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Recalibrating expectations of acceptable decorum
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Awful indignation
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Lambda calculus, a vignette
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I don’t want to get too meta here, but, I just got an email about the phased shutdown and deletion of Google+ content
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Who knew
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The NHS sues a small volunteer organization making a Linux distribution for use by the NHS
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The language hygiene initiative
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He’s still alive
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What is Data Science
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I call bullshit on this email description of changes in Paypal’s legal policy
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I’ve been reflecting from time to time on the mystery of Hadley Wickham’s “Readings in Applied Data Science” at Stanford
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James Shaw Jr. on why he wrestled an assault rifle out of the hands of a man killing indiscriminately in a Tennessee waffle house
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The dirty little secret of the ongoing “data science” boom is that most of what people talk about as being data science isn’t what businesses actually need.
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The Dunning-Kruger effect
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We know now that we get it wrong an awful lot of the time
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Video from Uber car in autonomous mode, that hit and killed a cyclist on a highway
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Alex Lovell’s girlfriend suspected he was cheating, so she waited until he was asleep and attacked him with a Samurai sword.
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The StackOverflow developer survey has a section called most loved / dreaded / wanted languages, where “wanted” means a language that you want to learn
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Science by volume … that has to stop.
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Learning outcomes encapsulate a trivial view of University education
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Python has become the most popular language for teaching introductory courses in computer science
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Data scientist wanted: Must have Python, spontaneity not required
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Working more than 40 hours a week causes an overall drop in productivity and increase in errors
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Noam Chomsky on the purpose of education
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Just a humble question
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Some evidence that employers want data and coding skills
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Why I’m Learning Python in 2018
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I had not thought that I would read this opinion on Pinochet, but here it is
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Do not love the system
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The growth of Julia seems to be pretty slow
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Python overtook R in a poll of languages used for data analytics
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In his famous essay “On Bullshit”, Harry G. Frankfurt argues that a bullshitter is someone who does not care about the difference between true or false, but will use whatever comes to hand in order to persuade.
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I wrote up the argument for switching to Python from Matlab
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The seeker after truth
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A study comparing standard teaching with Arts Integrated (AI) teaching of science subjects
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The derisive local nickname for Amazon employees is “Amholes” — pugnacious and work-obsessed
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I am trying to work out how to teach statistics to undergraduates in life-science disciplines such as Biology and Psychology.
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I am reading a 2006 paper by Kirschner, Sweller and Clark on “Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work
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Douglas Crockford got uninvited from a conference, apparently because he as a reputation for being rather rude about things he doesn’t like
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Analysis of StackOverflow views shows that interest in Python is growing fast, and at an increasing rate.
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Data Engineering
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How to deal with an armed kidnapper, 1974 UK style
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I had previously noticed that most people that do teaching believe that they are pretty good, including people I would have rated as bad teachers.
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Training data scientists is hard work
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Eminent teachers of statistics discussing the future of statistics education
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I just read the now famous Google memo, that got the author fired.
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I just watched “An American Radical” about Normal Finkelstein
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What does real data analysis look like?
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Excellent 10 minute argument about the horrors of standard statistical theory compared to the joys of resampling methods.
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Gender reveal parties
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UK science has declined compared to the US in terms of Nobel prizes, but is catching up in terms of number of papers and citations.
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Is the UK research excellence framework doing more harm than good
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Student ratings of satisfaction have very little relationship to their performance in the final exam
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Hadley Wickham on “big data”
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Smetative
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Wasting money on mapping the brain
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Shotguns to toddlers
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Bundle it up and send it off
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Big data and (not) knowledge
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A panel discussion on the nature of data science
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Academic statistics may have lost its way
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Industry as the origin of “data science”
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Tukey (1965) on the importance of computing in the education of statisticians
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In 1965, Tukey predicted the rise of computer science at the expense of statistics
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“Computing with data” in 1998
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To be a mature data analyst, you must also be a programmer
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Hatred in America
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A rather depressing snapshot of the visitors to St Peter’s in Rome
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I have a memory, that is probably false, of a 1980s Private Eye cover, with a picture of Cecil Parkinson, a reviled Thatcherite.
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I have found it very hard to work out the meaning behind the term “data science”, but I think I have solved it now
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Looking out a link for the Anaconda Python distribution, I found the main web page at
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I got sick, so took to following Wikipedia trails, which brought me to
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A love-song to Cuba, with beautiful and evocative images of Havana (that I know) and the Cuban countryside (that I don’t know
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In the 1820s, the Society for Progressive Education in New York introduced a system of redeemable tokens as rewards for correct school work and a system of fines for various offenses in the school.
