Can Handwriting Make You Smarter? Students who take notes by hand outperform students who type, and more type these days, new studies show

Laptops and organizer apps make pen and paper seem antique, but handwriting appears to focus classroom attention and boost learning in a way that typing notes on a keyboard does not, new studies suggest.

Students who took handwritten notes generally outperformed students who typed their notes via computer, researchers at Princeton University and the University of California at Los Angeles found. Compared with those who type their notes, people who write them out in longhand appear to learn better, retain information longer, and more readily grasp new ideas, according to experiments by other researchers who also compared note-taking techniques.

Source: Can Handwriting Make You Smarter? – WSJ

Apparently MTA (the company running the NYC subway) has a real-time API. My fascination for the subway takes autistic proportions and so obviously I had to analyze some of the data. The documentation is somewhat terrible, but here’s some relevant code for how to use the API:

from google.transit import gtfs_realtime_pb2
import urllib

for feed_id in [1, 2, 11]:
    feed = gtfs_realtime_pb2.FeedMessage()
    response = urllib.urlopen('http://datamine.mta.info/mta_esi.php?key=%s&feed_id=%d' % (os.environ['MTA_KEY'], feed_id))
    feed.ParseFromString(response.read())
    print feed

I started tracking all subway trains one day and completely forgot about it. Several weeks later I had a 3GB large data dump full of all the arrivals for L, 4, 5, 6, SI and GC (the latter two being Staten Island railway and Grand Central Shuttle).

Let’s do some cool stuff with this data!

Source: NYC subway math · Erik Bernhardsson

Learning about working from home and location independent lifestyle was a true pivotal moment for me. Before that, I didn’t think much about the concept of “freedom at work” or anything like that.

And even though the concept was a bit far-fetched for me at the time, I realized that it surely was something that I would like to try out.

Since then, it’s been 5 years.

My no.1 conclusion? This thing is not easy, at least not for me. However, it’s also incredibly rewarding, and, in the long run, I think that those rewards make it worth the effort.

So, here are 8 good, bad, and ugly things that I have learned along the way:

Source: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Remote Work (After 5 Years of Experience)

Today we hear from Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard about how their researchers and software engineers are collaborating closely with the Google Genomics team on large-scale genomic data analysis. They’ve already reduced the time and cost for whole genome processing by several fold, helping researchers think even bigger. Broad’s open source tools, developed in close collaboration with Google Genomics, will also be made available to the wider research community.
– Jonathan Bingham, Product Manager, Google Genomics.

As one of the largest genome sequencing centers in the world, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard generates a lot of data. Our DNA sequencers produce more than 20 Terabytes (TB) of genomic data per day, and they run 365 days a year. Moreover, our rate of data generation is not only growing, but accelerating – our output increased more than two-fold last year, and nearly two-fold the previous year. We are not alone in facing this embarrassment of riches; across the whole genomics community, the rate of data production is doubling about every eight months with no end in sight.

Source: Research Blog: Genomic Data Processing on Google Cloud Platform

How to use this guide.

We have gathered here a lot of information about configuring GnuPG. There are detailed explanations for each configuration suggestion. Many of these changes require you to make changes to the GnuPG configuration file on your machine located at ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf. For your convenience, all the suggested changes to the gpg.conf file are gathered in one place near the bottom of this page. We strongly encourage you to not blindly copy the file, but read the document and understand what the

Source: OpenPGP Best Practices – help.riseup.net

When you’re building software with people from around the world, sometimes it’s important to validate that commits and tags are coming from an identified source. Git supports signing commits and tags with GPG, and starting today GitHub will show you when commits and tags are signed.

Source: GPG signature verification