Tuesday, October 31, 2006
The Stern Review has been in the news recently for predicting that global warming could cost up to $7 trillion if not addressed soon. Of course, this has caused quite a stir as it offsets many of the, likely unfounded, concerns that fixing climate change will cost too much. The full report is available online and should be a quite interesting, if long, read.Saturday, October 7, 2006
This article in the Guardian explores the use of public relations firms by big oil companies to fight against the science of climate change. Apparently, the same tactics and people even of the tobacco industry’s fight against the link between smoking and cancer are being employed by the oil industry.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.Tuesday, September 19, 2006
An excellent presentation regarding the use of country statistics. The visualizations are particularly effective.Sunday, September 10, 2006
Since I’m looking for work, I found this post rather interesting. They’ve applied a spam filter to resumes to automatically filter through candidates. The output is only as good as the reference resumes used to construct the filter, but still an intriguing idea. My results are below. Most importantly the probability of me not being hired is 1.15e-59, which is a very, very small number. Perhaps I should add this fact to my resume?Wednesday, July 12, 2006
The Canary Project is an intriguing idea. They are documenting the effects of global warming through pictures. Since many people, apparently, don’t believe the abundant scientific evidence, perhaps some startling pictures will be convincing.Tuesday, July 11, 2006
I’m not sure how this escaped my notice until now, but `RSiteSearch` is a very useful command in R. Passing a string to this function loads up your web browser with search results from the R documentation and mailing list. So, for example: RSiteSearch("glm") will show you everything you need to know about using R for generalised linear models.Monday, July 10, 2006
I generally write my documents in Sweave format. This approach allows me to embed the code for analyses directly in the report derived from the analyses, so that all results and figures are generated dynamically with the text of the report. This provides both great documentation of the analyses and the convenience of a single file to keep track of and work with. Now there is a new contender for integrating analysis code and documentation with the release of an R module for ConTeXt.Friday, July 7, 2006
The CBC Radio 3 podcast is an excellent source for independent, Canadian music. They have recently added a playlist feature that helps you search for your favourite artists and create your own radio station. Definitely worth checking out.Thursday, July 6, 2006
Here’s a simple trick for creating experimental designs in R: use the function expand.grid. A simple example is: treatments which produces: treatment level 1 A 1 2 B 1 3 C 1 4 D 1 5 A 2 6 B 2 7 C 2 8 D 2 9 A 3 10 B 3 11 C 3 12 D 3 Now, if you want to randomize your experimental treatments, try:Wednesday, June 7, 2006
Burning our money by Marc Jaccard is a useful overview of some policy options for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately, this article is part of the Globe’s subscribers-only section, but his paper, Burning Our Money to Warm the Planet, is available from the CD Howe Institute.Wednesday, May 24, 2006
CBC’s Ideas has been running a series of shows on heart disease called “Heart of the Matter”. Episode 2 is particularly interesting from a statistical perspective, as the episode discusses several difficulties with the analysis of drug efficacy. Some highlights include: Effect sizes Some of the best cited studies for the use of drugs to treat heart disease show a statistically significant effect of only a few percentage points improvement. Contrast this with a dramatic, vastly superior improvement from diet alone.Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Some technical issues coupled with my road-trip-without-a-laptop conspired to keep Plantae from working correctly. I’ve repaired the damage and isolated Plantae from such problems in the future. My apologies for the downtime.Monday, May 22, 2006
The Competitive Enterprise Institute has put out some ads that would be quite funny if they weren’t so misleading. I imagine that most viewers can see through the propaganda of the oil industry. Regardless, in the long-term, industries that invest in efficient and low-polluting technology will win and the members of CEI will be out of business. CO2: They call it pollution. We call it life.Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Google Importer is a useful Spotlight plugin that includes Google searches in Spotlight searches. This helps integrate your search into one interface, which seems like an obvious progression of Apple’s Spotlight technology.Thursday, April 20, 2006
Google Calendar has been featured in the news recently, and for good reason. Many of us have wanted access to a good online calendar program. One of my favourite features of Google Calendar is its integration with Gmail. If Gmail detects an event in your email message, a link appears that sends the information to Google Calendar. This is incredibly convenient and, seems to me, is one of the great promises of computers: reducing the tedious work that occupies much of our day.Friday, April 14, 2006
