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| Friday, December 25th, 2009 |
patrissimo
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10:47a |
fight the urge
I wrote up a post on climategate b/c I saw some posts on it that reinforced my prejudices, but then I deleted it. Yay! (tentative new years resolution: don't post about climate or genetics in 2010) |
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xkcd_rss
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5:00a |
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philg
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2:19a |
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| Thursday, December 24th, 2009 |
grrm
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6:01p |
Merry Christmas
Here's hoping all my friends and readers have a merry Christmas. And you other people too. Current Mood:  happy |
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hunch_net
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10:55p |
Top graduates this season
http://hunch.net/?p=1131 I would like to point out 3 graduates this season as having my confidence they are capable of doing great things.
- Daniel Hsu has diverse papers with diverse coauthors on {active learning, mulitlabeling, temporal learning, …} each covering new algorithms and methods of analysis. He is also a capable programmer, having helped me with some nitty-gritty details of cluster parallel Vowpal Wabbit this summer. He has an excellent tendency to just get things done.
- Nicolas Lambert doesn’t nominally work in machine learning, but I’ve found his work in elicitation relevant nevertheless. In essence, elicitable properties are closely related to learnable properties, and the elicitation complexity is related to a notion of learning complexity. See the Surrogate regret bounds paper for some related discussion. Few people successfully work at such a general level that it crosses fields, but he’s one of them.
- Yisong Yue is deeply focused on interactive learning, which he has attacked at all levels: theory, algorithm adaptation, programming, and popular description. I’ve seen a relentless multidimensional focus on a new real-world problem be an excellent strategy for research and expect he’ll succeed.
The obvious caveat applies—I don’t know or haven’t fully appreciated everyone’s work so I’m sure I missed people. I’d like to particularly point out Percy Liang and David Sontag as plausibly such whom I’m sure others appreciate a great deal. |
brad
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3:12p |
Doing Hos is Hard Work
Etch-a-Sketch doesn't involve much hill climbing. GPS-a-Sketch in San Francisco does, however:  Merry Christmas from me and ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) whatever_art to you! *In other news: not going anywhere for Christmas. Staying in San Francisco, hosting a 10 person orphan dinner. But then going to the Caribbean on a 7 night cruise over New Year's with parents, Sierra, my brother Cole and his girlfriend. Should be fun. :) |
spacefem
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4:26p |
IMSAFE
think I'm going to write about flying, without flying, because I'm like that. Monday I had a plane scheduled but didn't go up. Winds were on the borderline, and the instructor who was supposed to approve me was maybe not going to be around, so I gave up. I had a cold. Not a huge nasty cold, just a mild one, which also contributed to my not really wanted to try hard to fly. I didn't feel like THE SICKNESS I was just sort of annoyed. They say you're not supposed to fly with a cold. Well here's what they really say: You are definitely not allowed to fly if you've had cold medicine, there are very few cold medicines (if any) that don't slow you down and pilots should not be slowing down. Part II of that advice is that if you feel like your cold is bad enough that you want to take medicine, then you probably shouldn't fly anyway, you're too sick. The acronym they teach us is I'M SAFE: Illness, Medication, Stress, Alcohol, Fatigue, Eating. Those are the big things to consider before jumping into an airplane. Some of the things like Medication and Alcohol are obvious, but others like Stress are kinda iffy, I think. Anyway instead of flying on Monday I went to work out, with my mild cold, and it freaking kicked my ass. I did the elliptical and was just winded to DEATH after 20 minutes, usually I do 30 I feel great. I felt like I was gasping for oxygen right there on the ground. Which made me think, maybe it's okay that I didn't fly. Maybe it's good that I've had a zillion hours of training because I'm starting to learn more about these limits. I thought the E in Eating left a lot of room, I could eat lunch, jump into a plane at 5pm, and adrenaline would keep me from noticing it was dinnertime until 8. Of course I'd land and feel like eating the furniture but I figured that was no big deal. Well later on we did stuff like steep turns where there's actually some G-forces there and I'd REALLY notice the difference between doing them after breakfast and doing them with no blood sugar whatsoever. It's like anything you do that's mental and physical, except with safety being a major issue we have these systems to think about how to get your brain in just the right zone. It makes me think of track again, when we were trying to be these tuned machines. There, we learned that it's not always about how much sleep you get the night before, but the night before that really comes into play. And you have to eat what you crave. I was really good at this, for a while. |
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bashorg
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10:21p |
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elodea_2
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11:55p |
Extinction never felt so good...
