Category Archives: Logs

No 45: A Few Updates

24 January, 2012 4:12 AM / Leave a Comment /

Hey everyone,

I have a few updates.

I fell on Saturday

Each Saturday, I drive back down to Clear Lake to ride my bike with the Space City Cycling Club for about 3 hours – about 60 miles. I had mistakenly checked the weather forecast for my own zip code which indicated clear skies but when I arrived in Clear Lake I encountered some mild precipitation. I had the appropriate clothing with me and the rain almost never poses a problem except for thunderstorms as I’ve ridden in the rain dozens of times over the last three years. Unfortunately, about 35 miles into the ride on the way back to Bike Barn, the group approached a series of railroad tracks and I fell while crossing the second set, which lie at roughly a 70 degree angle which makes it difficult for cyclists to cross them perpendicularly – the safest trajectory. The rain causes the oil deposits to rise to the surface, and the combination of oil and slick iron makes for a very slippery crossing. So, I fell over to the right and landed on the side of my torso, which I think is the safest way to land when you fall to the side. What you don’t want to do is stick your arm out to break the fall because that’s an easy way to break your arm or collarbone. Anyway, I didn’t have time to think about what to do as I only realized I had fallen after I had fallen. I slid out a few feet due to the rain which is nice because it mitigates the impact and the scrapes, although I did get a few since my elbow and hip made contact with the pavement. The people in the group were so nice and it was really considerate of them to stop and make sure I was okay. They helped me straighten out my shifters and I was back on the bike after a couple of minutes. Thankfully, I escaped with no broken bones and I really think the weightlifting’s paid off over the last few years in strengthening my muscles and bones, especially the power cleans which I started at the end of last year.

I listened to Rachmaninoff at Jones Hall

After I got home, I read a little bit of European history (as of today I’ve cut the deficit from 50 pages to 25 pages) and ate dinner before I went to see Kirill Gerstein play Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.2 with one of my friends whom I met at state orchestra back in high school, along with some of her friends from Rice. I don’t actually go to see concerts very often and during most of my young life I had been performing them more than listening to them. I really miss playing and if I didn’t hurt my hands I think I would still be practicing 3-4 hours a day, but I decided against surgery a couple years back because the doctor told me that there was a high chance of recurrence and that it wasn’t worth it unless I couldn’t do basic things like hold a spoon or button my shirt. However, I’m fine with not playing anymore and right now I think cycling, math, computers, and studying makes me about has happy as I was when I still played, though relatively I’m not as good at cycling and math as I was at playing – mainly because I haven’t pursued these interests for as long, but I’m sure I’ll reap the benefits over time. Anyway Kirill Gerstein put on a flawless performance and I really enjoyed the concert.

On stuyding

I completed writing down all the theorems I needed to know for exam C/4 – 107 in all, and you can download the pdf from my SkyDrive (file – “temp_mem_bank”). I plan to memorize all the theorems to work on my memory, even though I don’t have to strictly memorize them for the test. I also started a couple of other projects – using a random number generator for studying these theorems, which I mentioned last week, and also another tool for the study of arithmetic. These are still in the early stages so I didn’t include them here, but I’ll talk about them next week. Anyway, I really rushed though this post and even though I say that I’m really short on time for these posts I think that this was especially true this time as I’ve only had about half an hour to write this. The quality of the post is low, has way too many verbs to be, and it doesn’t reflect my best writing. What really took me back today was a stumbling block I ran into while doing some algebra problems – I had trouble finding complex solutions to cubic equations of the following form:

$latex displaystyle ax^3+bx^2+cx+d=0$

For example, I needed to solve for $latex x^3=-1$. I got the first root, -1, but I had trouble finding the complex roots which happened to be $latex frac{1}{2}pmfrac{sqrt{3}}{2}i$. Larson’s book briefly went over complex numbers and I did plenty of exercises that involved quadratic equations with imaginary parts to the solutions, but none involving cubic equations. I looked up how to solve for cubic roots on Wikipedia and the general solutions consist of some unpleasantly gargantuan equations:

