hilary_mason_data hilary_mason_data-2009 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
1 hilary mason data-2009-12-24-IgniteNYC: The video!
Introduction: IgniteNYC: The video! Posted: December 24, 2009 | Author: hilary | Filed under: academics , blog | Tags: presentation , python | 15 Comments » The video of my IgniteNYC presentation is up, and has gotten a great response! I’m working on removing the me-specific bits from the code and I’ll be posting it as open-source very soon!
2 hilary mason data-2009-11-25-IgniteNYC: How to Replace Yourself with a Very Small Shell Script
Introduction: IgniteNYC: How to Replace Yourself with a Very Small Shell Script Posted: November 25, 2009 | Author: hilary | Filed under: blog , Presentations | Tags: email , ignitenyc , presentations , scripts | 15 Comments » I recently gave a talk at IgniteNYC on How to Replace Yourself with a Very Small Shell Script . The Ignite events are a fun blend of performance, technology, and speaking skill. Each presenter gives a five minute talk with twenty slides that auto-advance after 15 seconds. The title of my talk is a classic geek reference (you can get the t-shirt ). I’m very interested in developing automated techniques for handling the massive and growing amounts of information that we all have to deal with. I started with e-mail and twitter, both of which are easy to access programmatically (via IMAP and the Twitter API ). In the talk, I went through several of the simple and successful e-mail management scripts that I’ve developed. I decided to
3 hilary mason data-2009-11-10-My code is on TV (and so am I)!
Introduction: My code is on TV (and so am I)! Posted: November 10, 2009 | Author: hilary | Filed under: academics , blog , Media | Tags: code , media , press , television | 5 Comments » FoxNY did a piece featuring me and Diana as hackers who use our technical powers for good, not evil. There are way too few female technologists on television, and I’m happy to do what I can to show that women kick ass with code! Look for my mischievous I’m-writing-infinite-nested-loops grin in the clip where I’m programming. If this looks like fun to you, come join us at NYC Resistor (where the segment was filmed!) for Thursday night craft nights or for one of many awesome classes .
4 hilary mason data-2009-10-17-Yahoo OpenHackNYC: The Del.icio.us Cake
Introduction: Yahoo OpenHackNYC: The Del.icio.us Cake Posted: October 17, 2009 | Author: hilary | Filed under: blog , projects | Tags: api , cake , conference , delicious , hack , openhacknyc | 4 Comments » Last weekend Yahoo came to New York for an Open Hack Day , and it was great! I was invited to speak on a panel on semantic metadata , moderated by Paul Ford (harpers.org) along with Marco Neumann (KONA) and Paul Tarjan (Yahoo/Search Monkey). The panel was a lively discussion, and we got some great questions from the audience. After the panel, I stayed around to participate in the hack competition. Yahoo! provided a fantastic space, with free-flowing coffee, snacks, comfy chairs and plenty of Yahoo folks and other hackers around to give advice and play foosball with. I teamed up with Diana Eng , Alicia Gibb , and Bill Ward to create the Del.icio.us Cake! The cake is attached to a laptop via USB. A program running on the laptop accepts a delicious
5 hilary mason data-2009-10-16-Data: first and last names from the US Census
Introduction: Data: first and last names from the US Census Posted: October 16, 2009 | Author: hilary | Filed under: blog | Tags: data , dataset , mysql , sql | 1 Comment » I’ve found myself in need of a name distribution for a few projects recently, so I thought I would post it here so I won’t have to go looking for it again. The data is available from the US Census Bureau (from 1990 census) here , and I have it here in a friendly MySQL *.sql format (it will create the tables and insert the data). There are three tables: male first names, female first names, and surnames. I’ve noted several issues in the data that are likely the result of typos, so make sure to do your own validation if your application requires it. The format is simple: the name frequency (percentage of people in the sampled population with that name) cumulative frequency (as you read down the list, the percentage of total population covered) rank If you want to use this to generate
6 hilary mason data-2009-10-03-Hadoop World NYC
Introduction: Hadoop World NYC Posted: October 3, 2009 | Author: hilary | Filed under: academics , blog | Tags: conference , data analysis , hadoop | 9 Comments » Yesterday, I attended the first Hadoop World NYC conference. Hadoop is a platform for scalable distributed computing. In essence, it makes analyzing large quantities of data much faster, and analyzing very large quantities of data possible. Cloudera did a great job organizing the conference, and managed to assemble a diverse set of speakers. The sessions covered everything from academic research to fraud detection to bioinformatics and even helping people fall in love (eHarmony uses Hadoop)! I’m not going to review every session, but I saw several themes emerging from the content and conversations. Hadoop is Getting Easier New integrated UIs like Cloudera Desktop and Karmasphere mean that developers will no longer be required to use a command-line interface to configure and execute Hadoop job
7 hilary mason data-2009-08-29-Do you do human subject research?
