Megan @ Elon

How ad serving works, now

megan — Tue, 14 May 2013 12:06:33 +0000

I had really not considered all that goes into ad serving since, oh probably 1999. I used to work on some ad serving technology back then, but I have not thought much recently about the way that tech had matured and become so much more… evil.

Behind the Banner

Fostering participation in FOSS | opensource.com

megan — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:34:25 +0000

Fostering participation in FOSS | opensource.com is about female participation in open source, specifically Google Summer of Code. Google is congratulating itself on getting participation up to a whopping 8.3%. I guess we can’t complain. Yesterday I calculated the “women in Apache Software Foundation leadership roles” at about 2.3%.

The Noun Project

megan — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 12:01:03 +0000

Excellent collection of vector graphics for web site building. There are thousands of them.

Book orders for Fall 2013

megan — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 12:19:38 +0000

Web Development (ISC 325)

Head First Javascript. Morrison. (O’Reilly). Required
Head First HTML5. Freeman. (O’Reilly). Required

Data Mining (ISC 420 – note new course number)

R and Data Mining. Zhao. (Academic Press). Required
Predictive Analytics. Siegel. (Wiley). Required

White House responds to scientific data access petition

megan — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 13:39:14 +0000

Using the White House petition system, the People asked to “Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research”. A few days ago, the White House responded, and took it a bit farther with “Increasing Public Access to the Results of Scientific Research“. So, they’re proposing not just access to the journal articles but also the data. The recommendation follows the NIH model (requiring open access to data) but sadly, applies only to research of more than $100m.

To that end, I have issued a memorandum today (.pdf) to Federal agencies that directs those with more than $100 million in research and development expenditures to develop plans to make the results of federally-funded research publically available free of charge within 12 months after original publication.

Forgotten HTML tags, hilarity ensues

megan — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 13:35:33 +0000

I got a legitimate belly laugh from this site today. I hope it doesn’t go away (or get fixed) — here’s what happens when you use HTML +1 or proportional size tags for your fonts and forget to close them. Each font gets progressively larger, “until the greatest website in the world is achieved” as BoingBoing put it on their coverage of this awesome piece of work.

Rep Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) bill Aaron’s Law

megan — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 22:48:52 +0000

Rep Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) bill Aaron’s Law (PDF)

Rep Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) is sponsoring a bill to make it no longer a felony to breach a tech contract, such as a “terms of service” that no one ever reads. Support it.

R Code School

megan — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 19:21:58 +0000

Found this fun link today: Code School for R. If I had known about this BEFORE my data mining class, that would have been helpful. I just completed chapter 1 and got my first badge. Pretty fun.

MapReduce in simple words

megan — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 14:05:29 +0000

Web Of Data has an explanation of MapReduce that is so simple, anyone can understand it, even kids hopped up on Halloween candy.

Twitter sentiment for airlines during hurricane Sandy

megan — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 19:00:49 +0000

My students used Twitter feeds & R (twitteR package, ggplot) to produce sentiment distributions for six American carriers at 2:00pm on Tuesday 30-Oct.

Higher scores are “better” sentiment (happier customers).

This particular graph only used 1000 tweets per airline. We started with this tutorial.