Holy and Wise: The mythology and contributions of the fool in mathematics and physics

On August 8th, the NY Times published a long essay about Allan Brooks who fell under a dellusion that he had "had discovered a novel mathematical formula, one that could take down the internet and power …

This is my grandfather. I am named after him. He shined shoes outside in Union Square Park in NYC for 60 years. Giving people a chance for a better life is what the United States, NYC and Columbia University is all about. link to his profile

Introduction

Many justice-involved adults …

I am interested in making a contribution to Emedded Optimal Transport by extending some of the low dimensional encoding techniques to Optimal Transport. This is the first of my projects to learn the computational literature and techniques

You can visit my code: (https://github.com/EvanMisshula/variational-encoder)

🧠 What Is a …

Roadmap to Become a Machine Learning Researcher Focused on Embedded Optimal Transport

🧠 Phase 1: Mathematical and Theoretical Foundations

Goal: Build deep fluency in the theory that underpins optimal transport, geometric learning, and high-dimensional data analysis.

Core Topics

• Measure theory & probability

• “Probability with Martingales” (Williams)

• “High-Dimensional Probability” (Vershynin)
• Linear algebra & matrix …

o

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of becoming. ~ Victor Frankl paraphrasing Johann Wolfangang von Goethe

Teaching Python to Rikers Detainees

On Saturday, December 10th, I had the privilege of joining students from the Columbia …

Comparison is the theif of Joy. ~ Sofia Kovalevskaya

Renowned Researcher and GC CompSci EO Haralick vists undergrads

CUNY Graduate Center Executive Officer and Distinguished Professor Robert Haralick came to visit the Computer Science club at John Jay last Thursday. His nominal topic was graduate school applications. More than 40 students …

It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul. ~ Sofia Kovalevskaya

Respecting our students helps them (and us)

Linked below is an excellent but long presentation on the gaps in minority achievement in mathematics and the reasons for their persistence from the Mathematical Association of America …

In memorium to Faigy Mayer

We all struggle with finding our place in the world. Sometimes when we lose our way, it seems impossible to go on. I am lucky to never have had a voice appear in my head when I was on a rooftop. But the emotional distance …

The problem

We all have to complete tutorials to learn new languages. One constant pain is that the tutorials are usually trapped in pdf's when we need to type code. Emacs makes this problem go away through its doc-view mode which allows you to render pdf's in Emacs. The problem …

When someone says: 'I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done', give him a lollipop. ~Alan J. Perlis

The problem

Javascript can be notoriusly difficult to debug if you are coming from a language with tight degugger integration like C/C++ or Java …

Switched to Mac

My switch to the Mac meant that I was making more typing mistakes and on one them I was always getting to Emacs to freeze. I looked like this:

I switched to the Mac last summer. I was given one for work. I would never buy one …

Update

On November 3, I gave a talk at the Emacsnyc meetup on reproducible research. I will get a link to the presentation up soon.

You can view the presentation:

And here is the github:

http://github.com/EvanMisshula/rr" target="\_blank\">rr repo

I have developed a Zen-like approach to the operating systems that people use: 'When you're ready, the right operating system will appear in your life.' ~Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist of Canva, an online graphic design tool. Formerly, he was an advisor to the Motorola business unit of Google …

Say you were standing with one foot in the oven and one foot in an ice bucket. According to the percentage people, you should be perfectly comfortable. ¹ ~Bobby Bragan, 1963

Encountering data

Here we will describe the techniques you should use to give yourself and your readers/bosses/teachers …

R foundations

In God we trust. All others must bring data. ~ W. Edwards Demming

R console

Start an R buffer through ess by typing M-x R. See the earlier tutorial here or here if that is mystery. At the console type:

10+20

Making your editor do statistics

All models are wrong, but some are useful.¹ ~George E. P. Box

Why is ESS useful?

ESS makes your command history searchable and modifiable. When you start doing statistics you think you will always remember what you did and instantly recall why you did …

Emacs

What I cannot build, I do not understand. — Richard Feynman

Why Emacs?

