Today, I need to launch a new AWS EC2 instance to collect some more tweets. Since I have done this several times, I used my AWS console to replicate the most recent instance I created that collects tweets. Everything ran smoothly until I tried to install streamR, my go to library for collecting tweets in […]
This post is a sequel to my wildly popular – ok, not wildly popular, but very useful for me – post documenting my function to create a forest plot. Recently, I made models using cross-validation via R’s caret package. The train() function does the heavy lifting, but the problem is that its output is a […]
TL;DR: Just use generic style files for new projects. Overleaf is the best tool I have found for collaborating on Latex documents. It is cloud-based, has a ton of templates, nice text editing features that go beyond TexShop and other desktop editors I know, and the rich text editor (using a GUI, like a word processor) […]
On the heels of my book inventory for 2017 is this post, my celebrity sighting inventory for 2017. The New England sophisticate in me hates that I even considered documenting these events, much less put them on my professional website, but the budding Angelino in me, interacted with my forgetfulness, thinks it’s so cool that […]
Inspired by Aaron Clauset’s annual catalogue of his productivity and spurred by my forgetfulness, this post is the first of what I hope will be many that catalogue my leisure reading of the previous year. In no particular order, I read: The Autobiography of Malcolm X – As good as you’ve heard. Though dictated, it felt like the […]
With some free time on my hands, I sat down to update my code that extracts tweets from my tweet collection based on user-supplied keywords or locations. In doing that, however, I ended up making a major improvement, one that should have existed from day one. You see, simply trying to read a file of […]
I thought I was going to spend some time on Friday analyzing tweets from Cameroon. Instead, starting that process led me down a rabbit hold that has, I hope, culminated in me realizing I should have used Python’s simplejson library this whole time. A script of mine used a try-except sequence to enclose the section […]
I recently wrote a script that reads thousands of files of tweets, transforms them, and spits out “only” hundreds of files. Having tested the script on my computer on a few files, I was surprised to find the execution taking much longer than anticipated on my server, especially since the server’s CPUs are more powerful […]
I am grateful for many things; one of those things is living in LA. Another thing is that I am reasonably close to my job, by LA standards: 9 miles as the crow flows. I learned quickly what any Angelino will tell you: wow, traffic. While I have been fortunate not to have a Michael […]
Working with machine-coded events data is cool. What’s not cool is that the raw data from two of the main datasets, GDELT 2.0 and Phoenix, do not include headers in their files. It is simple to create a list with the column names, but the closest I could find that already existed for GDELT 2.0 […]
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