tecznotes

This is a lazyweb request for a math tutor. I know just enough linear algebra and matrix math to be curious, but not yet enough to be dangerous, and I'm looking for a tutor in Oakland, Berkeley, or San Francisco to help me fill in the gaps.

Ideally, I'd like to meet with a math student or professional for a half-dozen hour-long sessions that will help me understand terminology, notation, and concepts involved in linear algebra and (important!) how these apply to computer science domains such as data mining, search engines, document clustering, and other related topics. I'm particularly interested in being able to quickly understand and apply papers such as this or this.

I don't know how difficult this is for someone well-versed in the subject, so I can pay in food, beer, or US$. Amount negotiable. Write me at mike at stamen dot com.

Aaron Swartz recently moved to town, and I think he got hassled by some mission bike hipster, because he really hates it here despite having completely figured out the city in record time.

I'd like to nominate him for The First Annual John C. Dvorak Award For Outstanding Achievement In The Field of Attention Journalism. The souvenir award statuette (or "trollie") is pictured below:

The new Buzzfeed archive view is pretty damn cool. From their about page:

We automatically detect new buzz by crawling 50,000 of the very best web sites, blogs, and news sources. ... The moment we detect new buzz, it appears in a special terminal interface used by our editors. ... Finally we track the buzz as it spreads through word-of-mouth and blogs. Our trend pages link to the most interesting commentary, videos, news articles, and debate.

It's a new project from a bunch of our friends over at Eyebeam, and its worth to me was proven during my first pre-release peek, when I learned about New Rave. I'm mostly taken by the look of the thing, though. Dead-simple colors, dead-simple URL's, dead-simple typography, and a dead-simple logo that looks like it says "BuzzFeep" when you read it too quickly. The calendar-like archive view (below) is probably the coolest part. Buzzfeed performs basically the same function as Techmeme, but does it about 100x better through the intervention of a human editor choosing succint names, writing concise copy, and dispensing with the link-barf on a typical Techmeme page.