COPS is still on the air. Last night was the season premier (in the US).
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 5:22 PM on September 7, 2008

One approach to excluding the bogus data would be to set a threshold that would indicate bogus data and use it in a column with an if statement to output either the row's legitimate value or a blank.

Imagine if A is date, B is Odometer reading, C is # of gallons:

D3 (mileage) would be =(B3-B2)/C3 [miles traveled since last fill up divided by # gallons added]

E3 could be =if(D3>40,D2,D3) [if mileage is greater... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 3:57 PM on August 6, 2008

Jonathan B. Smith

The use of formal first names is the norm, as is the use of middle initials. When you are referenced, it will be Smith, J. B. (2008). People who know you personally will call you Jon, people who have only seen your work in print will call you Jonathan or Dr. Smith, allowing you the opportunity to say "please, call me Jon."

Using your example, I go by Jon in person and on my business cards, but Jonathan B. Smith on... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 7:09 PM on August 2, 2008 marked best answer

Pipes is a nice compromise between power, flexibility, and ease of use. You should be able to get up and running with some simple tasks like combining feeds pretty quickly. If you are looking to do some more advanced things, the learning curve is not as steep as trying to learn a programming language, but the documentation seems to be spotty in places.

[My favorite use these days is filtering news feeds to remove any stories that mention either Obama or... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 4:50 PM on July 28, 2008

Before the [more inside], some people used to come up with their own (often annoying) ways of indicating [more inside] that distracted from the question.

Also, when I see a poorly formed question that isn't followed by [more inside], I usually don't look inside.

Let me add that I am particularly annoyed by people who use the question title as the first part of their question. Then, I see some random question like, "even when I tried going... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by i love cheese at 7:04 PM on July 14, 2008

If you can get your hands on a copy of Cost Justifying Usability, you may find some useful arguments from a business perspective.
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 6:40 PM on July 7, 2008

Robert Angelo is right. Starting a week or two ago, TSA is enforcing a new procedure for people without ID. Ignore any advice based on experience prior to mid June. Things have changed, and you WILL have to go through the new process.

Arrive early, be friendly. Let them know that you lost your ID, and that you are NOT trying to take a stand or exercise your civil liberties or anything of the sort (sigh).

You will have to go through some... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 5:10 PM on June 30, 2008

Not to pile on, but if he's not eating your mother is essentially choosing to let him starve to death. In what way is starving to death humane? Compare this to the opportunity to be with him, petting him gently, talking to him, and comforting him while he drifts off peacefully.

I'm sorry for your loss. I hope you can make it as peaceful a transition for him as possible.
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 6:27 PM on June 29, 2008

Most Color Kinetics lights are for professional use (convention booths, theaters, buildings). Their consumer line is (was?) called "Sauce." The LightOrb is probably the model you are thinking of. I found one for less than $20 here.

My understanding is that they own a patent on some aspect of controlling RGB LEDs to create other colors. I believe that the CK Sauce line was actually licensed to some other company to manufacture and market while CK focused... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 8:01 PM on June 28, 2008

Could you suggest posing with your nose in the book, looking over it? Two benefits: less of you to be embarrassed about, and additional publicity for the book.
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 6:22 PM on June 26, 2008

I only know it from driving through, but you can see demographic details at ZIPskinny.

With no traffic, it would probably take you 25-35 minutes to make it from the upper west side. With normal traffic, probably 45+ minutes.
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 12:46 PM on June 21, 2008

Oh, and the demographic breakdown by school is on this page
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 12:47 PM on June 21, 2008

There's a follow up entry on the blog answering some reader questions about the original summary of the work. The paper is online now.
posted to MetaFilter by i love cheese at 4:59 PM on June 10, 2008

[on preview, what beachhead2 says]

Yep, the prep was the worst part. Once all the solid waste is out, you'll enjoy the surreal experience associated with passing LOTS of liquid out your butt.

The earlier the appointment, the better.

If you're going to be sedated, it really isn't a big deal -- you'll be a bit nervous, they'll give you an IV, you'll relax, then wake up in a recovery area.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 3:45 PM on May 14, 2008

We recently bought a new Simmons World Class plush top (and love it). During the hassles associated with shopping, I learned a few things:

The whole mattress name issue is a real pain. If you go into a mattress store and tell them about a particular model from another store, they can look up their equivalent one. This list is something of a rosetta stone. In general, you can match the materials, coil size and count, and two beds will be equivalent.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 8:02 PM on May 8, 2008 marked best answer

I'm assuming these people aren't on the same outlook server (where they could use outlook's built in scheduling features to see your free/busy details).

