Earthquakes vs. Time of Day

Time and tide wait for no one. Add to that: earthquakes. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, a.k.a. “earthquake country”, in a house built in the 1950s before earthquake building codes had been created. Within the next 30 years, the USGS tells us we can expect a “big one” in the East Bay …

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Economic Recovery in Red vs Blue States

I was chatting with my Dad recently and he brought up a debate he’d heard on the radio between a Republican and Democratic candidate. The Republican candidate said that in our present-day recession economy, Republican states were better off than Democratic states. My Dad seemed to particularly relish how the Democratic candidate scrambled to defend his …

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International Women’s Day

Thanks to Google’s ngrams project page I have wasted my scarce spare hours looking at micro trends in literature. A couple of months ago, the Google ngrams project presented a database of all the words from Google’s extensive book collection. Making the books freely available presents copyright issues, but a database of word frequency in …

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Data-mining in school districts

Starting a decade ago more and more schools across the US began implementing data mining programs to improve school performance. It was claimed that data-mining real-time and after the school year had ended could identify students who were in danger of not graduating. Real-time data mining would be a way to find these students early …

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