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Inauguration day
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Here I have made a small change to another quote from Marcus Aurelius
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This is more of the story of cell culture contamination and striking indifference in the scientific community.
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Terry Speed remembering George E. P. Box, and the huge advances in statistics that resulted from work during the second World War
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Let them eat Gauss
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Kent Beck is interesting on the change in culture from the old days, where programmers wrote code and the quality assessment people tested it, to the current practice, where the programmer takes responsibility for the quality of their own code
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How much do scientists care whether their results are correct
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I hope you will enjoy the irony as I quote this fragment from Plato, Letter 7
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There’s an interesting discussion going on at the Research Software Engineers mailing list
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On getting basics right
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Data Scientist (n.)
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Blog post on sheltering students from install problems
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I get regular fund-raising emails from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
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In the years between 1974 and 2014, the frequency of the words “innovative,” ”groundbreaking,” and “novel” in PubMed abstracts increased by 2500% or more (Vinkers, Tijdink & Otte, 2015)” From
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TODD talks
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At the theory lunch, we do not believe in using slides, waiting until the end to ask questions, or stopping the speaker when he or she runs out of time
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UC Berkeley student questioned, refused service after speaking Arabic on flight | The Daily Californian
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I found that I didn’t understand the Fourier transform very well, and I’m weak on my complex number algebra, so I wrote a tutorial explaining the Fourier transform using cos and sin rather than the traditional e^ix notation
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In “Guess who’s coming to dinner” (1967), Joey Drayton, a young white woman, wants to marry John Prentice, a black man.
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A flash-bulb illumination of a moment in history
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Which programming language should we use for scientific computing
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An occasional cure for injelititis
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Every error is a jewel that can be used to uncover weaknesses in systems and individuals, which in turn can be improved
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One evening [Thomas Carlyle and Alfred Tennyson] met in [Carlyle’s] house, and smoked continuously for three hours, neither of them saying a word, opening their mouths only to emit floods of smoke, and when Tennyson rose to depart, he said “This has been a blessed evening, Thomas”, and Thomas replied “Alfred, I have never enjoyed your company more than tonight
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Sea-Lioning is an Internet slang term referring to intrusive attempts at engaging an unwilling debate opponent by feigning civility and incessantly requesting evidence to back up their claims
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An interesting before and after picture
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Nine Reasons Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia (in their own words)
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Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women’s movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not).
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Stefan van der Walt pointed me to this
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Researchers are surprisingly likely to admit to questionable research practices
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I wrote a blog post about “makes-sense epistemology
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The American Academy of Sciences wrote this paragraph in 1989
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Here we see a 1969 memo from the deputy director of the FBI Cartha De Loach
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Stanford’s Jordan Hall is named after the first president of Stanford, David Starr Jordan, and home to the Department of Psychology
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But - it is only Python and R, measures code contribution by number of commits, and doesn’t (can’t) analyze journals for which text is not freely available
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I read this quote from a book written by a friend of mine
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I believe these lines from the pope’s homily show a deep understanding of the way Cubans think of themselves
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Jon Stewart on bullshit
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A UK report on research culture found that
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Excellent and relevant quote from Confucius in a comment on a nature news article
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Nancy Kanwisher on how to evaluate FMRI studies
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Bibliometrics: The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics
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Sourceforge went down heavily and is only slowly coming back up.
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The BBC bowed to pressure from the government to suppress a film about nuclear war and claimed they did this because the film was a failure.
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Are preclinical drug studies becoming less replicable at a rapid rate
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Here is a picture of the strangely informal world of the British Government during the war
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The tools we use have a profound (and devious!)
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APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.
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The work on satisfactory formulation of technical patents was a true blessing for me.
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I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science.
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Results for standard neuroimaging analysis pipelines differ somewhat when run on two very similar Redhat-based Intel Linux clusters.
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Authors should submit their proposed study for peer review.
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Please sign this
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I was reading about Joe Strummer (Clash singer / guitarist), and found this vivid echo from Britain in the 1980s
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Fred Brooks on “The Joys of the Craft” in the book “The Mythical man-month
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Suggestive evidence that women in technical jobs are more likely than men to get negative personal criticism in performance reviews, regardless of the gender of the reviewer
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Software engineering had emerged as a compelling solution to the software crisis in part because it was flexible enough to appeal to a wide variety of computing practitioners.
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I just watched this episode of Buffy the Vampire slayer
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Thomas Caswell just mentioned this article in a post to the matplotlib mailing list
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My impression is that most scientists feel that they don’t make very many errors in reporting their results.