If you are familiar with VBA for creating macros, you can use the freebusy method. The example on the page will work if you change "Nate Sun" to the way your name is listed when you send emails, and change the date to something current. You may have to change your security settings to allow macros, and may... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 4:45 PM on May 5, 2008

also, you should fix the spelling error in "outllok" your tags
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 4:47 PM on May 5, 2008

you should try doing the search and replace before creating the pivot table.
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 6:56 PM on May 4, 2008

You may find some answers in the Social Network Analysis literature. If you are familiar with some of the concepts (e.g., matrix algebra, graph theory) you will have an easier time with it. The classic starting point for the ideas of SNA is Wasserman & Faust (1994) "Social Network Analysis."

Kathleen Carley at Carnegie Mellon wrote a paper [PDF] formalizing cellular networks. I think she may have written some other stuff on the advantages/disadvantages... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 4:47 PM on April 16, 2008 marked best answer

Sudoku by Gaby Vanhegan (who is/was a mefi member) supports free syndication, although the link currently 404s. You can contact him onthis page.
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 4:10 PM on April 3, 2008

peanut butter on celery, yum.
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 5:23 PM on April 2, 2008

I recently left an NSPS position (spiral 1.1 - we switched in Jan 2007). I'll dig around to see if I can track down my performance objectives and send you a copy (probably over the weekend). The key really seems to be coming up with measurable numerical standards (the trainers seemed fixated on "fewer than 5% errors" which was completely irrelevant to my job). And, no this has almost nothing to do with 'writing.'

As a supervisor, if you don't have any real... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 6:45 PM on April 1, 2008 marked best answer

DTIC is the PubMed of US Department of Defense research. The first hit on a query of "mental health" returns Mental Health Advisory Team (MHAT) IV Operation Iraqi Freedom 05-07 Final Report [PDF].
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 6:47 PM on March 30, 2008 marked best answer

Not the most elegant solution, but if you add two extra columns you can use (either at the end or beginning of the row), you can do this:

suppose your data start in row 2 (letting us use row 1 for the query)
in IU2 (or whatever the cell right after the end) set a formula like

=concatenate(A2,B2,C2,D2,...)

so that IV2 is equal to the contents of all the cells. This won't include spaces between cells, but you... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 7:43 PM on March 20, 2008

Thanks!
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 6:23 PM on March 1, 2008

If you give me $1 I will sit in silence and think about you for one minute. I will send you an email when I start this, and I'll send you another email when I'm done.

oddman, you owe me $4 and two emails.
posted to MetaFilter by i love cheese at 8:37 PM on February 24, 2008

How about becoming a research assistant in a lab at a nearby college or university? Faculty members are frequently in the market for competent, mature RAs. Most RAs tend to be undergraduates -- with all the strengths and weaknesses that come with that age and lifestyle. If you are able to present yourself as dedicated, intelligent, hard working, and mature, and you are able to devote some time (and technical skills if you have them), you should be able to find some opportunities.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 3:43 PM on February 20, 2008

it was the celebrity game. both teams had wnba centers.
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 11:57 AM on February 16, 2008

Designing Virtual Worlds by Bartle talks a bit about designing economies. I've only skimmed it, but it is a well regarded resource.

Castranova's Synthetic Worlds hits on many of these topics as well. As an economist, he has done some of the best work on understanding economies in virtual worlds.
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 12:22 PM on February 9, 2008

In research papers, it would almost certainly be your second alternative. They have a broad sample, and found that after statistically controlling for family income, there is still a relationship between staying at home and SAT scores.

Using the phrase "even adjusted for income" implies that this was statistically controlled. Of course, the full paper would indicate this using words like 'covariate' to indicate the variables that were statistically controlled for.
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 9:05 PM on February 7, 2008

There are 31,556,926 seconds in a (non-leap) year, so you could use that and say that it is the equivalent of about 4 minutes over the course of an entire year.
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 8:57 PM on February 7, 2008

otherworldlyglow and mudpuppie are correct. There was a camera that captured your license plate number at the ticket dispenser when you first arrived at the garage, and this was associated with the ticket you received, and matched up with the data collected by the roaming camera vehicle.

Another nifty bonus is that they can charge you the correct amount even if you lose your ticket (that's not to say they won't charge you the maximum rate just because they can).
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 7:30 PM on February 5, 2008

Dish says that they have updated their DVR software to avoid infringing, and that customers would not see any downtime.
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 9:32 PM on January 31, 2008

For 3, I'm not sure if it would be over their heads, but I found some of the chapters in Gleitman & Osherson's volume on Language to be well done, particularly Gleitman & Newport's chapter, and to a lesser extent, those by Pinker (this one in particular).... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 8:31 PM on January 30, 2008

That's it!
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 4:16 PM on January 27, 2008

[I'm sure lawyers deal with this issue regularly]

Going one step beyond procrastination's link, you could have some trustworthy person cryptographically sign a copy of the page with their public key, accompanied by an affidavit stating that they downloaded it on such and such a date from that particular URL. Then, you could have printout of the crypto signed web page and affidavit notarized by a notary public.