General Solutions to Cubic Equations

I think the proof of this is beyond the book and I couldn’t even find these equations anywhere within the text. I shouldn’t have any trouble understanding the proof but I think as far as basic College Algebra goes I can just use the general solution until I move into discrete math, and then abstract algebra. Anyway, looking for how to solve the problems and then solving them set me back a couple hours, but it was worth it skimping out on the quality of this post to get the solutions. Anyway, I’m glad I found the equations and that I managed to complete this post on time.

Posted in: Logs

No. 44: A Brief Note on Studying

17 January, 2012 4:34 AM / 2 Comments /

On Studying

When I began the actuarial exam process a few years ago, I stumbled upon a personal essay from the SOA archives about Andrew Lin, a brilliant student who became full fellow at the age of 20. Even today, we actuaries and actuarial students consider this an extremely rare feat and an extraordinary display of intelligence. The most talented actuaries tend to achieve fellowship at the age of 25, about three years after college,  so I’d imagine that you could count the number of 24-or-younger FSAs on your left hand. Anyway, when reading the article you shouldn’t focus on how Lin achieved the designation so early – but more on how he, as a non-native speaker of English, motivated himself to learn 25 words of English each night for 9 consecutive months. 25 words doesn’t sound like a lot and you can’t hold an intelligent conversation with such a limited vocabulary. However, over the span of 9 months Lin would learn approximately 6,750 words. Had he continued the ritual for another two years he would have learned over 20,000 words – the size of the average vocabulary of a native English speaker. In addition to vocabulary, he devoted each night to learning non-school related material that he found interesting.

I’d say the article has left a lasting influence on the way I learn. Ever since I started my job in March, I decided, time permitting, to devote each night to reading something I found interesting at a rate of 100 pages per week. I started with the book A Mathematician’s Apology by G.H. Hardy and then moved on to Hackers by Steven Levy and shortly afterward to Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I got to the point where Dagny Taggart started having an affair with Hank Rearden but I later saw the book as dull and intellectually unstimulating (sorry, Ayn Rand fans) so I switched over to Norman Davies’ Europe, A History since I never took European History in high school. I figured that, in a manner similar to that of the preceding paragraph, if I read 100 pages a week I would have read over 5,000 pages after a year. Since I like to read textbooks (I have a Sociology book lined up after Davies), and each textbook is roughly about 1,000 pages, I concluded that I could read a college semester’s worth (or maybe even a year’s worth since college courses rarely cover the entire book) of material each year. This, in addition to the Actuarial curriculum and the projects I learn at work, makes for a very education-heavy lifestyle that I’ve come to enjoy.

I like to alternate between “Heavy” material and “Light” material as I complete each book. “Heavy” material consists of textbooks or academic material whereas “Light” material consists of pleasure reading, like novels. In an effort to speed up my reading (I don’t plan on doing only 100 pages a week forever), after I finish a “heavy” book, reading slowly to absorb the material, I start reading a “light” book and read it as fast as possible. For instance, I consider Davies as heavy material. The next book (a light book), Kingpin, tells the true story of Max Butler, aka “Iceman,” a computer criminal who stole 2 million credit cards and sold them on the black market. Another former criminal, Kevin Poulsen, now a journalist, wrote the book so I think this will present a unique perspective into the cybercriminal underworld. The book consists of about 250 pages, which I plan on reading over the span of a week (so about 2.5 times the speed of heavy material). The easily digestible nature of light material makes it an ideal source for developing my reading speed. After finishing Kingpin, I plan on going back to “Heavy” material, in this case – Sociology by John Macionis (since I never took a sociology course), except at a rate of 105 pages per week. The cycle continues in this manner until I can no longer read the required pages within the allotted amount of time, the point at which I reduce 10%-20% of the required page count and start the cycle again.  Unfortunately, this week marks the first time in 6 weeks that I’ve fallen behind schedule – by about 50 pages. I’ll let you know next week if I’ve caught up.

