I once heard Brewster Kahle discuss managing the Internet Archive’s many-petabyte data platform: “everytime one of our engineers comes to me with a new, ingenious and clever idea for managing our data, I have a response: ‘You’re fired.’
There are two primary things to take away from this exercise: 1) power-laws are much less frequently observed than is commonly thought, and careful estimation of scaling parameters and goodness-of-fit should be performed to check; 2) it appears that the WikiLeaks data fall well short of proving, or even reinforcing, previous conclusions about the underlying dynamics of violent conflict.
rebinding built-ins is quite a deprecated as well as a rare practice in Python. In Ruby, it strikes me as major — just like the too powerful macro facilities of other languages (such as, say, Dylan) present similar risks in my own opinion (I do hope that Python never gets such a powerful macro system, no matter the allure of “letting people define their own domain-specific little languages embedded in the language itself” — it would, IMHO, impair Python’s wonderful usefulness for application programming, by presenting an “attractive nuisance” to the would-be tinkerer who lurks in every programmer’s heart).
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part… What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
— Richard Feynman
a three dimensional PCA plot… [shows] the first, second and third principal components of variation. In other words, the three largest independent dimensions in terms of explanatory power of genetic variation. Panel A includes all world populations, and panel B just Africans.
Sex- and substance-issues notwithstanding, professional athletes are in many ways our culture’s holy men: they give themselves over to a pursuit, endure great privation and pain to actualize themselves at it, and enjoy a relationship to perfection that we admire and reward (the monk’s begging bowl, the RBI-guru’s eight-figure contract) and love to watch even though we have no inclination to walk that road ourselves. In other words they do it “for” us, sacrifice themselves for our (we imagine) redemption.
Ok. So here we have a statistically non-robust result, that the authors are well aware is not statistically robust, being published because it’s of “high policy significance”. However, and critically, the authors included no discussion whatsoever of the statistical limitations of the evidence. The “-0.55” in the abstract is not “-0.55 +/- 1.1” or something like that to give the reader a heads up that there is a lot of uncertainty here. There is no calculation of the “p-value” of that trend (how likely it was to occur by chance), even though the rest of the paper is littered with p-values of subsidiary results. They know perfectly well how to calculate this, they know it’s not statistically significant, but they chose to put their readers in a position where we have to take the data off the graph and do our own statistical analysis to realize what’s really going on.
And the refereeing and editorial process at Science allowed the paper to be published like that.
I think that sucks.
— Climate Alarmism at Science Magazine? - Dr. Stuart Staniford
Dr. Staniford is a physics PhD and is not a climate skeptic.
our main finding is that once we control for firm age there is no systematic relationship between firm size and growth
— Who Creates Jobs? Small vs. Large vs. Young - Haltiwanger, Jarmin and Miranda
Young companies create jobs, not small companies as is commonly claimed by politicians. Via @pkedrosky
Teams that take possession of the ball inside their own 20-yard line actually have a negative point expectation for that drive because of the likelihood of turnovers and slim chance of actually moving the ball far enough to score. As an example, teams that take over on their own 10-yard line score, on average, -0.92 points on said drive.
— Bill Barnwell via Freakonomics
But even if you are a founder, don’t do it for the money. Do it because you love small teams. Do it because you love your product. Do it because you love playing the startup game (even if you don’t win it). But for the love of God, don’t do it because you think you’ll get rich and retire on a beach somewhere when you’re 30. Because, as crazy as it sounds, when you sell your first company it almost certainly isn’t going to happen.
Budiansky ignores all that to focus strictly on energy consumpion. But the quality of our lives depends on a lot more than energy consumption, so Budiansky’s narrow-minded computations are strictly loco.
How, then, could one ever hope to do the right computation? How can we possibly gather enough information to compare the opportunity costs of land, fertlizers, equipment, workers, transportation and energy costs (among many others) and reach a conclusion about which tomato imposes the fewest costs on our neighbors?
Well, it turns out there’s actually a way to do that. You do it by looking at a single number that does an excellent job of reflecting all those costs. That number is known as the price of the tomato.
It makes more sense to have students watch lectures at home and do homework at school as opposed to vice versa.
— Sal Kahn via Ben Casnocha
As a result, we now have a situation where the U.S. telecoms are reconsolidating their power and putting customers at a disadvantage. And, their empowering factor is Android. The carriers and handset makers can do anything they want with it. Unfortunately, that now includes loading lots of their own crapware onto these Android devices, using marketing schemes that confuse buyers (see the Samsung Galaxy S), and nickle-and-diming customers with added fees to run certain apps such as tethering, GPS navigation, and mobile video.
Just as Google is overwhelming the iPhone with over 20 Android handsets to Apple’s one device, so the army of Android phones that can be carrier-modified is overwhelming the one Apple phone on a single carrier that allows it to stand apart and not play the old carrier-dominated game that resulted in strong handsets weakened by the design, software, and pricing ploys of the telecoms.
