romunov’s blog et al

We need your votes to put Statistical analysis stack exchange site into a testing, beta phase. If you like for instance StackOverFlow (I’m especially fond of the R tag) or other stack exchange sites, please drop your vote. Registration is super easy. If you wield a google account, you can register in two clicks!

Cast yer vote here: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/33/statistical-analysis?referrer=kAwcbvcUyIY1

Ker nikjer na internetu ni bilo lahko dostopnih akordov in besedila za Planet Galgala avtorjev Slon in Sadež, sem se odločil, da dam vkup pričujoči dokument.

Planet Galgala - Slon in Sadež

If you’re by any chance working in Eclipse (or even StatET plugin), you might appreciate word wrapping of your text. This does not come out-of-the-box, though. You will have to use the Eclipse’s Install new software wizard. Enter http://ahtik.com/blog/projects/eclipse-word-wrap/ as the URL and install Virtual Word Wrap. An option to Virtual word wrap will appear if you right click in your main text editing area.

At home, I use Eclipse to write my R code. Package StatET is the utility of choice for this task. For some reason, calling help (for instance ?read.table) wouldn’t produce the desired effect of opening my web browser and navigating to the specific page of the help file. After searching high and low and trying to figure out what’s wrong with my Eclipse/StatET, I solved the issue by specifying help_type, which was, for some reason, NULL (which explains no action at all)?! The command to fix it is

options("help_type" = "html")

Wheew, what a relief. No, Obama hasn’t changed course, nor did Dick Cheney experience a fatal hart attack. I just managed to solve my problem through wits and cunning. I’m posting this mostly for myself, so I may remember how to deal with this the next time.

I have a 35 page (that’s A4 pages) of scientific references that I need to publish on a website dedicated to subterranean amphipods. Posting references is so special because I need to add custom tags before and after each paragraph so that the references are indented, which makes them easier to read. I also needed to add html tags before and after each italicized word (species names).

I started digging into the world of writing an OpenOffice.org macro, which could quite elegantly solve my problem. Snag number one: I’m not experienced in BASIC (which is the programming language used). A pretty big snag, I would say. I then again did it all wrong and first posted a question on Stack Overflow and then started browsing for answers (I should have done the other way around). After 10 seconds of browsing the Stack Overflow, the answer struck me out of the blue.

What I did was I saved the file in .XML. What this does is basically save all the information on the page ready to be posted on the internet. Which means every paragraph is defined, all bold, italicized and underlined elements are recognized and so forth… It was then just a matter of Find and Replace to switch the default XML tags (tags like P and I) to my custom tags. Voila!

You just have to hear this. Alex Jones calling out CNN and Anderson Cooper on their own show. Unfortunately the thing wasn’t live and they’ll probably edit it down, but AJ and the crew made the right decision to film his whole response. See videos below.

Pred nekaj dnevi me je pri rednem obisku največjega Mercator centra v Dravljah (Ljubljana) pozdravila čisto gantz nova razstavi super foto-montaž fotografij. Ne vem točno kaj je cilj razstave, ampak če sem malo demogoški in se pošalim, je zgolj zato, ker EU daje sredstva za promoviranje globalnega segrevanja.

Kot mlajši znanstvenik pa od mene morala zahteva, da sem do vsega skrajno skeptičen, kot zavesten državljan in prebivalec planeta Zemlje pa to še posebej velja, ko zadevo v roke vzamejo politiki in na njo praktično onanirajo. Za vse, ki o znanosti ne razmišljajo vsak dan naj le povem, da znanost ni rigidna struktura in debata glede nekatere stvari nikoli ni “končana”, kot radi razglašajo nekateri.

Da se vrnem nazaj na stvar. Ko sem prvič šel mimo razstave sem bil zelo impresioniran nad dobrimi fotomontažami. O zadevi si nisem mislil nič in odšel naprej po nakupih. Na poti nazaj pa sem se le priklonil in pričel brati tekst na panojih in pod slikami. Kot biolog najprej nisem vedel ali naj se smejim, jokam ali pa letim po defibrilator, ki je stacioniran na stebru na drugi strani Mercatorja. Sicer se vseh izjav v tem postu ne bom dotaknil, se bom pa osredotočil na eno izjavo, ki pravi, da Zemlja ni bila tako vroča zadnjih 50 milijonov let (to je 50.000.000 let). To je ravno malo po tem, ko je izumrla večina dinozavrov (ostali so samo ptiči, ki so zelo sorodni skupini dinozavrov, v katero spada tudi famozni Tyrannosaurus rex). No, pa poglejmo, če obstaja možnost, da je to resnica posebne vrste (laž)!

