can you believe that dec.1 is tomorrow??  insanity i tell you.  taylor keeps asking when we are decorating the christmas tree....the better question would be- when are we buying our christmas tree!  so have you started decorating yet??*images courtesy of fashion toast, fabulous k, so very pre...

Great Youth Turnout at Buffalo Green Code Meetings!

During the week of November 15th, the City of Buffalo held three public meetings to discuss the planning of the new Buffalo Green Code - an overhaul of the existing zoning code and the development of a new land use plan for the city. The meetings were informative and interactive - allowing participants to share information about the places they liked and disliked in the city - giving the planning...

Choline and Fatty Liver

I've been writing about non-alcoholic fatty liver disorder (NAFLD) since the early days of this blog, because it's an alarmingly common disorder (roughly a quarter of Americans affected) that is typically undiagnosed. It often progresses into its more serious cousin non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), an inflammatory condition that causes liver damage and can progress to cancer. In a number of previous posts, I pinpointed excess sugar and seed...

good morning!!  i hope y'all had a wonderful thanksgiving!  we sure did.  i think i will be okay if i never eat another carb again :)  here are some pretties to start off your monday....*images courtesy of hillary the mammal, greige, domino, living ins...

Letters to a young graduate student: Part I

Every so often when a new batch of graduate students join our department, I often get tasked with telling them, in ten minutes or less, Everything You Wanted To Know About Doing a PhD Here (But Were Afraid To Ask). I'm not sure if they ask me to do this is because I'm a "mature" student, or friendly, or a woman, but in any case I don't mind. I also keep finding myself somehow giving impromptu lectures to whole groups of students on How To Do Research....

Happy Thaknsgiving!

Here is a comic strip by Ryan Lake that illustrates the concept of Russell's turkey. The idea is simply the induction does not always work the way you expect. There could be some factors, which did not have influence on the training data, yet changing the learned concept dramatically. We should thus keep in mind that machine learning (which is based on induction) is not the panacea.Bertrand Russell...

You probably think this post is about you

One of the songs that always makes me laugh is Carly Simon's song, "You're So Vain." In case you're unfamiliar with the tune, the refrain goes something like this:You're so vainYou probably think this song is about youYou're so vainI'll bet you think this song is about youDon't you? Don't you?I always start giggling when the chorus starts. (Sometimes I even yell things at the radio.) I guess I find it funny because I tend to think about some...

TSA Awareness FAIL

First there were the women who had their vaginas groped. (Including a rape survivor). Then there was the woman who had breast cancer who was rudely asked to remove her prosthetic breast. And now, there is a person who had bladder cancer (and an urostomy bag) who was treated rudely when he requested privacy pat-down, would not be listened to when he tried to explain his condition and how his urostomy...

happy thanksgiving!!!

so i am officially signing off for the thanksgiving holidays....i have a pile of things i need to do, food i need to cook, vacuums' i need to use, bathrooms i have to clean, tables i need to decorate, family i need to visit with, and turkey i need to eat.  i have so many things to be thankful for this year....including y'all- a HUGE thank you for being w/ me for so long!  i hope you have...

I'm male, yet again!

I just got back yet another revision back of a paper I reviewed, and once again, I am male! Check this out:We'll fix XYZ... (also as pointed out by Reviewer 1 and addressing his comment as well).And the first author is a woman, no less! For shame.I wish I could write back that I am not a man. But that would surely out me, as, really, there's only N women in my subfield and you can count them on two hands.I accept that in this day and age "guy"...

wow....

can you believe that thanksgiving is this thursday??!!  is your kitchen and dining room ready for all of the excitement??!  mine needs some help. it's a little messy at the moment....if i had that adorable dish towel, i swear it would be clean :)*images courtesy of remodelista, the desk of annie, donna wil...

Glucose Tolerance in Non-industrial Cultures

BackgroundGlucose is the predominant blood sugar and one of the body's two main fuel sources (the other is fatty acids). Glucose, in one form or another, is also the main form of digestible dietary carbohydrate in nearly all human diets. Starch is made of long chains of glucose molecules, which are rapidly liberated and absorbed during digestion. Sucrose, or table sugar, is made of one glucose...

Calling all the engineers

I was going to write another post in the "english-is-fun" category, but decided we need to discuss more computer science around these here parts.So, I have Very Important Question for all the engineers out there:If memory is so cheap and advancing so quickly, why can one not buy one of those cute MacBook Airs with half a terabyte of solid state disk? What's up with this 64G stuff? That's barely a few days of photographs from my fancy camera....

