Photo by Romana Klee

The joy of unrepresentative samples – It’s uncontroversial in the commercial world that biased samples can still produce useful results, as long as you are careful. There are techniques that help you understand your sample, like bootstrapping, and we’re lucky enough to have frequent external validation because we’re almost always measuring so we can make changes, and then we see if they work according to our models. The comments on this post are worth reading because the approach seems to offend some sociologists viscerally. (via Trey Causey and Benjamin Lind)

Humanize – A Javascript library that handles the common language transformations like translating numbers into positional text (eg 1 into ‘first’), turning lists into comma-separated strings with ‘and’ between the last two entries, and other goodies. I wonder if this will be translated into languages other than English?

Should Excel spreadsheets be subject to external peer review? – Making it easy to get more sets of eyes on your data.

Thoughts on Intel’s upcoming software guard extensions – My conclusion after reading this overview is that the complexity of modern processors is mind-boggling, and it’s becoming increasingly impossible to verify the security of any of the hardware or software we use by inspection.

Black Midi – Jamming insane numbers of notes into an ancient music format, and playing them back with the dinkiest software you can find. A thing of beauty.