Thursday, August 31, 2017
This tweet about the charitable donations by Albertans showed up in my timeline and caused a ruckus.
Albertans give the most to charity in Canada, 50% more than the national average, even in tough economic times. #CdnPoli pic.twitter.com/keKPzY8brO
— Oil Sands Action (@OilsandsAction) August 31, 2017 Many people took issue with the fact that these values weren’t adjusted for income. Seems to me that whether this is a good idea or not depends on what kind of question you’re trying to answer.
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Monday, February 19, 2007
My experiences helping people manage their data has repeatedly shown that databases are poorly understood. This is well illustrated by the rampant abuses of spreadsheets for recording, manipulating, and analysing data.
Most people realise that they should be using a database, the real issue is the difficulty of creating a proper database. This is a legitimate challenge. Typically, you need to carefully consider all of the categories of data and their relationships when creating the database, which makes the upfront costs quite significant.
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Wednesday, January 31, 2007
I like to believe that my brain is useful for analysis, synthesis, and creativity. Clearly it is not proficient at storing details like specific dates and looming reminders. Nonetheless, a great deal of my mental energy is devoted to trying to remember such details and fearing the consequences of the inevitable “it slipped my mind”. As counselled by GTD, I need a good and trustworthy system for removing these important, but distracting, details and having them reappear when needed.
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Thursday, November 30, 2006
Prior to general release, plantae is moving web hosts. This seems like a good time to point out that all of plantae’s code is hosted at Google Code. The project has great potential and deserves consistent attention. Unfortunately, I can’t continue to develop the code. So, if you have an interest in collaborative software, particularly in the scientific context, I encourage you to take a look.
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
I recently helped someone process a text file with the help of Unix command line tools. The job would have been quite challenging otherwise, and I think this represents a useful demonstration of why I choose to use Unix.
The basic structure of the datafile was:
; A general header file ; 1 sample: 0.183 0.874 0.226 0.214 0.921 0.272 0.117 2 sample: 0.411 0.186 0.956 0.492 0.150 0.278 0.110 3 .
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Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Choosing appropriate software tools can be challenging. Here are the principles I employ when making the decision:
Simple: This seems obvious, but many companies fail here. Typically, their downfall is focussing on a perpetual increase in feature quantity. I don’t evaluate software with feature counts. Rather, I value software that performs a few key operations well. Small, focussed tools result in much greater productivity than overly-complex, all-in-one tools. 37 Signals’ Writeboard is a great example of a simple, focussed tool for collaborative writing.
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Wednesday, March 15, 2006
My six-year old laptop is incredibly slow, particularly when analysing data. Unfortunately, analysing data is my job, so this represents a problem. We have a new and fast desktop at home, but I can’t monopolise its use and it would negate the benefits of mobility.
Fortunately, with the help of Emacs and ESS there is a solution. I write my R code on the laptop and evaluate the code on the desktop, which sends the responses and plots back to the laptop.
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Friday, February 24, 2006
I’ve spent the last few days struggling with a problem with Plantae’s rails code. I was certain that code like this should work:
class ContentController 'show', :id = @plant.id else ... end end def show @plant = Plant.find(params[:id]) end ... end These statements should create a new plant and then redirect to the show method which sends the newly created plant to the view.
The problem was that rails insisted on asking sqlite3 for the plant with id=0, which cannot exist.
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Wednesday, December 7, 2005
In my investigations of ovule fates, I’ve needed to estimate regression parameters from discontinuous functions. A general term for such estimates is breakpoint regression. OFStatisticalEstimates.pdf demonstrates an approach using R for such estimates in the context of seed-ovule ratios. The code includes a mechanism for generating seed-ovule data that illustrate the types of functions that need to be considered.