Google Colaboratory

If you need to use and interact with a jupyter notebook on a computer that does not have it installed, Google Colaboratory seems like a great in-browser solution. I learned about it from a student earlier this semester from a student.

The best part is that you don't need to install any software locally on the machine. The standard scientific/data science python stack (numpy, scipy, sympy, pandas) is available, and you can even "install" some additional on the fly using pip install.

It works more or less like Google Docs, in that you documents are saved on Google Drive, and you can collaborate with others in much the same way.

Check it out!

One Year Later

One year ago, I decided to get off of Facebook.

It wasn't a carefully thought out decision. I did not weigh the positives against the negatives. I just stopped.

There were some signs of this for a few years. In mid-2016, I wrote:

A few years ago, Facebook was a source of joy in my life. I was actively rediscovering friends who had slipped away over time. Reconnecting, discovering what they were up to, and filling the gap between where we had left and found each other again, ushered in a sense of everyday freshness. 

Over time, as a billion people got onboard, the rate of rediscovery diminished, and so did the excitement of eagerly checking new notifications. These days, most of my Newsfeed is cluttered with click-bait, unscientific bullshit, flashy headlines, and "Hallmark" greetings.

Here is a recent Vanity Fair article that touches on similar issues.

During the past six months alone, countless executives who once worked for the company are publicly articulating the perils of social media on both their families and democracy. Chamath Palihapitiya, an early executive, said social networks “are destroying how society works”; Sean Parker, its founding president, said “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” (Just this weekend, Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, said he won’t let his nephew on social media.) Over the past year, people I have spoken to internally at the company have voiced concerns for what Facebook is doing (or most recently, has done) to society. Many begin the conversation by rattling off a long list of great things that Facebook inarguably does for the world—bring people and communities together, help people organize around like-minded positive events—but, as if in slow motion, those same people recount the negatives. 

Links

1. "Ten Lessons I WishI Had Learned Before I Started Teaching Differential Equations" (Gian-Carlo Rota)

What can we expect students to get out of an elementary course in differential equations? I reject the "bag of tricks" answer to this question. A course taught as a bag of tricks is devoid of educational value. One year later, the students will forget the tricks, most of which are useless anyway. The bag of tricks mentality is, in my opinion, a defeatist mentality, and the justifications I have heard of it, citing poor preparation of the students, their unwillingness to learn, and the possibility of assigning clever problem sets, are lazy ways out.

2. A web clone of MS Paint (jspaint.ml)

3. Strogatz Lectures on Nonlinear Dyanmics and Chaos (youtube)

Frequentist verus Bayesian Statistics

Jake VanderPlas has a bunch of interesting resources on this fascinating topic.

For example, this video from SciPy 2014 and the associated conference proceeding.

He also has a nice python-based 5-part series on the same topic.