Some highlights: “iPhone owners said they find cool gadgets, “most attractive,” about a person, in fact, three times more than they find a college degree attractive” (implied that it’s because they don’t care about college degrees, but perhaps it’s because everyone in their social circle has one, so it’s not a good differentiator?)
“iPhone owners are more likely to break up with someone “electronically” than BlackBerry owners” (oh, I’m sorry it’s ‘cause they’re all teenagers and nobody has a college degree. I see);
iPhone owners seem to spend a great deal more time on their phones than BB users (including 20% of users (40% of men, one wonders?) “frequently” surfing for porn vs. 12%! …but those 3.5 screen inches are HD! :-) but at the same time they are more likely to break up with a partner for phone overuse (25% to 17%). I wonder how the paired study would go.
445 (self-selected?) respondents, 95% confidence interval at 4%. If they asked age and gender, then the above questions would be mostly answerable… they might even make the data available… nope, well, one has to ask at least.
This isn’t so much a post in the “GSI” series, but just two links that recently came out. Kevin Knight and Philip Resnik both just came out with tutorials for Bayesian NLP. They’re both…
Dr.Hugh Hill, storyteller and Cambridge personality known to generations as Brother Blue, has died.
Hill, 88, died at his home Nov. 3.
Brother Blue was born in Cleveland, Ohio on July…
A work email in its entirety:
Sadly, I am writing to let you know of the untimely passing of our microwave. A stalwart and faithful part of our gastronomic experience for several years, the…
How have I been using unix systems for over a dozen years and only now discovered lesspipe? You just put
eval $(lesspipe)
in your .bashrc and suddenly less stops warning you that the pdf or tarball you asked it to less is a binary file, and starts doing what you mean, vis, pdftotexting or untarring it for you.
Works by file extension, and lets you configure your own filetype filters. Fifteen lines of copy/paste from the manpage plus one line of change got it handling odt files using odt2txt. It just needs an image to ascii converter and a code pretty printer. Maybe even a reader for those proprietary formats people keep using for some reason.
def foo():
keepnames = []
for name in ["one", "two"]:
def keepname():
name_copy = name
print "my name is",name,"or",name_copy,"and my locals are", locals()
keepname.name = name
keepname()
keepnames.append(keepname)
return keepnames
nameds = foo()
print "Later..."
for kn in nameds:
kn()
print "its name is "+kn.name
print "Now with default parameters:"
def foo():
keepnames = []
for name in ["one", "two"]:
def keepname(myname=name):
print "my name is",name,"or",myname,"and my locals are", locals()
keepname.name = name
keepname()
keepnames.append(keepname)
return keepnames
nameds = foo()
print "Later..."
for kn in nameds:
kn()
print "its name is "+kn.name
You were desperately hoping that this would all be sane, but the output is:
my name is one or one and my locals are {'name_copy': 'one', 'name': 'one'}
my name is two or two and my locals are {'name_copy': 'two', 'name': 'two'}
Later...
my name is two or two and my locals are {'name_copy': 'two', 'name': 'two'}
its name is one
my name is two or two and my locals are {'name_copy': 'two', 'name': 'two'}
its name is two
Now with default parameters:
my name is one or one and my locals are {'myname': 'one', 'name': 'one'}
my name is two or two and my locals are {'myname': 'two', 'name': 'two'}
Later...
my name is two or one and my locals are {'myname': 'one', 'name': 'two'}
its name is one
my name is two or two and my locals are {'myname': 'two', 'name': 'two'}
its name is two
So: Is it a bug, or is it a feature?
In 2007, the American Psychological Association commissioned their Task
Force on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation.
The background is this: early in the history of mental…
Friends,
Our fair city of Cambridge, affectionately “the People’s Republic of Cambridge”, is holding municipal elections on Tuesday, November 3rd. The definitive website for quickly familiarizing yourself with the basics of each candidate is wickedlocal’s survey:
http://www.wickedlocal.com/cambridge/town_info/your_vote
(you have to click on the candidates’ pictures to get at the substance)
I know only a little about the politics of the city, read the news, have attended some council meetings, but the major issue seems to be (and this is admitted by most of the candidates) that the elected officials of the city (the council) are somewhat impotent at the hands of an entrenched appointed city manager, Robert Healy, who has made some absolutely disastrous fiscal decisions, partly in salaries (e.g. he is paid over 300k), partly in the Gates case (he hired some friends to … make recommendations), and a large part of it to do with an employment discrimination case against the city brought by Malvina Monteiro, in which the city appears entirely guilty, and which he has spent enormous sums of money fighting.
http://www.google.com/search?q=malvina+monterio+cambridge
The candidates fall into the camps of 1. Healy loyalist, 2. folks who want to change the city charter to at least give the council power over the formation of committees, 3. folks who want to kick Healy out, and 4. the requisite nutjobs. Voting is by ranking, and I plan to vote for the following mix of those folks (listed alphabetically) with some yet to be determined ranking:
I look forward to hearing your ranking suggestions and other opinions!
I know even less about the school committee, and just reading the texts, there appears to be just one nutjob (Stead), and a whole host of bright, dedicated people. I’m really impressed. My favorites, again, just from the responses they provided, are Richard Harding and Nancy Tauber. There appears to be an issue facing the next school committee asking them to balance the benefits of having dedicated subject teachers at a new facility for middle schoolers against the too few students that would remain at local elementary schools if the middle schoolers got their own facility. Many candidates want to make the decision vewy vewy cawefuwwy or simply oppose the new middle school, but both Harding and Tauber had a bit more nuance in their responses. Again, I welcome your input!
Grem
p.s., unless you’re reading this on Facebook, email me to comment.
