You'd better read this

The clean white front cover of this month's Bloomberg Businessweek carries a few lines of Python code, and two lines of English as a footnote... If you can't read that, then you'd better read this. The entire issue is a single essay written by Paul Ford. It was an impeccable coincidence: I picked up a copy before boarding the plane to Austin for SciPy 2015. This issue is a grand achievement; it could be the best thing I've ever read. Go out an buy as many copies as you can, and give them to your friends. Or read it online right now.

Not your grandfather's notebook

Jess Hamrick is a cognitive scientist at UC Berkeley who makes computational models of human behaviour. In her talk, she described how she built a multi-user server for Jupyter notebooks to administer course content, assign homework, even do auto-grading for a class with 220 undergrads. During her talk, she invited the audience to list their GitHub usernames on an Etherpad. Minutes after she stood down from her podium, she granted access, so we could all come inside and see how it was done.

Dangerous defaults

I wrote a while ago about the dangers of defaults, and as Matteo Niccoli highlighted in his 52 Things essay, How to choose a colourmap, default colourmaps can be especially harmful. Matplotlib has long been criticized for its nasty default colourmap, but today redeemed itself with a new default. Hear all about it from Stefan van der Walt:

Sound advice

Allen Downey of Olin College gave a wonderful talk this afternoon about teaching digital signal processing to students using fun and intuitive audio signals as the hook. Watch it yourself, it's well worth the 20 minutes or so:

If you're really into musical and audio applications, there was another talk on the subject, by Brian McFee (Librosa project). 

More tomorrow as we head into Day 2 of the conference.