Using C11 or the earlier C99, which include some changes that make old C habits obsolete.

Explanation of blockchains by Jeni Tennison.<br> https://twitter.com/JeniT

http://theodi.org/blog/impact-of-blockchains-on-privacy<br> Potential privacy issues of blockchain applications.

From 1926 until the early 1950s, US military aircraft relied on a "one size fits all" design based on average measurements of hundreds of male pilots.

But a 1950 study by Lt. Gilbert Daniels showed that out of 4,063 airmen, not even one was average in all ten measurements. They started designing cockpits and controls to be adjustable. Accidents decreased, and pilot performance increased.

Standardized education makes the same mistake.

A mathematical psychologist at Penn State University, Molenaar extended ergodic theory (link is external) to prove that it was not mathematically permissible to use assessment instruments based on group averages to evaluate individuals.

A Manifesto on Psychology as Idiographic Science, Peter Molenaar

-- John Dewey

-- James Truslow Adams, coining the phrase "The American Dream" in his 1931 book The Epic of America.

I can imagine it, but Don't Worry, Be Happy was written and recorded by vocalist Bobby McFerrin. One by Bob Marley that sticks with me is Redemption Song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFGgbT_VasI

https://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2016/02/cve-2015-7547-glibc-getaddrinfo-stack.html

Number Theory: In Context and Interactive, Karl-Dieter Crisman (online textbook)

Introduction to Computer Organization with x86-64 Assembly Language and GNU/Linux, Robert G. Plantz

A First Course in Linear Algebra, Robert A. Beezer<br> Free as PDF or online.

Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski is a 22-year-old MIT graduate and Harvard PhD candidate in physics whose talents have gained a lot of attention.

http://physicsgirl.com/

Mike Caulfield explains why he supports Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, in response to a pro Sanders article.

A study of typing strategies among both touch-typists and self-taught typists.

http://10fastfingers.com/typing-test/english<br> Test your typing speed by typing a series of random words for one minute.

Academic researchers protest Elsevier's business practices. 15,647 so far.

https://twitter.com/costofknowledge

John Quiggin points out that we have consumption peaks, as well as production peaks. Coal, oil, steel, and paper usage per person have all declined. If I understand him, then the per person rates have declined enough to create a decline in total consumption, in spite of population growth.

Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics

• Seek truth and report it
• Minimize harm
• Act independently
• Be accountable and transparent

http://urban.org/mobilitypartnership

Tutorial series on distributed systems.

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20160211<br> http://www.ligo.org/

Scientists sharing knowledge! Naughty!

https://twitter.com/RepTedLieu<br> https://twitter.com/farenthold

Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies<br> https://www.coursera.org/course/bitcointech

According to numbers from the American Journalism Review and the Pew Research Center, less than a third of U.S. newspapers have a reporter present at the statehouse (either full- or part-time) and almost no local television stations assign a reporter to state politics.

Net result: the public’s awareness of and access to the activities of state government is vanishing, at the same time that the decisions made by state-level actors are having greater effects on American lives.

The first step towards righting this asymmetry is access, and there’s a good idea out there you need to know about: State Civic Networks are state-based, non-profit, independent, nonpartisan, “citizen engagement” online centers, and they should exist in every state. (Think C-SPAN, but way better, and focusing on statehouses.)

"Free school" has a few different meanings. Here, it means a classification of schools in England that are publicly financed but independent.

https://www.gov.uk/types-of-school/free-schools<br> https://www.gov.uk/set-up-free-school

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school<br> (various meanings)

REBUS Open Web Textbooks - A new project to build a collaborative system for open source textbooks.

https://twitter.com/hughmcguire<br> https://twitter.com/Bopuc

Books on data science and R programming by Roger D. Peng of Johns Hopkins.

Design-Oriented Analysis Rules and Tools, Dr. R. David Middlebrook

Real problems usually have more variables than equations. So approximations and inequalities are essential.

Free courses and tutorials from the Santa Fe Institute on subjects related to complex systems science.

