Digital explorations

This post is also available in the post containing all Topblogs daily rankings for this week: March 14

March 14
The last definitive rankings for the week ending March 14 is here before the counters are reset by topblogs.com.

Thinking Made Easy rules the roost with a total of 48,814 visitors besting the second Coolbuster with 27,613 visitors, a wide gap of 21201!

Critical Thinker made a good jump +2 in the ranks to position #5 in the last day of the week.

Our site is at #11 and suffered drops in visitors due to inaccessibility problems with the server. It shares the host with our Python powered solvers.

Succeeding reports of topblogs rankings in education will be posted in our other blog posted at blogger.com. We will provide a link to it tomorrow.

Our Wordpress blog ‘Digital Explorations” share computing resources with our dynamic solvers written in Python. Unfortunately, they can’t work together due to capacity constraints, 256 Mbyte cpu memory and 4Gig harddisk and unoptimized Apache installation.

The problems arose when we upgraded from Quixote to Qpy and replaced lighttpd with Apache. Next time, we will avoid upgrading for change sake. That’s a bad decision. We shall learn to be content with what is working.:(

We shall try to use our blog “Dr-Ernie-Adorio-Adventures” hosted in blogger.com more often now than our own hosted digital explorations so to restore our dynamic solvers. This will take us the whole summer!!! aargh.

But take hope. When we completely transfer our blog to blogger.com, we will revise and improve the contents also. Hope you will like it better starting June.

I am wondering why I see the following error when running a Python script
with the following contents:

import commands
s  = commands.getstatusoutput("uptime")

The error is

$ sh: -c: line 0: syntax error near unexpected token `2′
sh: -c: line 0: `{ uptime; } 2>&1′

Test on my 2.6.4 does not emit the error. Maybe the 2.5.4 version of commands module is buggy?

If all we want is the load average, one can read off the information from /proc/loadavg or simply use the os.getloadavg() function. These do not entail using an intermediary terminal, whether visible or not.

I came upon a lot of blogs about Lito Banayo’s article “Not everyone is for sale.” and wanted to get at the source. Here it is:

Ed Banayo

Hopefully it will open the eyes of the reader about Villar’s businesss acumen.

Head over to
Dona Victorina

One minor claim: Bistek cannot explain why he spent 8 to 9 million a month just for food and softdrinks and that without even a public bidding.

Needs more stories and revisions……

Is the administration getting back at the critics of GMA and her allies?

I invite all discriminating readers to read the news item:

Src: http://www.malaya.com.ph/03122010/news1.html

This case is pending in the supreme court and this blogger believe it is the Supreme Court who will ultimately decide if Judge Yadao did commit an error in judgement.

I talked with a legal mind and been told that it is within the Secretary of Justice’s job to file cases against judges.

Last time we wrote code for generating all subsets of an n element set using indices to indicate membership in each subset. Here is a preliminary code for doing allsubsets regression.

We are encouraging our readers to make suggestions and corrections to our allsubsets Pyton code.

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from lm import *
from matlib import *
 
def allsubsets(n):
    S = [[i] for i in range(n)] #initial.
    for s in S:
        yield s
    N = S
    for k in range(n):
      if N:
           S = N
           N = []
           for e in S:
             for i in range(e[-1]+1,n):
                f = e[:]
                f.append(i)
                yield f
                N.append(f)
 
if __name__== "__main__":
      Y = [1673,1688,1666,1735,1749,1756,1815,1867,1948,2048,2128,2165,
	2257,2316,2324]
 
      X = [[1, 1839, 1],
	[1, 1844, 2],
	[1, 1831, 3],
	[1, 1881, 4],
	[1, 1883, 5],
	[1, 1910, 6],
	[1, 1969, 7],
	[1, 2016, 8],
	[1, 2126, 9],
	[1, 2239, 10],
	[1, 2336, 11],
	[1, 2404, 12],
	[1, 2487, 13],
	[1, 2535, 14],
	[1, 2595, 15],
	]
 
      n = len(Y)
 
      # Perform all variables regression.
      fit = ols(X, Y)
      allR2 = fit.R2
 
      # our implementation includes the constant vector.
      # which is always the first column.
      P = len(X[0])  
      print "P = ", P
      print "allR2 = ", allR2
 
      # The real thing! Generate each subset of indices and 
      # perform linear regression, compute R2 and Mallows Cp.
      for i,subset in enumerate(allsubsets(P)):
        subX   = matSelectCols(X, subset)
        subfit = ols(subX, Y, withintercept=False)
        subR2  = subfit.R2
        mallowsCp = (n-P) * subR2/allR2- n + 2 * P
        print "# Subset, subR2, mallowsCp"
        print  i+1, ":", subset, subR2, mallowsCp

When the program runs, it outputs the following:

P = 3
allR2 = 0.997618594631
# Subset, subR2, mallowsCp
1 : [0] 0.0 -9.0
# Subset, subR2, mallowsCp
2 : [1] 0.993208179557 2.94694868242
# Subset, subR2, mallowsCp
3 : [2] -8.45211160348 -110.667450655
# Subset, subR2, mallowsCp
4 : [0, 1] 0.996176201629 2.98264996652
# Subset, subR2, mallowsCp
5 : [0, 2] 0.949264485031 2.41836557747
# Subset, subR2, mallowsCp
6 : [1, 2] 0.994701140955 2.96490698519
# Subset, subR2, mallowsCp
7 : [0, 1, 2] 0.997618594631 3.0
toto@toto-laptop:~/lm/allsubsets$

In our implementation, the first column is the constant vector of all ones.