Introduction: Do you do human subject research? Posted: August 29, 2009 | Author: hilary | Filed under: academics , blog | Tags: headlamp , human , research , science | 2 Comments » Dear friends and colleagues, Do you do research that involves gathering data from human participants? This can be anything from marketing surveys to psychology experiments to medical science. If so, please take a short (5 to 10 minute) survey: research tool survey The results of the survey will help us design a new platform for online human research ! I’m very excited about this project and would very much appreciate your input. If you have colleagues who do this kind of work, please pass it on. Thank you!
8 hilary mason data-2009-08-12-My NYC Python Meetup Presentation: Practical Data Analysis in Python
Introduction: My NYC Python Meetup Presentation: Practical Data Analysis in Python Posted: August 12, 2009 | Author: hilary | Filed under: blog | Tags: data , data analysis , nltk , presentations , python , spam , twitter | Leave a comment » I gave a talk at the NYC Python Meetup on July 29 on Practical Data Analysis in Python . I tend to use my slides for visual representations of the concepts I’m discussing, so there’s a lot of content that was in the presentation that you unfortunately won’t see here. The talk starts with the immense opportunities for knowledge derived from data. I spent some time showing data systems ‘in the wild’ along with the appropriate algorithmic vocabulary (for example, amazon.com ‘s ‘books you might like’ feature is a recommender system ). Once we can describe the problems properly, we can look for tools, and Python has many! Finally, in the fun part of the presentation, I demoed working code that uses NLTK to build a Twitter sp
9 hilary mason data-2009-06-01-My Barcamp Presentation: Have Data? What Now?!
Introduction: My Barcamp Presentation: Have Data? What Now?! Posted: June 1, 2009 | Author: hilary | Filed under: blog | Tags: barcamp , barcampnyc , classifier , clustering , conference , data , presentations | Leave a comment » I gave a talk at BarCampNYC4 on Saturday on common data problems and a very light overview of algorithms that address them. My talk at barcampnyc4 - photo courtesy of dynamist on flickr. I delivered the majority of the content verbally, by talking through examples of problems and how to solve them, so there’s no guarantee that these slides will make sense, but they might be funny! Have data? What now?! View more presentations from Hilary Mason . Sanford took some excellent notes during the presentation. There were some very nice comments on twitter. The discussion was so lively and engaging that I’m planning to expand on this content — I really welcome your suggestions and comments!
10 hilary mason data-2009-05-07-I’m on Jon Udell’s Interviews with Innovators!
Introduction: I’m on Jon Udell’s Interviews with Innovators! Posted: May 7, 2009 | Author: hilary | Filed under: blog | Tags: media , path101 , podcast | Leave a comment » Jon Udell hosted Charlie and I on his Interviews with Innovators podcast. We discussed Path101 ‘s approach to career advice through data, and how the high availability of data is changing the way we make decisions. Listen here .
