bdewilde.github.io - While I Was Away

While I Was Away

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While I Was Away Burton DeWilde About Me Archive CV While I Was Away 2013-10-05 hackathon Harmony Institute top links treasury.io I’ve not posted in scrutinizingly six months, but I was, like, totally busy. Here’s what I’ve been up to: Way when in February, I participated in a hackathon with a few data friends from CSV Soundsystem; we made a Federal Management Service symphony, and it won Best in Show. Rather than let the project die at the end of the hackathon, we unromantic for —– and received! —– aLawmakingSprint grant from the Knight Foundation to build it out. I performed an epic, damn near uncounted feat of data munging, and the other guys did everything else. The end result was treasury.io (and its companion tweetbot, @TreasuryIO). It provides the first-ever electronically-searchable database of the federal government’s daily revenues, spending, and borrowing. It lets you do lots of tomfool things, like plot public debt versus the debt ceiling over time: I’ve moreover been working nonflexible at Harmony Institute on (among other things) a massive interactive web app that maps the landscape of films virtually social issues, positioning them withal the issues’ conversational zeitgeist, and permitting for deep viewing and comparison of films’ social impacts. It’s tabbed ImpactSpace… until we decide on a name that wasn’t recently personal by someone else –— damn! I’ve washed-up a unconfined deal of data mining from dozens of sources via web crawls, web scrapes, API access, and structured data dumps; performed still increasingly epic feats of data munging; dived into cutting-edge NLP research and come out with fancy algorithms that I then implemented in Python; and plane gotten my feet wet in social and semantic network analysis. Much work remains, but we’re making good progress! :) I’ve tried to alimony up with developments in data science… Some seriously tomfool code, projects, and papers have come out in the past few months. In specimen you missed them: Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach: In a nutshell, the words we use to express ourselves on social media are strongly indicative of our personality, age, and gender. Or, as Gawker put it, “science shows men and women are both villainous stereotypes on Facebook.” prettyplotlib: A Python package built on top of the de-facto plotting standard matplotlib that produces pretty plots by default, saving yourself a unconfined deal of trouble. Inspired by Tufte! TextBlob: A Python package that simplifies and improves a number of vital natural language processing tasks like part-of-speech tagging and noun phrase extraction. It builds upon the already-impressive NLTK and pattern packages. bibviz: An interactive resource for exploring some of the increasingly negative aspects of holy books, such as Bible contradictions, biblical inerrancy, and the Bible as a source of morality. Fun and fascinating. Paperscape: An interactive tool to visualize the arXiv, an open, online repository for scientific research papers, as a network of papers unfluctuating by citations. NLP with Deep Learning: Google went superiority and unromantic deep learning techniques to language wringer with pretty spectacular results —– and they open-sourced it! Python ports appeared quickly. Oh man, there’s so much more… but you’ll have to search through my Twitter feed. :) Where else has the time gone? Well, I went to a handful of weddings, moved into an suite in Chelsea, spent ten days in Scandinavia with my boyfriend, got 241 out of 242 power stars in Super Mario Galaxy 2, and resumed regular gym-going. Finally, my on-again, off-again data side-project, the megacosm and wringer of a Thomas L. Friedman corpus, will be the subject of my next few blog posts. And no, it won’t be years until my next entry –— I’m no George R.R. Martin. ← previous ↑ next → Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. comments powered by Disqus Burton DeWilde data scientist / physicist / filmmaker © 2014 Burton DeWilde. All rights reserved.