Daniel Lemire's blog

Everything is Miscellaneous

, 1 min read

Andre pointed me to Weinberger’s talk on his book “Everything is Miscellaneous.” It is really worth watching.

WWWrong

, 1 min read

WWWrong

WWWrong

, 1 min read

No, WWWrong has nothing to do with Web 2.0… It is a concept… you organize a “What Went Wrong” workshop. Imagine writing a paper about what went wrong in your research during the last year, what would write about? (This was originally an email to Owen, but it makes a good post, doesn’t…

The Google Similarity Distance

, 1 min read

I read a paper on the Google Similarity Distance this morning by Cilibrasi and Vitanyi. They search for word cooccurrences using the Google search engine. Their formula goes as follows: (G(x,y)-min(G(x,x),G(y,y)))/max(G(x,x),G(y,y)) where G is the “Google code” function. The Google code…

The Next Web

, 1 min read

This video is probably worth it only for Tim O’reilly and his discussion of what Web 2.0 is:

My favorite SciFi authors

, 2 min read

In the last year, I decided to go back to science-fiction novels and learn what is out there. Here are my favorite scifi authors. Frank Herbert for his Dune saga. Some interesting trivia: Frank is a college dropout and Dune was rejected by nearly twenty publishers before being accepted by a small…

Yield returns are not esoteric anymore

, 1 min read

I did a little bit of research on the Web today, following a statement by my friend Owen to the effect that yield returns were not something Joe Programmer could be expected to know about. Turns out that yield returns are supported in C#, Visual Basic (VB.NET), Python and Ruby. So, yes, I’d say…

Blogosphere and Time Series

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Though blogpulse seems to be going nowhere, as far as I can see, it is still one of the most fascinating tool out there. What it does is plot word occurrences versus time on the blogosphere. The recall is rather poor compared to Technorati but the time series plot are very nice. Here’s one…

Thermal Noise makes Quantum Cryptography obselete?

, 1 min read

The New Scientist (and slashdot) reports that a very simple method that basically achieves what million-dollars Quantum Cryptography set out to achieve: unbreakable two-way communication. This is due to Laszlo Kish. His papers are on arxiv and they appear pretty convincing, but I have left the…

University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM) going out of business?

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My current employer, a state university, may technically go out of business in July. Naturally, management blames the lack of funding. There are two issues at stake. Firstly, the University has been chronically in the red. This means that tuitions and government grants are not sufficient to cover…

Technorati: Only 45 People

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Technorati is one of the few long standing Internet companies to be in the search business and to stand tall in front of Google and Yahoo. And there are only 45 of them. That is not exactly a basement operation, but given how well established the company is, that is a very small number. What does…

Is P vs. NP a practical problem?

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Here’s a recent quote from ACM TechNews: The ACM’s Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computing Theory honored Rudich and Razborov for their contributions to addressing the P vs. NP problem, which involves the computational complexity behind the security of ATM cards, computer passwords,…

Multivitamins are bad for you

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It seems multivitamins can increase your chances of getting cancer. Vitamins A and E, folic acid can be dangerous. It seems that the problem stems from excessive dosage. A very moderate use of multivitamins is probably not dangerous.