Recently updated blogs

By far the largest part of Schumachers book is in regard to the third world and this section really hasn’t aged well at all. The world is different place 50 years on, but it exposes in one way just how little economic progress some countries have developed and just how much progress countries have made. Schumachers approach is very much a what we can do for them or really to …

This three ingredient fig jam is designed for canning and uses just fresh figs, sugar, and lemon juice. It’s bright, flavorful, and so easy to make. If you find yourself awash in figs every year, keep this recipe handy! Hello friends! I realize that it has been an absolute age (more than a year!) since I’ve posted anything new here. I have desperately missed sharing my canning practice with all …

I quit the old bird site last December, and I’ve been a happy Mastodon user instead ever since. Nonetheless, I’ve recently begun dalliances with Threads and Bluesky. I’m not looking for greener pastures, but I’m curious about what’s on offer now, and I want to find some of the people who I don’t see on Mastodon. Juggling social media platforms is inconvenient, but seemingly unavoidable at this particular moment, as …

We’re thrilled to unveil our latest endeavour – the IMMERSIONS project! Our new initiative, the IMMERSIONS project, is funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe program, and is set to transform the world of electronic music and cultural engagement across Europe. This collaborative effort brings together four countries – Poland, Norway, Portugal, and Lithuania – in an ambitious endeavour to create a European hybrid music network that bridges geographical and …

http://chat2024.com is a candidate simulator that lets you chat with them to get their positions, in a good simulation of their style of speech. In a quick session this morning it seemed ok at that. It even responded appropriately when I challenged “Biden” about shipping cluster munitions to Ukraine. It did an appropriate job when […]

A as was changed in the 1997 redesign of the London Review of Books. There were no editorial innovations: the table of contents remained undifferentiated, giving the same emphasis to contributions be they book reviews, essays or poems. The Caslon masthead stayed, as did the four-column layout, itself indebted to, if not precisely inherited from, […]

Here we are going to look at several diagnostic plots are helpful when attempting to answer a causal question. They can be used to visualize the target population, balance, and treatment effect heterogeneity. Setup I’ve simulated data to demonstrate the utility of the various plots. In each simulation, we have four pre-treatment variables: var1, var2, var3, and var4, a treatment, t, and an outcome y. I have also fit a …

I recently left my job at Netlify and have been looking at what's next. At Netlify I became very interested in the power of ML, AI and LLMs in particular, and that's the area I've been looking in. But there's a lot of hype and buzzwords around, so I wanted an explainer I can point people to when they ask "but what is all that stuff really?" It's intended to …

I wrote this for Times Higher Education a couple of weeks ago: The people who work in universities are made up of two tribes: tragedians and comedians. These tribes view each other with bewilderment across a seemingly unbridgeable mental and cultural divide. What makes things worse is that the tribes are not named as such, and no one ever declares or even knows which tribe they belong to or why. …

It’s been awhile since I blogged about mathematics. You know why, of course — there are so many issues in the real world, the imaginary world is just not as relevant as it used to be. Well, at least that’s how I felt until now. But the latest paper we wrote with Swee Hong Chan was so much fun (and took so much effort), the wait is over. There is …

Grouping items in an array is one of those things you've probably done a load of times. Each time you would have written a grouping function by hand or perhaps reached for lodash's groupBy function. The good news is that JavaScript is now getting grouping methods so you won't have to anymore. Object.groupBy and Map.groupBy are new methods that will make grouping easier and save us time or a dependency. …

English professor Michael Clune comments.

There are two new updates to high-end cameras, at either end of the ILC sensor spectrum. Let's take a look at the Micro 4/3 update first, the Panasonic G9II ($1,900), introduced yesterday. The new G9II. Look familiar? While I'm happy that Panasonic has introduced a new Micro 4/3 camera, updating the flagship stills-side body, some of the choices it made seem, let us just say, interesting. First of all, it …

The Enlightenment in Slovenian lands was initiated by a group of like-minded people who advocated the change of the linguistic and cultural practices of the time, which relied exclusively on the use of the Latin and German languages. The Slovenian educators believed that the national language could be used equally...

Richard Davis, whose soulful, pronounced upright bass was heard on a wide range of post-war sideman recordings—from chamber jazz and hard bop to free, funk, fusion and spiritual jazz—and on a variety of albums of his own, died on September 6. He was 93. [Photo above of Richard Davis] Davis began his recording career in the Ahmad Jamal Trio in 1954. Throughout the 1950s, he recorded extensively with Don Shirley …