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Update on 8-29-2023 Last week, I put up a poll that asks users what they would do if faced with some ethical dilemmas that arise on the business side of data science. I'm presenting the first set of results here. I'm guessing the responses have stabilized but will provide further updates below should the trends shift. Case Study 1 Is it acceptable for BestHotels.com to present fake statistics to influence …

Hello! Just popping in very quickly in amongst wrapping a big parcel, making a packed lunch, sorting laundry, dashing out to the shops, and packing for a few days away (and trying to remember to breeeeathe). Life is busy. Sometimes hectic, but mostly just the kind of normal busy that comes at this point in the summer. Haircuts and new school shoes, outings and a birthday and mini holidays. Squeezing …

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Introduction This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for a long time. Sometime earlier this year I saw a job posting where someone wanted to use Apple’s vision framework to do text recognition. I wasn’t interested in the job but I was curious about the Vision framework as I had never used it before. In this article, I will take you through how I used PyObjC to interface …

So, it’s been almost a year since Steve Wright in the Afternoon came to an end. This popular Radio 2 show had been on air for nearly 24 years, and Steve Wright himself has been a constant presence on UK radio for nearly twice as long.I thought it was worth me looking back on this end of an era one year on from that event, and also one year on …

I recently encountered an open source project that hadn't received updates for a while. The issue tracker had ~200 open issues, ~70 open pull requests, and CI was partially failing. It's not uncommon for projects to go through lulls, and that's where this project was at. As is often the case, some person had posted an issue to ask "Is this project still maintained?" The person ended with this line: …

It was late 2013 when I drove past a little dog head with big floppy ears attached poking out of the long grass in the backwoods of Florida. My girlfriend at the time said we had to go back and get him, so we did. He was timid at first but friendly, and came right up to us when we approached. We took him home and fed him. I was …

I came across this chart from an infographics that claims to show which zip codes in the U.S. are the "dirtiest" (link). I won't go into the data analysis in this post - it's the usual "open data" style analysis that takes whatever data they could find (in this case, 311 calls) and make some hay out of it. It's amazing how such analyses frequently land on the Top N, …

Conway’s Game of Life is a simulation developed in 1970 describing a grid of binary cells and transition rules for each cell which depend on the state of the cell’s neighbors. It’s capable of creating some pretty cool patterns. This variant of the Game of Life uses three overlapping channels, so instead of just one simulation, there are three simultaneous simulations. I visualize these in the three color channels, red, …

Earlier today I got a surprise invitation to Google Foobar,1 a series of coding tests presented as a text adventure. You’re presented with a normal terminal interface, and a few familiar commands like ls, cd, cat to navigate around the file system and print the readme files. There are five levels to the challenge, and it’s allegedly used as a secret hiring technique, with the winning prize being that you …

Different policies introduced by a social planner, whether the government of a country or the head of an institution, lead to situations in which different peoples' lives go better or worse. That is, in the jargon of this area, they lead to different distributions of welfare across the individuals they affect. If we allow the unfettered accumulation of private wealth, that will lead to one distribution of welfare across the …

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reports: For years, cops and other government authorities all over the world have been using phone hacking technology provided by Cellebrite to unlock phones and obtain the data within. And the company has been keen on keeping the use of its technology “hush hush.” As part of the deal with government agencies, Cellebrite asks users to [Read More...]

Even the most unobservant readers of the blog will have spotted that August's Pylon of the Month is a bit different and I have @moakcarlsson to thank for bringing it to my attention on Twitter. I'll certainly be getting hold of a copy of the book she is currently writing that includes this and other CEGB adverts. The image of a pylon being plonked down by a hand from the …