Captivated by R's Power

The R programming language is being used by a growing number of data analysts as data mining is increasingly being used by organizations to set ad prices, find new drugs faster, or fine-tune financial models. The open source language also has become popular among statisticians, engineers, and scientists without a background in programming because of the language's ease of use. "R is really important to the point that it's hard to overvalue it," says Google research scientist Daryl Pregibon. "It allows statisticians to do very intricate and complicated analyses without knowing the blood and guts of computing systems." Statisticians find R particularly useful because it contains several built-in mechanisms for organizing data, running calculations on the information, and creating graphical representations of data sets. Some familiar with R describe it as a stronger version of Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet that can help present data trends more clearly than is possible using information in rows and columns. R also is popular because users can alter the software's code to write variations for specific tasks. "The great beauty of R is that you can modify it to do all sorts of things," says Google's Hal Varian. "And you have a lot of prepackaged stuff that's already available, so you're standing on the shoulders of giants."
New York Times (01/07/09) Vance, Ashlee

NSF Looking for Wicked Cool Visual and Data Analysis Algorithms

The National Science Foundation (NSF) wants to develop highly interpretive mathematical and computational algorithms and techniques to help the U.S. government and private researchers evaluate the data generated by health care, computational biology, security, and other areas. NSF wants to make it easier for law enforcement and the intelligence community to present its data in a visual format, which will require the development of new algorithms capable of representing and transforming digital data into mathematical formulations and computational models that allow for efficient and effective visualization. NSF's research effort is part of a five-year, $3 million project known as the Foundation on Data Analysis and Visual Analytics (FODAVA), which is led by the Georgia Institute of Technology, the NSF, and the Department of Homeland Security. One FODAVA program is a Georgia Tech system known as Jigsaw, which provides multiple coordinated views of large document collections to show connections between entities found within the collection. Meanwhile, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency says it wants to develop software capable of capturing knowledge from naturally occurring text and transforming it into the formal representations used by artificial-intelligence reasoning systems.
Network World (01/07/09)

Reply to SciAm Perspective: After the Crash

In the December 2008 issue of Scientific American, the editors wrote a SciAm Perspectives piece entitled “After the Crash,” that focused on making sure that some of the blame for the Wall Street crash is placed on the developers of the software models. The last sentence of the opinion piece really drives home how little the SciAm editors understand about the software models, “Like an airplane, financial models can never be allowed to fly solo.”

What?! The problem wasn’t that the financial models were allowed to “fly solo”. The problem was that the models kept getting changed to appease the developers’ bosses. The SciAm editors also try to make it sound like the developers should have just not made the changes to the models each time “overoptimistic assumptions and faulty data” was given. What should have they done? Just said, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” They would have been fired and then replaced. In some cases maybe they could make a stand and say that making the change is risky and shouldn’t be done without being fired. However, it would amount to the same efforts that Roger Boisjoly made on January 27, 1986, when he convinced his manager, McDonald, to warn the NASA managers not to launch the space shuttle, Challenger, until warmer weather. The push back from the bosses was such that another person was found to sign off on the launch.

I am getting a little off topic. Let us return to this financial airplane that we don’t want to allow to fly solo. Many disasters have been caused by people doing their best to “fix” the problem instead of allowing the established protocols (usually designed using mathematical models) to deal with the problem. I’ll give two examples: Three Mile Island and the incident aboard the drill rig Ocean Ranger in February 1982.

In short, it is wrong to blame the people who work on the product because they are not the people with the power to decide what work is done on the product regardless if the product is a car or a financial model.

Bucket List

Get SCUBA certified: https://www.diventures.com/scuba/dive-certification-costs

Go on an Insight cruise: http://www.insightcruises.com/

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Winchester Palace, London, UK

November 2, 2017 - Riverside remains of a 13th-century bishops' complex with ruins of great hall, prison and brewhouse. https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/winchester-palace

Donald Knuth

Dr. Dobb's Journal published an Interview with Donald Knuth in April of 1996. It was a very good read.

Knuth discusses what distinguishes a "computer scientist" from a "computer programmer" but neatly side steps actually separating the two terms. Choosing to instead explain how computer science is about thinking about problems in a different way. (You'll have to ready the article to see what I mean.)

There is some discussion about Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming. Which Charles Moss tells me is a wonderful read. I'm not sure I believe that but the MSU library has volumes 1-3 in case I want to check them out.

I must quote this because one of my coworkers is just fanitical about C++. To him, everything that is not C++ is crap with the exception of javascript and ruby.