Great explanation of 15 common probability distributions: Bernouli, Uniform, Binomial, Geometric, Negative Binomial, Exponential, Weibull, Hypergeometric, Poisson, Normal, Log Normal, Student's t, Chi-Squared, Gamma, Beta.

http://software-carpentry.org/lessons/<br> Basic programming skills for scientific researchers.<br> SQL, and Python, R, or MATLAB.

http://www.datacarpentry.org/lessons/<br> Managing and analyzing data.

Chelsea Rustrum

The term "sharing economy" was stolen a few years ago, by firms that aren't sharing anything.

The technology of these platforms is not expensive to build. Meanwhile, these companies have skyrocketing valuations (exceeding even the growth trajectory of Facebook) because they are absorbing value from the people actually creating and providing the value.

Everyone on the Internet is being exploited without noticing.

"Our personal data is not unlike labor -- you don’t lose by giving it away, but if you don’t get anything back you’re not receiving what you deserve. Information ... is inherently valuable."

An economy where workers get fair exchange for the value they produce is possible. Rustrum points out these means:

• Cooperatives. In particular, platform coops
• ESOP, employee stock ownership plans
• Crowd funding
• Blockchain - digital peer-to-peer secure transactions

50 Years of Data Science, David Donoho<br> 2015, 41 pages

This paper reviews some ingredients of the current "Data Science moment", including recent commentary about data science in the popular media, and about how/whether Data Science is really different from Statistics.

The now-contemplated field of Data Science amounts to a superset of the fields of statistics and machine learning which adds some technology for 'scaling up' to 'big data'.

Discussion about Obama's computer science for K-12 initiative. CS programs in high school are about 40 years overdue. It is a valid concern that much of this money may be wasted on overpriced proprietary software, hardware, and training programs. And of course, average schools will handle CS about like they handle other subjects -- not very well.

Another concern raised, and countered, is that more programmers will mean lower wages for programmers. But not everyone who studies CS in high school is going to become a programmer. And an increase in computer literacy may help increase the demand for programmers and technicians.

PeerTracks, a music streaming and retail platform company, is the first outfit to use the brand new MUSE network, in partnership with CCEDK and OpenLedger.

http://www.peertracks.com/faq.php<br> https://www.openledger.info/<br> https://www.ccedk.com/about

Announcing the Bank Whistleblowers United Initial Initiatives

Our group publicly released four documents on January 29, 2016. The first outlines our proposals, all but one of which could be implemented within 60 days by any newly-elected President (or President Obama) without any new legislation or rulemaking. Most of our proposals consist of the practical steps a President could implement to restore the rule of law to Wall Street.

Tutorial on new features of JavaScript in ES6.

Raw Deal: How the "Uber Economy" and Runaway Capitalism are Screwing American Workers<br> Steven Hill

Intellectual property law is not a strong motivation in the creation of art, science -- or even business. It tends to hinder progress more than it promotes progress.

The Eureka Myth: Creators, Innovators, and Everyday Intellectual Property<br> Prof. Jessica Silbey

Ami Bloomer's new company Clozer provides on-demand sales representatives globally.

Ami herself currently calls it "the Uber of sales". But that must be a very loose comparison. Anyone who can drive a car could work for Uber, but salesmanship is a talent.

Professor Christine Ortiz is stepping down from her post [at MIT] as dean for graduate education to found a new residential research university.

...

Ortiz said the university would focus on project-based learning and would dispense with some of the familiar hallmarks of university education, like the lecture.

"I don't see it having any face to face, on-the-ground lectures, actually," she said. "No majors, no lectures, no classrooms."

Scott Johnson tweeted a screen-capture of a message he received from academia.edu.

Would you be open to paying a small fee to submit any upcoming papers to our board of editors to be considered for recommendation? You'd only be charged if your paper was recommended.

Academia.edu founder Richard Price replied.

Tips on writing nonfiction and avoiding bullshit, by Josh Bernoff.