In addition to all this, I still have my actuarial material to study, along with the math/computer projects I do on the side when I’m not studying for exams. I’m still in the early stage of exam preparation and most of it consists of the rote memory of basic theorems and definitions that serve as the foundation of model construction. I felt inspired by Tesla’s ability to memorize complete books and for a while I wrote down some theorems (see “temp_mem_bank”) in $latex LaTeX$ using my RStudio server and tried using a random number generator to generate a theorem or definition number (say, Definition 2.5 from Klugman) and then trying to write down that theorem or definition verbatim, including the punctuation marks. Right now I’ve done this at a rate of 3 theorems a day but I find it really taxing. I feel a slight improvement in my memory but if I find that I haven’t gone anywhere after a month I might have to ditch this method for practical reasons to devote more time to solving problems.

As a side note, my tubulars arrived last week and I rode them last Saturday for a 3 hour training session back in Clear Lake. They feel fantastic. I had them up to 120 psi but it felt like I was riding at the comfort of 90 psi on clinchers. The wheels were extremely fast. They look pretty sweet too.

Cronus Ultimate with HED Stinger 6 Tubulars

Posted in: Logs

No. 43: A Perfect Score, Imperfect Preparation

10 January, 2012 2:19 AM / 1 Comment /

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to make this quick because I need to wake up early tomorrow. I just wanted to let you know that I received a perfect score of 10 on Exam MLC/3L, which I received today to my relief. This is my second perfect score – I got also got a 10 on FM/2 last year. I felt confident that I would pass but today confirmed how well I thought I did after I took the test. A score of 10 doesn’t mean that I answered every single question correctly, which I probably didn’t since I had to guess on a handful of them when I ran out of time towards the end of the test. Rather, the SOA determines an initial pass mark (usually around 18 or 19 of the 30 questions), equates that to a 6, and increments the score equating each previous or subsequent point to 10% of the pass mark. For instance, if they set the pass mark at 19, a score of 6 means you got 19 right on the exam. A score of 7 means you got 21 or 22 right (since 19 + 1.9 = 20.9), a score of 8 means you got 23 or 24 right, and so on.

A score of 10 means I finished somewhere on the right side of the distribution – but since the SOA doesn’t release the distribution of scores I can’t determine my percentile or performance relative to my peers, though they do release the pass rate which usually ends up somewhere between 40%-55% of the candidates. Although I do feel satisfied with the result, I don’t feel happy with the way I studied or prepared for the exam. I skipped the May sitting because I moved to Memorial for my new job, and I had to take care of a lot of “firsts” in life such as apartment rent, savings and retirement accounts, bills, and so on and so forth, which may or may not belong to the set of acceptable excuses for skipping an important professional exam. Furthermore, the SOA introduced significant changes to the MLC syllabus effective in 2012, so skipping the first sitting in 2011 meant that I only had one shot to pass before the exam change. Also, I only started studying in mid-August which gave me about 2.75 months to study (which may seem ideal for others, but short for me). I studied frantically, and I don’t think I paced myself well at all.

Anyway, I can at least put away the anxiety of the hardest preliminary exam, but I’ve made it my goal to not make the same mistakes as I have in the past. The next exam, C/4, from what I hear has easier problems than those in MLC, but the calculations require more steps, which leaves more space for human error so I have to tread carefully. The exam feels more like an older sibling to the first exam, P/1 since you work with probability distributions, but work with more sophisticated modeling techniques and more complicated distributions. I decided to change my method of study to include a lot more rote memory since the exam focuses more on knowledge of methods, rather than insight and creativity (the C/4 questions are more similar to “do this method on this data set” as opposed to the “what can you conclude from this” style questions found on MLC). I’ve already created a Temporary Memory Bank in written form (you can find the file on my sky drive as “temp_mem_bank”), which includes concepts that I’ve committed to memory for this test, but have not, as of now committed to permanent memory as I have in the Permanent Memory Bank.