Failing that, you could try... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 8:58 PM on January 18, 2008

citeulike.org is a free online reference manager that supports tagging, has a bookmarklet that you can click when looking at a pubmed (or other online database) page to automatically add the references.

It is social, so that you can access other people's tags, join groups, and search for related articles. You can add notes to your references that can be public or private, and if you upload the pdf version of an article, you can access it from any computer (you must... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 4:20 PM on January 18, 2008

I'm not sure what your question is, but it seems like a straightforward project that can be done entirely in Access (or Excel) by someone with some VBA programming skill in less than a day. In Access you would want a table for the prizes and a table for winners. If the list of potential winners is known (e.g., if it is an employee roster), then you would have a table listing all the eligible people.

Here's what it could look like:

Table:... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 3:35 PM on January 16, 2008

Assuming the good ideas from above don't suit you, you may have luck asking people who stop by the supermarket to drop off their empties to give them (or sell them for 5 cents) to you. If they know why you're collecting bottles, they'll almost certainly be happy to help.
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 6:33 PM on January 6, 2008

If her cell phone supports it, Gmail Mobile might be a nice alternative. You get the advantages of text messaging on her side, plus the ease of email on your side.
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 3:36 PM on January 4, 2008

I read a book about bad dates a while ago. It may have been this. Or not.
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 3:35 PM on December 19, 2007

You'd have some thorny copyright issues to deal with, depending on the site. I remember years ago when Jon Katz was planning on publishing a book based on some post-Columbine Slashdot threads. I don't remember all the details, or whether the book was published, but there was a good deal of uproar from some who commented on the threads and didn't want this guy publishing their work.
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 7:24 PM on December 18, 2007

As some others have mentioned, the office/policy for disputing grades does vary by school, and will be documented.

Also, if you are unable to have the grade changed or stricken, your school may have a procedure that allows you to retake a class and either have the new grade replace or at least be averaged with the old grade. If there is another instructor teaching it during other semesters, you may be able to take it then.

Some advice for... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 4:53 PM on December 17, 2007

You may find the book, The Introvert Advantage helpful.

I can empathize with you. Social interaction is something of a puzzle with fuzzy rules that nobody can clearly explain. Some people just get it, while others don't. It is something like traveling to a foreign country. No matter how well you know the language, no matter how much you read about the people and their culture, you will show up missing something. The subtleties, the nuances of a foreign culture can... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 8:36 PM on December 9, 2007

* If he were interested in throwing people off the trail, I'd imagine 'accidentally' dropping a credit card in the right place would lead to lots of activity to confuse the pursuers. He could even pick up some spending money by selling his own identity (ID, credit cards) to an appropriate person (although, I'm not sure your typical middle class guy would easily find the right person).

* A site like couchsurfing.com could provide places to stay off the beaten path... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 3:28 PM on December 7, 2007

I had the same problem, and according to my googling, so have many, many others. Dell tech support was sure that installing new drivers would fix it (it didn't), others have suggested switching the resolution of your wallpaper image to match the screen's native resolution. That doesn't work either. Nor does switching to a blank screensaver (another web suggestion).

The actual culprit is TMM, Vista's process that looks for multiple monitors and attempts to... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 3:49 PM on November 16, 2007 marked best answer

Thanks for everyone's input. It appears that the PDF I used (of an out of print book here's the .zip) rendered an uppercase theta incorrectly.

So, they were simply defining theta as an operator. (although, perhaps they were pulling a Prince move, and creating the symbol formerly known as theta).

I discovered this in a later paper by some other authors that used Theta in the same definition. These other authors either made a really plausible... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 12:48 PM on November 2, 2007 marked best answer

I don't know if he specializes in Crohn's, but I would recommend Dr. Alan Diamond in Silver Spring. He did a great job of being competent and having a good bedside manner when I saw him a year ago. I don't have any chronic condition, so I'm not a regular on the gastro circuit, but I'd put him among the top few specialists I've had to visit.

The practice is well run (in contrast to too many other doctor's offices these days) and the docs use tablet PCs (which just... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 9:48 PM on October 22, 2007

What is the What by Dave Eggers was one of the most powerful "autobiographies" I've read.

The Amazon reader reviews should give you an idea of how good it is.
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 3:27 PM on September 30, 2007

Previously, Previously, and Previously
posted to Ask Metafilter by i love cheese at 6:44 AM on September 24, 2007