Posts by Category

Blogging with Jupyter Notebooks and Jekyll using nbconvert templates

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Here’s a quick (and hopefully helpful) post for those wishing to blog in Jekyll using Jupyter notebooks. As some of you may know, nbconvert can easily convert your .ipynb files to markdown, which Jekyll can easily turn into blog posts for you.

Introducing makeitpop, a tool to perceptually warp your data!

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Note: It should go without saying, but you should never do the stuff that you’re about to read about here. Data is meant to speak for itself, and our visualizations should accurately reflect the data above all else.

Could Brexit have happened by chance?

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As a scientist, watching the Brexit vote was a little bit painful. Though probably not for the reason you’re thinking. No, it wasn’t the politics that bothered me, but the method for making such an incredibly important decision. Let me explain…

The beauty of computational efficiency

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When we discuss “computational efficiency”, you often hear people throw around phrases like $O(n^2)$ or $O(nlogn)$. We talk about them in the abstract, and it can be hard to appreciate what these distinctions mean and how important they are. So let’s take a quick look at what computational efficiency looks like in the context of a very famous algorithm: The Fourier Transform.

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NIH Fellowship Success Rates

As I’m entering the final years of graduate school, I’ve been applying for a few typical “pre-doc” fellowships. One of these is the NRSA, which is notorious for requiring you to wade through forests of beaurocratic documents (seriously, their “guidelines” for writing an NRSA are over 100 pages!). Doing so ends up taking a LOT of time.

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Using Craigslist to compare prices in the Bay Area

In the last post I showed how to use a simple python bot to scrape data from Criagslist. This is a quick follow-up to take a peek at the data.

An academic scientist goes to DevOps Days

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Last week I took a few days to attend DevOpsDays Silicon Valley. My goal was to learn a bit about how the DevOps culture works, what are the things people are excited about and discuss in this community. I’m also interested in learning a thing or two that could be brought back into the scientific / academic world. Here are a couple of thoughts from the experience.

Brainy Jingle Bells

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This is a quick demo of how I created this video. Check it out below, or read on to see the code that made it!

Coherence correlation

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Note - you can find the nbviewer of this post here

The bleeding edge of publishing, Scraping publication amounts at biorxiv

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Per a recent request somebody posted on Twitter, I thought it’d be fun to write a quick scraper for the biorxiv, an excellent new tool for posting pre-prints of articles before they’re locked down with a publisher embargo.

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5 things I learned at SciPy

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I’ve finally decompressed after my first go-around with Scipy. For those who haven’t heard of this conference before, Scipy is an annual meeting where members of scientific community get together to discuss their love of Python, scientific programming, and open science. It spans both academics and people from industry, making it a unique place in terms of how software interfaces with scientific research. (if you’re interested the full set of Scipy conferences, check out here.