Interrelativity

Category: Web/Tech

  • Thumbs down on Netflix ditching of 5-star ratings for a thumbs-based system

    The Netflix video streaming and DVD service announced Thursday that it is switching from a 5-star rating system to a simpler thumbs up / thumbs down system. I've been a Netflix user (and fan) for many years, and love their personalized ratings predictions. I have often used their model in presentations and brainstorming involving other services…

  • Motivating and Visualizing Recursion in Python: Three Flavors

    Yesterday, I encountered some great instructional posts on programming, Python and the IPython Notebook. How to more effectively teach the concept of recursion (by Gustavo Duarte) How to use the web-based PythonTutor to learn Python (by Philip Guo) How to embed an IPython Notebook inside a blog post (by Brian Granger) I thought it would…

  • Python for Data Science: A Rapid On-Ramp Primer

    In my last post, I was waxing poetic about an IPython Notebook demonstration that was one of my highlights from Strata 2014: "this one got me the most excited about getting home (or back to work) to practice what I learned" Well, I got back to work, and learned how to create an IPython Notebook. Specifically, I…

  • Hype, Hubs & Hadoop: Some Notes from Strata NY 2013 Keynotes

    I didn't physically attend Strata NY + Hadoop World this year, but I did watch the keynotes from the conference. O'Reilly Media kindly makes videos of the keynotes and slides of all talks available very soon after they are given. Among the recurring themes were haranguing against the hype of big data, the increasing utilization…

  • An Excellent Primer on Data Science and Data-Analytic Thinking and Doing

    O'Reilly Media is my primary resource for all things Data Science, and the new O'Reilly book on Data Science for Business by Foster Provost and Tom Fawcett ranks near the top of my list of their relevant assets. The book is designed primarily to help businesspeople understand the fundamental principles of data science, highlighting the…

  • Clear Mind, Wild Heart, Spiral Career Path, New Job

    I recently accepted an offer to assume the role of Director, Analytics and Data Science, at Atigeo LLC. This career transition mostly marks a shift of title and status, as I've been consulting at Atigeo as a Principal Scientist for the past 18 months (part-time during the academic year and full-time during summers). I'm excited about…

  • Using pydelicious to fix Delicious tags with unintended blank spaces

    I've been using the Delicious social bookmarking web service for many years as a way to archive links to interesting web pages and associate tags to personally categorize – and later search for – their content [my tags can be found under the username gump.tion, a riff on the original Delicious URL, del.icio.us]. In December…

  • Valuable Advice on Preparing for Technical Interviews … and Careers

    The cover of Gayle Laakmann McDowell’s book, Cracking the Coding Interview, and links to her Career Cup web site and Technology Woman blog are included in the slides I use on the first day of every senior (400-level) computer science course I have taught over the last two years. These are some of the most…

  • musica requitur sequitur: songs that must be played in sequence

    Since my shoulder surgery 4 weeks ago, I've been spending a lot of time developing software and listening to Pandora. The pain meds (oxycodone & hydrocodone) put me in a bit of a brain fog, limiting the effective breadth and depth of my thinking (and doing), but a reasonably well-defined coding task seemed ideally suited…

  • How to Prevent a JList in a JScrollPane on a JPanel from Resizing

    I've been working on a graphical user interface to enable a user to view, modify and add relevance judgments for a set of results returned by a search engine in response to a set of topics. The GUI was developed as part of some work I've been doing on the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) 2012…