Needs an example for comparison. Will check later.

Boxing Record

Clottey is 33 years old and stands 5ft 8in tall while Manny is two years younger than Clottey and stands at 5ft. 6.5in. It would be interesting to see the two fighters box it out on March 13, in the Dallas Cowboys stadium in Texas.

Pacquiao can deliver accurate and strong rapid-fire punches. Will Clottey suffers his first knockout loss?

Or will there be surprises? A win or a loss will not diminish the star of Pacquio.
And know this: Clottey never lost by knockout.

Here are the current betting(we don’t practice this since we have no money!) odds

Draw or Technical Draw 25/1
Joshua Clottey by Decision or Technical Decision 7/1
Manny Pacquiao by Decision or Technical Decision 1/1
Manny Pacquiao by KO or TKO or Disqualification 2/5
Joshua Clottey by KO or TKO or Disqualification 5/1

And a 700 dollar bet on Pacquiao will only earn you a hundred bucks and a refund of your 700 dollars.

Src: Wikipedia and gambling911.com

I sometimes bought Pringles when I was still in Diliman because I liked to collect their tall cans. Of course I threw them away later. It is comforting that food manufacturers are alert to any contamination of their popular products. Here is a news clippings I cut from the Procter and Gamble home page only for the convenience of the reader. The home page is http://www.pg.com:

P&G Joins Industry Ingredient Recall by Voluntarily Recalling Two Flavors of Pringles(R) in the United States In Response to FDA Industry Guidance

CINCINNATI, March 8, 2010 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — The Procter & Gamble Company (NYSE: PG), in response to a recommendation from the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to the food industry, announced today that it is voluntarily recalling Pringles Restaurant Cravers Cheeseburger potato crisps and Pringles Family Faves Taco Night potato crisps as part of an industry ingredient recall to protect consumers from potential Salmonella exposure. There have been no reports of Salmonella-related illness in relation to these products.

To view the multimedia assets associated with this release, please click: http://multivu.prnewswire.com/mnr/pg/42830/

P&G was notified by one of its suppliers that a seasoning used in these two products contains hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP) manufactured by Basic Food Flavors, Inc., who has voluntarily recalled several lots of this ingredient because of potential salmonella exposure. As a result, the FDA has recommended that food manufacturers recall certain types of products containing HVP manufactured by Basic Food Flavors, and P&G is complying with this guidance.

Only products with the following “best by” dates are being recalled. The “best by” date for each product can be found on the bottom of the can.

No other Pringles varieties or flavors are affected by this recall. These two products represent only one half of one percent of Pringles’ U.S. volume. None of the affected products have been shipped to retailers outside of the United States.

The safety of our products is P&G’s top priority, and we follow rigorous food safety and ingredient testing standards. We are withdrawing these products out of an abundance of caution for consumer safety and in response to FDA’s recommendation to the food industry.

Salmonella is a common food borne pathogen that can cause severe illnesses, including fever, abdominal cramps and diarrhea. While most individuals recover without medical intervention, the infection can be life-threatening in some cases such as young children, the elderly and those with compromised immune systems. There have been no reports of Salmonella-related illness to date in relation to these products.

Consumers who have purchased the recalled products should discard the product and call P&G for a replacement coupon or refund at 1-877-876-7881 (Hours of operation: Monday – Friday, 9AM – 6PM US ET).

SOURCE Procter & Gamble

HVP or hydrolyzed vegetable protein , is a common “flavor-enhancer,” made by Basic Food Flavors, Inc., that has been found to be contaminated with salmonella.

A public school teacher was arrested today at John F. Kennedy International Airport as he attempted to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a compass, a slide-rule, and a calculator.

At a morning press conference, the Attorney General said he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-Gebra movement. He did not identify the man, who has been charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction.

“Al-Gebra is a problem for us,” the Attorney General said. “They derive solutions by means and extremes and sometimes go off on tangents in search of absolute values. They use secret code names like “X” and “Y” and refer to themselves as “unknowns,” but we have determined that they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country. As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, “There are three sides to every triangle.”

When asked to comment on the arrest, President Obama said, “If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, he would have given us more fingers and toes.” White House aides told reporters they could not recall a more intelligent or profound statement by the President, and it is believed that the Nobel Prize for Physics will follow.

Src: Forwarded email from a close relative. Original ultimate source not given.