November 2008
5 posts
Organic food and the recession
I’ve long been puzzled by the organic food movement. I think it encapsulates several different ideas:
Better tasting food
Food that is better for us
Food production that is better for the environment
Proponents are typically unwilling to unpack these different ideas: they could be contradictory afterall. But now that recession is on us, the organic movement will be sorely tested...
play with your data before you put it through...
Years ago as part of my Masters in Cognitive Science, I wrote a dissertation on forecasting foreign exchange with neural networks. An investment bank kindly provided several years worth of data to develop and test the model. My tutor cautioned me to play with the data before I started the development: graph it, seek outliers and generally understand the shape and consistency of the data. It was...
Small Basic
I spent some time at the weekend playing with Microsofts Small Basic, a simple programming environment. It’s excellent (if a bit slow). If you’re looking for a way to learn proper programming (rather than html, css etc…), I highly recommend it; I’d say it’s particularly suitable for kids.
You can find more here:
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BizSpark
It’s great to see Microsoft attempting to reengage with the startup community through their newly announce BizSpark program. Whatever open source zealots may say, it ill serves the IT community that the worlds biggest software company fails to work with or inspire software innovators. But I hope Microsoft understands that this is the start of a process and that this program gets them 5-15%...
