Search was revolutionized by Google. Before Google, we had Yahoo, AltaVista, AskJeeves / Ask.com, and more (full history here) – most used indexing, clustering etc. to produce search results. Searches were slow, inaccurate, queries weren’t parsed very well, etc. Then Google came along using PageRank, and stole the whole market. PageRank, was then copied industry wide, but […]
Ever wonder what it would be like to request the grade distributions for every semester, course, and professor at a major university? No? Luckily, you won’t have to. Over the last month, my wife Jennifer and I decided we wanted to get the grade distribution for every university we could using a FOIA requests (template form here)! We […]
Today, it is fairly common to turn on the news, read a book, listen to a lecture in history and for the speaker to discuss the cost of a war. Quantifying the cost is usually done in dollars, assessed by how much money was actually spent or how many lives were lost. The victor and […]