Odsurfal sem na spletno stran NOAA (to je ameriški “statistični urad” za satelitske in druge podatke), ki shranjuje temperaturne (in druge podatke) iz preteklosti. Konkretno gre za dataset (tako pravimo podatkom) z Greenlandije, ki prikazuje relativno temperaturo (relativno na današnje razmere) za zadnjih 50.000 let (to je 0.05 milijonov let). Podatke sem uvozil v program R (verzija 2.10.1, linux verzija) in izrisal graf. Če bi kdo rad preveril kodo (da nisem morda kaj goljufal), naj me kontaktira.

Poglejmo, kaj se je na Greenlandiji dogajalo zadnjih 400 let. Opazimo, da se je v zadnjem stoletju in pol temperatura dejansko povzpela nad “povprečje”. In to kar skokovito!

Pa poglejmo še malo bolj v preteklost. Recimo 800 let. Vidimo, da gre temperatura gor in dol in GOOOR in DOOOL. Opazimo, da obstaja verjetnost, da je bila Zemlja kdaj tudi že toplejša.

Ker temperatura tako niha in s trendi zadnjih nekaj 100 let nismo zadovoljni, poglejmo kaj se dogaja zadnjih 50.000 let. Opazimo, da je temperatura v zadnjih 10.000 letih nekako poskočila, kar sovpada s koncem zadnje ledene dobe. Pred tem je bila temperatura nižja (kot bi lahko sklepali iz imena ledena doba) od današnje in kar lepo nihala (temu strokovno rečemo “oscilirala”, zato da nas povprečen človek ne razume).

Vprašati se moramo, ali gre to za nekaj unikatnega (neponovljivega), ali pa gre morda za celo cikličen pojav?
Pa pojdimo ponovno na spletno stran NOAA-e in si poglejmo temperaturne podatke (zdaj že znamo reči “dataset”) iz Vostoka (Antarktika, torej na drugi strani Zemlje) za zadnjih 400.000 let (0.4 milijona let, kar niti približno ni 50 milijonov let). Za vaš vizualni užitek sem pobarval zadnjih 50.000 let rdeče, da si lahko predstavljate za koliko let nazaj smo si pogledali podatke z Greenlandije. Podatkov za zadnjih dveh stoletih se s tega grafa praktično ne vidi. Ali mi lahko nekdo objasni zakaj je današnji trend segrevanja ali ohlajanja tako poseben, da moramo zapravljati davkoplačevalski denar za to propagando (v najslabšem pomenu te besede)?

A blog by the Haskell family is a place for all you ever wanted to know (and more) about the Flight 253, the flight that carried the Underwear bomber on the Christmas day in 2009 from Amsterdam to Detroit. Kurt and his wife were eye witnesses to the event and offer an inside scoop which would otherwise go unnoticed. Someone has tried to silence them or bury their stories, but thanks to their profession and wits, they have managed to fight this off so far.

And you shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free (as engraved at the CIA headquarters).

While we’re observing IPCC slowly flying off the radar (into the ground), there is another bleep on the radar that is being missed or ignored by most. It’s the swine flu (do you still remember it?) and the way WHO reacted to the threat.

For those of you who remember, the outbreak started in Mexico and slowly spread over the globe. Even after WHO prematurely proclaimed this pandemic (it was still “localized”) ban on air travel was not put into place. I guess these sort of things are not pretty high on to-do list when you’re being faced by A FUCKING VIRUS THAT IS GONNA KILL YOU, YOUR FAMILY AND RAPE YOUR PETS. Nail one into the coffin of the world “authority” responsible for keeping up healthy and ready and willing to slave for the bank.

