Monthly Archives: December 2011
Code as Play
Cool project for teaching programming through web games: Play My Code How to embed the game in the blog?
Filed under education
PyMC and PyMCMC
I learned last week about a Python Package for doing MCMC estimation, called PyMCMC. It sounds sort of like something I’m always writing about, doesn’t it? From my quick look, it appears that pyMCMC has some advanced sampling methods (like … Continue reading
Filed under MCMC
Bitcoin and Anonymity
Bitcoin is intriguing, a digital currency where the entire transaction history of economy is held in common by all participants. I think that this will be a great observatory for research for someone. I read a recent paper that has … Continue reading
Filed under Complex Networks
Complex Networks in the Kitchen
Two papers in the Arxiv caught my eye recently, (I have time to keep up on papers again!) both about networks and cooking. Both came out around Thanksgiving, too, but maybe that is just a coincidence. Chun-Yuen Teng, Yu-Ru Lin, … Continue reading
Filed under Complex Networks
Teaching in Video Blips
Claire Mathieu has been blogging about intro math and CS videos from Khan Academy and from others: I’ve heard about this Khan Academy, and it seems like more and more course material is appearing as tiny web videos. Also I recently found … Continue reading
Filed under education
False information
Ben Birnbaum stood for his general exam last week, on a topic that I’m very interested in: ABSTRACT– Surveys are one of the principal means of gathering critical data from low-income regions. However, interviewer fabrication, or curbstoning, can threaten data … Continue reading
Filed under education
Unscientific America
I read a short book about science and society last weekend, Unscientific America by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. It’s a quick read, and the context is very much the 2008 elections, so you should browse it sooner than later. … Continue reading
Filed under science policy
Validating Statistical Models
I’ve been thinking a lot about validating statistical models. My disease models are complicated, there are many places to make a little mistake. And people care about the numbers, so they will care if I make mistakes. My concern is … Continue reading
Filed under MCMC, software engineering
NSF Program Solicitation for Smart Health
This NSF Program Solicitation crossed my desk recently. It is for “Smart Health and Wellbeing”, which includes a lot of healthy algorithms topic in the “new tools and methods” it lists. For example: From Data to Knowledge to Decisions: Investigate … Continue reading
Filed under Uncategorized
