Latest English Blog Posts
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Do not get Amazon Kids+ or a Fire HD Kids
The Amazon Kids “parental controls” are extremely insufficient, and I strongly advise against getting any of the Amazon Kids series.
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AI Have a Dream
The following contents are generated by prompting AI with a bad pun, cherry picking, and do not reflect my personal opinion.
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Machine Learning Lecture Recordings
I have uploaded most of my “Machine Learning” lecture to YouTube.
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My first Rust crate: faster kmedoids clustering
I have written my first Rust crate: kmedoids.
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Publisher MDPI lies to prospective authors
The publisher MDPI is a spammer and lies.
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Contact Tracing Apps are Useless
Some people believe that automatic contact tracing apps will help contain the Coronavirus epidemic. They won’t.
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Altmetrics of a Retraction Notice
As pointed out by RetractionWatch, AltMetrics even tracks the metrics of a retraction notices.
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Chinese Citation Factory
RetractionWatch published in Feburary 2018 an article titled “A journal waited 13 months to reject a submission. Days later, it published a plagiarized version by different authors”, indicating that in the journal Multimedia Tools and Applications (MTAP) may have been manipulated in the editorial process.
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Facebook is overly optimistic with respect to Cambridge Analytica data scope
Facebook is too optimistic when it comes to Cambridge Analytica extends.
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Predatory publishers: SciencePG
I got spammed again by SciencePG (“Science Publishing Group”).
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Elsevier CiteScore™ missing the top conference in data mining
Elsevier Scopus is crap.
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Cluster analysis lecture notes
In Winter Term 2017/2018 I was substitute professor at Univeristy Heidelberg, and giving the lecture “Knowledge Discovery in Databases”, i.e., the data mining lecture.
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Disable Web Notification Prompts
Recently, tons of website ask you for the permission to display browser notifications. 99% of the time, you will not want these. In fact, all the notifications increase stress, so you should try to get rid of them for your own productivity. Eliminate distractions.
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Online Dating Cannot Work Well
Daniel Pocock (via planet.debian.org) points out what tracking services online dating services expose you to. This certainly is an issue, and of course to be expected by a free service (you are the product – advertisers are the customer). Oh, and in case you forgot already: some sites employ fake profiles to retain you as long as possible on their site… But I’d like to point out how deeply flawed online dating is. It is surprising that some people meet successfully there; and I am not surprised that so many dates turn out to not work: they earn money if you remain single, and waste time on their site, not if you are successful.
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Booking.com Genius Nonsense & Spam
Booking.com just spammed me with an email that claims that I were a “frequent traveller” (which I am not), and thus would get “Genius” status, and rebates (which means they are going to hide some non-partner search results from me…) - I hate such marketing spam.
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Homepage reboot
I haven’t blogged in a long time, and that probably won’t change.
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Stop abusing lambda expressions - this is not functional programming
I know, all the Scala fanboys are going to hate me now. But: Stop overusing lambda expressions.
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Protect your file server from the Locky trojan
The “Locky” trojan and similar trojans apparently can cause havoc on your file servers (you may have heard the reports of hospitals that had to pay thousands of dollars to be able to decrypt their files).
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ELKI 0.7.0 on Maven and GitHub
Version 0.7.0 of our data mining toolkit ELKI is now available on the project homepage, GitHub and Maven.
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Ubuntu broke Java because of Unity
Unity, that is the Ubuntu user interface, that nobody else uses.
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@Zigo: Why I don't package Hadoop myself
A quick reply to Zigo’s post:
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Your big data toolchain is a big security risk!
This post is a follow-up to my earlier post on the “sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers”. While I was drafting this post, that story got picked up by HackerNews, Reddit and Twitter, sending a lot of comments and emails my way. Surprisingly many of the comments are supportive of my impression - I would have expected to see much more insults along the lines “you just don’t like my-favorite-tool, so you rant against using it”. But a lot of people seem to share my concerns. Thanks, you surprised me!
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The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers
System administration is in a sad state. It in a mess.
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Year 2014 in Review as Seen by a Trend Detection System
We ran our trend detection tool Signi-Trend (published at KDD 2014) on news articles collected for the year 2014. We removed the category of financial news, which is overrepresented in the data set. Below are the (described) results, from the top 50 trends (I will push the raw result to appspot if possible due to file limits).
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Big data predictions for 2015
My big data predictions for 2015:
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