a blog from Alex Reinhart
In a previous edition , we discussed industrial accelerometers: sensitive instruments for measuring vibration inside structures, but also fun ways to listen inside watches, cameras, and watermelons. Unfortunately accelerometers are designed to connect to laboratory data acquisition systems that cost more than a hobbyist is likely to pay, so to use them, we need some kind of adapter to connect to…
It’s a common problem that I’m sure many of you have experienced: You find yourself with a PCB 352C68 accelerometer but no ICP signal conditioner to connect it to your recorder. No? Let me start over. Suppose you want to know how something sounds on the inside , by listening to the vibrations transmitted through its structure. Like this: Be sure to watch the video with its sound. That’s not a…
On November 18, 2019, I gave a department “internal seminar” on the TeachStat Research Group’s work on statistics education research. The internal seminars are intended for faculty in Statistics & Data Science here at CMU to get to know each other’s work better, and to interact with graduate students and faculty from other departments who may also be interested. This is not a transcript, but, as…
Picking up from last year , here are a few brief reviews of particularly interesting books I read in 2017, selected from a total of 45. The Age of American Unreason , by Susan Jacoby Tries to be the intellectual successor of Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life , but doesn’t really succeed. Jacoby roughly moves chronologically, jumping from early America to the late 1800s (and the…
As part of my obsession with tracking things I’ve read , I keep a file with every book I’ve read since 2012(ish). I write myself brief reviews or commentaries for particularly interesting books, so I remember what they’re about in a few years. Here are some of the best of 2016, selected from a total of 32. The Day of the Jackal , by Frederick Forsyth This is what I needed after Tom Clancy: a…
Update, September 2018: The R Journal recently published an interesting review of the state of data structures and collections in R: Timothy Barry (2018), “ Collections in R: Review and Proposal ”, vol 10 no. 1, pages 455-471. R is the lingua franca of academic statistics. Many papers introducing new statistical methods are accompanied by a package posted on CRAN , R’s repository of useful…
Introductory statistics textbooks usually point out Simpson’s paradox , an interesting phenomenon that’s usually illustrated with a story from the University of California, Berkeley. The story goes something like this: In 1973, UC Berkeley was sued for gender bias, because their graduate school admission figures showed obvious bias against women: 1 Applicants Admitted Men 8442 44% Women 4321 35%…
James Boyle is a law professor specializing in copyright law, and The Public Domain is some of the most readable legal writing I’ve seen in a long time. (He gets bonus points for making the ePub and PDF freely available on his website .) Boyle covers the recent expansion of copyright law to protect more works for longer terms, depriving our culture of the benefit of their free use. He starts by…
Conway’s Game of Life is a simple simulation with surprisingly complex behavior. We start with a simple 2D grid of cells. Each cell can be either alive or dead. The rules are: A live cell stays alive if it has two or three live neighbors. A dead cell becomes alive if it has exactly three live neighbors. We started with a certain set of cell states and then iterate, applying the rules to every cell…
Amusing Ourselves to Death is interesting both for its arguments and the realization that things have gotten much, much worse since it was published in 1985. The key to Postman’s argument is that the medium affects the message : yes, you can say the same thing on TV as you would in print, but you probably won’t. To illustrate this, Postman begins by describing typographic America: America in the…