Biweekly links for 03/30/2009

• Reflections on Trusting Trust: Ken Thompson
  • One of my favourite essays. Written by the co-creator of Unix, Ken Thompson, this is the text of his Turing Award lecture. In it, he explains a beautiful hack to put a backdoor into the Unix login program, a backdoro that would let him login to any Unix system. I doubt his superiors at AT&T thought it was all that funny.
• Python pdfminer
  • “PDFMiner is a suite of programs that aims to help extracting or analyzing text data from PDF documents. Unlike other PDF-related tools, it allows to obtain the exact location of texts in a page, as well as other layout information such as font size or font name, which could be useful for analyzing the document. It can be also used as a basis for a full-fledged PDF interpreter.”
• Science in the open » Capturing the record of research process – Part I
  • Thoughtful discussion of the difficulty of capturing _process_, not just facts, or ideas, or relationships. Ties in with many other important issues in open science: the importance of the context in which data was taken, and how tacit knowledge affects that data; how to represent process online in a way that is useful.
• Galaxy Zoo Blog » This is my first time….
  • “[I]f one wants to use a telescope to study something in the sky, one must write a proposal 6 months in advance, submit it for scrutiny, and then await your allocation of time on a telescope. The process can take nearly a year and then after your night staring at the stars, it can take a further year to analyse the data (assuming it wasn’t cloudy!). Only then are we ready to ask questions of the data and test our observations against our original hypothesis written two years ago in a haste!

    With the Zoo, it’s all a little too quick! For example, I can ask the question “how many galaxies have a bar through the middle of them” and typically I would embark on a career-long quest to answer this fundamental question. I may even recruit some poor graduate student to eyeball 50,000 galaxies to answer the question (like they did with Kevin!). But now, two days after the launch, we already have the data to address this question and it’s a little too fast for an old-timer like me. “

• Galaxy Zoo Blog » Lost in Space … and more (An Italian in the zoo)
  • The story of how someone became addicted to Galaxy Zoo.
• [0803.3247] Galaxy Zoo: The large-scale spin statistics of spiral galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
  • Analyses the rotation axes of spiral galaxies, and claims that, contra Longo, there is no statistically significant anisotropy.
• [0812.3437] Does the Universe Have a Handedness?
  • The latest in Longo’s series of papers suggesting an anisotropy in the rotation axes of spiral galaxies. Big news if true, but a team using Galaxy Zoo’s data suggests that Longo is mistaken.
• Galaxy Zoo Blog » Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about Blue Early-type galaxies!
• Academic publishing house Springer put up for sale in teeth of recession | guardian.co.uk
• Jacques Distler on Instiki
  • I’ve only fiddled with Instiki, but it looks like Jacques has done a great job making this a truly math-aware wiki.
• Yuja Wang plays the Flight of the Bumble-Bee
  • Don’t try this at home.
• Erdös and the Quantum Method « Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP
• Daring Fireball: Obsession Times Voice
  • “My muse for the session was this quote from Walt Disney: “We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.” To me, that’s it. That’s the thing… Obsession times voice is a pretty good stab at a simple formula for doing it right.”
• Machine Learning (Theory) » Machine Learning is too easy
• Whitepaper: Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution · October 2008
  • “we estimate that it would take approximately $10.8 billion to build the Fedora 9 distribution in today’s dollars, with today’s software development costs. Additionally, it would take $1.4 billion to develop the Linux kernel alone. This paper outlines our technique and highlights the latest costs of developing Linux. “
• Cheating Goes Global as Essay Mills Multiply – Chronicle.com
  • “One customer, for example, identifies himself as a Ph.D. student in aerospace engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He or she (there is no name on the order) is interested in purchasing a 200-page dissertation. The student writes that the dissertation must be “well-researched” and includes format requirements and a general outline. Attached to the order is a one-page description of Ph.D. requirements taken directly from MIT’s Web site. The student also suggests areas of emphasis like “static and dynamic stability of aircraft controls.”"

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