DDJ: You've mentioned Edsgar Dijkstra. What do you think of his work? DK: His great strength is that he is uncompromising. It would make him physically ill to think of programming in C++.

Kunth followed that quote up with some very reassuring comments about trying to find the middle ground between very specific control of code and allowing a library to be used without knowing how it was implemented.

[W]hen you write a program, think of it primarily as a work of literature. You're trying to write something that human beings are going to read. Don't think of it primarily as something a computer is going to follow. The more effective you are at making your program readable, the more effective it's going to be: You'll understand it today, you'll understand it next week, and your successors who are going to maintain and modify it will understand it.

DVD-RW driver problem in Windows Vista

Something I installed in the past month made Vista no longer recongize my DVD-RW. I tried removing it and reinstalling it but that didn't work. After a few online searches I found "Top Tip: DVD-RW driver problem in Windows Vista?".

I don't know why it works or what application made my DVD-RW stop working, but Andy2639's solution works.

In case that URL is broken in the future here is the solution:

Open the Registry Editor, navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class
select key {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} (now's a good time to backup)
delete the LowerFilters string value
delete the UpperFilters string value
Restart Windows.

She blinded me with Science!

The following tidbits were discussed last weekend with a small group of friends. It's mostly science stuff that I'm following up with links to confirm or expand on the things I talked about.

We were watching MythBusters and they had a Lifter on the show and I said that it is an example of ionic propulsion. Which then lead to a discussion of ion engines. Yes, NASA has launched a space craft with a ion engine. It was called Deep Space I; it launched in October 1998 and was retired in December 2001. I would to love to know why it was retired, what it's max speed was, and how far from Earth did it make it.
Anyway, back to Lifters; while most people might avoid Wikipedia I like it because it reads well and at the end of most entries are a list of sources with links. Anyone who has a problem with Wikipedia can skip right down to the links.

Next came the uses of magnets in MythBusters (we are all big fans of the show). JP said that Dr. M (physics prof. that we all took for Physics II) said that there are one pole magnets. This conversation was really short lived. I said that Dr. M is an idiot and Kirk explained that without two poles there would be no magnetic field and without a magnetic field the "magnet" would not be magnetic. Okay, it is possible that Dr. M was talking about a Halbach Array, this is a magnet setup so that one pole is on top and the other pole is on the sides. This leaves the bottom with no or very little magnetic effect. However, I'm sticking with my Dr. M is an idiot hypothesis because there is a big difference between a Halbach Array and a magnet with only one pole, and as a teaching professor he should be able to explain that.

There were undoubtedly more science related things talked about but I can't think was anything else that might deserve comment here.

x64 QuickTime

I don't know when it happened but QuickTime is now working on my Windows XP x64 system. Even though the last attempt to install iTunes gave a warning message saying the install was unsuccessful I guess that the QuickTime install was good. So, rejoice every who enjoys using QuickTime on a 64-bit system. Of course, VLC does a better job with fullscreen, but it is nice to have more software working correctly on my system.

The Expert Mind

"Teachers in sports, music, and other fields tend to believe that talent matters and that they know it when they see it. In fact, they appear to be confusing ability with precocity. There is usually no way to tell, from a recital alone, whether a young violinist's extraordinary performance stems from innate ability or from years of Suzuki-style training. The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born. In fact, it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field. Even child prodigies, such as Gauss in mathematics, Mozart in music, and Bobby Fischer in chess, must have made an equivalent effort, perhaps by starting earlier and working harder than others. It is no coincidence that the incidence of chess prodigies multiplied after László Polgár published a book on chess education. The number of musical prodigies underwent a similar increase after Mozart's father did the equivalent two centuries earlier." The Expert Mind @ Scientific American

XML - No Silver Bullet

Several years ago, when XML was just a buzzword and I was an undergrad in Computer Science, I went to a technical presentation / recruiting talk given by Cerner at my university. One of the "big" reasons to go work at Cerner was that they were cutting-edge; they were using XML. I gave the presenter some flak on that point. XML is no silver bullet. No one would consider listening to me, an undergrad with very little experience, not even the professors who should have known better*. Maybe someone with more experience can be more convincing....

Software Development Amidst the Whiz of Silver Bullets...

ACM Queue vol. 4, no. 5 - June 2006 by Alex E. Bell, The Boeing Company

* In retrospect, the professors were being politically correct. This is a business that funds scholarships, hires students, and took the time to give a presentation.