's some infrastructure involved, which means gratification is not instant. But it involves something that most people who use computers care about: e-mail, and spam.
I mention this because the following web site sparked some interest in statistics among some acquaintances who were otherwise very cool to it: http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html This outlines a "Bayesian" spam filter. I'm not sure it's wholly Bayesian, but it comes close, the author's are good, and I hear that it performs well, in fact better than many commercial spam filters (or so I hear). Moreover, the web site virtually gushes about the virtues of statistical methods. The interesting thing about the filter is that you get to see what "features" it's discovering. A quick search also indicated that Mozilla apparently offers a plug-in for the same spam filter. That would offer a quick way to get the filter up and running with real e-mail. But I don't know if Mozilla offers interesting diagnostics about which features it's using, which is the pedagogically interesting part. Mozilla mentions it here: http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/spam.html Of course, you can use any number of classification techniques to distinguish spam from other e-mail, you just need data. Hastie and Tibshirani's _The Elements of Statistical Learning_ demonstrates a couple of types of models applied to the spam problem, and points to data at ftp.ics.uci.edu Ideally, you would do some exploration to design a filter, implement it in R, and then integrate it with your nephew's e-mail program. This would be a long-term project, maybe even a science-fair project, with long-term benefits (educational and practical). I know this can be done with Linux, but I have no idea about Mac OS 9! It's probably a stretch for typical 13-year-olds, but for the right 13-year-old, it would be a blast. Good luck! Jim Garrett Baltimore, Maryland, USA ********************************************************************************* This message is intended only for the designated recipient(s). ... [[dropped]] ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help