אחותי הכירה לי להקה חדשה והשירים שלהם תפסו אותי מיד. הם מאד אינטילגנטים, והמוזיקה מהירה ורועשת, כמו שאני אוהבת (הם גם חובבים, אבל זה לא רלוונטי). שני שירים שלהם תקועים אצלי ב repeat בסלולרי. עם הראשון אני מזדהה כי פעמים רבות מדי בחיי אני נתקלת במצבים בהם אין לי ברירה אלא לזמזם את הפזמון החוזר של השיר הזה ( רק מילים למאותגרי רעש). את השני אני אוהבת כי הוא אמנם מדבר על תעשית המוסיקה האמריקאית, אבל אני, אישית משליכה את המילים על פסטיבל ספציפי ( רק מילים, שוב). והנה השאלה - מה זה אומר עלי אם במקום לקרוא ברכבת אני מעדיפה לשמוע שירים על אידיוטים ודינוזאורים? |
theferrett
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4:39p |
It's a Christmas Miracle!
So here's a weird question which, yes, I AM discussing with loved ones (though not that type of love): What's an orgy? I mean, okay, my personal definition is "More than four people, I guess.". Clearly, it's some gathering of multiple people - but three and fours are threesomes and foursomes. But it just seems like a foursome is orgyISH, but not if you go into it with two established couples. So there's kind of a nebulous definition going. Honestly, I'm not sure if I've been to one. So how do YOU define it personally? Where's the cutoff line between consensual fun and whoo, ORGY!?
I acknowledge this is a fully ludicrous question. Merry Christmas. Posted via LiveJournal.app. |
jwz
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1:35p |
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langbeheim
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10:39p |
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yrk
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9:50p |
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citesmulilikes
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6:24p |
Intel Virtualization Technology
http://www.citeulike.org/user/muli/article/469736 Computer, Vol. 38, No. 5. (2005), pp. 48-56.Once confined to specialized server and mainframe systems, virtualization is now supported in off-the-shelf systems based on Intel architecture hardware. Intel Virtualization Technology provides hardware support for processor virtualization, enabling simplifications of virtual machine monitor software. Resulting VMMs can support a wider range of legacy and future operating systems while maintaining high performance. Rich Uhlig, Gil Neiger, Dion Rodgers, Amy Santoni, Fernando Martins, Andrew Anderson, Steven Bennett, Alain Kagi, Felix Leung, Larry Smith |
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hpcdanreedblog
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1:00p |
The Ghosts of Holiday Shopping: Past, Present and Future
http://www.hpcdan.org/reeds_ruminations/2009/12/the-ghosts-of-holiday-shopping-past-present-and-future.html N.B. This article also appeared on the Communications of the ACM (CACM) blog. I will be off for the holidays.
In many parts of the western world, the frenzy of holiday shopping has reached its crescendo. In the U.S., it began with Black Friday, the day immediately after U.S. Thanksgiving. Not only is holiday shopping a major component of retail profits, financial analysts also use such consumer spending as a barometer of possible economic recovery. With apologies to Charles Dickens, it is instructive to consider the ghosts of shopping past, present and future, albeit with a bit of U.S.-centric perspective.
Past
Those of a certain age (read, older than 40) remember when catalog sales and retail stores defined the spectrum of shopping options, and the traditional media (newspapers, magazines, radio and television) carried the advertisements of sales and loss leaders. Other than a few national chains (e.g., Sears), retail stores were largely independently owned and operated, supported by a wholesale distribution network.
As a boy in a small town, I distinctly remember awaiting the annual delivery of the Sears Christmas mail order Wish Book, via which one's parents could purchase holiday gifts via mail order. Long before the ubiquitous UPS and FedEx trucks traveled the highways, multiple weeks could ensue from purchase to delivery.
From an information theoretic and network perspective, the system was much more loosely coupled. Consumers and retailers operated primarily with local availability and pricing data, coupled to the larger national and international economy via logistics and supply chain costs. The price of a toy could vary substantially across town and certainly across states and regions. Soon, all of that would change.
