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awesome
Monthly Archives: November 2009
links for 2009-11-27
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"Brilliant … but what made Dr. K’s technique most insidiously evil and genius was, during the most technically difficult lecture of the entire quarter, there was no lie. At the end of the lecture in which he was not called on any lie, he offered the same challenge to work through the notes; on the following Monday, he fielded our theories for what the falsehood might be (and shooting them down “no, in fact that is true – look at “) for almost ten minutes before he finally revealed: “Do you remember the first lecture – how I said that ‘every lecture has a lie?’”"
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"Keeping tabs on the thematic redundancy with which the United States government has marketed its calls for regime change over the years would appear to be a responsible activity for American citizens, given the fact that our nation has its imperial tentacles wrapped all over the planet. But I have never seen a "Remember Panama" sign at a protest, and, as I have confessed, until a few weeks ago, I would not have known what such a sign meant. Whenever Panama is discussed in the media, it is in order to advise Americans to go there and spoil their unspoiled beaches (hence, my initial interest in the country)."
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""g" is a new library that provides a global "g" method that you can use to inspect objects much in the same way as Kernel#p. The difference is that the output goes to Growl, a popular OS X global notifications tool. It's technically an easy gem install and go, but if you have problems with it not finding Growl, this blog post about getting ruby-growl working should salve your distress."
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"Science doesn’t work despite scientists being asses. Science works, to at least some extent, because scientists are asses. Bickering and backstabbing are essential elements of the process. Haven’t any of these guys ever heard of “peer review”?
There’s this myth in wide circulation: rational, emotionless Vulcans in white coats, plumbing the secrets of the universe, their Scientific Methods unsullied by bias or emotionalism. Most people know it’s a myth, of course; they subscribe to a more nuanced view in which scientists are as petty and vain and human as anyone (and as egotistical as any therapist or financier), people who use scientific methodology to tamp down their human imperfections and manage some approximation of objectivity."
links for 2009-11-22
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"ggplot2 is a plotting system for R, based on the grammar of graphics, which tries to take the good parts of base and lattice graphics and none of the bad parts. It takes care of many of the fiddly details that make plotting a hassle (like drawing legends) as well as providing a powerful model of graphics that makes it easy to produce complex multi-layered graphics."
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"Because the first priority of the Fed is the health of the banking system itself, and not the national economy and the availability of credit to non-banking institutions. They are seeking to drive commercial entities out of secure savings to risk investment again, but providing a safe harbor for the banks while they are doing it, while attempting to maintain the appearance of financial system solvency. "
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"SuperCollider is an environment and programming language for real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. It provides an interpreted object-oriented language which functions as a network client to a state of the art, realtime sound synthesis server.
SuperCollider was written by James McCartney over a period of many years, and is now an open source (GPL) project maintained and developed by various people. It is used by musicians, scientists, and artists working with sound. For some background, see SuperCollider described by Wikipedia."
links for 2009-11-20
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"Most machine learning researchers perform quantitative experiments to estimate generalization error and compare the performance of different algorithms (in particular, their proposed algorithm). In order to be able to draw statistically convincing conclusions, it is important to estimate the uncertainty of such estimates. This paper studies the very commonly used K-fold cross-validation estimator of generalization performance. The main theorem shows that there exists no universal (valid under all distributions) unbiased estimator of the variance of K-fold cross-validation."
links for 2009-11-19
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"A framework to allow Ruby applications to generate file/folder stubs (like the rails command does for Ruby on Rails, and the ‘script/generate’ command within a Rails application during development)."
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"It’s only natural that you’re asking how the hell we wound up in this mess. Why did a bubble inflate in commercial real estate? Why are smaller banks so disproportionately exposed? What caused this catastrophe?
Fortunately, we figured it out for you."
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I would like to suggest a Workantile Exchange Faceball league.
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"It’s Thanksgiving, and we’re very thankful for the continuing kind words and terrific support you all have shown us this year.
We know it’s been a tough year for a lot of folks out there. So we’d like to help. Before the madness of retail’s Black Friday hits, with all kind of crazy “get up at 4am to get in line” sales, we have a much simpler alternative for you.
40% off all our titles. Now through Wed Nov 25. Just use the coupon code PRAGTHANKS40 when checking out. Please note that orders placed on or after Tuesday may not get shipped until Monday, November 30, as our shipping facilities will be closed for the holiday. So order now, and stock up for some dynamite holiday reading. Feel free to use the coupon as many times as you need to before it expires, and pass it on to your friends and relatives."
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"How to create your first Personal Kanban and visualize your work."
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"PR is about managing media and analyst relations. A good PR company helps manage messaging and positioning targeted at the media. PR should generate interest from relevant trade magazines, blogs, editors, award bodies, analysts, etc. The goal is increase knowledge of your company and products among customers, industry experts, investors, etc. Specific PR campaigns should have more concrete objectives."
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"Marketing feels daunting because you are being shown a dozen yellow brick roads that weave off gloriously into the colorful horizon. That and the promise that the chosen path is flowering with ROI poppies. Walk forward in your customer’s shoes from before purchase; from pre-realization. How do you get to you?"