Archive for April, 2005

Seb In The News

« 29 April 2005 | 13:42 | General | No Comments »

Seb Wills, a postdoc in my group, was in the news! He’s working to get cheap computing in the developing world. Very cool stuff. Here’s Seb’s quote from the article:

“Your PC is a bulky, noisy, expensive mess that clutters up your life,” Ndiyo’s Dr Seb Wills told a Microsoft Research conference in [...]



Reworked Lab Webpage

« 28 April 2005 | 8:46 | General | No Comments »

I changed the layout of my work webpage to make it a little more utilitarian. Sooner or later I need to make a personal webpage.



First NCAA Football Power Rankings

« 27 April 2005 | 19:02 | NCAA Football, Sports | No Comments »

Alright! Stewart Mandel posted his NCAA power rankings, even though the season won’t be starting for another four months or so. He must be just as starved for football as I am. From the Big Ten: Ohio State and number four, Iowa at eight, Michigan at ten, Purdue at nineteen, and Penn State… [...]



Richard Hamming on Research

« 27 April 2005 | 12:53 | Research, Science and Math | No Comments »

Every scientist or aspiring scientist should have a look at the transcript of a talk by Richard Hamming at the Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar in 1986.



1D Tetris

« 24 April 2005 | 14:44 | Humor | No Comments »

This is rather amusing.



Maurice Clarett Drafted in Third Round

« 24 April 2005 | 14:19 | NCAA Football, NFL, Sports | No Comments »

Did I call it, or did I call it? It turns out that Clarett was probably on quite a few teams draft boards and so, in order to even have a chance at getting him, Denver took him in the third round. Ha! “Might not get drafted” my ass.



Andrew Moore Machine Learning Tutorials

« 23 April 2005 | 14:21 | Research, Science and Math | No Comments »

Andrew Moore at CMU has a nice set of tutorials on various machine learning topics.



Stixbox: Free Statistics Tools for Matlab

« 21 April 2005 | 19:17 | Research, Science and Math | 12 Comments »

Stixbox is a useful set of functions (under the GPL) for doing statistical work in Matlab. Here’s the contents file:

Distribution functions.
dbeta - Beta density function.
dbinom - Binomial probability function.
dchisq - [...]



CSL in Slate Article

« 21 April 2005 | 16:53 | General | No Comments »

A while back, I blogged that my friend Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno had released his biography of E.E. Cummings. A recent article on Slate quotes him:

“No one else wrote like Cummings, and Cummings wrote like no one else” is how the poet’s latest biographer, Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno, delivers the bad and good news in E.E. Cummings: A [...]



PDL: Perl Data Language

« 21 April 2005 | 2:53 | Computing, Research, Science and Math | 1 Comment »

I have a new tool to play with: The Perl Data Language. The idea is to provide a numerical-processing backbone underneath Perl. All the tough stuff is written in C and abstracted away. Less memory and fewer CPU cycles. Conceptually, it seems right on the money. Perl may not be [...]



Maurice Clarett is Back

« 5 April 2005 | 14:41 | NCAA Football, NFL, Sports | No Comments »

Maurice Clarett, as you may recall, was the true freshman running back at Ohio State University whose brilliant running led them to the 2003 National Championship. He had always been standoffish and critical of the school and the NCAA in general. Both parties essentially told him to “shut up and get back out [...]



Aperiodic

« 5 April 2005 | 14:38 | General, Science and Math | No Comments »

Somebody posted a smart-ass comment asking how I felt about the existence of the word “aperiodic,” which is how nonrepeating behavior is usually described. I managed to delete the comment accidentally. The person was a slashdotter because they prefaced the coment with [-1: Offtopic]. Anyway - it’s a legitimate question. Here’s [...]