http://delicious.com/lemire bookmarks posted by lemire 2009-07-09T03:23:58Z http://code.activestate.com/recipes/466302/ lemire This recipe can be used to sort big files (much bigger than the available RAM) according to a key. The sort is guaranteed to be stable on Python 2.3. programming python sort recipe 2009-07-09T00:22:18Z http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2009/07/universities-empty-vessels.html lemire Many academics spend very little time at their universities. Some live so far away that it would be impractical. If I decide to do a course at university in October, I have to wait 11 months to start. In this age of on-demand, timeshifted experience, they’re an anachronism. academia inefficient space buildings elearning 2009-07-08T14:08:50Z http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/indepth/38904 lemire Online networking tools are pervasive, but why have scientists been so slow to adopt many of them? Michael Nielsen explains how we can build a better culture of online collaboration dic collaboration subversion research education open-science openaccess online 2009-07-08T14:06:40Z http://blog.openwetware.org/community/2009/06/12/state-of-the-oww/ lemire We also represent a broader experiment in changing the process of research that is very much in a fragile intermediate stage of its development. I would currently be hard pressed to make a successful argument that supporting and using OWW has made the research in my own laboratory significantly better, as judged by our traditionally published results. On the other hand, using OWW as it exists today has led to increased frustration with the slow inanities to be found within the conventional research publication process, while simultaneously and naively reducing the pressure to publish more formally and enabling others outside the (v. small) OWW community to “borrow” results without giving credit. I am convinced that we are figuring out a new way to do research. We just have a lot of work to do in order to make the transition complete. dic openwetware collaboration web disruption 2009-07-07T20:08:43Z http://www.downes.ca/presentation/227 lemire downes dic 2009-07-07T19:53:31Z http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/ lemire Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important books in the world. Handwritten well over 1600 years ago, the manuscript contains the Christian Bible in Greek, including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. Its heavily corrected text is of outstanding importance for the history of the Bible and the manuscript – the oldest substantial book to survive Antiquity – is of supreme importance for the history of the book religion bible book reference christianity manuscript greek online archive 2009-07-07T01:49:38Z http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ lemire Welcome to BlindSearch, the search engine taste test. Type in a search query above, hit search then vote for the column which you believe best matches your query. The columns are randomised with every query. The goal of this site is simple, we want to see what happens when you remove the branding from search engines. How differently will you perceive the results? research web tools cool google search analysis yahoo bing 2009-07-06T16:58:10Z http://dogphysics.com/ lemire Quantum physics has never been more popular. Once thought of as an obscure science, it reached the masses via the notion of teleportation in Star Trek, and more recently as an integral part of such popular television shows as Lost and Fringe. Now, inspired by the author's hugely popular website and science blog, Chad Orzel uses his cherished mutt Emmy to explain the basic principles of quantum physics. And who better to help explain the magical universe of quantum than a talking dog? dog physics vulgarization common 2009-07-06T14:44:56Z http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_smoothing lemire In statistics, exponential smoothing is a technique that can be applied to time series data, either to produce smoothed data for presentation, or to make forecasts. The time series data themselves are a sequence of observations. The observed phenomenon may be an essentially random process, or it may be an orderly, but noisy, process. Whereas in the simple moving average the past observations are weighted equally, exponential smoothing assigns exponentially decreasing weights as the observation get older. Exponential smoothing is commonly applied to financial market and economic data, but it can be used with any discrete set of repeated measurements. The raw data sequence is often represented by {xt}, and the output of the exponential smoothing algorithm is commonly written as {st} which may be regarded as our best estimate of what the next value of x will be smoothing regression timeseries 2009-07-05T23:32:43Z http://www.ourblook.com/The-Media/The-Future-of-Journalism.html?gclid=CJbgsrzPvpsCFZkA4wod8kuQDQ lemire You don't get free gas from a gas station. You don't get free meals from a restaurant. You wouldn't walk into the Googleplex ... that's Google's corporate headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. ... and expect a staffer to rush to the lobby with 1,000 free shares of Google stock for you. At least we don't think so. So why is the newspaper industry the only one in America that is expected to give its product ... in its electronic version ... away for free? Wrestling with that question will determine the fate of this nation's newspapers. journalism disruption 2009-07-04T15:47:10Z http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/benfords-law-zipfs-law-and-the-pareto-distribution/ lemire A remarkable phenomenon in probability theory is that of universality – that many seemingly unrelated probability distributions, which ostensibly involve large numbers of unknown parameters, can end up converging to a universal law that may only depend on a small handful of parameters. One of the most famous examples of the universality phenomenon is the central limit theorem; another rich source of examples comes from random matrix theory, which is one of the areas of my own research. Analogous universality phenomena also show up in empirical distributions – the distributions of a statistic from a large population of “real-world” objects. statistics math 2009-06-29T12:56:33Z http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/2008/10/24/tsinghua-versus-berkeley/ lemire Just as drug companies hide the side effects of their drugs, both professors and students hide the side effects of this life-wasting situation. At Berkeley, few non-professors know the vast array of deals that are struck to reduce one’s undergraduate teaching. In Psychology, there has been long-lasting resentment that you can’t use grant money to buy your way out of teaching. Students hide how much cheating goes on. A Penn student told me: No student project at Penn is completely honest. At Berkeley, surveys have revealed high amounts of cheating. Few outsiders know the low level of lecture attendance at Berkeley. teaching learning education university 2009-06-29T12:42:31Z http://www.intermine.org/ lemire InterMine is a powerful open source data warehouse system. Using InterMine, you can create databases of biological data accessed by sophisticated web query tools. Parsers are provided for integrating data from several common biological formats and there is a framework for adding your own data. InterMine includes an attractive, user-friendly web interface that works 'out of the box' and can be easily customised for your specific needs. All InterMine code is freely available under the LGPL license database web datamining tools datawarehouse data 2009-06-28T00:56:39Z http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/health/research/28cancer.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss lemire One major impediment, scientists agree, is the grant system itself. It has become a sort of jobs program, a way to keep research laboratories going year after year with the understanding that the focus will be on small projects unlikely to take significant steps toward curing cancer. research productivity 2009-06-27T21:31:41Z http://www.plosone.org/static/latexGuidelines.action lemire Thank you for your interest in submitting your work to PLoS. This document will help you prepare your LaTeX formatted manuscript. Part of the production process includes the use of automated utilities to convert your LaTeX manuscript into a Word document. In order for the conversion process to go as smoothly as possible, please limit the use of non-standard LaTeX packages and formatting. latex plos