Six Responses to Bernie Skeptics<br> Robert Reich

Recently rediscovered photos from The Band's 1976 Last Waltz concert. link

Vigilant Solutions, a surveillance technology company, is making shady deals with police departments in Texas. They lend the police equipment and database access. The police use it to spot people with outstanding warrants, whom they can stop and take payments from by credit card -- with a 25% processing fee tacked on for the tech company. The company also intends to keep all the license plate data collected by the police.

One of the drawbacks of anonymity on the Web is romance scams. Scammers set up fake personas on social media. They often use photos stolen from a real person's accounts

When the same person has their photos stolen repeatedly, Facebook could prevent this easily. But they don't.

Jennifer Garam<br> https://twitter.com/writeouschick

Some members of UK Parliament think it's a fine idea to spend thousands of pounds of public funds on portraits of themselves.

Notepad++, a free, open source text editor for Windows.

"Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right", Jane Mayer (19 Jan 2016)

review

Google announcement from 10 Nov 2015.

Estimate of operating system usage.

Microsoft security updates for Windows Vista are scheduled to continue until 11 April, 2017.

The Syllabus Explorer publishes only metadata (citations, dates, locations, etc) extracted from its collection via machine learning techniques. It does not publish underlying documents or personally identifying information.

Searchable list of textbooks categorized by field, institution, state, and country, ranked by the number of times they found them listed in a course.

http://opensyllabusproject.org/<br> https://twitter.com/opensyllabus

stack fallacy - Tech companies often fail when they create a new product by building upward from their existing product. They may know the technology well -- but fail to do enough research about what customers want. It is easier to innovate downward, by developing a product that you need yourself.

The strategy seems to be archive everything in case traffic analysis finds something worth going back and reading.

Defense against traffic analysis:

Messages from users must be padded to be uniform in size and combined into relatively large “batches,” then shuffled by some trustworthy means, with the resulting items of the randomly ordered output batch then distributed to their respective destinations. (Technically, decryption needs to be included in the shuffling.) Mix network

He then talks about limited anonymity and pairwise pseudonyms as ways of solving problems with complete anonymity versus public identification. There is an article in Wired about his proposed system.

Site on pre-Renaissance Muslim contributions to knowledge. https://twitter.com/HeritageMuslim

State legislators in New York and California have introduced bills that would require smartphone vendors to be able to decrypt users' phones.

Collection of programming bit tricks with bitwise logical operators: & | ^ ~ << and >>

A thorough primer on C programming, specifically for the Texas Instruments TM4C123 or TM4C1294 microcontrollers. By Jonathan Valvano and Ramesh Yerraballi of UT Austin.

Jeff Atwood tweeted a picture of someone's pet capybara, and a reply led me to this page. They are not suitable as pets -- unless you are willing to be a full time caretaker.

Putting together a custom home Internet router.

Recurse Center is starting a free one-to-one mentorship program for new programmers called RC Start. Those selected will get three 45-minute sessions with an RC alum, and access to a private forum and mailing list.

https://www.recurse.com/apply/start

While its causes are still debated, the political behavior of authoritarians is not. Authoritarians obey. They rally to and follow strong leaders. And they respond aggressively to outsiders, especially when they feel threatened.<br> . . .<br> my poll asked a set of four simple survey questions that political scientists have employed since 1992 to measure inclination toward authoritarianism. These questions pertain to child-rearing: whether it is more important for the voter to have a child who is respectful or independent; obedient or self-reliant; well-behaved or considerate; and well-mannered or curious. Respondents who pick the first option in each of these questions are strongly authoritarian.

The article goes on to say that support for Trump is likely to continue to grow. People tend to become more authoritarian when they feel threatened. And people are worried about terrorism -- and maybe about losing jobs to immigrants.

The main reason for Trump's lead among right wingers might be simply that it seems like he could win. This is the most pathetic group of Republican presidential hopefuls I've ever seen.

"Recently, someone asked what keeps me up at night. It's the fear that the mindset concepts, which grew up to counter the failed self-esteem movement, will be used to perpetuate that movement." -- Carol Dweck

In any reporting on a controversy in science or technology a journalists job is first and foremost to find out whether there’s overwhelming support for one side among experts and if there is to report that straightforwardly.

