Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, October 2016
Attention conservation notice: I have no taste. Thomas Levenson, The Hunt for Vulcan: And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity and Deciphered the Universe A short, but engaging...
View ArticleBooks to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, November 2016
Attention conservation notice: I have no taste. Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914--1949 An absorbing history, emphasizing politics and social change. (Overlap with Kershaw's two-volume...
View ArticleIn Memoriam Stephen E. Fienberg (27 November 1942 -- 14 December 2016)
Steve was an inspiration to me long before I came to CMU, when he was just a name on the page. When I did meet him, he was only more impressive. He seemed to know everything and everyone, to be...
View ArticleBooks to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, December 2016
Attention conservation notice: I have no taste. Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account Historical fiction, in which the Narvaez expedition across what's now the American South and Southwest in the early...
View ArticleBooks to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, April 2017
Attention conservation notice: I have no taste. Jean d'Ormesson, The Glory of the Empire: A Novel, a History (translated by Barbara Bray) This must be one of the strangest and most brilliant of...
View ArticleBooks to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, February 2018
Attention conservation notice: I have no taste. Joel Michell, Measurement in Psychology: A Critical History of a Methodological Concept Comments having passed the 1500 word mark, including long...
View ArticleBooks to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, January 2017
Attention conservation notice: I have no taste. David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It Mind candy horror and juvenile humor (informed by reading about actual social...
View ArticleBooks to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, May 2017
Attention conservation notice: I have no taste. Karin Slaughter, Cop Town and The Kept Woman Mind candy mysteries. Cop Town is a historical mystery, set in the distant and alien past of early 1970s...
View ArticleBooks to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, February 2017
Attention conservation notice: I have no taste. Ben Aaronovitch, The Hanging Tree Continues the long-running series, and went by pleasantly, but I don't think it really advanced the plot very much....
View ArticleBooks to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, June 2017
Attention conservation notice: I have no taste. Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism An expansion of his essay of the same name. This short book is very much worth reading if you like my...
View ArticleBooks to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, January 2018
Attention conservation notice: I have no taste. Maria Konnikova, The Confidence Game: And Why We Fall for It... Every Time An engaging popular-science look at confidence games, their players and their...
View ArticleBooks to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, March 2017
Attention conservation notice: I have no taste. Check Wendig, Invasive Mind candy technothriller, drawing on obviously-loving research into ants. Fun enough, but takes its own oracular pronouncements...
View ArticleCourse Announcement: Data over Space and Time (36-467/667)
Attention conservation notice: Notice of an advanced statistics class at a university you probably don't attend, covering abstruse topics you probably don't care about. Also, it's the first time the...
View ArticleAn _Ad Hominid_ Argument for Animism
Attention conservation notice: Note the date. A straight-forward argument from widely-accepted premises of evolutionary psychology shows that humans evolved in an environment featuring invisible beings...
View ArticleMajor depression, qu'est-ce que c'est?
Attention conservation notice: 1100+ words on a speculative scientific paper, proposing yet another reformation of psychopathology. The post contains equations and amateur philosophy of science....
View ArticleBooks to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, July 2017
Attention conservation notice: I have no taste. Also, I have no qualifications to opine on 19th century America, criminology, the history of science, cultural evolution, or linguistics. Wallace...
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Data over Space and Time, Lecture 1: Introduction to the Course
Any lesson plan that survives first contact with the students is a good one. Have some slides: (R Markdown source file). Not un-related: I appear to be the last carbon-based life-form actually running...
View ArticleSome Blogospheric Navel-Gazing, or, Strange Memories of the Recent Past
Attention conservation notice: 2600 words about blogging for young scientists, last touched in 2013. Found five years later while looking for something else, they are too dated to be good career...
View ArticleData over Space and Time, Lectures 2 and 3: Smoothing, Trends, Detrending
Lecture 2 was a chalk-talk, which proved not to work very well in the room. (I never thought I would miss Wean Hall, but there you are.) Lecture 3 went back to slides, which will probably have to be...
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Data over Space and Time, Lectures 4: Principal Components Analysis I
(R Markdown source file) Corrupting the Young; Enigmas of Chance
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