Git is a version control system that has been gaining in popularity recently. If you have heard of or used Subversion or CVS, you are familiar with the basic principle of keeping track of changes by multiple users in a series of documents (source code, text files, etc). One of the chief benefits of version [...]
Archive for November, 2008
10 Reasons to Use Git for Research
Posted: 30 November 2008 in UncategorizedTags: academia, coding, computational linguistics, computer science, cvs, git, github, productivity, reproducibility, research, subversion, version control systems
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Herding Bee
Posted: 23 November 2008 in UncategorizedTags: bucks, deer, dog training, dogs, georgia, herding, sheep, stalking, woods
We took Willow herding yesterday. There is a nice little setup near Cumming, GA that offers herding lessons for beginning and intermediate dogs. We got three sessions in the circular pen with three sheep. Willow did really well the first time and it seemed like her herding instincts had kicked in full-force. She kept trying [...]
Fun with trees in Ruby
Posted: 20 November 2008 in UncategorizedTags: algorithms, github, inheritance, interfaces, java, programming, ruby, ruby gems, trees
Like Java and unlike Python, Ruby does not support multiple inheritance. Also there is no explicit way to create an interface. One way Ruby lets you get around both problems is by allowing you to include a module in a class. It’s not quite the same, but with the proper planning you can duplicate the [...]
Sometime earlier today, I hit 100,000 hits on this blog!
This is why I love linux #372
Posted: 18 November 2008 in UncategorizedTags: grep, linux, logs, ruby on rails, tail
Let’s say you want to monitor the output of a log file while a process is running. One easy way to do that is tail -f my.log. As lines of text are passed into the log file, they will be displayed on the screen. Very handy! But let’s say this is a central log file [...]
LDA in Ruby
Posted: 17 November 2008 in UncategorizedTags: c, code, computational linguistics, git, github, latent dirichlet allocation, machine learning, programming, ruby, ruby gems, rubyforge, topic modeling
Since Ruby is my new favorite toy, I thought it would be fun to try my hand at C extensions. I came across David Blei’s C code for Latent Dirichlet Allocation and it looked simple enough to convert into a Ruby module. Ruby makes it very easy to wrap some C functions (which is good [...]
Latent Dirichlet Allocation
Posted: 16 November 2008 in UncategorizedTags: computational linguistics, computer science, em algorithm, latent dirichlet allocation, machine learning, statistics, topic modeling, topics, unsupervised learning
Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is an unsupervised method of finding topics in a collection of documents. It posits a set of possible topics from which a subset are selected for each document. This selected mixture of topics represents the topics discussed in the document, and each word in the document is generated by this mixture. [...]
Am I an Aspie?
Posted: 16 November 2008 in UncategorizedTags: aspberger syndrome, aspie, neanderthals, psychology, quizzes
Aspberger syndrome is a social interaction disorder that falls under the autism umbrella, but isn’t accompanied by any delay in cognitive development. I’ve considered the possibility that I have it a few times given the fact that I seem to have a lot of trouble in social situations. However, based on the descriptions of Aspies, [...]
