Embedded in Academia

Month: November 2012

  • Gaining Confidence in Confidence Intervals

    Many computer scientists, including myself, end up doing research that needs to be evaluated experimentally, and yet most of us have had little training in statistics or the design of experiments. We end up teaching ourselves this material as we go, which often works pretty well. On the other hand, sometimes the issues are surprisingly…

  • Spiral Jetty

    Smithson’s Spiral Jetty is often totally submerged, or else high and dry as it was when I last saw it. Today a favorable lake level as well as warm weather and a feeling of having spent maybe one too many days around the house motivated us to take a day trip. The hazy air and calm water…

  • A Few Thoughts on Scratch

    Over the last year or so my older son, who is about to turn eight, has spent maybe one morning a month creating a video game using Scratch. This doesn’t seem like a lot of time to spend learning to program, but I’ve been trying to avoid pushing. Our usual mode of operation is that…

  • Fastest FizzBuzz

    The always-entertaining FizzBuzz problem came up again on Hacker News today, and for no other reason than I just got out from under a nasty deadline, I looked around on the net for interesting solutions, for which this Rosetta Code page is a gold mine. The Windows batch file and BSD make versions are hilarious,…