Stikkit-- Out with the mental clutter

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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Mac vs. PC Remotes

I grabbed this image while preparing a new Windows machine. This seems to be an interesting comparison of the difference in design approaches between Apple and PC remotes. Both provide essentially the same functions. Clearly, however, one is more complex than the other. Which would you rather use?

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Plantae's continued development

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.

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Text processing with Unix

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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Edward Burtynsky documents our impacts on the landscape through extraordinary photographs. In this presentation at TED he describes his motivations for the work and showcases some of his best images. The descriptions of China are particularly impressive.

Stern Review on the economics of climate change

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.

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Climate change and public relations

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.

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Principles of Technology Adoption

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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Resumes & Spam Filters

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?

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RSiteSearch

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.

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R module for ConTeXt

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.

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CBC Radio 3

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.

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expand.grid

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:

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Burning your money

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.

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Heart of the Matter

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.

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Plantae resurrected

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.

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Competitive Enterprise Institute

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.

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