The dot.com bubble brought grand visions of reinventing retail commerce. Pure plays and a "get big fast" mentality prized growth over profits, with massive advertising campaigns for online orders. (Who can forget the pet food sock puppet and the Super Bowl advertisements?) Before the bubble collapsed, the frenzy stimulated a massive build out of dark fiber, which ultimately helped enable greater broadband penetration. From the rubble of the dot.com collapse, a set of viable business models did emerge, ones that leveraged the long tail and delivery of small, relatively high value items.
Present
Today, big box stores are common, supported by supply change management and point-of-sale data mining. Consumers commonly compare product characteristics and prices online and (increasingly) negotiate prices onsite, based on near real-time data from social networks and smartphones. In the electronic equivalent, we now have Cyber Black Friday and Cyber Monday, with many electronic retailers offering online promotions. Advertising is increasingly dominated by ad sales associated with web search engines, and ad placement can be the differentiator between profit and loss.
Although I felt some trepidation when I first entered a credit card number on a web site, particularly one I had found via a web search, I am now as likely to shop electronically as I am to frequent a physical store. Indeed, for many items, electronic shopping is my preferred method, as it saves my time. This is a profound sociological change, enabled by inexpensive computing, broadband networks, rapid transport, globalization and information flow. However, security and privacy remain important concerns, with both social and technological components.
Future
As Yogi Berra once remarked, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." I suspect, however, that the distinction between the physical and virtual worlds will continue to blur as the cost of information transfer continues to decline. Business competition between electronic retailers and big box stores is increasing, with each competing on the other's territory. Augmented reality and intelligent devices will allow most customers to comparison shop and purchase simply by photographing objects. Finally, for information and entertainment, direct electronic delivery is likely to become increasingly predominant, with concomitant implications for physical manifestations of that information.
All of these are, of course, simply guesses. As they say in sports, even with rankings, the teams play the games to see what really happens. So it is with the future. We can predict, but reality is the ultimate validator. |
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nsfrecentopport
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7:11p |
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nsfrecentopport
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7:11p |
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rands_in_repose
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6:09p |
A Creative Soundtrack
http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/12/24/a_creative_soundtrack.html The first story I wrote for myself was a piece of fiction about God being sent to high school. I was, not surprisingly, in high school at the time. What was surprising was the vein of writing I found in myself. I sat down at the computer and the story just showed up -- seven pages of it.
As the creative burst subsided, I stared at those seven pages in the word processor -- Wordstar -- and I began to fret about line spacing, page numbers, and other formatting decisions. I was silently asking myself, "How am I going to make this palatable to the editor? To the publisher?
My first story ever. Seven pages in and I'm worried that double-spacing is going have an impact on whether I get published.
Ambition. The great blind motivator. You gotta love it.
To God and Back Again was never finished, let alone published. It's sitting on a 3.5-inch floppy somewhere in a file format I'm certain will prevent me from ever reading it again, and, that's probably best. Old writing is like an old girlfriend: the memory is better than the reality.
Since high school, I've continued to write constantly. Journals, physical and online. There was a weblog way back when, and then there is this one, which, 15 years after my first foray into independent writing, actually resulted in published work.
The lessons I've learned in that time are myriad, but today I'm thinking about simplicity.
The Writing Tools
For first drafts, I use one of two tools: a Moleskine notebook, or, TextEdit.
The choice of which to use often comes down to location. Is where I'm currently sitting MacBook Pro friendly or not? If that answer is yes, I'll fire up TextEdit and get started. As sophisticated tools go, TextEdit is bare bones. It's just a simple text editor (Sentinel, 15 pt, FTW) that allows me to do rich text editing, search and replace, bold, italics, and the occasional underline.
That's it. No macros, no line numbers, no revision control, just pure writing simplicity.
This requirement of simplicity is rooted in my belief that choices are distractions and distractions are the leading cause of you not writing. And I think you should write more, which is why my holiday present for you is OmmWriter.
Let It Begin
Let me start by saying that I didn't write this draft in OmmWriter. I used that fine tool for a good two weeks before I returned to my pleasant, vanilla TextEdit, but that two-week journey is worth understanding.
OmmWriter is a full-screen text editor with an intense focus on simplicity, and when I say intense focus, I mean a maniacal focus on stripping away every distraction that might prevent you from writing... and then providing a subtle set of new distractions. Briefly:
- There's no menu bar. You must be in full-screen mode. If you leave full-screen mode, the full-screen window calmly fades away.
- In full-screen mode, there are three gorgeous white backgrounds to choose from: snow, white, and white-pattern. That's it.