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One reason that people don’t want to share data is that other people might find mistakes or bias in the analysis
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Psychiatry / psychology papers support the tested hypothesis 90% of the time.
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Living in the danger zone
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Dijkstra was not impressed by Ada
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The last sentence of Edsger Dijkstra’s report on the “green” proposal for what would later become the Ada programming language
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Max Weber on “Science as a vocation
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The enjoyment of one’s tools is an essential ingredient of successful work
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Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things.
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The BBC has a page on the outbreak of Christmas goodwill between the allied and German trenches in 1914
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US department of defense on open- vs closed- source software
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Chomsky - you can only be “concise” if you saying something everyone believes already
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Paul Ivanov mentioned this talk in his Scipy presentation
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The founder that Julie Ann Horvath refers to in her interview was Tom Preston-Werner.
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Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism And Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit | TechCrunch
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This is a self-conscious rant about the Perl programming language
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This blog post argues that BSD licenses make it more likely that projects will lose developers when they get hired by companies
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Frederick Herzberg points out that satisfaction at work is not the opposite of dissatisfaction.
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Egypt wants to execute how many people?
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Elsevier journals – some facts
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A poem by Ivor Cutler, in “Is that your flap, Jack
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Mac binaries find their libraries at run-time
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For the quote at the top from Steve Gilhooey
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I spent a while trying to understand the detail of “Why most published research findings are false” by John PA Ioannidis
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A confused crowd shouting at Sinead O’Connor or each other, and then she sings, bravely
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A science journalist sent 304 random variations of a deliberately and severely flawed paper to open access journals
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we urge future researchers to exercise caution in the use of advanced mathematical tools, such as nonlinear dynamics, and in particular to verify that the elementary conditions for their valid application have been met
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Summary of a study of code review techniques
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Quoting from page 32 of Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt
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Another danger is that commercial pressures of one sort or another will divert the attention of the best thinkers from real innovation to exploitation of the current fad, from prospecting to mining a known lode.
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Since the Romans have taught us “Simplex Veri Sigillum” —that is
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Computer coding for children
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Honest, and later on, wise
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This experience has taught me one very important lesson
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A reflection on the the problems of paying for work on open source projects
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Thinking of the depressing (lack of, blocking of) discussion about governance on the numpy mailing list, I came across this email explaining why making XFree86 governance more open was a waste of time
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Paying people for work they are doing for the common good can make them angry
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The page tells the sad story of Admiral Sir Dudley North.
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The editors of PLoS responding as editors to the article “Why most published research findings are false
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A hint as to why an older generation of scientists might be more prone to believe that scientific sofware need not be written by scientists
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I gave desperate warnings against the obscurity, the complexity, and over-ambition of the new design, but my warnings went unheeded.
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The mysterious belief that we don’t make many mistakes in scientific computer programs
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Why many scientists think reproducible science is desirable but not necessary
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A characteristic summary of the British idea of being British
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Don’t expect too much in the early days; […].
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Some more vivid phrasing from the introduction to
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Excellent quote from the end of the introduction to “Javascript, the good parts” (Douglas Crockford, 2008, O’Reilly
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Disapproval of heart
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A bad time
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Evidence of very low statistical power and high risk of false positive findings in neuroscience
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Matthew Brett hung out with 1 person.Nolan Nichols
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Message in banner at top of page confirming I had paid for a book on the SpringerLink website
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How Python installs scripts on Windows and Unix.
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Quoting from
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Fast forward tracking branch to latest remote commit
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TED talks on vulnerability, shame and courage
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my niece is so awesome!!!!!
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Some useful references, including this paper in PLoS
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I need to use Yahoo messenger web app.
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Then the question ; what happens when this breaks down?
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Last year, in a seven-month period there were two explosions inside factories where iPads were being produced that killed four people and injured 77 others.
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This is a continuous functional MRI activation map.
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In this study, the researchers pretended that they needed recommendation to the ethics committee for an experiment that would cause severe emotional distress.
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I wonder whether there is a large difference between people in what they see.
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I realized that I was still confused about floating point error, and I found it hard to understand the explanations I could easily find, so I wrote my own
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I have twice now run into links to articles by Peter Lawrence.
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Do functional MRI papers replicate?
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Forensics on a paper published in Science, but likely to be substantially or entirely wrong
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Blog post with some basic forensics of an open-source software fork
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Then, on the BBC report
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I visited this link
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I wrote a discussion of culture on the numpy mailing list
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The photo that JB sent to Neuroimage, celebrating finishing our somewhat late paper
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I never felt I had quite grasped floating point, so wrote a tutorial to explain it to myself