Daniel Lemire's blog

This map shows the current location of Tim Hibbard

, 1 min read

This reminds me of the days when we thought that a webcam pointed at a coffee machine was cool. Using Google Earth, you can track some guy who is carrying GPS gear. (Source: Battelle)

Baby blues: Louka is growing teeth

, 1 min read

Louka kept us up last night. Ok. Louka is irritable. Quite a bit so. As usual, medical knowledge is useless, all you can learn is this: For some babies, teething is painless. Others may experience brief periods of irritability, and some may seem cranky for weeks, experiencing crying episodes and…

Open-Source MOLAP with PHP and Linux

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There is a now an online demo of the open souce MOLAP engine Palo running a PHP application on a Linux-based Palo Server. The application is somewhat limited, but it is a proof-of-concept. This is a very small step for open source Business Intelligence, but a step forward nonetheless. (Our very own…

Hierarchy of Collaborative Filtering Distribution

, 2 min read

I think that, increasingly, both creators and clients want to regain control. The beauty of it is that I think that businesses can be built on putting customers back in charge. To a large extend, I keep prefering Amazon to my local bookstore in part because, I have more control when using…

China and India as academic powerhouses?

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Ian cites the Guardian: China and India – already braced to become two of the world’s greatest economic powers – are now expected to become two of its most important academic powerhouses. What I am waiting for is for the business world to shift to Asia. Right now, blue collar jobs, tech…

FIFO Data Structure in Python

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This post is obselete, see this more recent discussion. For some odd reason, Python doesn’t come with a good FIFO data structure (as of 2.4). Here’s one. class Fifo: def init(self): self.data = [[], []] def append(self, value): self.data[1].append(value) def pop(self): if not…

UCR Time Series Classification/Clustering page

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Eamonn Keogh just posted this announcement: We are please to announce a new resource for researchers working on time series classification and clustering. The UCR Time Series Classification/Clustering page has the largest collection of test datasets (with objective class labels) in the…

On moving a sofa around a corner

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I just thought it was a cool title for a paper (if anyone has read it, let me know if it is any good): On moving a sofa around a corner in Geometriae Dedicata, Volume 42, Number 3, June 1992 Joseph L. Gerver A necessary condition is given for a region of the plane to have the greatest possible…

The Cost of Graduation

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From Ian I got to this Observer article. The story is that university education is becoming less attractive as the costs increase and the salaries for graduates don’t correspondingly increase. The net result is that universities might be in an increasingly competitive game as western universities…

Problem Solving Heuristics

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Ian recalls some of the basic problem solving heuristics: If you are having difficulty understanding a problem, try drawing a picture. If you can’t find a solution, try assuming that you have a solution and seeing what you can derive from that (“working backward”). If the problem is…