Unstructured data is to the usual database as Toontown is to Irvine Ranch (or Diamond Bar or Porter Ranch or any other white bread community that has two names, six types of floor plans and where half the children are named Buffy, Jessica, Jason or Justin – you know who you are). If one were…
I am a huge fan of the OpenGov initiative. In brief, this is an effort mandated by executive order to increase transparency in government. One of the major benefits to people like me with equal parts curiosity, cynicism and gigabytes of RAM is that anyone can access just mountains of government data by going to…
Hurray, you! You read my last post and now have your data on the high performance computing cluster wherever it is that people were silly enough to give someone like you access. You have an account. You have data. Now what? Oh, yeah, you need to connect to your host computer and do stuff. If…
“How often times it happens that we live our lives in chains, and we never even know we hold the key.” I remember listening to that song by The Eagles at the Mississippi River Fest back when I was a teenager. Yes, the Mississippi River existed back then. It’s a good point. So often we…
The difference between working for a business and being at a university is in a business we’re not paying you to show us how smart you are. Don’t get me wrong. I think the best career advice I ever read was in an article by James Watson in Technology Review, never be the brightest person…
You know those movies you see where there’s a guy that looks like Brad Pitt (or is Brad Pitt) and some woman who looks like Miss Universe and they sit down at a random computer and in less than five minutes they have re-programmed all of the computers on Planet Earth while simultaneously disarming the…
AN ACTUAL CONVERSATION THIS WEEK … “This paper is not going to be as much an academic treatise as most of the ones I write, but I am hoping it will be more interesting. I was wondering about the fact that some well-respected people say the secret to career success is to be the foremost…
So, I am writing these papers on moving from novice to intermediate programmer and Kim Le Bouton has to go apply logic to it and ask, “Just how do you define a novice programmer, anyway?” I was tempted to be a smart ass about it and answer that it was anyone who didn’t come to…
My work day started with a call on research design and ended ten hours later after I fixed a program that wasn’t working. I just resigned from my position as senior statistical consultant at a major research university so that I could concentrate on research. I’m on the technical staff on several projects, have a…
Years ago, I read a science fiction story about a future where all plays were performed by robots that had been programmed with the combined characteristics of the world’s best actors. An aspiring actor sadly asked the technician working on the computers to run these robots: “What would you do if they invented a little…