A lot of people in the Data Science world seem to be on Twitter. And I think it's true of techy people in general, at least the sort of techy people who are into Free Culture type things ( Read more... )

To my big surprise, the spam problem seems to be getting better, and it's not due to better spam filters or captchas, but rather to crackdowns on botnets. I do remember that it used to be worse.

Researcher: The End of Spam Is Closer Than You Think, July 2012

The End of Spam?, Jan 2011

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Tonight I saw the Drunken Master of country music, Greg Garing, at the Treehouse a.k.a. 2A, just the man and his guitar (thanks Kathryn Minogue). It was the craziest performance I've ever seen, quickly switching between mellow and ultra-hard rock; between quiet&romantic and rude. His vocal range is amazing, and I was especially entertained by his ( Read more... )

Tyler Cowen's 8 insights on how human-computer collaboration in the context of chess
Insight #1, as one might imagine, is that human creativity is now worth more than it used to be, since most of the analysis is now automated.

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I've given up on compressing my videos. Most compression software doesn't compress batches of files, and those that do usually lose meta-data, like datetime. It also requires a ton of processing, which is slow and heats up my computer (this incidentally explains why my Canon digicams keep them in bulky formats, AVI or MOV: they are not nearly ( Read more... )

Skeptical friends: some people say that when remembering things, your eyes move in a certain direction; when inventing things, they move in a different direction. The source of these ideas seems to be a pseudo-scientific field known as "Neuro-Linguistic Programming" (NLP). Is there any empirical basis for this claim?

See here

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My yoga teacher, Joseph, is an atheist/skeptic, thinks very logically about what I need to work on. This seems to be very rare for yoga.

Today he told me that his "style" doesn't have a name, but that his teacher was Allan BatemanFinally, I asked him to name some materialistic schools/style of yoga. He told me ( Read more... )

Although I love graphical models, I suspect that the "potential outcomes approach" is a more proper treatment of causal inference. See new book by Hernan and Robbins (h/t Michael Sobel).

Key concepts:
* counterfactuals: should be well-defined, but often aren't in the social science literature (e.g. to answer "what is the effect of marriage on ( Read more... )

Attention Conservation Notice: ranting about a topic that I know very little about; accuracy is sacrificed for the sake of cute analogies.

Taxation happens when you have transactions between separate entities. For example, when you buy/sell something, or pay/receive money for services. It makes no difference whether the tax is charged to the ( Read more... )

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