I’ve set the word count limit for my posts as 500 for the minimum and 1000 for the maximum. I figured, that updating the blog with extremely short posts would not satisfy the requirements of a New Year’s resolution, so I decided that 500 words seemed appropriate since I had to write brief, 500-word essays every week during my English course of my first semester of college (in addition to 3 longer papers ~5 pages and a term paper ~20 pages). This post, at ~750 words, took me less than an hour. I put a limit of 1000 words since these are blog posts, not dissertations, and I feel no need to bore the time-conscious reader.

As a side note – I ordered some new tubulars for the 2012 race season. One of these is mine:

My new set of wheels is in there, somewhere. Photo by Philip Shama

Posted in: Logs / Tagged: , , , , ,

No. 42: The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search – How to Install and Start GIMPS on Ubuntu 11.10

3 January, 2012 6:28 AM / 2 Comments /

Hey everyone,

When I said that I’d update this blog once a week, I didn’t realize that I’d have to post five times as many updates as I did last year. Fortunately, I don’t see this as something I can’t do so I decided to make it my new year’s resolution. Today I’ve decided to write about the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS)- an online distributed computing project that aims to find Mersenne Primes.  Distributed computing means that several computers on a network work together on a certain task. In the case of the Great Mersenne Prime Search, these computers come from university computer labs, homes, and even video game consoles all across the world. Other distributed computing projects involve protein folding (perhaps the most famous), finding extraterrestrial life, searching for gravitational waves, and so on and so forth. These projects work by utilizing spare processing power from participating computers. All this processing power put together makes for a very powerful network, and these projects have already made important discoveries, such as a protein structure related to HIV. Anyway, after I set up my Linux server, which runs throughout the day, I decided that letting it run idly would waste a lot of processing power, so I decided to install a program from a distributed computing project. I chose GIMPS because I spent some time studying the Mersenne primes in school, so as a math major this project would come naturally to me. I couldn’t find a suitable setup guide for Ubuntu 11.10, however, so I decided to write one here.

About Mersenne Primes

We call numbers of the form $latex M_p = 2^p-1$ Mersenne Numbers. However, only a few of these Mersenne Numbers belong to the set of prime numbers, and as of 2009 we know of only 47 Mersenne Primes. The nature of Mersenne Primes makes them some of the largest known prime numbers out there, and indeed, the largest known prime, $latex 2^{43112609}-1$, is a Mersenne Prime. The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search aims to find additional Mersenne Primes through distributed computing using the Lucas-Lehmer test for Mersenne Primes.

Downloading GIMPS

Go to the GIMPS homepage, and click on the link “Getting Started.” Go to the link called “Register a new user account login” and create your user account. After you create your account, go to the Download Software page and select the package appropriate for your operating system. Since I use 64-bit Ubuntu, I downloaded the 64-bit Linux package. Place the package into the desired directory. For my computer, I created a folder called “GIMPS” in my home folder, and put the package there.

Placing the package into the GIMPS folder and opening it with Archive Manager

Next, click open the package with Archive Manager and then extract the files. Archive Manager will extract the files into the GIMPS folder.

GIMPS folder after extraction

Next, open up the terminal (CTRL+ALT+T) and change the directory to the GIMPS folder (do this simply by typing “cd GIMPS”). Now, open the mprime folder by typing in the command “./mprime -m”. Remember the space! The program “mprime” is the main program that will do the primality testing.

Use these commands to start mprime

mprime will now ask you if you want to join GIMPS. Select yes. Then, mprime will ask you to create an optional user ID and computer name. Fill these out – for example I entered my name as “gene” and my computer name as “Archimedes.” You can leave the proxy host name blank, just press enter. Then, type “Y” when mprime asks you to accept the above answers.

