Next Monday I start a new job at Walk Score, a Seattle startup that promotes walkability by producing a measure incorporating information on nearby businesses and attractions. You can learn more about the company here.

From a mission standpoint, the appeal of this company to me is obvious to anyone that knows me well. I care a lot about resource consumption issues (which is what initially attracted me to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory for my postdoc), having a good commute (good to me is being able to conveniently reach work by transit, foot, or bike), and having tools to assist in finding a home that has sufficient nearby attractions. I like the languages and tools used at Walk Score, and this job is going to give me an opportunity to learn a bunch of new technologies. I will be making contributions that are visible and are valuable to the company, and my contributions will be used by a large number of users every day (a number that I intend to help grow), which I find very motivating.

Also, don’t forget that I a really enjoy compelling and informative visualization. I like Walk Score’s heat maps (here’s Seattle)!

As for my commute: I had a pretty good set up for my job at Microsoft. I was walking to work daily since I live just down the hill. Since Walk Score is in Seattle (and I live in Redmond) it is a more complicated. I will start on a bike and bus commute and expect that to work pretty well for me most of the time.

One of the studies collected whale fecal samples for five years (using former drug sniffing dogs to lead them to the samples, nonetheless), and the other study collected acoustic data for a couple days before and after the attacks. It was not until 2009 that one of the researchers realized that they had inadvertently collected data showing (1) how much quieter the ocean became after the attacks, and (2) what the whale stress hormone levels were for a five year period including the period after the attacks.

The fecal samples show stress hormone levels in the whales was much lower during the period after the attacks, which corresponds with the drop in sound levels, than at any other time during the five year period. This, of course, is an uncontrolled experiment, so it could just be a coincidence. The researcher does point out, however, these animals weigh fifty tons and are difficult (i.e., impossible) to study under controlled conditions.

It is not necessarily surprising that noise increases whale stress levels, but it is good to have supporting data.

There’s a lot of sources, but here are a couple to get you started:

• Unplanned 9/11 Analysis Links Noise, Whale Stress
• Whales ‘stressed by ocean noise’

Now, the point of this post: thanks to the changes to Geneagrapher mentioned above, I have set up a web-based “Geneacache“. It is a very early preview, so the API may change in the near future. A lot of other changes are needed, too, and it is possible I will move the page to a different address. Here’s the idea: your software can use the Geneacache to retrieve records from the Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP), saving you the trouble of scraping the MGP pages or having to use Geneagrapher to do it for you. The response contains the record’s information in JSON. For example, for Gauß you currently get:

{
    "advisors": [
        18230
    ],
    "descendants": [
        151876,
        55175,
        29642,
        18603,
        19953,
        29458,
        62547,
        18232,
        18233
    ],
    "institution": "Universität Helmstedt",
    "name": "Carl Friedrich Gauß",
    "year": 1799
}

Behind the scenes, the Geneacache either returns what it has locally or fetches it from the MGP, stores it locally, and then returns the record to you.

This is not used for anything at the moment, but I intend to start exposing Geneagrapher through a web page again (history lesson: the first version of Geneagrapher, from when I was in graduate school — was a web service) at some point in the future. The Geneagrapher client is nice and all, but I imagine most users are not interested in installing it locally to use it.

I am also planning to get in touch with the MGP folks about this and related topics.

Conveniently, there was an orienteering event in Seattle yesterday, and I went (results here). This was my first event, so I ran the beginner course. I liked it and plan to continue attending events. I think the sport will be really interesting on more challenging courses because of the decision making that will go into navigating to the controls.

Back to the book: it would benefit from updating and releasing a new edition. The basic information is still accurate, but parts of the book have become outdated, based on what I saw and learned from talking to an experienced club member.