Fortunately there are some sane people out there, who wield some sort of power and had an opportunity to investigate. Chair of council of Europe’s sub-committee on health, Wolfgang Wodarg has let an investigation into the 2009 swine flu outbreak and here are a few nuggets from here (visit the link for the entire story and audio of the visit on Alex Jones Show):

Appearing on The Alex Jones Show, outgoing Chair of the Council of Europe’s Sub-committee on Health Wolfgang Wodarg said that his panel’s investigation into the 2009 swine flu outbreak has found that the pandemic was a fake hoax manufactured by pharmaceutical companies in league with the WHO to make vast profits while endangering public health.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, a 47 nation body encompassing democratically elected members of parliament, began hearings last month to investigate whether the H1N1 swine flu pandemic was falsified or exaggerated in an attempt to profit from vaccine sales.

Ever wondered how to compare group means (when you have more than two groups) and test if there is a difference between them? One way ANOVA does just that. You can compare group means between each other and avoid a Type I error you would get if you compared the groups pair-wise with a t-test. Each group can have only one factor, though (if you happen to have more factors, see two-way ANOVA, for example). To find out how to do ANOVA in R (freeware, downloadable from http://www.r-project.org/) see post @ SEDASM.

I have been bestowed upon a task to create a sample pdf of a recently published book on butterflies of Primorska and Notranjska (Slovenia). The full title reads Metulji Notranjske in Primorske (this is just too lure in google/start page searches ). It was authored by Slavko Polak with accompanying pictures from a number of lepidopterologists (butterfly experts). It is a pocket guide and ready to be used out in the field. Highly recommended.

But I digress. I had to create a sample pdf of a few pages to be put online for some spreading the word about the book. I have tried two methods to create these pdfs. One is extremely long, one is extremely short. Both produced a similar result.

1)
I exported certain pages from the full pdf into png (ImageMagick). I joined two by two pages (GIMP) and transformed them into a jpeg (of lower quality and dimensions to keep the file size down) in ImageMagick again. This produced a 600 kB file which is OK, given that I don’t have a source file from which the pdf was created (which is about 8 MB), but has degraded the quality of the pages. This was partially the intent, but I’m having more and more reservations about it.

2)
I used pdftk to extract desired pages into an output file. This took about 40 minutes less (seconds, actually) than the first method and produced an output file of superior quality and similar size (difference of about 50 kB).

pdftk is a pdf processing tool and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Kudos to the authors. pdftk is accessable through your repos (if you’re running a debian based distro).

Our minister for Environment has stepped down, beating his colleagues to call a nay vote on him. The sit is now empty, there is rumor that at least eight candidates await the commission. We anxiously wait who will assume the position and sign an illegal Regulation on shooting of bears and wolves in 2010? Bets are up!

This sort of reminds me of the MEMRI moment a while back (see my post from 2006), when a story how Ahmadinejad (Iranian president) called on the destruction of Israel. It was later revealed that this was an erroneous claim at best, as an Israeli run translational service mis-translated the speech.

But to the current story. A few days ago Venezuelan presidenet Hugo Chavez blamed the US for the earthquake in Haiti using its geo-weapon. This has been repeated throughout the web and print media ever since. Monthly review reports that this claim was falsely attributed to the Venezuelan president, saying the claim came from an obscure opinion post on a Venezuelan state TV.

Before I start ranting, a few explanations are in order. To anyone not familiar with our system, a high school or college student can legally work, which becomes part of their income. Students are contracted and paid through a private business mediating “small” jobs for students.

Student organization of Slovenia has recently produced a video regarding working hours of students. They are banging the drum to rally students against a proposition of a bill that may be passed into law. They claim forced reduction of working hours, which will, according to their forecasts, result in streets full of homeless students… or something. In the video they also claim a student requires around 500 €/month to “survive”. There are also other outrageous claims, which you better see for yourself.

Students are contracted to perform a number of tasks, from bar-tending to high skill jobs like working on a multi million € projects. Students are often (most of the time) equivalent to a newly graduate, which makes it harder for a young unemployed person to compete. My biggest beef with small jobs for students is the way business owners exploit it as a means to get cheap labor force. In a sense I understand them, as it’s more economical to get a student(s) who does work equally well as a regular hired person would. I feel this issue needs to be addressed as a priority. This would not only take the load off of a busy student (don’t laugh), but will also stimulate to hire more young people, who are most vulnerable when seeking or keeping employment. This is why I’m more in favor of making newly graduated student more attractive to hire over students. In my opinion this could be elegantly achieved with amending current laws.

