Fuzzier Logic

Google Acquires AppJet – are there any live, functional alternatives to Etherpad?

Posted via web from Simon’s posterous

Tags: posterous, Software, web

Randomness, statistics and understanding

So here I am, sitting in a statistics workshop, having finished all the exercises ahead of time, musing on how much easier all this stuff is once you understand where it all comes from. This made me think that I have found this workshop more understandable and simpler to tackle because I have pretty much finished reading a marvellous little book called ‘The Drunkard’s Walk’ by Leonard Mlodinow.

Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/sixmilliondollardan/3193613357/

Mlodinow aims to educate the reader about randomness and statistics, by way of history and illustrative example, and he succeeds admirably. The book is a walk through mathematics from the Greeks and Romans, by way of the renaissance, to Einstein and the modern day. Each important advance toward the modern day study of statistics is illustrated with excellent examples and anecdotes, many of them personal to the author. The Monty Hall problem, the anomoly of Jeanne Calment, who reverse-mortgaged her apartment to a 47 year old lawyer when she was 90, only to outlive him (and he died aged 77), even the author’s own (false) positive AIDS test makes for an intriguing case study, and illustrates the importance of understanding prior probabilities when reporting the results of a test.

The setting of all this stuff in context has really helped my brain with the basic concepts, and even without this current course, I feel like I’ve got a much better grip on statistics in general. A remarkable claim for a popular science book. I look forward to the remaining 30 or so pages.

Tags: book, randomness, Review, statistics

Eee PC & Eeebuntu

I’ve been hankering after a netbook for a while. Not just new shiny gadget lust (though that is certainly part of it, I’m only human after all), but a small machine with good battery life would be ideal for on the road, and for all the chugging round campus (and beyond) to meetings I do on a weekly basis. I casually mentioned this fact to Phil recently, and a week later a nice new Asus EeePC 1000HE was sitting on my desk (thanks Phil!).

I got the 1000HE because of the promised battery life (9.5hrs). No other comparable netbook comes close, and it is every bit as good as promised. 6hrs real world use is no problem at all. 8hrs should be realistically achievable on a daily basis. Overall the machine is surprisingly nippy too. Its not going to break any speed records, but the Intel Atom N280 drives it along at a reasonable clip under normal usage. The extra 1GB of RAM I installed helps out with the speed some too, this is an ‘underpowered’ laptop that can fire up OpenOffice.org in around 10 seconds.

Since I just can’t get along with Windows as a primary OS these days, I installed Eeebunutu. This is a version of Ubuntu customised for use on Asus netbooks, and as such all the hardware works out of the box. Power management is very impressive, with the battery life holding up about as well as it does under Windows. The only glitch I’ve noticed so far is that the Wifi card doesn’t turn on and off properly with the keyboard shortcut, but its a low power device, I think I can live with that (and the Eeebuntu forums seem very good if I really want to find a fix).

Eeebuntu is certainly a pretty distro

The standard desktop is very good looking, better than the default Ubuntu look and feel, and the configuration makes the most of the (admittedly limited) screen real-estate. A few tweaks to Firefox to make the most of the available room, and I’m very happy to work on it all day. Considering I’m used to 20-24″ widescreens, that’s pretty impressive.

I’d recommend the Eee PC to anyone looking to make a netbook purchase, and since Asus are phasing the 1000HE out pretty soon, if you are looking, I’d grab one while you still can.

Tags: hardware, netbook, Review, Software

Experiments with MindMapping

I’ve been experimenting with various forms of note taking recently. I keep my daily diary on my wiki, but struggle to capture my every note there, because of the editing overhead, and requirement to be online (which I often am not during meetings, for example). So I have tried Evernote, which seems to work very nicely. The online requirement is gone, and I can take quick notes on my phone too (better for meetings). However, if I want to record these notes easily on the wiki, I have to adhere to wiki syntax in my note taking which can be a bit of a pain outside of that environment.

I’ve noticed a few people that I work with using Mind Mapping software recently, and the approach intrigued me. So I looked through FriendFeed for what different people were using (useful as a fast, informal survey of the tools available), and downloaded a couple to tinker with (FreeMind and XMind, for the record). Of these, XMind is the more polished tool, and allows you to share your maps once you have created them. I decided to give it a thorough test run at a workshop meeting in Manchester today. I’ve embedded the results below.

I’m quite impressed. It allows me to record detailed notes, and also to have a visual representation of how the various topics fit together. The XMind upload & share facility allows me to embed the final map in my wiki (or blog, obv.), and the outline view of the map is actually a good textual representation of the meeting too.

XMind is not going to be a solution for every situation. Often, pen & paper will still be used in meetings, and transcription to some electronic format will still be required. The fastest way of recording these types of notes will probably still be directly on the wiki. In the end, a mixture of tools seems the best approach overall, but for all day meetings/conference sitations, XMind seems like a very good tool.

Tags: mindmap, Review, Software

Papers for iPhone, a brief review

Papers, from Mekentosj, is a literature management program for Mac. It organises pdfs into a searchable library, and stores the appropriate metadata associated with scientific articles (which it retrieves from public repositories such as PubMed, though in practise you can tag any document with any metadata).

I have been a Papers user since v1.0. I bought my license in April ‘07 and have not looked back, it makes it so much easier to find that particular paper you are after, to organise papers by subject or project, and it even converted me to reading articles on the screen, rather than printing everything out.

I haven’t had an iPhone for very long, and it is safe to say it is by far the most impressive gadget I have ever owned. I am aware of its imperfections, but I don’t care, they are either in areas I don’t use anyway (I’ve never sent an MMS in my life), or they haven’t affected me yet (though I probably will curse the lack of Copy-Paste at some point). I have been thinking about the impending release of Papers for the iPhone ever since I got it, and wondering if it would (a) be any good and (b) add anything to the already high value of Papers for Mac.

The answer to both questions is a resounding yes so far. The app is lovely, very intuitive and smooth. Syncing my Papers library to my phone was a doddle, and my (not inconsiderable) library was copied across in less than 10 minutes. Now my article collection is quite literally at my fingertips. Searching PubMed on the phone and retrieving papers also works really well. Find the paper you want, click import, and you’re done. The viewer is good too, pdfs render quickly and clearly. My only criticism is that zooming in can be a little cumbersome, but I suspect this is a hardware, rather than software, limitation.

Although I have yet to spend a lot of time with it, I don’t regret my purchase of Papers for iPhone for a second (and £5.99 is a very reasonable price btw), I think that I will get so many more articles read now I can summon them at the press of a button on my bus ride home every evening. All I need now is the full range of my institution’s journal subscriptions available to me over my 3G connection.

Tags: iPhone, Papers, Review, Software