I’m looking forward to going back to RecSys this year, reconnecting with old colleagues and meeting some new ones.
I also am involved with a couple of papers this year and will be presenting one, as well as serving as publicity co-chair.
IN RE the Jello Research Challenge:
Sometimes people need directions when making jello.
But there are so many ways to prepare jello, and different directions for different dishes.
What if your dishes could track what you’ve done with them and use that information to help you find more relevant jello instructions?
In my previous post, I mentioned that we’re using Jupyter notebooks for a lot of our data analysis, even in R.
This post is a quick ‘howto’ for doing such analyses on remote compute severs (in the university data center, Amazon or Azure clouds, or whatever).
During my two years at Texas State, I’ve been engaged in a bit of an experiment on statistics & data analysis tools. Some of my graduate students have been using R for data analysis, but some have been working with the PyData stack. I’ve also been learning PyData, doing some new analysis or data processing in it and trying to convert a few old analyses.
I learned R in grad school, and used it throughout my Ph.D work. My R style dramatically changed over time, as I learned ggplot2, then data.table, and finally plyr and dplyr. I’d like to think that I’ve become fairly proficient at R. I even like the language.
But Python is a far more usable general-purpose language. If we can do the things that we currently need from R, in a reasonable fashion, then using it decreases the number of different things that students need to master to contribute to research. There are a few things it just can’t do yet — I have yet to find a structural equation modeling package for Python — but the core capability is there for most of what we do.
Curried chickpeas (garbanzo beans) and peanuts is one of our favorite foods. The recipe is pretty flexible — I am writing the rough contours here, but you can always add or subtract ingredients to suit your preferences.
This dish can be made in either the crock pot or on the stove. We tend to like the stovetop version better. It requires a fair amount of forethought due to the bean prep, and about 15 minutes of prep for the crock pot and 30-60 minutes of prep & cooking for the stove.
I haven’t indicated quantities on most of these ingredients. Again, this is flexible! Put together a quantity of food that seems right, and adjust the spices to taste. I have yet to have it come out terribly.