Author Archives: Vince

Enrollment

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Wow! Both courses I’m teaching filled up almost immediately. This is good and bad. Good: I must be teaching the right subjects. Bad: I have to turn away many students.

If you wanted to get into a course and couldn’t that is regretful and I empathize with you. Unfortunately, each course has a limit. Registration is controlled by the registrar and policy set by the dept, college, and university. I do not have any control of this process. If you have any questions or requests, please direct them to the dept grad office, csc-gradoffice@ncsu.edu.

Your only option is to get on the wait list and hope that enough students drop the course. I do not know whether that will happen, but in the past about 10% of those that initially enroll drop the course. If you are not on the wait list, I believe you can set up an alert in MyPack to let you know if space opens up on the wait list.

Python is not a scripting language

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Many refer to Python as a scripting language. I heard it again last week. It came from an accomplished computer science professor and colleague. This comment was borne of ignorance: He has little experience with Python.

While there is no universal definition of a scripting language, calling Python a scripting language is ignorant. Python is the underlying language for a web framework (Django) that powers monster sites like Instagram and Pinterest. Python has major libraries like numpy and NLTK. The features of Python are too numerous to list but certainly they greatly exceed those of a language typically called a scripting language.

Creative graphing

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Most graphs use zero for the origin of the X and Y axes. In a some cases, it is better to use a different origin. Because this is unusual, the present should take care to note the atypical origin in order to not confuse or fool the audience. In some cases, those who fail to do this fool themselves. Case in point, consider the graph below, which appeared here.

fb-relationship-graph

This appears to show a big difference. Until you look at the y-axis and see that the difference between the high and low is 0.11 posts/day. This is about a 7% over all change, which may be significant. But the graph is highly misleading.

To prove the point a facsimile of the original graph is presented below.

a

And here it is with 0 as the origin of the Y-axis.20120918_184854.jpg

b

As noted above, this variation of 0.11 posts/day may be significant. But the unzoomed plot gives a better understanding of the magnitude of the change.

Improve your commute by hacking traffic lights

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This paper presents an opportunity for a killer app.

I am leery of the Internet of Things because (a) security is hard and (b) too little time is given to it. The latter is an over-generalization. But most solutions are delivered incomplete because too few resources are available or allocated. The result is essentially all software is vulnerable to attack.

This is the primary reason I am nervous about the Internet of Things.

Professors at U. of Michigan Question Administrators’ Extra Pay

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It is well known that university administrators take care of themselves. It is encouraging that some are questioning this. “Additional pay” is category for rewarding employees, think bonuses. At Michigan, additional pay has jumped from $13M to $46M in 9 year.
It is likely that this is being abused. Read about it here.