Electoral systems

I've been reading up on voting systems and "proportional representation". The BBC has a nice article on what other countries do. If you are interested in a bit more detail about voting systems from an academic who has thought about them a lot, see Denis Mollison's article about STV and his paper for publication in the RSS's journal.
Denis, a statistician at Heriot-Watt University, recommends the STV system with multi-candidate constituencies. Its implementation would require a computer.
[If you're interested in more exotic methods that require not only a computer but also the use of randomness, then please see Probabilistic electoral methods, representative probability, and maximum entropy by Roger Sewell, David MacKay, Iain McLean.]

How to make an animated gif with small file-size

I wanted to make an animation showing the evolution of global temperature and the number of sunspots over the last 129 years. I used gnuplot to spit out 129 png files (each of size 2k to 14k), then the question was how to make the animation.
Initially I tried:
convert -delay 10 -loop 0 *.png -delay 1000 2009.png Anim.gif
which made a grand-looking animated gif, but its size was enormous - over 1 megabyte! Many thanks to Patrick Welche for telling me to try the deconstruct flag:
convert -delay 10 *.png -deconstruct Anim.gif
which makes a 161k animation.
Here is a link to the resulting animated gif (161k)

Bayes' theorem makes it into the BBC

This article about false positives seems quite well done.

The BBC article links to an animation on the Understanding uncertainty website. I'm not sure if the animation is a good teaching aid - it shows the test being applied with a great random rattling of the faces of the 100 humans. I think it would be better to reveal the truth early so the viewer can understand the generative process, instead of it looking like every individual is being utterly randomized. I also find it confusing that colour (Red/green) is used initially to encode test result, then it is later used to encode the underlying truth. I think two different dimensions should have been used.
I'd reveal the truth, show the generative process, then hide the underlying truth to emulate "what the tester sees"; then reveal the truth again.

ps... I find it a bit uneasy-making that the whole set-up involves "detecting terrorists". The implicit endorsement of "war on terror"; the endorsement of the campaign to "be suspicious of your neighbours, look for stuff in their bins, and get them arrested and interrogated".

How to handle copyright forms from dinosaur journal-publishers

If you want to publish an article with a dinosaur journal that says "you can't publish your academic work on the internet any more; all your copyright are belong to us", here is the recommendation: fill in the
SPARC addendum and attach it to their copyright form.
Assuming the journal publisher accepts this addendum, your work can then benefit from the modern day miracle of efficient communication.

One hundred and eighty!

Three students in the inference group had their PhD vivas on June 1st, 2009.
Congratulations to Ollie Stegle, Ryan Adams, and Keith Vertanen on superb PhDs!

Star Wars - Retold

Star Wars - Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it)


Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

Hurray for the internet - I haven't laughed that much for a while!

only self-teaching has any lasting value

"only self-teaching has any lasting value" is a quote from this essay by John Gatto,
"Why Schools Don't Educate".

My own thoughts on this topic are in (1) a short essay on exams - "everyone should get an A" - which notes how exams interrupt education; and (2) a one-page suggestion on "how to teach".

1. A Note On Exams (postscript) | pdf
   
2. How to teach (postscript, 1 page)|(pdf, 1 page)