11 hilary mason data-2009-04-28-LSL: AOL IM Status Indicator
Introduction: LSL: AOL IM Status Indicator Posted: April 28, 2009 | Author: hilary | Filed under: blog | Tags: aim , lsl , second life | 3 Comments » I think this might be my very first LSL script, from back in 2005! This script indicates whether your AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) account is online by changing the color of an object. You can configure it to either share your AIM ID publicly, or keep it private. AIM Indicators in Second LIfe This script uses the AIM web services API to check your online status — you only need to give it your username, not your password! This is not a proxy service. You can’t send messages through this script, just show your online status in SL. To use this script, create an object in your favorite shape, create a new script inside of it, paste this code into it and save . key request_id; string aim_id; string av_name; key data_card; integer nLine = 0; integer public = TRUE; default { state_entry() { llSetText(
12 hilary mason data-2009-04-02-From the ACM: Learning More About Active Learning
Introduction: From the ACM: Learning More About Active Learning Posted: April 2, 2009 | Author: hilary | Filed under: blog | Tags: acm , active learning , machine learning | 2 Comments Âť The April edition of Communications of the ACM has an interesting article on recent advances in active learning by Graeme Stemp-Morlock. In passive learning (a more traditional approach), you build a large training set of classified data by (often) manually assigning labels. This data is used as the basis of your analysis. In the real world, we find that generating these large sets of labeled data is often expensive and time consuming. With active learning , you identify the most ambiguous data to label, resulting in a much higher payoff for each label defined (and fewer headaches for your labelers). The article goes on to mention that active learning is being used in practice with excellent results (for example in music identification, text classification, and even bioinfo
Introduction: LSL: Newspaper Stand (Pull Data From an API and Display it in Second Life) Posted: February 28, 2009 | Author: hilary | Filed under: blog | Tags: edtech , lsl , news , rss , second life , virtualworlds , xml , yahoo | 6 Comments » Second Life news stand One of the more popular objects that I created in Second Life is the News Stand. This charming device takes any query term and displays the two latest headlines from Yahoo! News. Clicking the news stand will load the top news story for the topic in a web browser. I’ve gotten more requests to customize the script than I can possibly keep up with, so I’ve decided to release the code under a creative commons license. I hope you find it useful! Please let me know if you make improvements, so that I can link to them from here. Unfortunately, parsing XML at all and RSS feeds in particular is extremely messy in LSL. This script doesn’t contain a general RSS feed parser — the parsing code was written s
14 hilary mason data-2009-02-10-JWU Guest Lecture: Introduction to JavaScript and AJAX
Introduction: JWU Guest Lecture: Introduction to JavaScript and AJAX Posted: February 10, 2009 | Author: hilary | Filed under: blog | Tags: ajax , javascript , jwu , presentations | Leave a comment » JWU Guest Talk: JavaScript and AJAX View more presentations from Hilary Mason . (tags: javascript jwu ) I was invited to give a talk at JWU for an audience of graphic design students on how to enhance their XHTML/CSS skills with JavaScript and AJAX. Enjoy the slides, and I’m looking forward to part 2!
15 hilary mason data-2009-01-31-WordPress tip: Move comments from one post to another post
Introduction: WordPress tip: Move comments from one post to another post Posted: January 31, 2009 | Author: hilary | Filed under: blog | Tags: tips , wordpress | 3 Comments » I recently ended up with two posts on this site about the same project — one was a short summary, and the other a long, detailed article. I decided to consolidate them into the longer article, but I didn’t want to lose the six comments that had been posted to the short article. I couldn’t find a way in the WordPress UI to move comments from one post to another, so I jumped into the database. If you run WordPress on a host, they probably provide a MySQL management tool like PHPMyAdmin, or you can log in with a mysql client. First, find the table that contains the posts for your blog (the table name usually ends in _posts ). Find the ID that matches the post you want to move comments from , and the ID for the post that you want to move comments to . Note: An easy way to do this is to search by t
16 hilary mason data-2009-01-01-Twitter: A greasemonkey script to show who follows you
Introduction: Twitter: A greasemonkey script to show who follows you Posted: January 1, 2009 | Author: hilary | Filed under: blog | Tags: extension , firefox , greasemonkey , script , socialmedia , status , twitter | 9 Comments » A couple of days ago I saw @skap5′s comment : “Dear Twitter Is it too much to ask to add a follower marker so I can know if someone is following me and not just if I am following them?” I think that Twitter could benefit from displaying more information on the home page, and this idea was easy enough to code up. It should save some time and make the Twitter homepage that much more useful. The script displays a tiny icon on top of the portrait of people who are following you back on your Twitter home page. It leaves your non-followers alone, though it would be easy enough to develop a version that puts silly mustaches on them. This is only a first version, and I welcome your comments and suggestions. If you already have Greasemo