linhir's comments

I would look at http://datawithoutborders.cc/ if you want a data science element or http://codeforamerica.org if you want a more development angle.

Fun fact, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs is the largest cultural funding agency in the nation, with an expense budget in Fiscal Year 2012 of $152 million, larger than NEA.

I went through the Codeacademy exercises even though I can program reasonably well (i.e. I can do everything I need to, but I would never call myself a software engineer). I did this partially because I do not know js and partially because I wanted to see how the systems work. The “Oops, try again.” message can be very frustrating because, as the author points out, often the output they want is opaque. They have a great idea, but it seems that they sometimes prefer brevity in their instructions over specificity.

Totally agree, R studio has made my life much easier.

I do a good bit of R programming, and R in a Nutshell has been the best quick reference guide I have found.

The Boston Globe is owned by the NYTimes company, I wonder if this design might be a preface to a more fluid design of that site.

I've been using TileMill recently and their focus is mainly web/html. The static maps (PNGs) are pretty, but there is also some frustrating aspects. For example, PNG/PDF exports don't include legends and they don't have plans to implement that feature presently.

I would suggest Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning by Bishop.

I am most excited about the machine learning course, since I could use the structure to go through Andrew Ng's lectures; also the ones from 2008 are already out of date.

As for the AI course, I'm skeptical, frankly. Sign-up right now has meant putting your name and email address. There is a big difference between spending 2 second to fill that in, and spending the amount of time necessary to finish the course. You come to a website that sounds like making robots and turns out the class is about developing pruning heuristics for search trees, do you stick with it? Maybe...but I'm going to save my awe for how many people complete.

I praise Stanford (CS) for thinking up this idea. Like Khan, they are going to reach a lot of people, and I think its particularly useful for motivated learners who, for whatever reason, are stuck in a place that you can't take a good AI course or can't afford one. Ultimately, though, the course is going to require drive that a lot fewer than 65,000 have.

By that metric, I think the choice is pretty clear. The quality of the discussion has gone up since the scores haven't been displayed. In an ideal world we could all be adults, and there would not be people trying to score points through fights (I would make semantic case for "arguments" being good, "fights" being bad), but that has not been the case as the community has gotten larger and larger.

The article reminded me of this quotation from JFK: "We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."

I've always been annoyed that the list doesn't include one of the foundational books of modern statistics/casual inference, such as Ronald A. Fisher's The Design of Experiments (1935). What do people think are some books from 2000-2010 that might make such a list in 2100?

I sent a screen shot of this to PG last month. He responded that he's aware, he just hasn't had time to fix it yet.

I guess I'm just unwilling to grant the point that the idea of closed government is dead. If anything, the reaction to this leak may be worse than the disease. But, nonetheless, these were a ton of `secret' cables. They were embarrassing, they make it more difficult to conduct foreign affairs, but they were not actually that destructive or informative. For two key reasons:

1) The cables are the opinions of low-level functionaries, no matter how good they are at their job. These were not TS cables, they did not include a shocking set of information. In fact, it is all sort of "meh, we pretty much knew that.

2) "The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets. Many governments -- some governments deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation."

The first point is that we pretty much didn't learn anything, and the second is that it won't really matter.

Can someone explain to me how Wikileaks changed the world? I'm not trying to be provocative, but seriously what is all that different now than it was two months ago?

Not to be callous, but no matter how tragic one war crime is, it doesn't rise to anywhere near the level of either the more recent Wikileaks data or, well, a lot of other news events from the year. That is to say, if the Baghdad air-strike video was the only thing Wikileaks did this year, than you wouldn't think Assange should be person of the year.

In short: cables are the official record and communication tool of the diplomatic corps. As several other replies have pointed out, cables are a form of electronic communication, but they aren't emails. That may sound like a meaningless distinction, but in the everyday business of the department it is real. If you work at DOS, you usually have two email addresses--one on the unclassified and one on the classified network. Additionally, you can have access to a system to read, review and send cables. Think of them as official inter-office memos, or something like that. They're formatted in a specific way, and they do not, under any circumstances, travel on any communications systems not completed operated by the US Government. You get the sense of what I mean by format if you look at some of the documents on the NYT site (or sit down, as I have, and read a few thousand cables in a row). If you're the Ambassador to Country X, and you have a meeting with the President of X, you write a memo, in a particular format, with each paragraph classified U/SBU/C/S/TS, and in a pretty particular tone. That memo (cable) then gets sent to, who knows, the Assistant Secretary for the Region X is in, an Undersecretary or two, the OPs center, the Deputy, etc.

The title is "What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?" The subtitle is "A nighttime raid. A reality TV crew. A sleeping seven-year-old. What one tragedy can teach us about the unraveling of America's middle class." I made is the HN headline something like "What one tragedy can teach us about the unraveling of America's middle class" since no one knows who Aiyana Stanley-Jones is...and the title makes less sense without the subtitle.

Well, the real answer is that you learn roughly the same quality of things no matter what college you go to, not that you don't learn anything anywhere, just that Harvard College's distinguishing factor is not its education vs. UMass-Amhert, it is the admission process itself.

Neither of our statements re:admission is exactly correct, but what I meant is that admissions wasn't anywhere near being fair until at least the early 1960s (and that's being generous to Harvard), so the 60 years I was referring to was from 1900-1960. Buuuut, that's not quite right because when Eliot was President things were a little more competitive, but whatever.

I don't really see how signally is bullshit from the examples you've given. Harvard College does make a a decision to cultivate a class composed of the best students, that's sort of the entire point. Acceptance to Harvard College ends up being a signal for those things it selects for, not necessarily those things one actually learns. The gateway is admissions, not what Harvard actually imparts.

Since the admissions standards of Harvard Extension school are lower, it doesn't matter that the students can do the same work. It matters that the students weren't selected in the same way. Selection itself matters to the signal that the education is sending.

As for Harvard (etc) not selecting for Jews and Asians, very explicitly throughout the first 60 years or so (Anyone particularly interested in the topic should read Karabel's The Chosen), that's also, exactly as you point out, a signal sent if you went to Harvard in those years. That doesn't make the policy right or wrong, it just means that if you graduate from Harvard in 1930 you're likely a WASP, and, indeed, that item on you resume is signally to all sort of employers that a good Harvard WASP interviewed you and deemed that your character is fit, that saves a step when they want to hire you at their White-Shoe law firm circa 1935.