January 2011
25 posts
Night Trip to Mountain View and Hacker Dojo
Skipped into Mountain View last night to see Jofish and Terence/Wendy. They live 0.8 miles apart. I talked with Terence about HFT, Wall Street, and the new normal for Silicon Valley start-ups. He’s seeing the same “index model” approach in Mountain View that I’m seeing become more common in NYC. This model has venture funds putting up $150k to $300k with few meetings to...
Farm to Table Done Right (with Bacon, yes please!) →
Zazu Restaurant is well done farm-to-table. The farm is directly next to the roadhouse restaurant. On the farm, they grow vegetables and raise pigs. The pigs are turned into absolute deliciousness. The vegetables are well done too. The restaurant is Michelin Recommended, but this is the best meal that we’ve had in Sonoma County in our life.
We began with oysters w/bacon hollandaise and...
Bookmarking New R Stats Package for Sentiment
This is a PDF related to the new textir package.
Yes, Wired. It is no longer news that Facebook... →
Wine Tasting in Napa & Sonoma
I’m writing an ICSWM submission while sipping from a Pride Syrah and thinking about who needs gifts from our trip. Hronn is house sitting and watching our cats, so she gets a bottle. Mark & Mark and Jimmy & Steve will need bottles for my upcoming trips to Philly and NYC.
This is the list of appointments that we are committed to attending while in the San Francisco area next week. It...
Slate Prep Article on BMI for our Fit4Life CHI... →
Slate has written a quick overview on the use of BMI in health studies. This is good timing as we prepare to release our CHI 2011 paper: “Fit4Life: The Design of a Persuasive Technology Promoting Healthy Behavior and Ideal Weight”. Like many other health and fitness systems, the Fit4Life system uses BMI as a target goal for its users.
The Slate article provides an overview of some of...
Bookmarking this for Later Modeling →
This article indirectly discusses a model for predicting reduced interest by buyers in an area. Data sources should be examined for use in similar modeling.
MacBook Air boots from 64 gb SDXC
For those interested in slowly booting a 13” MacBook Air, like the new Mac Minis, the MBA13 Late 2010 will boot from a high performance (30 Mbps) SDXC card. 30 Mbps would normally be considered dog slow, but this works well for a system maintenance volume. You can squeeze the Mac OS plus utilities into about 8 gb of space.
S&P and Moody's: Remember who your sugar-daddy... →
The rating agencies are threatening to downgrade the U.S. government’s debt rating due to the size of the total national debt. I appreciate the sentiment, but given their history of foresight, I’m not certain the saber rattling will have the intended effect.
More Coverage of the ESP Paper and Why Bayesian... →
The Irony of Tor is that Privacy Advocates are... →
I write occasionally about privacy and there is nothing new in this article (that wasn’t known 10+ years ago). But, in the comments, there is an interesting note about Tor (a “privacy resilient approach to web browsing”. It’s not easy to say this without sounding like a nut, but, according to the speakers at the recent MIT summit on Internet privacy, one of the primary...
Still Fixing Macbook Air After Apple Data...
The fifth phone call with Apple support about data migration fallout is about rampant permission problems in the resulting operating system. As an example, Spotlight can’t find any of the data files on the system because it thinks that I don’t own them.
Apple is at the growing pains point in its career when its technical support and attention to OS detail for existing customers is...
Setting up the New Macbook Air
A few observations about setting up the Macbook Air:
The fastest way to transfer data on to the device is through a USB hard disk or the $28 100 Mbps USB ethernet adapter. There’s no way to get around it; copying 256 Gb of data to this thing takes a lot of time.
I wouldn’t use Apple’s Data Migration Tool. It is: (A) poorly documented (except online) (B) likely...
JP Morgan Markets Its Latest Doomsday Machine (or... →
One of the interview questions that I’ve been getting lately is about rehypothecation in the repo market. This is an interesting take on the problems with collateral multipliers. Of course, it is interesting to imagine that, when you’re truly wealthy, you can take your assets and achieve 4x to 10x multipliers into more liquid assets.
Journal’s Article on ESP Is Expected to Prompt... →
Two things are interesting about this:
The ESP experiment is situated in the literature because it reverses the order of steps of previous experiments to determine whether those experiments were flawed.
It’s good to see someone (another researcher at Missouri) finally call out researchers on a common but disingenuous practice of social science researchers — the assumption that all...
How Do You Sous Vide a Whole Pig? In a Hot Tub, of... →
I can neither confirm or deny that we are cooking a whole pig in a hot tub as soon as I figure out how to disinfect a hot tub.
stopwilson.com →
= awesome
Politicians Face Online Privacy Concerns with...
In the run-up to the 2008 and 2010 elections, political campaigns learned an annoying fact: online news outlets, increasingly concerned with the liability of linking to web sites that collect personal information and abuse it, were demanding privacy policies at advertiser web sites, including political web sites.
Political campaigns use private data collected on the web. They look at...
Unholy French-Italian Fusion for Dinner
New recipe tonight: Foie Gras Pasta Bolognese w/Eataly Dried Pasta
The historical Purpura family pasta meat sauce passed down for generations but modified to use duck fat, duck liver, and Toulouse sausage (from Bryan’s Fine Foods) instead of olive oil and Italian sausage.
Note that if I could spare more time, I would produce foie gras noodles by cooking the duck liver with liquid nitrogen,...
Fido’s No Doctor. Neither Is Whiskers. -... →
I was convinced that my cats alleviated my pet allergies, so I stopped taking my allergy drugs. Luckily, the NYTimes helped me overcome that wrongheaded thinking.
House Republicans Outline Budget Cuts -... →
This will be entertaining to watch.
Flaws Spotlighted in Tor Anonymity Network →
I saw this posted by a couple of people and it reminded me that I should look at this eventually, because Tor is currently used more frequently by people that have a reason to hide their identities.
alexainslie:
“… An attacker — perhaps an ISP instructed by law enforcement or a government to engage in such surveillance — would first have to develop a list of potential sites that the target...
Pages that I will eventually read, but no time for...
Economics and Trading
The New Speed of Money Reshapes Markets (a post about New Jersey exchanges … probably little new information)
Economic Optimism, I’ll Take that Bet (entertainment … this guy gets in obvious bets with crackpots)
Computers that trade on the news (lots of friends want me to read this, I should write a more thoughtful reply to them)
Context Modeling
Robert...