Initial running of mprime

mprime will then ask you the number of hours per day the program will run, how much memory to let it use, and the number of workers (number of CPUs) that will run. The default answers to these questions are in parentheses (). I selected the defaults for all of them. You do have the option to use more memory to speed up the program, however. mprime will then ask you to set the work priorities for your computer. Go ahead and select all the defaults, this will allow mprime to automatically allocate work to your processors. After accepting the answers, you will see your terminal window fill up with a bunch of text. This text describes which Mersenne Numbers your CPUs are testing, how much progress they’ve made, and the estimated completion dates. Depending on how you set it up, you may have missed the main menu. On my first install I saw the menu right away, but on the second install the program seemed to have skipped over the menu.

Here is a screenshot of the menu:

mprime options menu

Go ahead and select option 3. This will give you a summary of the progress.

mprime at work, showing progress

You can see here that my version of mprime is currently testing Mersenne numbers M55085531, M55091137, M55093139, and M55093327 using the Lucas-Lehmer test. The number after the M is the p in $latex M_p = 2^p-1$. So as you can see, these are very large numbers. The odds of me finding a Mersenne prime are 1 in 113533 for this current batch of tests!

And that’s it! Press any key to continue, and select option 5 to exit.

Things to do

You can see from the last picture that mprime will cause your computer to constantly use 100% of its processing power, 24 hours a day. This somewhat concerns me when it comes to temperatures, as I don’t want things to overheat while I’m away from the computer or at work. So, I plan on writing a script to have the server save the temperature readings into a text file so I can check on it periodically from a phone or another computer, and in the case of an emergency I can shut it down remotely.

If you think there’s anything missing in this guide, or if you think you have anything useful to add, or if you find any errors, let me know! I’m always open to input from others.

Posted in: Logs, Mathematics / Tagged: , , , ,

No. 41: Project No. 1 – An Eternal Memory Bank via LaTeX; Project No. 2 – RStudio via Linux Server

27 December, 2011 5:55 AM / 3 Comments /

Hey everyone,

Let me introduce you to a couple of projects that I began working on over the last week – a memory bank written in LaTeX and a Linux server hosting RStudio for my predictive modeling projects. I started working on these tasks in order to give myself challenges that would develop my skills, because I had noticed that after I graduated college, the sudden scarcity of drilling, testing, and intellectually stimulating tasks other than actuarial exams or projects at work led to what I felt was a lack of cognitive development, creative activity, and perhaps even a decline in my working memory. This doesn’t mean that I hadn’t done anything in the meantime, however. Over the past year I’ve continued my studies at a pace of around 14-20 hours per week reading things that I found interesting. For instance, I’ve been reading a book on European History because I never got the chance to take a course on it in high school or college. I think over the past year I may have studied more hours than I had in any year of my life. During exam time, I studied a year’s worth of material on Life Contingencies in a span of 3 months. However, I’ve realized that studying can only get you so far. I’ve heard countless times that you have to put down the books if you want to get good at something – you cannot, for instance, learn to ride a bike by reading a book on riding a bike – you actually have to get yourself on a bicycle, ride, fall down, learn from your mistakes, and try again. Thus, I decided to begin a series of projects in order to actively learn by creating. In this way, I hope to keep myself sharp, motivated, and most importantly, intellectually fulfilled.

Project 1: Eternal Memory Bank

I haven’t forgotten about $latex LaTeX$, the markup language that I set about learning around this time last year, though I have forgotten much of the syntax I need to typeset mathematical notation. Unfortunately, using LaTeX via WordPress, as I had done last year, presents some significant drawbacks due to syntactical differences and the fact that I can’t develop my typesetting skills further if I only use LaTeX within my blog. Thus, I’ve decided to construct a memory bank as a complete LaTeX document that you can print out as a book. I first had to start out by learning all the things I forgot over the last year by reading Kopka and Daly’s Guide to LaTeX, at an extremely slow pace – sometimes as slow as 5 pages per minute – though fortunately, it does has some very good exercises. For instance, the following table took me more than an hour to produce:

