Partha Niyogi
Below are some notes I wrote as a graduate student while (for a brief time) working with Partha Niyogi at the University of Chicago. Partha recently passed away, and I wanted to put these notes in a...
View ArticleAnimation from Kaggle traffic prediction competition
Below: two animations (same one twice, just as different speeds) I made from the highway data for the Kaggle traffic prediction competition.The data are travel times for 61 different sections of...
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risk-aversion in charitable giving
My friend Jeff wrote that you shouldn't try to avoid risk in charitable giving, I wrote with some thoughts about why it's maybe conceivable that you should diversify charitable giving, and he replied....
View ArticleInstalling R on Amazon Linux
When I wanted to run R (statistical software) on the Amazon "cloud", the first thing I found was this post explaining how to launch an Amazon EC2 "instance" (virtual machine) and pointing to an "image"...
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pre-generate pictures of your knitting
[Update: I've made a website for this: http://www.plannedpooling.com/.]This was a birthday present for my spouse. (Don't worry--I also covered a lot of things -- fruit/nuts/cocoa puffs/etc -- in...
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my first python script
555 = ((5) - ((5) * ((5) * (5)))) + (((5) * ((5) + (5))) + (((5) * (5)) * ((5) * (5))))At her blog, Sue VanHattum mentions this puzzle: Use five 5's to make 37.That got me thinking about making things...
View ArticleAvoiding responsibility with mitigated speech
[EDIT: Comments here and elsewhere have made it clear to me that I should have been a lot more careful in how I wrote this -- in particular, I think it would have been much better as a more personal...
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Simulated Knitting
Alternate title: I'm a big fan of the Fruchterman & Reingold graph embedding algorithm.Recently I created a site for trying to predict the pattern of colors in pooled knitting.Next I wanted to be...
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Visualizing Gestures as Paths
Kaggle is hosting an exciting new competition in which the object is to learn to identify sequences of gestures from just one example of each gesture. I would bet this competition has a lot of...
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Defining Churn Rate--is instantaneous better?
I enjoyed this post on defining "churn rate" at the Shopify tech blog, though I don't remember at all how it ended up in my reading list.The author goes through ways you might define define "churn...
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speaking of machine learning
Umm, not exactly:And "Albanian" doesn't come first ("Africaans") does, so it's not even that kind of bug.
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Visualizing ChaLearn Gestures Test Data
The colored paths are labeled training data, just like in my last post on this.The title gives the "answer" for a test video:Could you tell from just this what the sequence of gestures was?Not...
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Chrome is smart about "back" and redirects?
This website I made creates an image based on the parameters in a URL. For example, this...
View ArticleTweaks to Instapaper "Read Later" Button
I love Instapaper (please support it by becoming a premium member!). Being able to easily save articles for reading later lets me move the article-reading time from when I shouldn't be getting...
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Random forests for visualizing data
Recently I read about using random forests as a way to visualize data. Here's how it works:Have a data setCreate a set of fake data by permuting the columns randomly -- each column will still have the...
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Visualize a random forest that classifies digits
My last post uses random forest proximity to visualize a set of diamond shapes (the random forest is trained to distinguish diamonds from non-diamonds).This time I looked at the digits data set that...
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Weierstrass Elliptic Function
I was reminded of Weierstrass' elliptic function by John Cook's recent post about elliptic functions:(where are the points of a lattice in the complex plane).The technique of adding up one term for...
View ArticleEffective altruists -- lifestyle changes for animals vs. the environment
A good question from the Effective Altruism group on Facebook: "why EAs [people in the effective altruism community] often think that making changes to their personal lifestyles in order to reduce...
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Mine Depth (Make your axes meaningful!)
At the Empire Mine State Historic Park, you can walk 30 feet into the old gold mine, meet a quirky and knowledgeable blacksmith named David, see an awesome scale model of the mine (above--very secret...
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