And apropos luck and skill, from Hacker News:
> i'm not entirely sure what I'm doing, but I think I'm winning...
I think that's a pretty fair description of how the world works.
I actually worked on Sankey diagrams at LLNL. Up until recently, they were all made by hand, which would explain their simplicity. While someone they hired maybe 5-8 years ago did write up a small program in python to generate them, in his spare time, they still required a significant amount of data-specific tweaking.
I was the first, and as far as I know, last, person to attempt to apply the format to city resource flows. I was ostensibly there working on a proposal to apply lab expertise to the "problems" in cities (sustainability, heat island, infrastructure). Unfortunately the project was really scattershot the entire time I was there, probably because I was the only person actually working on it, I had no real direction, and my boss repeatedly mentioned wanting a workable city-sustainability theory on the level of germ theory in its transformative power. Needless to say, that didn't pan out, and our paper still makes the rounds in email limbo between us 2 years later.
The source from which I first recognised this lesson was Steve McConnell's <u>Code Complete</u>, which punched home the message of building highly modular software.
"Ball of Mud" is definitely another archetype.
I'm reading Thinking, Fast and Slow right now. It's pretty awesome to say the least. It has a very high concentration of well though-out content on an per-page basis.
With regards to the Halo effect it's also similar to the goals of optimal ranked queues in competitive games, such as with sports, or even more apparently, esports. In any given game or round of the game, if it's too easy, or the competition fed by the system is not challenging, it may limit the skill ceiling of your player base.
"The third great wave" at The Economist.
Less than spectacular, grossly oversimplifies the industrial revolutions (see Robert U. Ayres five Technological Transformations).
> Both the first Industrial Revolution, starting in the late 18th century, and the second one, around 100 years later, had their victims who lost their jobs to Cartwright’s power loom and later to Edison’s electric lighting, Benz’s horseless carriage and countless other inventions that changed the world. But those inventions also immeasurably improved many people’s lives, sweeping away old economic structures and transforming society. They created new economic opportunity on a mass scale, with plenty of new work to replace the old.
> A third great wave of invention and economic disruption, set off by advances in computing and information and communication technology (ICT) in the late 20th century, promises to deliver a similar mixture of social stress and economic transformation. It is driven by a handful of technologies—including machine intelligence, the ubiquitous web and advanced robotics—capable of delivering many remarkable innovations: unmanned vehicles; pilotless drones; machines that can instantly translate hundreds of languages; mobile technology that eliminates the distance between doctor and patient, teacher and student. Whether the digital revolution will bring mass job creation to make up for its mass job destruction remains to be seen....
Proceedings of the ... Constitutional Convention, UAW-CIO
https://books.google.com/books?id=UvsZAAAAIAAJ
International Union, United Automobile, Aircraft, and Agricultural Implement Workers of America. Constitutional Convention - 1958 -
> May this city in which we meet, which once was called the arsenal of democracy, become transformed into a dynamo of freedom and an engine of prosperity and peace. Give of Thy strength to this Union, that this Union may in turn impart its ...
Not the usual term, but an earlier variant applied to tariffs:
> We hear ad nauseam the shouting about the party of prosperity, and the tariff as the great engine of prosperity. This blatant talk goes back about fifty years, to the eighties of the nineteenth century, when the American Protective Tariff League ...
Noted from Hacker News discussion: the possibility that this is a trial balloon for the Obama Adminstration being floated via the Times.
Also of interest, the Times coverage of the Times editorial: "Weeks in the Making, an Editorial on Snowden May Go ‘Beyond What Is Realistic’"
> Andrew Rosenthal, The Times’s editorial page editor, told me Thursday that the editorial had been under discussion by the editorial board for weeks. The Times has written strong editorials about Mr. Snowden ever since the former contractor for the National Security Agency emerged into the national consciousness last spring. In general, The Times’s editorial page has supported Mr. Snowden, calling him a whistle-blower who has done a public service for American citizens by revealing vast – and unconstitutional – government surveillance.
Thanks, handy guide.
I also saw a bunch of XLS files, so those should be extractable.
I've also got a few tools for converting / extracting documents, including <code>pandoc</code> which will convert between many, many document formats, and <code>pdftotext</code> (part of Poppler, a Linux toolkit), which will do a pretty good job of pulling text from documents. There are also some OCR tools, though I've been known to simply resort to re-keying data if necessary.
Pandoc, BTW, is simply fucking amazing:
> Pandoc can convert documents in markdown, reStructuredText, textile, HTML, DocBook, LaTeX, MediaWiki markup, OPML, Emacs Org-Mode, or Haddock markup to
> * HTML formats: XHTML, HTML5, and HTML slide shows using Slidy, reveal.js, Slideous, S5, or DZSlides. > * Word processor formats: Microsoft Word docx, OpenOffice/LibreOffice ODT, OpenDocument XML > * Ebooks: EPUB version 2 or 3, FictionBook2 > * Documentation formats: DocBook, GNU TexInfo, Groff man pages, Haddock markup > * Page layout formats: InDesign ICML > * Outline formats: OPML > * TeX formats: LaTeX, ConTeXt, LaTeX Beamer slides > * PDF via LaTeX > * Lightweight markup formats: Markdown, reStructuredText, AsciiDoc, MediaWiki markup, Emacs Org-Mode, Textile > * Custom formats: custom writers can be written in lua.
In particular, you can go from HTML/Markdown to LaTeX, and from there to ePub, which is really slick.
Thanks. Note that I can't see MKaTS for now.
Fetch the key:
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit,edu --recv-keys \ 'C210 9883 FFB4 3AC1 DEBF 9A2C AC6F 1E84 420A B7BD'
Save the message block locally to a file, say "dred.pgp"
Then verify it:
gpg --verify dred.pgp
Result should look like:
gpg: Signature made Mon 16 Feb 2015 09:51:23 PM PST using RSA key ID 420AB7BD gpg: Good signature from "Dr. Edward Morbius (Superscedes 2048R/74CCF7CD) <>"
Invalid messages will vary, if I swap the first 'i' in the ciphertext for an 'a' I get:
gpg: CRC error; 000BE5 - B69F42 gpg: [don't know]: invalid packet (ctb=69) gpg: no signature found gpg: the signature could not be verified.
For more: "Making and verifying signatures" from the GNU Privacy Handbook.
Since part of this is a search for platforms amenable to intellectual and research activities, Authorea, which I've just stumbled across, looks potentially interesting. "Write and manage your documents in one place, for free."
It's not clear if it has references management (a huge problem for me), but that would be a tremendous advantage.
I'm trying to see who's behind it -- Elsevier or other scientific publishers would be a dealbreaker.
Update: TOS requires real names. I may simply ask them about that.