I don't know enough about bitcoin to have an opinion about this controversy. Regardless of that, this is a very good point. "Impartial" shouldn't mean giving equal credence and equal time to fringe viewpoints -- unless they are coming from some noteworthy experts with strong evidence.

Mike Belshe, CEO of BitGo, says they need to increase the blockchain size immediately.<br> http://belshe.com/2016/01/18/bitcoin-blocksize-and-the-future/

Petition President Obama to pardon alleged whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling. He was convicted on the basis of exchanging emails and phone calls with a reporter, with no evidence of what was discussed? These conversations took place in 2002-2004, but they didn't decide to press charges until December 2010?

http://en.rsf.org/united-states-jeffrey-sterling-latest-victim-of-18-09-2015,48366.html<br> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Alexander_Sterling

Life is short. Avoid bullshit. Especially the bullshit that's your own fault. Identify the things that really matter to you. If there's something worthwhile that you want to do, do it. Value your family and friends, because you won't have one another for very long. Savor your moments.

I only skimmed this, but I think I got the point. You move more people faster on escalators when none of them are reserved for walking -- simply because not enough people are willing or able to walk. If you have walking lanes, they are under-used, and the standing lanes are over-crowded.

Exercises for learning PostgreSQL.

Dea Conrad-Curry contrasts ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act) with its predecessor, NCLB (No Child Left Behind).

• ESSA is 391 pages. NCLB was 670 pages.
• ESSA takes a somewhat softer tone.
• NCLB emphasized SBR (scientifically-based research).<br> ESSA emphasizes EBP (evidence-based practices).

The Center for Plain Language is a non-profit organization that promotes clear communication in government and business.

"A communication is in plain language if its wording, structure, and design are so clear that the intended readers can readily find what they need, understand it, and use it."

Plain language checklist<br> https://twitter.com/plain_language

A popular list of assertions about "100 years ago" is not very accurate -- partly because the same list is recirculated without changing anything but the years.

Kotlin, a statically typed language that compiles to Java bytecode or JavaScript.

The story of Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch, whose theory of brain function was followed by John von Neumann's design for the stored program computer.

Online disassembler for many different CPUs that takes hexadecimal strings or several executable formats.

Excerpt

With a wide open network, it also makes the world look smaller.

This is a great essay by Gardner Campbell. I'd add more notes. But every time I try, I start sounding like a crazed revolutionary. Like this...

Ask not how you can be a more suitable corporate drone. Ask how you can knock them down a few pegs.

The computer is an unprecedented partner for the human mind. We've barely begun to tap its potential. Stop trying to turn it into television.

Stop training kids to do what they're told. Teach them to teach themselves and one another.

https://www.eff.org/document/library-congress-2015-dmca-1201-rules

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/lowering-your-standards

Petition Congress to vote NO to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Includes annotated full text of the TPP.

Category Theory for the Sciences by David I. Spivak<br> Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0<br> MIT Press.

No. The TPP was written by corporations, for corporations. It betrays national sovereignty and individual rights.

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/tag/tpp/<br> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/how-tpp-will-affect-you-and-your-digital-rights<br> https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-to-vote-no-on-the-tpp

Swift GUI examples, and several links.

IBM has a Swift Sandbox.<br> Official guide: The Swift Programming Language

No. The TPP is another trade agreement created by corporations, for corporations -- with no input from everyone else.

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/tag/tpp/<br> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/how-tpp-will-affect-you-and-your-digital-rights<br> https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-to-vote-no-on-the-tpp

I think the vast majority of open source users don't need to be told this. But it only takes a few jerks to regularly annoy someone.

Chris Patti added a good point. Even if you can't donate, you can send short thank-you emails. That should include anyone who makes something you find helpful or entertaining, whether it's software, open access books, MOOCs, tutorials, a blog, webcomics, videos, etc.

Open source textbooks approved by the American Institute of Mathematics.

Dr Shah warned that although there has been no local transmission of Zika as yet in the continental US, areas along the Gulf Coast have populations of the two species of Aedes mosquitoes that serve as vectors for Zika virus. He said that a patient with sufficiently high Zika viral load could, in theory, pass Zika to one of these mosquitoes.

