While working on a project to automatically collect statistics on my Anki databases (stay tuned…) I worked out a system for scheduling synchronization from my desktop OS X machine.

Prerequisites

• LaunchControl is a GUI application that lets you create and manage user services on OS X
• Anki is a spaced repetition memorization software system

The solution relies on Automator. Normally, I don’t care much for Automator. It has too many limits on what tasks I can accomplish and workflows created with it are often fragile. However, in this case, we take advantage of its workflow recording feature. We’re going to record the process of opening Anki, selecting the profile to sync, then quitting Anki. This sequence of events ensures that the database on the local system is synchronized with the remote version.

Hexo, the static blogging system that I use is very extensible and provides numerous hooks into generation pipeline.

While working on a Russian language blog that’s coming online soon, I had the opportunity to write a filter to render Cyrillic text in a different font than the rest of the body text.

I wanted to set the Cyrillic text apart both in color, typeface, and font weight. Although I could have extended Hexo using a new tag, I decided to use a filter so that after rendering HTML anywhere on the blog, items demarcated by double pipes || would be replaced by a new <span>.

Because the blogging system that I use doesn’t apply finely grained object-level caching rules, I end up with objects such as images that cache appropriately but an index.html page that does not. I don’t want client browsers to hang on to the main index.html page for more than an hour or so because it should update much more frequently than that as its content changes.

It’s possible that I could dig around under the hood of hexo and create a version that applies customized caching rules. Instead, I make a second pass over the content, adjusting the Cache-Control and other metadata according to my needs. For this task I use the Amazon Web Services command line interface AWS-CLI.

One of the most striking features of the GOP front-runner is his special fondness for conspiracy theories. From the (non-existent) connection between vaccines and autism to the “real culprits” behind 9/11, he shows the typical clustered endorsement of multiple conspiracy theories.

The question about whether this a form of pandering or a genuinely held set of perspectives is interesting, though barely relevant. In the former case, the abandonment of reason to achieve a political goal is an egregious fault. In the latter case, it sheds considerable light on crucial decision-making capacities. Endorsement of conspiracy theories requires a set of cognitive biases that fundamentally hobble evidence-based decision making.

An ingenious study using the massive Weibo network revealed insights into the spread of certain emotions through social networks. Weibo is a social network platform not unlike Twitter. It is also hugely popular in China with millions of users making it an ideal platform for understanding how emotional states between socially-connected users correlate with each other.

But the highest correlation by far was among angry users. Rui and co say anger strongly influences the neighbourhood in which it appears, spreading on average by about 3 hops or degrees. “Anger has a surprisingly higher correlation than other emotions,” they say.

Speaking of Anki, here’s a Swiss Army knife of database utilities that provides searching, moving and renaming functions from the command line.

On GitHub.

You can do things like this to rename and collect tags:

$ anki_tool mv_tags '(dinosaur|mammal)' animal

Looks cool.