47 years. That is the life expectancy of Sierra Leone, the lowest of all countries. Compare that with the highest life expectancy of 83 years in San Marino. Its easy to brush these numbers aside as another dull statistic, but that is a 36 year difference. I have yet to even experience that length of time! Imagine being told, that your life will end 36 years earlier than expected. It’s not very easy for most of us to comprehend. Continue reading
All posts by rajdas88
Data Analysis Assignment 1
I thought I’d share my first assignment from the Coursera class, Data Analysis. It’s a very simple analysis, but it did get me back into the feel of writing research papers (as opposed to the terse sentence fragments I email at work). I’m posting it here to demonstrate what level of work you can expect from such a course… and because charts in R blow Excel out of the water. Continue reading
How to Make a Fancy Map Visual
A week or two ago, Nikhil Kumar showed me this awesome real-time cartogram of twitter feeds. Since it was something I had no idea how to do, I thought it was a good time to learn. I decided to play around with geographical data visualizations and see what kind of graphics could be easily produced. Continue reading
Steganography – Hiding in Plain Sight
What can you see in the image above? A seemingly innocuous picture of Tower Bridge and the London skyline? But, there’s also hidden instructions for a devious, top-secret scheme. And, it can’t be detected by just looking at the picture. Continue reading
Mutating Random Polygons to Images
After being inspired by this link, I planned to implement a similar Genetic Algorithm. The algorithm uses a sequence of mutating polygons to recreate an image. Since I was taking a Coursera refresher in R, I decided to give it a shot in that language. Continue reading
Coursera
One aspect of my New Year’s resolution for this year was to hop on the Coursera (and other MOOCs) bandwagon. I started a course last year called Probabilistic Graphical Models, which was fascinating for the one week I stuck with it. But, it required about 15 hours (too many) per week. This time around, I decided to start with baby steps. Take a few short refreshers to get into the habit and then expand from there. But there’s just too many awesome courses available right now! Continue reading
The Final Beginning
This is not my first attempt at a blog. I’ve made three in the past. One to share my life in London, then one to inspire the manly man in all of us, and finally the one that had the sweetest collection of links on this side of the internet. Each one was made with utmost care to design. They had a defined structure, a strict schedule, and a clear focus. And none of them lasted. So this time I’ll do the opposite. I’ll use it to share my life experience. And since my life doesn’t happen with a structure, schedule, or focus… you’ll just have to keep up!