Hunting Heads

I delight in getting emails from headhunters, because it's really easy to tell if you're really being headhunted or if it's just Ooh-Look-a-Computer-Scientist-In-A-Prestigious-PhD-Program spam. The latter queries are particularly entertaining.If you're truly being headhunted by someone good at their job, you get letters like this:Dear Ms. Lovelace,Your research on concurrent ducks is fascinating. I was especially impressed by your recent journal...

Impressions from the Wise Traditions Conference

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2nd Policy Brief released today!

The second policy brief was released today by the HKHC assessment team from the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University at Buffalo. This brief outlines the food system in the City of Buffalo.What is a food system? The food system includes the production of food (farms, gardens, etc.), processing (canning, wrapping, etc.), transporting the food, distribution (grocery stores, corner markets, farmers markets, etc.) and food disposal...

What is Zoning?

Some of you may be asking yourselves why zoning matters to you. The following is an excerpt from the City of Buffalo's Green Code website:"A zoning Ordinance is a document containing rules, requirements and standards that guide and direct the use of structures and land, and the form and location of structures in a manner that carries out the policies of the Comprehensive Plan. It determines...

Letter Reminders

Since this is the season for writing and requesting reference letters, just a gentle reminder to all the letter writers out there to be aware of your language use when penning letters for female candidates. There's a nice article in last Wednesday's Inside Higher Education, "Too nice to land a job":You are reading a letter of recommendation that praises a candidate for a faculty job as being "caring," "sensitive," "compassionate," or a...

Buffalo Green Code Meetings this week!

Now is the time to get involved! We have been talking for months about the City of Buffalo's overhaul of the current zoning code. The public participation meetings are happening this week!You can attend any of the three meetings - doesn't matter where you live - just go to the one that fits best with your schedule.HKHC has prepared a flyer that helps to explain a bit about the Green Code process. Click here and you can download the fly...

i'm on a little business trip :)be back soon....*ps. you can find me on simply seleta one day this week (i think tuesd...

Can't Cite This

In someone's blog a few months ago (Prodigal's? GMP's? I forget), there was a discussion about getting students to be better about citing articles when they prepare manuscripts. The problem was that someone's students were under-citing (e.g., they should have 50 references and they have 10).This is not my problem.In fact, this is so not my problem, I am utterly dying under a current journal's citation limitation. I cannot write a paper with only...

Cara Mudah Mengetahui Data Pada CD/DVD

Belajar Komputer | udah lama g posting...akhirnya sempat juga posting skrang...!kali ini yang saya posting adalah software yang digunakan untuk cek data CD/DVD.. nama software yang dimaksud adalah CDCheck..tenang aja udah da serialnya ko'!Key features CDCheck 3.1.14 :  Hash creation and checkingFile/directory checkingBinary file/directory compareFile/directory recoveryAudio CD...

it's friday....hope you have a girlie, carefree weekend :)*images courtesy of silk and scallops, dress design decor, elements of style, beautiful things to sh...

I'm male - again!

Awhile ago I reviewed a paper, and just recently read the summary review an editor made of all the reviews. I was the third reviewer (mu ha ha!). The summary went something like this:Reviewer 1 discussed blahblahblah. However, Reviewer 1 was also concerned about blahblahblah. (no gender)Reviewer 2 noticed blahblah. And, later, Reviewer 2 also had some questions about blahblahblah. (no gender)Reviewer 3 found the paper blahblahblah. However, he is...

Nice paper acknowledgement

It turns out that not only in Russia PhD students could be underpaid so that they cannot afford food:This is from Olga Veksler's paper "Graph cut based optimization for MRFs with truncated convex priors" from CVPR 2007. Andrew seems to be a nice person. I should definitely ask Anton Osokin to introduce us on ocasion....

urban electric

it's no secret that i have a love for urban electric....it's hard not to when the produce such fabulous lighting and are located in charleston!  sooo....have y'all seen amanda nisbet's collection??  how great is it...and yes, the lamp shades are for sa...

The Twinkie Diet for Fat Loss

The ExperimentI've received several e-mails from readers about a recent experiment by nutrition professor Mark Haub at Kansas State university (thanks to Josh and others). He ate a calorie-restricted diet in which 2/3 of his calories came from junk food: Twinkies, Hostess and Little Debbie cakes, Dorito corn chips and sweetened cereals (1). On this calorie-restricted junk food diet (800 calorie/day deficit), he lost 27 pounds in two months.Therefore,...