- Applications preferences are built right into the writing area and are represented with glyphs. These minimalist preferences allow you to choose a serif, sans serif, or script typeface, and one of three typeface sizes.
My favorite feature of OmmWriter is the soundtrack. The application comes with seven chill songs, which are designed to stay the hell out of your writing way. More importantly, the application provides seven keyboard soundtracks. You pick the sound that occurs when you're typing, and it's not a solid, repetitive sound. The keyboard sounds have variation and generally don't annoy. My favorite is #7, which I call: "My old school typewriter and I sitting at the bottom of a well".
OmmWriter leads with a simple idea: creativity has a soundtrack. Think about how you begin an intensely creative act. You get your environment just so. You brew the coffee, grab the right mug, which you then place in precisely the correct location on your desk. Your feet on flat on the floor in front of you, your spine is straight, and you look directly the screen. Let it begin.
And sometimes it does. It just starts flowing, and the number one rule regarding flow is: "Ignore it," because any observation of flow risks that flow making a run for it. Your goal is to just sit there and not listen to the music.
The folks behind OmmWriter are aware of this ephemeral soundtrack, and they've done everything in their power to give you a fighting chance to get in the creative flow. The experience of first firing up and using OmmWriter is akin to the sensation of putting your head on a down pillow; you can't help but say, "Ahhhhhhhh".
This divine experience, even if you're not a writer, is worth the download of the free beta of OmmWriter, but it's also the reason I've stopped using it.
A Peculiar Creative Flow
My test of OmmWriter was a holiday letter to a friend. After some tinkering, I settled on a clear white background and the bottom-of-the-well typewriter soundtrack. I sat cross-legged on my couch and began. The full-screen editing made sure I wasn't distracted by icons dancing around in my dock. The delicate soundtrack gently nudged me along when I stared at a half-written paragraph too long. An hour later, I had a comfortable first draft.
As I'm apt to do, I let this draft sit for a day. During this lull, I continue to write in my head. I know what paragraphs suck and I'm instinctually aware of what I have not yet written. My issue during this time was that I could not get the OmmWriter soundtrack out of my head. Rather than thinking about how bad the end of my letter was, I was craving the calming clickity-clack sounds produced by my keyboard while in OmmWriter. Rather than thinking about the writing, I was thinking about the tool.
Having been writing for close to two decades, I've learned that the more I write, the less I need. Every feature, preference, or choice that your application gives you is a ripe opportunity to think about writing rather than actually writing.
OmmWriter is a gorgeous experience that you can't miss. What they've chosen to strip away from a traditional word processor is impressive, but what they've designed to surround you in as a comforting, artistic, and inspiring experience is even more impressive. It's not a tool for everyone, but it's worth, at least, a first draft.
Happy Holidays. |
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linuxjournalmx
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5:36p |
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academics_anon
[ devrose ]
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8:42p |
Attention: Queer Jewish Students
The National Union of Jewish LGBTQQI Students's 14th annual conference will take place January 15th to the 17th at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. As usual the conference will be held over a weekend, and co-hosted by a campus Hillel, the NUJLS leadership conference features workshops, services, community building, and social time. This year's keynotes are Rabbi Bradley Artsen, Dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies and comedian Dana Goldberg! We welcome students from all sorts of backgrounds (religious, not, newly out, not, liberal to conservative, and more). Workshops, speakers, and text studies address such topics as Judaism and homosexuality, activism, relationships, ethics, coming out, and politics. Last year more than one hundred students came from across the United States and Canada to participate, and we anticipate a similar turnout this year! Registration ($80) includes meals (all kosher), housing, and all conference events. Travel and registrations subsidies are available upon request (in the registration form). View past schedules and register at http://www.nujlsonline.org/conferenceinfo.html Current Music: Blackmore's Night - Ghost of a Rose | Powered by Last.fm |
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jeremy_zawodny
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10:02a |
Sphinx and Gearman: A Distributed Computing AH-HA! Moment
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/011502.html A week ago I decided to finally get serious about putting gearman to use for search indexing. I had been batting the idea around in my head for a long time (too long, really) but figured I should just write the code and see what happens. It took less than a day to get a prototype working in our development environment, but the end result made me very happy. Today, in our production deployment, when a sphinx cluster pulls new... |
patrissimo
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9:56p |
The failure of biotech to produce cures
Article in Fast Company, via Seth Roberts. I ask former researcher Manuel López-Figueroa, a rock-star-looking vice president at prominent biotech VC firm Bay City Capital and a manager of a major academic research consortium, to tell me what genome-related treatments or tests are emerging in the field. He thinks for a minute. "As far as I know, nothing," he says, finally. "People were very optimistic about DNA studies, but I can't recall anything that has come out of them. Time will tell whether we'll eventually get there or not, but would I put money into them? Philanthropic and government money, yes; investor money, no."
