Interrelativity

Interrelativity: musings about interrelatedness

  • The Scientific Method: Cultivating Thoroughly Conscious Ignorance

    Stuart Firestein brilliantly captures the positive influence of ignorance as an often unacknowledged guiding principle in the fits and starts that typically characterize the progression of real science. His book, Ignorance: How It Drives Science, grew out of a course on Ignorance he teaches at Columbia University, where he chairs the department of Biological Sciences…

  • 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…

  • Arthroscopic shoulder surgery: biceps tenodesis, but not rotator cuff tear repair

    Prior blog posts I've written about experiences with health challenges appear to have been helpful to others facing similar challenges. The following is a partial historical recounting of some problems I've experienced with shoulder pain, and some of the medical treatments (including surgery) that have been contemplated or applied thus far. I am not a…

  • How to approximate BorderLayout with GridBagLayout or BoxLayout

    I recently encountered some challenges using Java 6 Swing and AWT components to develop a GUI with a top-level BorderLayout, which did not prevent the shrinking of components in its CENTER area in response to an expanding JList in its WEST area. I provided more context about this problem (and its solution) in my last post,…

  • 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…

  • def main() in Python considered harmful

    I recently graded the first Python programming assignments in the course I'm teaching on Social and Computational Intelligence in the Computing and Software Systems program at University of Washington Bothell. Most of the students are learning Python as a second (or third) language, approaching it from the perspective of C++ and Java programming, the languages…