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Sometimes you can approximate a binomial distribution with a normal distribution. Under the right conditions, a Binomial(n, p) has approximately the distribution of a normal with the same mean and variance, i.e. mean np and variance np(1-p). The approximation works…Read more ›
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If you haven't seen Cabin in the Woods, go watch it before reading this post, because 1) It's a total blast and 2) This post will spoil the film's mysterious premise.Now, onto Cabin in the Woods: Even though the movie reveals its meta premise right away, with Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins preparing for a night of scientifically controlled sacrifice, it takes awhile for the film to fully reveal how controlled every element of its world is. Some of the most fun moments in the movie come
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Our Halo Needler prop is somewhere around 15 pounds at the moment, an amalgamation of wood, foam, bondo and various types of plastic. While the shape of the whole thing is spot-on, the prop leaves a little bit to be desired with how heavy and fragile the mishmash of materials ends up being. The parts we’ve got so far have to be molded, then cast in urethane plastic. This will yield a piece that is both far lighter as well as more durable, since it’ll all be one cohesive material through and
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The James Bond films, much as we love them, don't always tell the most believable villainous plots. It's still painful for us to think about Die Another Day's North Korean-turned-British-playboy who wants to carve up the Earth's surface with a sunlight-laser satellite. But an interesting post from Wired Science blogger Deborah Blum calls into question a different rogue plot element in the latest Bond film, Skyfall, that actually applies to decades of spy flicks: Cyanide.Image credit: Columbia
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The Panasonic ST50 was last year’s pick for best TV because of its affordable price and outstanding image quality. By all accounts, this year’s ST60 has even better image quality--and cheaper too. CNet put it simpily in their homepage splash this week: “Our first-ever 5-star TV is the one you should buy.”Initial reviews, including my own testing for an extensive upcoming Sound and Vision article, have even found the replacement not only superior to the ST50, but in many ways equal to
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No summary available for this post.
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Google's support pages are full of shortcuts and tricks for speeding up Gmail and its other services, but those tips aren't listed in a user-friendly presentation. This Minimalistic Gmail Cheat Sheet details 52 keyboard shortcuts most people probably don't use and does a good job explaining the function of each. It's not perfect, though: what's the difference between Shift + I and Shift + U?
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Android has come a long way in the last two years, traversing the expanse between version 2.3 and now 4.2. Looking at these two landmarks, it’s plain that Google started taking design seriously. Whereas Gingerbread and older versions of the platform were functional, but aesthetically questionable, the 4.x variants are genuinely beautiful. Google has also worked to fill in the feature gaps and build better developer tools in recent years.Photo credit: Flickr user mor10 via Creative
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People who work in laboratories take a lot of things for granted. When they come into work in the morning, they expect the equipment to have power, the sink to produce hot and cold water, and the internet and e-mail to be functional. Because these routine services are taken care of “behind the scenes” by [...]
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Electrical engineers use j for the square root of -1 while nearly everyone else uses i. The usual explanation is that EE’s do this because they use i for current. But here’s one advantage to using j that has nothing…Read more ›
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BWA-MEM, is a new tool that is part of the latest version of BWA. As said Heng Li on Biostar bwa-mem can be used to identify the viral integration sites in the human genome. Here I've used various short reads to explore how bwa maps the pairs. The sequences I used below are:
NOTCH2a and NOTCH2b two sequences on the chromosomes 1, on the same strandNOTCH2del : same as NOTCH2a but with a
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Over the next few posts I’m going to run you through some of the awesome new features in Windows 8, and how to use them. The end goal, getting the most out of the operating system and getting to grips with all the awesome new features. Microsoft launched the latest in a long line of Windows [...]
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Last week I attended the second Digital Wallet Foundry event, on the topic of Identity and Loyalty in digital payments, at Microsoft’s Modern Jago workspace in Shoreditch. It was the first time that I had visited Modern Jago and the space itself is absolutely gorgeous. Set in an old school, many of the original features [...]
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Whether you're interested in panoramic photography or crafts and copyright, this week's show has something for you. The gang starts by discussing their techniques for shooting great panoramas, followed by a conversation about the complexities of copyright law and props.
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Some users had trouble installing the WRS package from R-Forge. Here’s a method that should work automatically and fail-safe: ?View Code RSPLUS# first: install dependent packages install.packages(c("MASS", "akima", "robustbase")) # second: install suggested packages install.packages(c("cobs", "robust", "mgcv", "scatterplot3d", "quantreg", "rrcov", "lars", "pwr", […]
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After requesting a tag for all the entries that dealt with quantization issues, Petros Boufounos sent me the following:
Igor, thanks.
An initial page on quantization is now live:
http://www.boufounos.com/resources-on-quantization/
I also have a quick post on it:
http://www.boufounos.com/2013/04/19/new-page-resources-on-quantization/
Incidentally, I think our work on coding of signal distances (http://www.boufounos.com/2013/03/20/coding-of-signal-distances/
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