[cubedice]

I noticed the R packages for various functions in the text can be found here http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn//Rfun.html .

Their names are pretty catchy; I'll admit I want to use 'gradient boosting' and 'Lasso and elastic-net regularized generalized linear models'.

[jimbokun]

We just covered Neural Nets in my machine learning class, and the professor made some comments about how far a good name can take you. Neural Nets are better than other learning algorithms in some ways and worse than others, but the name gives you the sense that you are learning the secrets of how the brain works. That may or may not be true, but it sure has served as good branding for the Neural Networks algorithm.