Category: Technology

Lumpy Links

Here’s a lump of interesting articles I’ve come across over the past few weeks.

I got to see Jeffery Veen present at WordCamp San Francisco a few weeks ago. This video really hits home regarding some of our work at Mercy.

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Moving Past Default Charts (in R) – did you know R can make pretty charts?
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The Psychological Comforts of Storytelling – to say more would spoil the story.
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Ryan Goodman talks about why culture is the important part of any analytics project.
“Driving a culture where people think visually is not about a faster way to create bar charts. After carefully walking through the “people” aspect of driving a visualization roadmap, I asked the attendees (60/40 mix of business and IT professionals) to collaborate in micro round table discussions focused on technology. First, they took turns painting a perfect picture of what the optimal technology mix would look like. Immediately after they went through the self admitting process stating their organization’s current deficiencies. Sure enough, discussions evolved from technology to “people and process” and the body language quickly changed watching from the front of the room.”
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Michael Jordan (no, not the athlete) on the delusions of big data,
“Now, if I start allowing myself to look at all of the combinations of these features—if you live in Beijing, and you ride bike to work, and you work in a certain job, and are a certain age—what’s the probability you will have a certain disease or you will like my advertisement? Now I’m getting combinations of millions of attributes, and the number of such combinations is exponential; it gets to be the size of the number of atoms in the universe.


Those are the hypotheses that I’m willing to consider. And for any particular database, I will find some combination of columns that will predict perfectly any outcome, just by chance alone. If I just look at all the people who have a heart attack and compare them to all the people that don’t have a heart attack, and I’m looking for combinations of the columns that predict heart attacks, I will find all kinds of spurious combinations of columns, because there are huge numbers of them.

So it’s like having billions of monkeys typing. One of them will write Shakespeare.”

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The UK government is working on a huge (some might even say ‘Big”) data sharing program of anonymoized health data. One of the concerns being raised? Communication of what’s being shared and how.
“Many of the concerns care.data critics cite in opposing the program, such as patients being under-informed, doctors being at risk of losing their patients’ trust, and insurance companies having access to the data“

OS X Yosemite Notifications Preferences Don’t Stick

I’m really enjoying OS X 10.101 Yosemite and have only encountered one really pesky bug. Even the Citrix and VPN clients for work are running great. That hasn’t always been the case.

This bug manifests itself when you restart your computer after changing any of the Notification settings in System Preferences. They don’t stick!

Screen Shot 2014-11-07 at 2.42.14 PM

I found this fix on this Apple Support Community thread. Here’s the steps in case that thread disappears into the ether.2

1. Open the Library folder in your Home folder. Easiest way to do this is in Finder go to the “Go” menu in the menubar. Select “Go to Folder”. Punch this in: ~/Library/Application Support
2. Locate the folder named NotificationCenter. Drag this folder to the desktop.
3. Next, open the Terminal application. It’s located in the Applications/Utilities folder. Or just search for it in Spotlight.
Copy and paste each line of these commands into the Terminal window, in order. Press return after each line:

cd `getconf DARWIN_USER_DIR`
 rm -rf com.apple.notificationcenter
 killall usernoted; killall NotificationCenter

4. Close the Terminal app.
5. Restart your computer.
6. Change a few notification settings and restart one more time to make sure they stick.
7. You can delete the NotificationCenter folder you dragged to your desktop.

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As a side note, I’m going to try and compel you to turn off some of your notifications. I’m an anti-notification guy. I don’t need to know when every email comes in or every @ reply on Twitter. I’ve got other stuff to do. So do you.

The first thing I suggest you do with all your devices is turn off about half of the notifications. The computer should work for you, not the other way around.

Tim Cook

Part of social progress is understanding that a person is not defined only by one’s sexuality, race, or gender. I’m an engineer, an uncle, a nature lover, a fitness nut, a son of the South, a sports fanatic, and many other things. I hope that people will respect my desire to focus on the things I’m best suited for and the work that brings me joy.

What a guy.

Matt Mullenweg on the “State of the Word 2014”

The mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing, which means access for everyone regardless of language, geography, gender, wealth, ability, religion, creed, or anything else people might be born with. To do that we need our community to be inclusive and welcoming. There is beauty in our differences, and they’re as important as the principles that bring us together, like the GPL.

There are thousands of reasons why a person might pick one technology over another. Cost, support, growth, platform, user interface, etc.

The biggest one to me, and one that I’m happy to say WordPress embodies well, is the culture and community around such technology. After watching Matt Mullenweg give his State of the Word presentation at our WordCamp San Francisco Viewing Party, I’m glad to have aligned myself with such an awesome community. I want to work to use technology like WordPress to make other’s lives more rich. To improve my own knowledge of technology. To better myself as a person and be more including and welcoming.

Here’s to the future growth of WordPress, and all those who make it what it is. Grand.

Tom Hanks’ Short Story – “Alan Bean Plus Four”

Our brains could take in only so much, so our iPhones did the recording, and I stopped calling out the sights, though I did recognize Campbell and D’Alembert, large craters linked by the smaller Slipher, just as we were about to head home over the moon’s north pole. Steve Wong had cued up a certain musical track for what would be Earthrise but had to reboot the Bluetooth on Anna’s Jambox and was nearly late for his cue. MDash yelled, “Hit Play, hit Play!” just as a blue-and-white patch of life—a slice of all that we have made of ourselves, all that we have ever been—pierced the black cosmos above the sawtooth horizon.

A great short story by entertainer Tom Hanks.