An excercise in constructing arrays and adjusting formulas

By means of the following input:

[sourcecode]
documentclass{article}
newcommand{D}{displaystyle}
newcommand{bm}{boldmath}
newcommand{ba}{begin{array}}
newcommand{ea}{end{array}}
begin{document}
[ ba{|c|c|c|} hline
multicolumn{3}{|c|}{rule[-2mm]{0mm}{6mm}mbox{Equations for the tangential plane and surface normal}} \ hline
mbox{Equation} & & \
mbox{for the} & mbox{ Tangential plane} & mbox{Surface normal} \
mbox{surface} & & \ hline
F(x,y,z)=0 &ba[t]{r@{{}+{}}l}
D{frac{partial F}{partial x}}(X-x) & rule[0mm]{0mm}{8mm} D{frac{partial F}{partial y}}(Y-y) \[4mm]
& D{frac{partial F}{partial z}}(Z-z)=0
ea & ba[t]{r@{{}={}}c@{{}={}}l}
D{frac{X-x}{D{frac{partial F}{partial x}}}} & D{frac{Y-y}{D{frac{partial F}{partial y}}}} & D{frac{Z-z}{D{frac{partial F}{partial z}}}}
ea \[13mm]
z=f(x,y) & Z-z =p(X-x)+q(Y-y) &D{frac{X-x}{p}=frac{Y-y}{q} = frac{Z-z}{-1}} \[4mm]
ba{c}
x=x(u,v)\
y=y(u,v)\
z=z(u,v)\ ea &
left|ba{ccc}
X-x & Y-y & Z-z\
D{frac{partial x}{partial u}} & D{frac{partial y}{partial u}} & D{frac{partial z}{partial u}}\[3mm]
D{frac{partial x}{partial v}} & D{frac{partial y}{partial v}} & D{frac{partial z}{partial v}}\ ea right| = 0 &
ba{r@{{}={}}l}
D{frac{X-x}{left|ba{cc}
frac{partial y}{partial z} & frac{partial z}{partial u}\[1mm]
frac{partial y}{partial v} & frac{partial z}{partial v} ea right|}} &
D{frac{Y-y}{left|ba{cc}
frac{partial z}{partial u} & frac{partial x}{partial u}\[1mm]
frac{partial z}{partial v} & frac{partial x}{partial v} ea right|}}\[10mm]
& D{frac{Z-z}{left|ba{cc}
frac{partial x}{partial u} & frac{partial y}{partial u}\[1mm]
frac{partial x}{partial v} & frac{partial y}{partial v} \ ea right|}} ea \[15mm]
rule[-5mm]{0mm}{0mm}mbox{boldmath{$r=r$}}(u,v) & ba{r@{{}={}}l}
mbox{boldmath{$(R-r)(r_1times r_2)$}} & 0\
mbox{or} hfill mbox{boldmath{$(R-r)N$}} & 0\ ea & ba{r@{{}+{}}l}
mbox{boldmath{$R=r$}} & mbox{boldmath{$lambda(r_1times r_2)$}} \
mbox{or boldmath{$R=r$}} & mbox{boldmath{$lambda N$}}ea \ hline
multicolumn{3}{|c|}{rule[0mm]{0mm}{10mm}parbox{116mm}{In this table, $x,y,z$ and $mathbf{r}$ are the coordinates and the radius vector of a fixed point $M$ on the curve; $X,Y,Z,$ and $mathbf{R}$ are the coordinates and radius vector of a point on the tangential plane or surface normal with reference to $M$; furthermore, $p =frac{partial z}{partial x}, q=frac{partial z}{partial y}$ and $mathbf{r_1}=mathbf{frac{partial r}{partial mathnormal{u}}, r_2=frac{partial r}{partial mathnormal{v}}}$.}}\ hline
ea ]
end{document}[/sourcecode]

As you can see, the code does not look pretty. Fortunately, on another go I believe I can reproduce the above table in about 15 minutes, and perhaps even faster on the third try.

