Thomas Brox Røst › Comments

"Coming up on five years (and many teams) at Microsoft, there are a few things I’ve picked up along the way that I definitely didn’t know about when I left college. Call them core values, things I’ve learned, lessons learned, things I scream at my friends to do more of, whatever - they’ve served me well. Some of these are Microsoft-specific but most will apply to any team/corporate environment. Some of these are tricky - they can get you fired (or worse) if you don’t know what you’re doing." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"View all 902 letters from and to Van Gogh, richly annotated and illustrated, with new transcriptions and translations" - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"GWT 2.0 was released today, and even though I've been using it for months and contributing to it, I didn't realize the significance of this release until I saw the Google Campfire event, because I've been exposed to each new feature incrementally, rather than all at once." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"Python is the greatest thing to happen to computer science since the Turing Machine! Well, no, but it has inspired me into a personal renaissance for software writing. Its flexibility, widespread community support, and leveraging of legacy C and Fortran code also make it an outstanding language for social science researchers. If you are a new researcher looking to get started, or experienced and willing to walk away from your [:,:] lifestyle in Matlab—and licensing and training fees—then equip yourself with these 10 packages and get to it!" - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"Now the Japanese language is being transformed by blogs, e-mail and keitai shosetsu, or cellphone novels. Americans may fret over the ways digital communications encourage sloppy grammar and spelling, but in Japan these changes are much more wrenching. A vertically written language seems to be becoming increasingly horizontal. Novels are being written and read on little screens. People have gotten so used to typing on computers that they can no longer write characters by hand. And English words continue to infiltrate the language." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"With his company boasting the highest P/E of any major company in the U.S., Bezos is strapped to one of Corporate America's fastest treadmills. Boosting sales and profit 25%, quarter after quarter and year after year, will require running faster and faster. The slightest disappointment could send Amazon stock tumbling toward 100." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"A unique Icelandic dairy product, goat’s milk ice cream, made its debut on the domestic market yesterday on the 20th anniversary of the international Slow Food Movement. The ice cream will be available at Búrid specialty store in Reykjavík while supplies last." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

Introduction to 10 different programming languages. - Thomas Brox Røst

"Boing Boing Video proudly debuts a new piece from the "great god almighty could it get any more awesome?" N.A.S.A. music project, this one from two personal music heroes: Tom Waits, and Kool Keith. The track is called Spacious Thoughts, and you can pick it up on the project's debut album, Spirit of Apollo (Amazon link.)" - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

Doc Oc rips it; Keith is always on point. The animation is awesome too! - Carlos Ayala

"A paper by three Googlers, "Keeping a Search Engine Index Fresh: Risk and Optimality in Estimating Refresh Rates for Web Pages" (not available online), is one of several recent papers looking at "the cost of a page being stale versus the cost of [recrawling]." The core idea here is that people care a lot about some changes to web pages and don't care about others, and search engines need to respond to that to make search results relevant. Unfortunately, our Googlers punt on the really interesting problem here, determining the cost of a page being stale. They simply assume any page that is stale hurts relevance the same amount. That clearly is not true. Not only do some pages appear more frequently than other pages in search results, but also some changes to pages matter more to people than others." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood" - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

Tutorial on graphical model representation, inference, learning, and decision theory. - Thomas Brox Røst

"AMSTERDAM - Ramses Shaffy is dinsdag op 76-jarige leeftijd overleden in zijn woonplaats Amsterdam. Dat maakte zijn management bekend." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"This post talks you through the code of a simple extractive summarisation system written in Python." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"Python implementation of algorithms from Russell and Norvig's Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach." - Thomas Brox Røst

"I think caching is way overdone, to the point that, in some designs, the caching layers sometimes contains more machines than the database layer. Caching layers add complexity to the design, latency on a cache miss, and inefficiency to use of cluster resources. I tend to be more of a fan of partitioning. I often suspect the design of the data store could be both simpler and faster if the database layer was massively partitioned, the data sharded, the caching layer removed, and the machines allocated to the caching layer moved to the database layer instead. If the database layer can keep its working set in memory and its own caches are well designed, it should be able to exceed the performance and scalability of an architecture with a separate caching layer" - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"A chat with Malcolm Gladwell the other day has thrown an interesting across-the-pond perspective on the malfunctioning relationship between the NHS and information technology. Gladwell believes that many of the problems encountered by the health services IT programme (£12.4 billion and counting, before you ask) may actually make for a better service." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

