UMBC ebiquity
Middle-earth dictionary attack
From http://abstrusegoose.com/296
Middle-earth dictionary attack
August 24th, 2010XKCD on the difference between academia and business
November 18th, 2009
XKCD on elections and voting
November 12th, 2009Around here we prefer range voting to approval voting or IRV.
A modern Turing Test scenario
September 4th, 2009
Transformers: revenge of the Wozniaks
June 25th, 2009This is not your father’s Macbook.
Eat your own dog food pâté
May 4th, 2009
This one is going into the ebiquity research archives.
John Bohannon, Robin Goldstein and Alexis Herschkowitsch, Can People Distinguish Pâté from Dog Food?, American Association of Wine Economists, AAWE Working Paper No. 36, April 2009.
“Considering the similarity of its ingredients, canned dog food could be a suitable and inexpensive substitute for pâté or processed blended meat products such as Spam or liverwurst. However, the social stigma associated with the human consumption of pet food makes an unbiased comparison challenging. To prevent bias, Newman’s Own dog food was prepared with a food processor to have the texture and appearance of a liver mousse. In a double-blind test, subjects were presented with five unlabeled blended meat products, one of which was the prepared dog food. After ranking the samples on the basis of taste, subjects were challenged to identify which of the five was dog food. Although 72% of subjects ranked the dog food as the worst of the five samples in terms of taste (Newell and MacFarlane multiple comparison, P<0.05), subjects were not better than random at correctly identifying the dog food.”
It puts a new spin on the concept of eating your own dog food.
Twitter Swine Flu news: the downside
April 27th, 2009While we can use Twitter for news or reports on unfolding events from the field, it’s a noisy channel. As usual, Randall Munroe captures it well. I especially like its highlighting how Twitter’s search page lets you know there have been dozens of new matching tweets since you searched a moment ago. It seems that the flu-related tweets are arriving faster than anyone can read them.
xkcd on the correlation between correlation and causation
March 6th, 2009
The common observation that correlation does not imply causation is a cold and cruel idea that knows no mercy.
On the FaceBook economy
February 22nd, 2009
A comment on modern life
February 9th, 2009I thought this cartoon from a recent issue of the New Yorker offers an accurate comment on modern life.
Barack Obama on sorting algorithms
February 3rd, 2009No doubt about it, President Obama is a polymath.
