Alkahest

Publishers of academic journals have a sweet deal going. The content is written by researchers. The publisher hires a few academics to edit the journal. The editors then identify reviewers in the academic community. The reviewers cull the wheat from the chaff and make suggestions to help turn the later into […]

K’s mom suggested “Sierra” as a name for the new dog.  That works for both of us, so Sierra it is.

We’ve been needing to get another dog as a friend for Darwin.  Today we drove out to Wake Forrest to meet a rescue dog that needed a home.  She and Darwin hit it off and so we’ve brought her home with us.  Her name is currently Holloway, but she doesn’t know it and we don’t […]

I haven’t posted pictures of the squirrels in quite a while. Here are some from mid-September when they got big enough to move out of the aquarium and into a wire cage…

Two or three weeks ago, we put them in the outside cage. Today we opened up the release door, […]

The Chronicle of Higher Education today notes a report from Harvard regarding the number of women being offered tenure track faculty positions and the number accepting.  In 2005-2006, women were offered 39% of the tenure track faculty positions.  Unfortunately, only 20% of those accepting positions were female.  This compares to 2004-2005 when 40% of those […]

I recently had a small argument with a vendor selling biometric fingerprint scanners tied to your credit card number.  He said that they were the greatest and most secure thing ever; I said that there weren’t any standards and that the security of the devices was questionable.
I wish I had seen this earlier.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEXGetKk0Gg

last week saw the 300 millionth American. I happened to be online about that time and saw the U.S. census office’s population clock hit 3×10^8:

I don’t have too much to say about hitting 300 million people.  It seems like something of a mixed blessing.  On the one hand, population growth helps increase the level […]

Statistically speaking, there are apparently 171 people with my name:

HowManyOfMe.com

There are:
171
people with my name
in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?

That sounds like 170 too many to me. On the other hand, K statistically doesn’t seem to exist. Once again demonstrating the problem with statistics:

HowManyOfMe.com

There are:
0
people with my name
in the U.S.A.

How many have your […]

No, not that - Programming.
I need to do some statistical work to test a theory.  The best approach in order to compare my results is to do the work in R.  But it looks like I’ll need to extend a package.  I download the package from CRAN (the Comprehensive R Archive Network), unpack it and […]

IT security (and for that matter, other security concerns too) are often seen as conflicting with usability. There is something to that. If you take any given technology and turn up the level of security it provides, you will almost always decrease the usability of the system.
Consider passwords. If people are allowed […]