The role of Disney in endless extensions of copyright.

The two-party system, formal debate, and typical advice for essay writing all emphasize picking A or B, and then defending it to the death. We should place more emphasis on the identification of alternatives and the collection of objective facts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False-consensus_effect

We tend to assume that most people think and feel similarly to us. We then categorize those who don't as "other" and somehow inferior. This tendency is intensified when we gather with people who are in fact like-minded. And that happens in social media, where we tend to follow those with similar views.

I agree. But on the other hand, "mocking a caricature of the Other Side" is a description of satire, which seems to be a valuable way to spread ideas.

David Bowie died 10 January 2016 after an 18-month battle with cancer. On 8 January, his birthday, he released his 25th album, Blackstar.

Accurate and funny parody of amateur criticism of sci-fi and fantasy books whose popularity the critic doesn't understand.

Computer hardware is also full of bugs.

UT Austin SDS 348, Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. Course materials and links: R, regression modeling, ggplot2, principal component analysis, k-means clustering, logistic regression, Python, Biopython, regular expressions.

Elements 113, 115, 117, and 118 were recently produced in laboratories. 114 and 116 were created about five years ago. There is a petition to name one of the new elements Lemmium, after rock musician Lemmy Kilmister, who died 28 December 2015. It has 133,465 signatures so far.

NPR<br> https://twitter.com/LemmiumMetal

paradox of unanimity - Unanimous or nearly unanimous agreement doesn't always indicate the correct answer. If agreement is unlikely, it indicates a problem with the system.

Witnesses who only saw a suspect for a moment are not likely to be able to pick them out of a lineup accurately. If several witnesses all pick the same suspect, you should be suspicious that bias is at work. Perhaps these witnesses were cherry-picked, or they were somehow encouraged to choose a particular suspect.

Formal models are explicit in the assumptions they make about how the parts of a system work and interact, and moreover are explicit in the aspects of reality they omit.

-- Paul Smaldino

You already have a generating model for your data – it’s your model. Statistical analyses on model data often involve modeling your model with a stupider model. Don’t do this. Instead, run enough simulations to obtain limiting distributions.

I have come across too many modeling papers in which the model – that is, the parts, all their components, the relationships between them, and mechanisms for change – is not clearly expressed. This is most common with computational models (such as agent-based models), which can be quite complicated, but also exists in cases of purely mathematical models.

This is important for at least two reasons, the first and foremost of which is that science absolutely requires empirical data. Those data are often painstaking to collect, requiring clever, meticulous, and occasionally tedious labor. There is a certain kind of laziness inherent in the professional modeler, who builds entire worlds from his or her desk using only pen, paper, and computer. Relatedly, many scientists are truly fantastic communicators, and present extremely clear theories that advance scientific understanding without a formal model in sight. Charles Darwin, to give an extreme example, laid almost all the foundations of modern evolutionary biology without writing down a single equation.

General Relativity may also turn out to be a "dumb model". https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/672957979545571329

Twelve good uses for dumb models, William Wimsatt (1987).

By making our assumptions explicit, we can clearly assess their implied conclusions. These conclusions will inevitably be flawed, because the assumptions are ultimately incorrect or at least incomplete. By examining how they differ from reality, we can refine our models, and thereby refine our theories and so gradually we might become less wrong.

A model that approximates some aspect of reality can be very useful, even if the model itself is flat-out wrong.

But on the other hand, we can't accept approximation of reality as hard proof that a model is correct.

Many people, including some with training in advanced mathematics, contradicted her smugly. But a simple computer program that models the situation can demonstrate her point.

2/3 times, your first pick will be wrong. Every time that happens, the door Monty didn't open is the winner. So switching wins 2/3 times.

http://marilynvossavant.com/game-show-problem/

Statements, line breaks, semicolons, and ASI (automatic semicolon insertion) in JavaScript.

More detail here:<br> http://inimino.org/~inimino/blog/javascript_semicolons