August 2010
1 post
“If you makin’ legal money, then that’s alright”
– Missy Elliott
April 2010
1 post
“The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference...”
– Henry Rollins
August 2009
1 post
I haven't posted in forever...
because I’ve been teaching grad students about system administration. We had projects in East St. Louis and Champaign, IL. We also have a team of people working in Sao Tome, Africa. We’ve had a pretty successful semester, with new community technology centers built and about one hundred XO laptops deployed in Sao Tome.
June 2009
3 posts
Medicine is the reigning example of a field defined by difficult information problems. Evidence-based medicine is defined, as a methodology, by reliance on exact reasoning. However, exactitude can be elusive, particularly given the realities described in the quote below. This is not to slight close reasoning — I fully believe in the power of rigorous, quantitatively driven medicine to deal...
“Uncertainty is the central, critical fact about medical reasoning. Patients...”
– Peter Szolovits, “Uncertainty and Decision in Medical Informatics,” Methods of Information in Medicine, 34: 111-21, 1995
May 2009
16 posts
Wolfram Alpha; dopamine + caffeine + epinephrine →
…I find it amusing they provide the LD 50 for caffeine; 192 mg/ kg
Indeed, not a fun way to start the day! Wait until your really nasty weather hits later this afternoon! Possible tornadoes and winds up to 80 miles an hour! Rock and roll! Just a heads up. All of you stay safe! Grandma -how awesome is it that my grandmother says “Rock and roll!” about violent weather?
This mornings weather reminds me why it was so easy to convince Kirk to join Starfleet. The Midwest = BULLSHIT.
My paper on ICT analytics for community informatics == done. Hooray. Tomorrow I get up early to head into my last data mining assignment. I’ve got it mostly done, but need to redo some of the statistical analysis, since I’m a stats moron. After that, I need to get back to real work, i.e, finishing my research for a machine learning conference in St. Louis this summer.
Lately...
my productivity is very closely related to the Indian classical channel on last.fm
In my data mining class today we briefly talked about the challenges of visualizing data in high dimensions. The professor made a comment that we’re limited to the obvious 3 dimensions which human beings experience — but there are a few methods, like color, to expand depiction of dimensionality. This brought synthaesthesia to mind, and the possibilities of experiencing data or...
A song from Senegal, sung to soothe the nerves of...
data mining final paper is done. We have one last problem set, but it looks like it should actually be kind of fun to play with. Overall, this has been the most difficult semester, ever. Just need to survive one more week…
scheme(lisp) + godspeed you black emperor on last.fm == :-D
April 2009
17 posts
“In a dataset with k numeric attributes, you can visualize the data as a cloud of...”
– Ian Witten & Eibe Frank, introducing the concept of principal components analysis in Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques. Data mining, as evidenced by this passage, is for wizards from the deep age.
hooray
So I got a fellowship today. Basically this means I get paid to study, and have a chance to work closely with some very bright people at my school. It also means I can make a decent (almost adult) living while I get my PhD.
Today is one of those extreme gratitude days. As much as work has been difficult lately, I’ve really been given the opportunity to live out a dream. I’m paid to...
The last few weeks have been a trial.
Most days have started early and gone late, requiring every ounce of intellectual energy I have to bring my research to a presentable state. Late last week and over the weekend I ended up having a very severe reaction, presumably to stress and exhaustion. The details are ugly, but I basically had an immunological meltdown that knocked me out of commission for...
GUTS
I live
I’ve been gone for a couple days due to a bizarre allergic reaction. Basically, my body exploded. Likely causes are: Illinois bullshit plants and stress.
In happier news, I get to go to Oregon in the fall to give a technology talk on language preservation for Native American communities.
In not so happy news, I have two days to finish my data mining work. Well, enough to present for 15...
“Scientific research is an art form in this sense: It does not matter how you...”
– Edward O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
WatchI wish I didn’t relate to this as much as I do.
I knew technology changed my life when I started a twitter feed about my friend Jeff’s pancreas. I wonder how long it will take before he finds out.
Markov
We are such beings as vampires, some of the machine. Coming out onto the infantrymen placed in his attentions readily, though in his palms. Nine lives are God’s, and you call yashmak or I should feel dishonored, not only treated him like this. He puffed a pungent plumy blast. —From the rock like fireflies or those powders in boiled water and on the right side of the engine, and the...
How to explain this to English professors? →
March 2009
4 posts
Last week I had a chance to learn some fascinating techniques in a data mining workshop. We were looking at a study on breast cancer diagnosis with fine needle aspirate slides. The technique digitizes images of cell nuclei. A computer then processes the shape of the nuclei, recording multiple geometric aspects.
Once this data has been collected, a learning algorithm attempts to locate a plane...
What a week...
So I just got a call from MIT in the middle of my data mining workshop (yes, we work on Sundays). I’ve been accepted, and apparently I was “in the very top portion of a large applicant pool.” They are quite anxious for me to accept. I get financial information in a couple of days.
I am utterly and completely overwhelmed.
can haz sleep?
I just turned in my “weekly” assignment for data mining. 63 pages, single spaced with 10pt font -probably about 15-20 hours of effort.
My professor is the Mark Twight of information science.
the road
I haven’t written here in forever, mainly because I have next to no time these days. I’ve had my head buried in a machine learning project for the last week, and I’m still not quite done.
I’m having a hard time focusing because I got a letter of acceptance from the doctoral program here. I’ve been offered a full ride with a good stipend.
It feels a little weird,...
February 2009
8 posts
Nero was right
I’ve had a prominent drawing of a cartoon lion with the caption “Nero was right” up on my whiteboard for a few days.
I think it’d make for a cool t-shirt, actually. Fortunately, the historical memory of the religious is spotty at best. Very keen for guys living inside of whales and so on, but not so good for actual events — which means you’re safe wearing the...
My funding changed; I’m now dedicated primarily to machine learning related projects. My job will be to help write user interface code to a text analytics program, and to write documentation about artificial intelligence algorithms.
I’m also sort of supported in doing some of my own research. I’m using machine learning to find patterns in “bursts” of scientific...
I just got jabbed in the eye in Kung Fu. I’m not sure if it was forms or doing blocks, but my body is a lump right now. Programming class in 15 minutes. Feck.
But I secretly really love this feeling.