Posts

Today The Guardian prints the identity of the PRISM whistleblower, at his request: The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell. ...

As I’ve mentioned previously, currently I’m working in the realm of Web analytics. I don’t have a deep statistics background, and I’m definitely not what anyone would mistake for a data scientist, but I do have a good understanding of how analytics can be applied to business problems. I gained most of that understanding by way of being a baseball fan. I was hanging out with baseball nerds on the Internet talking about baseball analytics long before Moneyball was a twinkle in Michael Lewis’ eye. ...

Cam Davidson-Pilon talks about 21st Century Problems. Here’s how he describes most of the great technological leaps of the 20th century: What these technologies have in common is that are all deterministic engineering solutions. By that, I mean they have been created by techniques in mathematics, physics and engineering: often being modeled in a mathematical language, guided by physics’ calculus and constrained and brought to life by engineering. I argue that these types of problems, of modeling deterministically, are problems that our fathers had the luxury of solving. ...

Now that I’ve read Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes, I’ll never look at elections or election coverage the same way again. More importantly, I’ll never look at media criticism the same way again. First of all, let me start by saying that it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read, period. It’s brilliantly constructed and incredibly well written. Ezra Klein wrote about the book’s impact when Richard Ben Cramer passed away earlier this year. ...

A Corollary to ExperimentCalculator.com (with examples) There’s a lot of talk about A/B testing on Web sites these days, but most people don’t have a good concept of how many people need to see an experiment in order to produce a statistically significant result. It’s more than you probably think.

The NewsBlur Redesign My favorite online feed reader, NewsBlur, launched a major redesign last night. NewsBlur’s biggest drawback has been that the JavaScript-heavy user interface occasionally got in the way of users rather than assisting them. This redesign attacks that problem head on. The upside of NewsBlur has been that it works really well at its core purpose, fetching feeds and displaying them for the user. It also has solid native mobile clients, enabling you to keep read status in sync across devices. Finally, the entire source repository is available through GitHub. You almost certainly won’t run your own NewsBlur instance, and you probably won’t be submitting patch requests, but the transparency is appreciated. Finally, it offers social features that are comparable to the ones that Google Reader killed some time ago. The clock is ticking for Google Reader, and I strongly encourage you to check out NewsBlur. ...

The New Yorker is the first publication to create an anonymous drop box for sources based on Strongbox, an anonymized document sharing tool by Kevin Poulsen and Aaron Swartz. What the architecture really shows is how difficult it is to achieve anonymity and security on the Internet, given the amount of data exhaust created by just about any action online. If nothing else, this underscores what an amazing technical achievement Bitcoin is. ...

Graciousness looks easy, but of course it is not. Nice little essay on graciousness from Esquire magazine. People who don’t aspire to be more gracious scare me.

A stark but recurring reality in the business world is this: when it comes to working with data, statistics and mathematics are rarely the rate-limiting elements in moving the needle of value. Most firms’ unwashed masses of data sit far lower on Maslow’s heirarchy, at the level of basic nurture and shelter. What is needed for this data isn’t philosophy, religion, or science — what’s needed is basic, scalable infrastructure. ...

A lot goes into deciding whether to fire the thrusters for one second.