Daniel Lemire's blog

Human Brain Evolution Slows To A Crawl

, 1 min read

According to Chung-I Wu from the University of Chicago the human brain hardly evolves anymore. The researchers say the slowdown may be due to the increasingly complexity of interactions within the brain. “We know that proteins with more interacting partners evolve more slowly,” Wu said.…

Peter Turney launches his blog

, 1 min read

Peter Turney now has a blog. Who is Peter? One of the most interesting researcher I ever met. It is not so much that the research he does is different from any other research, but it is the way he does it. His first post is rather deep, but I was able to follow most of it. He makes us a promise: I…

Outsourcing Email: Universities Switching to Google Apps for Education

, 1 min read

My friend Owen sent me this article about Lakehead University switching more than 38,000 e-mail accounts to Google Mail in three days. Here’s the core of the article: Because it is getting the whole suite for no charge and it is entirely hosted by Google rather than on university hardware, the…

Half an Hour: Things You Really Need to Learn

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Stephen Downes’ Things You Really Need to Learn is a good read. Here are some good bits: It is perhaps cynical to say that society is a giant conspiracy to get you to feel badly about yourself, but it wouldn’t be completely inaccurate either. Advertisers make you feel badly so you’ll buy…

Should Academia care for standards?

, 2 min read

In the December 2006 edition of IEEE Computer, Simone Santini, from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid asks “Standards: What Are They Good For?” The gist of his argument is that using concepts like XML in Computer Science is harmful. He argues that there is no such thing as XML technologies…

Is this web page trying to sell me something?

, 1 min read

Mindset is a research program to train software to recognize commercial pages. One application of this tool is that you can try to exclude commercial pages out of the result set. Of course, if this is as good as spam filtering, people will only be partly happy with the results. And yes, there are…

We do not need to teach math and science

, 3 min read

Roger Schank, a math wiz, says we do not need to teach math and science. What (…) makes no sense is the idea that math and science are important subjects. You can live a happy life without ever having taken a physics course or knowing what a logarithm is. On the other hand, being able to reason…

My predictions for year 2007

, 2 min read

Let’s be daring for 2007: We will see something like “Google Games”.- We will see something like “Google Slides/PowerPoint”. Google will offer a full office suite on the Web and it will be pretty good for 80% of the office tasks. Governments will take tougher measures to stop spam and…

Roleplaying is Indicative of a Delusional Mind?

, 3 min read

According to Wired, the Isreali army does not like roleplaying: Israeli officials view a fondness for Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) as being indicative of a delusional mind, RPGers are out of touch with reality. “The game indicates a weak personality,” one security official said. “One of…

Collaborative Filtering Made Easy

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Bryan O’Sullivan wrote an excellent Collaborative Filtering tutorial. He gives out the first Slope One Collaborative Filtering algorithm in Python that I know of. Excellent work.

slidePresenter: Very Good (Free) Remote Slides Presentation Software

, 1 min read

I have been looking long and hard for a way to project slides remotely. I once proposed, on my site, that the ideal solution might be AJAX-based. I used with some success Webhuddle and even wrote a script to convert PDF files to a zip file of gif images for this purpose, but I don’t like to rely…