I feel small jobs are a way of destroying what several generations of people have shed sweat and blood to get working rights as we have them today (paid leave, sick days, working hours…). Students are forfeiting a number of acquired rights hand over fist, which I think should be stopped.

At last, I think this deserves at least a mention. In the entire video, they fail to mention that the Organization has a direct stake in this. The Organization is funded by a certain percentage of earnings from mediating small jobs and with slashing of working hours, their piggy bank will shrink. They fail to confront the listener/watcher that they are using public funds to promote the security of their jobs.

There were some applauses heard at the back. I wonder who was that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYj5baVfB0Y&feature=player_embedded

As you might have learned, just rising from the dead, that the poor nation of Haitians experienced a rather shocking day. They little island was rather unfortunately standing on the epicenter of a giant earthquake. I will not get into why the nation ranks pretty high on the poor country list, but this has several rather important consequences. Confer Japan, which is shock proof, Haiti infrastructure doesn’t use reinforced concrete, which makes building fragile at best (come to think of it, I live in a concrete house with little or no steel reinforcement - gulp). This is one of the reasons why about 90% of their infrastructure has been laid in ruin.

With a weak government (which is definitely not a pre-condition, let us all remember hurricane Katrina and its aftermath) and their cultural heritage, looting and pillaging is nothing new. It would seem chaos has erupted, but no need to worry, the US has already send 10.000 troops and god knows how many mercenaries from Xe (BlackWater). Several people have already warned that this may be a prelude to occupation. Maybe.

… happened squat. The “pandemic” swine flu didn’t killed scores, just like promised by the WHO and its “affiliates” (governments). I have called our hotline for swine flu and their model predictions were totally off. That didn’t get in the way of spending thousands of Euros for panic propaganda material, though.
According to the authority on body county, the World health organization (WHO), death toll from the “pandemic” swine flu is about 13.000. Well, if this constitutes a pandemic, then I don’t wanna be right (or how the expression goes?). For comparison, from regular seasonal flues, about quarter to half a million people die each year. And they ask why I don’t trust the government… Of course, at the end of the day, all we have to ask is “why”. I would wager a hefty bet that big pharma and vaccines may have had something to do with it. Maybe.

Numbers here.

The United States will eventually pass a huge bill, that may force everyone to buy health insurance. Unwillingness or inability to do so may result in a fine or jail time. Pretty much what we have here. If you’re employed, your employer takes care of it (but takes from your pay check).

The interesting part about this is how Obama campaigned (and also when in office) talked how the discussion on the bill will be televised. Here’s the clip:

Guess what happened. Yes, he has flip flopped on the issue, just like any other. The Congress wanted an open debate, but White House demanded (like they’re ABOVE the Congress?!) limited televised session of one hour. I will let you find out how long the debate has been and will be, lasting. That way, you can draw your own conclusion why this is such a big deal.

All praise Jebus, a country with kohones exists:

Iceland’s president has refused to sign a controversial bill to repay $5bn (£3.1bn) to the UK and the Netherlands.

As a matter of fact, the president will issue a referendum to decide on the matter:

Announcing the decision to hold a referendum on the bill, President Grimsson said that the Icelandic public had the right to choose.

Yeah, why should the people pay for bad decision by bankers?

Read more over here.

By now, I would guess, almost everyone has heard about the foiled attack on the Delta airliner en route to Detroit by a Nigerian fellow. He has been brewing bad temper since 9/11, they say. This will no doubt tighten the airport security even harder. If this will have any effect only god knows. One also has to wonder why no one reports that Umar Farouk Abdumutallab boarded the plane without the passport. It’s reported that a “sharply dressed” man helped him board without a passport. One has to wonder why no one mentions that the entire flight, including the foiled plot, was filmed by a second person. Umar’s father has contacted the US officials regarding his extremist views, but nothing happened. If all the above is true, it looks like we have just another young person dim witted enough to become a patsy.