Via Militant Geek. This is a great table that shows what keeps me energized and going…. mmmm… tasty:

I like how Milk is #8…. aka Oxygen on the real periodic table.

This is something from Slashdot but it’s an important issue for me so I’m posting it:

But an analysis of the publicly funded spy network, which is owned and controlled by local authorities and Transport for London, has cast doubt on its ability to help solve crime.

A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.

Even though these are the type of results I want I still have to point out that I have some serious issues with the study itself:

• They are using the absolute number of cameras in a region rather than some more objective measure that accounts for the size of the region like cameras/sq-ft.
• They are using the ratio of crimes stopped but we shouldn’t be as interested in that number (in isolation) if we’re trying to see the effectiveness of the cameras. We have to compare the ratio of crimes stopped before versus the ratio of crimes stopped after the cameras were installed while controlling for things like police force size, population in the region, etc.

Anyways… I like the conclusions of the study but I don’t like the study itself.

Many of you know that my favorite commercial is the “BFF Jill” commercial as shown below:

link
Well, AT&T released a new updated one that sucks:

link

For geeky people, this should make you laugh. For the rest, you’re probably thinking WTF?

Just because I love pointing this type of stuff out. There’s a recent study released that’s touting the rise in piracy. From the Globe and Mail:

MR’s fourth annual Digital Music Survey, which polled 1,700 people in the U.K. last month, suggests that illegal music is more popular than ever before, with 43 per cent of respondents claiming that they are illegally downloading tracks, up from 36 per cent last year and from 40 per cent in 2005.

Using their own numbers and a small assumption (that the sample size in 2007 was the same as the sample size in the past), I calculate the standard error on between their 2005 and 2007 numbers to be 3.3% at the 95% confidence level. Given that 43%-40%=3% we now know that there is no statistically significant difference between the number of people claiming to illegaly download tracks between 2005 and 2007.

So the statement “illegal music is more popular than ever” has been debunked. Thank-you and have a good day.

If you want to see a post about why being a geek rocks check out my Rotman Blog.

I found another way to Simpsonize yourself. The original post is . This time you upload a photo and it does a piss poor job of making a Simpsons character that looks like you. Here are the two photos:

Note: the original picture of me was quite a bit bigger. I just uploaded a small crappy picture to the blog.

I came across a cool Facebook App. It let’s you visualize your network and ranks the members of your network based on how many photos you have together. My entire network looks like a mess:

A subset of the 50 most connected (shared pictures) friends is more manageable:

The size of the dots indicates connectedness.

Try it out on your network (requires Java 5)

Take a look at this traffic graph for facebook.com vs tunerds.com:

As you can clearly see, the traffic on facebook.com was neck and neck with the traffic on tunerds.com up until 2006. Furthermore, before 2004 tunerds.com had an infinite percentage more traffic than facebook.com. Since 2006, however, facebook.com has had huge growth, leaving tunerds.com behind. As the CEO (Cool Editor Oh-yeah) of tunerds.com I will not stand for this. As of this moment I will be using all of my 1337 interweb and bizzzzz skillz to combat the popularity of facebook.com and ensure that tunerds.com traffic matches that of facebook.com.

Details on my plan in the coming… eventually.

p.s. I’m feeling silly today.

Eve just told me about The Simpsons Movie site that lets you create your own Simpsons Avatar!!!! Mine doesn’t look like me but whatever: