Lately I have been thinking about how to effectively communicate ideas over presentations. This has turned to be a key element when trying to convey the benefits of jumping on the Meandre wagon. Presentation Zen is a very interesting resource for methods, techniques, and example on how to convey and communicate ideas. I am working on revamping some of my Meandre presentations trying to be able to get the points across easily.
R has gained a lot of traction on the scientific community for data analysis, modeling, and exploratory work. I just run into a post by Michael E. Driscoll in his Data Evolution blog about how R is used in Google and Facebook. Nothing new, but what got my attention was ParallelR. If you have been using R for large problems, I am pretty sure you have been wishing that there was some parallelization capabilities. ParallelR targets the problem, and it definitely an option to check out. ...
One of the main handicaps I keep running over and over with Twitter is that there is no concept of groups. The usual story goes along these lines: You get forced to create accounts that behave as groups, make their updates private, and then ask the members to request to follow, and once they follow, that’s it. Yes, a bit convoluted. Yesterday, I ran into GroupTweet that basically automates this process. It still creates a new user account that works as a group fan but, at least it makes the process easier. ...
Since summer 2007 I have been twittering. It started as way to have a conversation with a bunch of friends scattered all over. Since we were not discussing any world-changing topic, my updates have been kept private. Lately, I have been receiving requests to follow me. So, instead of polluting my original intent, @xllora is now my public Twitter. Hope this gets things a bit simplified. I still wish that Twitter would one day allow you to have a better access control, but, oh well, it is what it is right now. Also, I added my @xllora tweets below :D ...
I just ran into the comic strip below at xkcd. I am still laughing now. Fitness functions are tricky. Once somebody told me that genetic algorithms always get their target; the main problem is to explain what the target is. If you want to learn a “fountain pen”, you better be accurate defining it or you may end up getting an unexpected all-terrain “pencil”. Yes, I know the example is quite solution free, but still has some truth to it. How many times have you end up getting something you did not expect, only because evolution find a better fitted crack in your description? Anyway, it is fun what you end running into on the Internet ;) ...