Open climate science data repositories. - Thomas Brox Røst

"I have attended a presentation by Simon Guest from Microsoft on their cloud computing architecture. Although there was no new concept or idea introduced, Simon has provided an excellent summary on the major patterns of doing cloud computing." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"Taking a brief step back, this article is the third of a series. In the first episode we posed a puzzle: Starting with a list of runners ordered by finishing time, select a sublist of runners who are getting younger. What is the longest such sublist? In the second episode we coded up a brute force solution which searched all possible sublists to find an optimal solution. Although the code was simple and succinct, its exponential complexity made it unsuitable for practical use. In this episode we’ll discuss an elegant algorithm which solves our particular problem as a special case. On the way we’ll visit dynamic programming, Python decorators, version control and genetics." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler (Little, Brown, 352 pp., $25.99) Before Facebook, few of us asked others, explicitly, to be our friends. We didn’t monitor how many friends we had as an indication of our status or scroll through listings of friends of friends to pad our own list. Yet the history of humanity is a history of social networking all the same, according to Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, authors of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. “Our connections affect every aspect of our daily lives,” they write. “How we feel, what we know, whom we marry, whether we fall ill, how much money we make, and whether we vote all depend on the ties that bind us.”" - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"So you're a metal detectorist and you find a silver figurine at storied Lejre in Denmark. It depicts a person sitting in a high seat whose posts end in two wolves' heads. And on either arm rest sits a raven. The style is typical for about AD 900. So when you hand the thing over to the site manager, he of course exclaims, "Holy shit! It's Odin!". And that's what he tells the press. Until somebody like me comes along and points out that it's a woman." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

Stack Overflow for scientists. - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"ATLANTA—A Zogby poll of 1,542 American grandparents published Monday found that grandsons were described as "very" to "extremely" talented by 1,542 of the respondents. "Participants in the poll were emphatic in their descriptions of the talents of grandsons in fields as diverse as advertising and sales, choral performance, baseball, talking, crawling, making their beds, video games, and instructing their elders on proper cell-phone use," pollster Tom Waterton said. "In addition, an overwhelming percentage of grandchildren were described as outgoing, sharp, and looking just like Uncle Andy, you remember Uncle Andy, he was always up to something, too bad he passed so young, he would have loved the grandchild in question." Sources at Zogby admitted that the survey was incomplete, as several hundred pollsters are still unable to get their assigned grandparents off the phone." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"[I]f ever a board of directors needed shuffling, it was GM's, which had been utterly docile in the face of mounting evidence of looming disaster. We decided to recommend to Tim, Larry, and ultimately the President a package that would include replacing Rick with Fritz as interim CEO, changing at least half of the board, and making an outside director chairman (which should be universal)." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"Only 37 percent of US companies have a separate board chair from the CEO, and over half of these chairs are not independent — they are the former CEO of that same company. So who's right — the British, Canadians, and Kenneth Feinberg, or the overwhelming majority of US firms that still combine the chairman and CEO roles? Let's look at the data. What it tells us quite clearly is that the appointment of an independent board chair, separate from the CEO, is not associated with any statistically significant improvement in either the company's net income or its stock price." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"From a game-theory perspective, price wars are usually negative-sum games: everyone loses. A recent study found that, if competitors do match price cuts, industry profits can get cut almost in half. The best way to win a price war, then, is not to play in the first place. Instead, you can compete in other areas: customer service or quality. Or you can collude with your putative competitors: that’s why cartels like OPEC exist. Or—since overt collusion is usually illegal—you can employ subtler tactics (which economists call “signalling”), like making public statements about the importance of “stable pricing.” The idea is to let your competitors know that you’re not eager to slash prices—but that, if a price war does start, you’ll fight to the bitter end." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

#cowfilms Forrest Rump - Mona Nomura

#cowfilms The Lord Of The Pinks - ★ Soner Gönül

Overview of font web sites. - Thomas Brox Røst

"Surviving is succeeding, no doubt about it. Doing the work is better than not doing the work. Waiting for perfect is never as smart as making progress. But, and it's a huge but, you define yourself by the work you do, and perhaps you need to redefine what you're willing to take and where you're looking for it." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet