Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Q: Who was the pitcher to pitch the only perfect game in the World Series? A: Don Larsen, October 8, 1956, as the New York Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers, 2-0. I've seen a few compilations on this subject, but the methodology in some cases seemed either flawed or not objective enough (surprise), so I though it would be useful to conduct my own research piece. If you take the "authority" approach on this, it makes it a lot easier to rank these various sites and eliminate the vast majority since they simply aren't strong enough to appear on the radar. Basically I got lists of networking sites and did a Google PageRank on all of them. Everything below PageRank 7 was thrown away. That narrowed down the field to 9 sites (boy, that part was easy!). Then, I got the Quantcast.com visitor counts and the Compete.com visitor counts. Then I compiled a composite number of inlinks for each site. Finally, I got the Alexa rank for each. What I did then was to try and come up with ...

"Oops! Wrong hat..." -- Bullwinkle It's interesting to observe the global warming debate and how easy it seems to be for various proponents on one side or the other to replace science with emotion - to the point of virtual hysteria in some cases (see my post on Al Gore ). I remember when I was doing research for my Ph.D. thesis, my faculty mentor and professor, Dr. James Gould, would exhort me "not to give up, finish the job" -- mostly because the data collection process was so time consuming and lengthy, and consequently I would occasionally get discouraged at how much work it can be to put together a first rate dissertation. I was collecting daily solar radio output data from NOAA, and developing programs to do all kinds of mathematical calculations on same (FFT, autocorrelation, various filters such as stochastic and Kalman, etc.). In this collection and research process I became acutely aware of the effect of the Sun on earth's climate, weather, and eve...