Late Spring flower delight

Clematis

Iris

Rose

Fighting Woodpeckers of Shellpot Creek

These two woodpeckers were fighting and teasing each other.  I think they were trying to claim the trees in our yard in order to impress lady woodpeckers.  These are red-bellied woodpeckers according to the pictures in the Delaware Museum of Natural History woodpecker collection.  (Cornell lab link with sounds!)

Incidentally taken with my new Panasonic DMC-ZS20 camera.  it is a  point and shoot with a really good 20X optical zoom Leica lens.  They were very high up the tree in the back by Shellpot Creek.  I am pleased with my new camera!

More Excel based destruction - this time in support of austerity

A coding error in excel, among other errors, has seriously weakened the conclusions of an important financial paper (by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, "Growth in a Time of Debt." ) regarding GDP growth at high debt to GDP levels. Another paper, ("Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff," by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin) tracked down the flaws - Excel spreadsheet errors, excluded data, and unusual weightings of statistics. With the importance f Excel as a modeling and calculation tool at our company, always be aware of the possibility of errors. 

When modeling and examining model results I especially think of three things among many others - 1. Do the final results make sense? 2. If not, is there an error in my calculations or in the original data? Is there an source external to the model I can check against? 3. If the result is unexpected, is this a new insight? The more surprising, the more evidence needed to convince others, especially in business.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-04-excel-austerity-economics-paper-coding-flawed.html

Beware the excel spreadsheet - especially when it can destroy the economy!

A variety of links about the ubiquitous use of excel in business and about the dangers of poorly designed software and models. Excel is a great liberator and allows the masses to create many different models, it also allows the freedom create bad or incorrect models and its very ubiquity means that it is likely to end up at the center of some big mistakes.

 In my model creation I try to separate data from calculations in a spreadsheet and I am a big proponent of database style formats (read columns) because then I can run a pivot table or better yet, put the data into Tableau for visualization. But then again much of my personal fun work in excel are modesl and simulations or data manipulation that doesn't need much rigor and will only be used by me so I am free to be creative. I do remember programming in other languages when I was young and in graduate school but now I am stuck with just excel. 

http://baselinescenario.com/2013/02/09/the-importance-of-excel/ 

This is a great link and great comment thread by programers who see the threat and promise of excel and how it fits into the bigger picture of creating software to do what the usefual spreadsheet was doing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5198187 

A longer article from The Atlantic

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/software-runs-the-world-how-scared-should-we-be-that-so-much-of-it-is-so-bad/260846/ 

two more views on bad software from Baseline Scenario.

http://baselinescenario.com/2013/01/16/more-bad-software/ 

http://baselinescenario.com/2013/01/22/another-perspective-on-bad-software/

Crocuses signal Spring is coming!

Graphing fourier series to get square waves and sawtooth waves on Google.

Did you know that Google will graph functions for you.  I played around with fourier series to make sawtooth waves and square waves just to see what it looked like.

Sawtooth - just copy and paste into google search.
2/pi(sin(x)+sin(2x)/2+sin(3x)/3+sin(4x)/4+sin(5x)/5+sin(6x)/6+sin(7x)/7+sin(8x)/8+sin(9x)/9+sin(10x)/10+sin(11x)/11+sin(12x)/12)

Square Wave- just copy and paste into google search
4/pi(sin(2x)+sin(6x)/3+sin(10x)/5+sin(14x)/7+sin(18x)/9+sin(22x)/11+sin(26x)/13+sin(30x)/15+sin(34x)/17+sin(38x)/19)

Fun with graphing.

Yes we do need more books!

From the delightful exploding dog.



Books!

We Descend - a hypertext book

A little expensive for a hypertext book (or is it?), but I would like to read We Descend by Bill Bly.  It seems interesting.

http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/WeDescend.html

It looks science-fictional and appears to be about a post-apocalyptic civilization remembering or mis-remembering its past.  Perhaps I will take the plunge and purchase it.

The path that got me to find this book was tortuous. Googling Valenstein got me some images of hearts looking like Frankenstein's monster and a few other images that were interesting.  One of which led to the Woodchipper analysis of Mary Shellley's Frankenstein, which led to me wondering who would build such an interesting piece of software, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), who also curate donated collections of some artists/authors work who have Bill Bly's papers and electronic material because he was a pioneer in writing hypertext novels and wrote We Descend.

Deconstructing texts with a Woodchipper!

Woodchipper is a tool that apparently deconstructs texts, decomposes the text into relatively orthogonal concepts and then plots them together to look for commonality.  Has anybody else ever hear of this Woodchipper tool?  It has an alpha test going, but it seem that you need to be affiliated with an institution to sign up and I just wanted to play with it.



This author has decronstructed and compared several gothic texts using the tool.  The plot above has these tantilizingly interesting yet unlabelled axes.

http://mith.umd.edu/eng738T/deconstructing-the-male-and-female-gothic-using-woodchipper/

Here the tool is described at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)

http://mith.umd.edu/corporacamp/tool.php

This link is the signup for the alpha test.
http://mith.umd.edu/corporacamp/signup.php

Surprise alternate endings to Groundhog Day

It is well known that I love the movie Groundhog Day.  Here are some surprise endings you never would have expected.

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Camera pulls back revealing Phil in a coma from the traffic accident when he tried to leave Punxitawney during his misforecast snowstorm.  Rita bites back tears as she reads a book of 19th century French poetry to him hoping that eventually he will awaken.

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The view dissolves into green Matrix style lettering as Rita (codenamed Winter) and Larry (codenamed Eyeball) disconnect Phil (codenamed Groundhog) from the Matrix, pulling the long black connector from the back of his head.  They tell him he's been caught in a glitch in the Matrix and they freed him but they have to get moving because the Sentinels are coming.

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After Phil falls asleep a crowd of roadies rush in to reset everything for the next day.  A montage reveals activity all over Punxetawney as the crew resets television's most popular reality show for 10 years, "Groundhog's Day" whose centerpiece is a kidnapped, completely unaware weatherman from Pittsburgh, forced to repeat the same day over and over.

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Al appears to tell Sam (as Phil) that something is wrong with the leap and that Gushi doesn't know what's wrong.  No matter how many things Sam (as Phil) does in Punxetawney he doesn't seem to put the things right that once went wrong and leap out of there. He just leaps to the same day.  Sam's (as Phil) Swiss cheese memory means he doesn't remember who he really is just the repeating days.

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On the last day the view switches to the groundhog himself who finally sees his shadow, rescues a little girl from a burning house, leads home a lost little boy, finally woos the girl groundhog he loves and unites the community of woodland creatures in the meadows outside of town.  It was the groundhog repeating the days over and over again until he learned to be a better groundhog, Phil the weatherman was just caught in the psychic backlash.

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Happy Groundhog's Day!