How do you get access to current and historical research articles if you are not affiliated with a university or large research organization? Our second public service article discusses some useful online research archives. Read more…
This is a public service article encouraging all of us to back up our data (which more and more is our lives). I sketch some methods and resources for doing this.
As more of our life becomes digital (work, finances, passwords, pictures, contacts,dairies,videos and email) we must be more diligent in backing up our data. If your hard drive fails at work you might lose some spreadsheets (and you might not lose anything if your IT department is on their toes) if you computer fails at home you lose your wedding album. Your hard disk will fail and try to take all of your data (life) with it- it is a matter of when not a matter of if. You want this to be an inconvenience, not a disaster. Become expert at backing up and take the time to help others.
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What is “genetic art?” My answer to this is http://www.geneticart.org (redirects to http://www.mzlabs.com), but this requires some explanation. Read more…
An interesting article on programming languages by Guillaume Marceau is making the rounds:
The speed, size and dependability of programming languages
. The article points out very clearly what some of the differences in major programming languages are. The author uses benchmarking and graphs in an interesting way.
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I recently had the pleasure of finding a copy of the manual for my favorite calculator. I know it is incredibly nerdy to have a favorite calculator (and even more nerdy to read the manual), but it really got me thinking. Read more…
We explore some of the ideas from the seminal paper “The Data-Enrichment Method” ( Henry R Lewis, Operations Research (1957) vol. 5 (4) pp. 1-5). The paper explains a technique of improving the quality of statistical inference by increasing the effective size of the data-set. This is called “Data-Enrichment.”
Now more than ever we must be familiar with the consequences of these important techniques. Especially if we don’t know if we might already be a victim of them.
What does the market think about IBM’s proposed acquisition of Sun? Read more…
There is plenty of blame to go around from the current global financial crisis. But, I would like to point out that it is not “all the quants’ fault.” We are all now, unfortunately, sitting in the middle of a high quality (and extremely expensive) lesson in financial mathematics. I would hate for some of the truly important points to be lost to paying too much attention to some of the shiny details.
I have just posted a new write-up: Volunteers in Large Clubs: The Theorist’s View. This paper describes some interesting issues in organizing volunteers in a large club and tries to show (without math) how a theoretical computer scientist attacks such problems. Read more…
Some time ago I subscribed to The Database Column because it would be fun to see what these incredible people wanted to discuss. We owe much of our current database technology to Professor Stonebraker and Vertica sounds like an incredible product. And I definitely want to continue to subscribe.
However, the reading experience is marred by some flaw in their RSS system that keeps marking the article “MapReduce: A major step backwards” as a new article. This causes the article to appear in my RSS reader every few weeks as “new.” This wouldn’t bother me too much except that the article runs so counter to experience that it is itself offensive.
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