I also look up all of the gene-focused companies mentioned in nine longish miracle-of-the-genome articles that ran in The New York Times and Boston Globe between 1998 and 2002: Of the 14 companies described as leading the way to remarkable new drugs and tests, all but one are out of business by virtue of having either folded, melted away in an acquisition, shifted to third-party gene-testing services, refocused on conventional drug development, or stooped to selling controversial direct-to-consumer products.
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The simple fact is we still just don't know very much about genes, says Craig Venter, who famously spearheaded the push to sequence the human genome, founded Celera, and remains a driving force in genetics research. "We don't know what most genes do, and we certainly don't know what the variations are in most people. The idea that we can design custom drugs around genes, or change genes, is just silliness and science fiction."
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The gene most strongly linked to intelligence accounts for less than 0.4% of the observed variation, while the top six intelligence genes together predict 1% of the variation. A 2009 study of about 6,000 people came up with a technique for predicting a person's height by looking at the 54 height-related genes; the results turned out to be one-tenth as accurate as averaging the heights of both parents and adjusting for sex, a technique introduced in 1886 by statistician Sir Francis Galton.
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The one corner of the genome-focused biotech industry that's thriving is the one churning out equipment and services to support researchers in their endless hunt for gene links.
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None of this is to say we shouldn't have bothered with the genome, or that we should stop working on it now. But we shouldn't base our decisions to invest in the science or in the biotech that comes out of it on an incomplete understanding of how long a task we're facing. |
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cv_atom
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3:45p |
Joy to the World
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CosmicVarianceBlog/~3/uQ2OcRKBDY8/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/?p=3617 Atheists can be such uptight downers. And I say that completely seriously and non-sarcastically, despite being a card-carrying atheist myself.
The latest example appears at the Illinois State Capitol, where someone from Freedom From Religion Foundation had the genius idea of erecting this sign among the holiday displays (via PZ):
At the time of the winter solstice, let reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is just myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.
Well now, there’s an uplifting and positive message. I’m sure that lots of religious folks came along to read that sign, and immediately thought “Gee, whoever wrote that sounds so much smarter and more correct than me! I will throw off my superstitious shackles and join them in the celebration of reason.”
There is a place to argue for one’s worldview — but not every single place. I happen to agree with all of the sentences on the sign above, but the decision to put in front and center in a holiday display merits a giant face-palm. (So does calling it “hate speech,” of course.) It’s like you’re introduced to someone at a party, and they immediately say “Wow, you’re ugly. And your clothes look like they were stolen off a homeless person. And you’re drinking a domestic beer, which shows a complete lack of sophistication.” I don’t know about you, but I’d be thinking — “Such taste and discernment! Here’s someone I need to get to know better.”
Until atheists learn that they don’t need to take every possible opportunity to proclaim their own rationality in the face of everyone else’s stupidity, they will have a reputation as tiresome bores. They could have put up a sign that just gave some sort of joyful, positive message. Or something light-hearted and amusing. Or they could have just left the display alone entirely, and restrained the urge to argue in favor of waiting for some more appropriate venue. (Maybe they could start a blog or something.)
Understanding how the real world works is an important skill. So is understanding human beings.
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xach
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10:39a |
Lispy 0.5 released
Here's how Matthew Kennedy describes his Lispy project:
Lispy is a library manager for Common Lisp, written in Common
Lisp. All of its dependencies except for GPG (with which signed maps
and releases are verified) are written in portable Common Lisp. With
this approach you should only need a Lisp implementation installed
to get started. The Lispy project has two goals:
- Implement an easy to use, portable library manager.
- Provide a wealth of ready to install libraries.
He just released version 0.5 yesterday, so if his goals sound good to you,
go give Lispy a
try.
Last year Jochen Schmidt wrote his impressions of Lispy, so check that out too.
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bashorg
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3:18p |
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