February 2009
17 posts
Quantifying Marriage
If the sanctity of marriage was actually something society valued, more rigorous studies of why marriages fail or succeed would likely be funded and performed. Luis Von Ahn points out some sketchy data from eHarmony on predicting the outcomes of dating/marriage. eHarmony has some stats from its service and a subset of its patrons, but a more believable study would cast a wider net (and not aim...
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Puzzle-Solving Communities
Randomly came across Project Euler — where folks interested in math can test their skills by solving (or trying to…) various math problems. The thing I have to wonder, though, is: who decides what the problems are? The problems seem to be solvable and solvable within a reasonable time frame using commonly-available computing power. But would the community behind Project Euler be as...
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How Are Tabloids Doing?
Given the flurry of articles on the “death of newspapers” that’s been going around, it struck me that I haven’t heard too many complaints from the tabloid side of the media. I need to look up how the tabloid publishers are doing in this economy, because I tend to think that the “saucier” side of media always tries more innovative things to stay in business...
Driving With Snow in Ohio
The Answer To US Recession: Immigration
A tongue-in-cheek suggestion to offer visas to more immigrants sounds like an interesting idea to help the US economy. Immigrants could help buy up distressed housing and start new businesses…. It’ll never actually happen, but it’s an interesting idea to try to brain-drain the rest of the world, instead of letting talented folks leave the US during a recession.
The Death Of Corporate Libraries
The Wall Street Journal is apparently laying off its library staff and shutting down its library research center. This trend of large corporations getting rid of research and library staff isn’t exactly new, but I wonder what happens to the library materials. I once worked for a large corporate library to catalog and digitize its proprietary research reports, and I know a lot of research...
Amish-Style Technology
An interesting description of the Amish’s view of technology reminds me of a high school summer job I had working at a restaurant that served “Amish-style” food. The restaurant had almost nothing to do with being Amish, but there was one delivery guy who seemed Amish. Anyway, it looks like the Amish are leap-frogging the “rest of us” by using some high-tech...
Iridium Loses A Satellite, But It's Still In Good...
Iridium is set to launch a next generation of its satellites and kill off its current 66 satellites. However, it looks like one of its satellites has been destroyed by colliding with a non-functional Russian satellite. Frankly, I’m surprised that Iridium is still around, but apparently they’re doing well enough to get funding for the next upgrade for its platform. Satellite...
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WikiDashboard Tool For Keeping Wikipedia Honest
A neat tool for analyzing wikipedia edits has been released (some time ago) by PARC (the Palo Alto Research Center) — WikiDashboard. It visually displays how the editing of a wikipedia page has changed over time.
Luis von Ahn Has A Sense Of Humor
Luis von Ahn has started blogging, and one of his posts struck me as “funny cuz it’s true” — regarding the composition of journal articles in computer science. But his sentiments could apply to any academic publication — you have to justify your research and put it in context (and repeat yourself about 4 times in the process).
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How To Teach Organic Chemistry....
I’ve always had a problem with how organic chemistry is taught in college. This lecture against lectures seems interesting — because it highlights the awful habits that organic chemistry professors sometimes adopt. The problems apply to other subjects as well, but the topic of organic chemistry seems like the class where there’s a perfect storm of poor student-teacher...
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A Wiki For Digital Research Tools
A cool repository for research tools is online at this pbwiki, started by Lisa Spiro of Rice University. There are useful lists of tools for text analysis, statistics analysis, collaborative authoring, and more….
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Spec Work Raises Questions of Fairness
Forbes promotes CrowdSpring in an article that describes the design service as novel way to get cost effective design work. But the question of “spec work” comes up again (via MeFi). Professional designers don’t like the idea of potentially working for nothing — since the design contest doesn’t pay everyone for their efforts, only the selected winners. Seems like...
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US Generates More Wind Power
The US has generated more wind energy in 2008 than it ever has — producing 25 GigaWatts of energy — in about a 50% increase year over year. Germany produced the 2nd most amount of wind energy at 24 GW, followed by Spain and China. Worldwide wind power hit 121 GW for 2008, an increase of about 29 percent.
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Human Eggs Aren't Cheaper By The Dozen
Looks like a bunch of scientists have been trying to use animal eggs to create human stem cells. But it doesn’t quite work. I wonder what happens if they use their procedure on human eggs — ie. take a human egg, empty it out, squirt in a different human nucleus to create an embryo, and count the cell divisions. When they did this with mouse eggs, cells stopped dividing after just...
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Text Files Should Be Readable -- Why Use .docx?
Fortunately, I don’t often get Word files sent to me. But when I do, I’m always a bit annoyed by docx files because I don’t want to upgrade my version of Word — and Google Docs doesn’t convert uploaded docx files (yet). So I’m stuck using weird services like Zamzar to convert the files. What a pain. I don’t understand why mostly “text”...