This looks like an incredibly important film. I hope it breaks all of the box office records.Thursday, April 13, 2006
When response variables are composed of counts, the standard statistical methods that rely on the normal distribution are no longer applicable. Count data are comprised of positive integers and, often, many zeros. For such data, we need statistics based on Poisson or binomial distributions. I’ve spent the past few weeks analysing counts from hundreds of transects and, as is typical, a particular challenge was determining the appropriate packages to use for R.Monday, April 10, 2006
There’s a common notion that our technology has slowed, or even stopped, human evolution. Evidently, this is not true as researchers have found many locations of strong positive selection in the human genome. New evidence suggests humans are evolving more rapidly – and more recently – than most people thought possible. But for some radical evolutionists, Homo sapiens isn’t morphing quickly enough. (Via Wired News.)Saturday, April 8, 2006
This is quite a surprise, McGill University’s Brian Alters had his proposal to study the effects of intelligent design on Canadian education rejected by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. A stated reason for the rejection was that Alters did not provide “adequate justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of evolution, and not intelligent design theory, was correct.” Granted, funding proposals can be rejected for a variety of reasons and the opinions of the reviewers do not necessarily reflect those of the funding body.Friday, April 7, 2006
Matt Hern provides an interesting podcast available from Canadian Voices. He considers the 150 year history of compulsory state education and asks what benefits it has provided. The basic question is, Why do we send our kids to school? Although the answer seems obvious, he takes a different approach and argues for alternatives to public education. I’m always fascinated when someone argues against what I believe to be obvious. That’s when I learn the most about my biases.Monday, April 3, 2006
I’m convinced that no computer display is large enough. What we need are strategies to better manage our computer workspace and application windows. Exposé and tabbed browsing are great features, but what I really want is the equivalent of a file folder. You put all of the relevant documents in a folder and then put it aside for when you need it. Once you’re ready, you open up the folder and are ready to go.Monday, March 27, 2006
As I accumulate projects (both new and completed), the maintenance and storage of the project files becomes increasingly important. There are two important goals for a file structure: find things quickly and don’t lose anything. My current strategy is as follows: Every project has a consistent folder structure: |-- analysis |-- data |-- db |-- doc |-- fig `-- utils analysis holds the R source files of the analysis. These, typically, are experiments and snippets of code.Friday, March 24, 2006
Sun’s new Grid Compute Utility could be a great resource. As I described in an earlier post, running simulations can be a challenge with limited computer resources. Rather than waiting hours for my computers to work through thousands of iterations, I could pay Sun $1, which would likely be sufficient for the scale of my work. This would be well worth the investment! I spend a single dollar and quickly get the results I need for my research or clients.Sunday, March 19, 2006
The Strongspace weblog has a useful post about using Transmit and Automator to make backups. One challenge with this approach is backing up files scattered throughout your home folder. The solution is the “Follow symbolic links” option when mirroring. I created a backup folder and populated it with aliases to the files I’m interested in backing up. Mirroring this folder to Strongspace copies the files to the server. The other option is to use the “Skip files with specified names” feature, but this rapidly filled up for me.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.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.Monday, January 16, 2006
How about a constitutional right to a healthy environment? The Constitution of Canada guarantees its people important rights, such as freedom of religion, freedom of expression, fair trials, free elections, and language rights. But the effective exercise of these rights is impossible without safe water to drink, wholesome food to eat, and clean air to breathe. The right to a clean and healthy environment – arguably the most fundamental right of all – is conspicuously absent from our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, despite being a feature of the constitutions of many other nations.Monday, January 16, 2006
Plantae now supports the addition and updating of species names and families. A rather important first step. Now onto adding character data to make the site actually useful.Sunday, January 15, 2006
I’ve made a variety of important changes to plantae’s foundations. For the curious they are: Converted the webserver from apache to LightTPD. LightTPD is fast and easy to configure. Plus it has built-in support for FastCGI which makes plantae run much faster. Set up a Subversion repository. This manages the code for plantae and allows me to track and reverse changes. This will also be very useful if someone else helps with the coding.