Computers and Internet
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Weekly geekery
Statistics Taking the bias out of crowd counting. (Tip from the Geek Press) A bad vita trumps bad statistics. (Outraged tip from The Endeavour) Doing statistical graphics? Worry about color. (Tip from the Endeavour) Security Typosquatting. (Tip from the Geek Press) Food and Drink We took my sister-in-law out to dinner at Il Sogno a Read more
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Reproducible research
Great article in the NY Times about Keith Baggerly’s push for open data and reproducible analysis of results. Curiously enough, one of my students hit upon a tiny example of the problem this semester: …I decided to run my own descriptive statistics on their data sets to make sure their reports were all represented in Read more
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You kids get off my lawn!
I bet this whiner was born a fuddy-duddy. And from his comments, he’s not alone. He should post his picture here. Read more
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Use the Cloud at your peril
Microsoft ‘fesses up to what everyone with half a brain knew already: Uncle Sam, wielding the Patriot Act*, can glom on to any and all of your data stored out on the Cloud. Not to mention assorted hackers, rogue server-farm employees, implausibly denied oriental cyberwarriors, and careless mooks who misplace laptops full of unauthorized downloads. Read more
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Why Twitter matters
Read about how one artisan blew up Urban Outfitters with a tweet. Then read this take-away. Now I gotta figure out how to leverage Twitter for my students, without it becoming a farookin’ nuisance. Tip from the Instapundit. Read more
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I gotta get busy on my lecture videos!
On his Forbes blog, Jerry Bowyer espies an Internet iceberg dead ahead of Titanic U. …you and your iPod (or desktop) can listen to the smartest people in the world give interesting lectures on the most important topics for free, or you can pay lots of money to hear an inarticulate and resentful grad student Read more
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Learn MATLAB, cheap
Cleve Moler, Chairman and Chief Scientist at the MathWorks, has published an online MATLAB texbook, Numerical Computing with MATLAB. You can download the chapters as individual PDFs, for free. Tip from the MathWorks, via email. (I knew there was a reason to stay on that mailing list!) Read more
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Kill switch? Only those terrible Egyptians would do THAT!
Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied. —Bismarck Tip from the Instapundit. Read more
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Update, update, have another update
Is it just me, or is are software developers slinging out patches to their half-assed software even more frequently than usual? I just had to restart my PC, and, as is more and more typical, Java and Adobe both had another friggin’ update to install. I begin to wonder if anybody ever codes anything right Read more
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Maybe the ultimate cheat sheet…
…at least for comp sci guys who do analysis of algorithms. Lots cheaper than buying everything Don Knuth has written. Thanks to John Cook at The Endeavor. Update (6 October). Matthias Vallentin presents a heavyweight contender, chock full of probability and statistics. The diagram on the last page of this monster comes from the October Read more
The Random Texan 