• This section is borrows heavily from Stephen Elgen and Phil Sung

The long answer (though still far from complete)

Emacs provides the same editing commands available for each language you are using. This is a big advantage …

Emacs Speaks Statistics (ESS)

ESS is a library (package) for Emacs which allows it to interact with a number of statistical packages including S+, R, SaS, SPSS and Stata. For the purpose of these notes. We will only deal with R. It allows the command history to be searchable and …

Intro

A number of my colleagues need to analyze data and are learning a programming language for the first time. It does not need to be said, this is a very heavy lift and occurs in the presence of a wide diversity of well intentioned opinion. It also occurs in …

My collaborator and friend Ernie Drucker was recently at the London School of Economics where he joined the expert panel on how to end the unproductive and wasteful drug wars. You can see his talk below.

The complete report is available here as a (pdf).

credit

I am trying to explain the ethos and social convention of FREE software. People have created software and they let you use it and modify it for free. Is only polite to extend them

academic courtesy and cite them for their contribution. Also it makes sense because you point …

Update

On May 5, I gave a lightning talk at the Emacsnyc meetup on the state of the Emacs IPthon notebook. A big thank you to Eric from http://emacsnyc.org for his extraordinary linux vs audio-visual equipment efforts.

The Judge would be wise to listen to a jury that understands the pointlessness of incarceration of the harmless. #MasssIncarceration #Justice4Cecily #NoMoreDrugWar

"Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day—you in the night …

Of course, one reason why it might be unprecedented is that other police forces might find it prurient, ludicrous, voyeuristic, perverse or merely a monstrous waste of time, money and a cell phone. #TweetingArrests http://www.cnet.com/news/police-to-live-tweet-prostitution-sting/

NYC is considering banning private employers from asking about criminal convictions on employment applications. If NYC passes this, it is a game changer. Once again Jumaane Williams is leading the charge on behalf of the working poor.

• wsj-online
• cssny
• fairChance.org

Cases check in but they don't check out. #DAsGoneWild Who gets to watch the watchers?

Resource map

The amazing Sheyla Delgado and I did some mapping for the Prisoner Reentry Institute. This map has some resources for returning prisoners.

Set up

My usage history

Back in 2009, one of the first advantages that made me play around with Emacs again when I went back to graduate school was Emacs-Speaks-Statistics. It allowed me to avoid the pain of using the R-console which was frankly a miserable experience. The deficiencies of that interface …

Motivation

It was this week during the project pitch exercise here at the Data Science For Social Good that I fell down a rabbit hole. I wanted to get summary statistics on foreclosures and land values for each of Chicago's 50 wards.  Of course I was not doing that when …

Most of the time you read about setting up virtual environments, it is for web development. But the same benefits hold for analysis and research software. You want to be able to reproduce results. It also increases security not to be adding all the unverified libraries with machine level privileges …

Packages

The Emacs package system is far from perfect. The most proficient users of Emacs are unaffected by this flaw. Many users of Emacs are experts who live at the bleeding edge of the linux kernel and gcc compiler. This guide is for the mere mortals who have used Emacs …

It is no secret that I have been working on delivering d3 over django. I am a novice to both of these technologies, I have been scouring the internet for FREE resources. Of what I have found. Here are my impressions. On Django, there seem to be few full tutorials …

Welcome to my blog

This is my first blog post using the IPython notebook. I am very excited about the things it can do.

Here is what I want to cover

1. Who I am
2. What the blog will cover
3. Why I named it Measure of Justice

Evan Misshula

I am …

So I was able to get this to post to my blog. However I was not able to get it to work here. Since then, to my surprise I have found myself working less with the visually amazing, but temperamental iPython and more with Emacs org-mode.

The ability to toggle …

1. The FBI is executing warrants against the Wiki-leaks supporters.I had long suspected that most of these guys were not as tricky (sophisticated) as they thought they were. details
2. Another article on government picking at your electronic data. Who gets picked for this is a crapshoot. The problem is not …

Great week…saw a preview of Released, the movie version of 'the Castle'. It is a great play about four amazing people who are making the very most of their second chance! The Castle.

This is the first issue so it is worth saying what I would like to cover. I am interested in increasing labor market participation and public safety. I believe that this is done through life long learning and remediation. I am particularly interested in using mathematics to decide what is …