Anyway, I began putting the pieces of my Eternal Memory Bank a couple weeks ago and spent the last couple of weeks putting what little I had together for this post. If you’ve taken a look at my Projects page, you can see that I’ve been learning College Algebra over the last few months – not because I don’t know algebra but because I felt that I needed to fill in a few gaps left behind by my inadequate high school education, and because I’ve forgotten a lot since then and I thought perhaps that I could get some new insight by revisiting an old subject. I decided to extract a few pieces of information that I really ought not to forget – and put them into this memory bank to commit to memory, forever. You can download the pdf from my SkyDrive here and the TeX file here.

An excerpt from the Preface:

“Hey everyone,

I’ve decided to construct an eternal memory bank, within which I’ve placed
select pieces of information that I’ve deemed important enough to commit to
memory, forever. This document serves as a visual representation of these
pieces in written form. I’ve undertaken this seemingly somewhat tedious and
arbitrary project to keep my memory in shape and because I’m sick and tired
of forgetting the formula to (a+b)^3 and having to either work out the expan-
sion every time it shows up (usally once in a blue moon for me) or look it up (I
usually work out the expansion out of pride, or just use the bionomial theorem).
In other words, these things take up precious time and I would much rather be
able to pull them immediately from memory than to rely on something that
may be in another book in some distant library or buried underneath mounds
of links in a website like Wikipedia.

Let me stress that I am not relying on memory for all of my tasks – that would
be ridiculously insane. You cannot solve complex problems on rote memory
alone becuase they require creativity and higher-level analytical skills. On the
other hand, there are some things you absolutely must memorize – for instance
as I write I am pulling out every single word on this page by memory. You can
gure out some words with context clues and associations, but if you have to
do that with every word during a conversation that is also absolutely, insanely
ridiculous.

So, welcome to my Eternal Memory Bank. Everything you see here, including
the fonts, document structure, Table of Contents – I guarantee you I’ve memo-
rized it. So, take a look, give me feedback if you wish, and enjoy.”

Project 2: RStudio via Linux Server

My second project began as a side project to my real job when my boss recommended that I check out Kaggle and sign up for their predictive modeling competitions. For those of you who don’t know, the website Kaggle hosts a series of predictive modelling competitions and awards cash prizes to the winners. The competitors include PhD-level academics, statisticians, mathematicians, hobbyists, and actuaries like me. I think of this as an excellent opportunity to see how the experts operate – the cash prize merely serves as icing on the cake, and I don’t really have the ambition to go for the top prize as of now.

To set up a base for myself and the rest of my team members, I decided to construct a Linux server out of an old computer I had laying around – it has some new components though, like an Athlon II x4 processor and plenty of RAM – 8GB. The server currently operates on ubuntu 11.10 “Oneric Ocelot,”  though I may change my mind and set up an ssh server using Ubuntu Server instead. In addition to the Ubuntu, I set up my Windows machine in a way that lets me control the Ubuntu Server remotely – including shutting down, turning on, logging in etc.

Logging into the server remotely with Tight VNC

After installing the server I downloaded RStudio server, a GUI developed by a group of volunteer programmers that allows people to connect to R remotely through their own Windows machines. In this manner I hope that my teammates and I can collaborate on our projects. I first asked some of my friends to try logging in but they couldn’t do it – so I asked my more technically savvy friends what to do and they suggested that I set up a static IP and forward port 8787 on my router. After doing so, they successfully logged in! Now I, or anyone on my team can access the server anywhere with an internet connection – hotels, coffee shops, etc.

Connecting to the RStudio GUI though Firefox on my Windows machine

Well that’s pretty much it, I have to say I’m happy that I posted this week as promised. I used to have trouble with these things as a kid but I feel that I’ve stayed on task much better as an adult. One study claims that it’s because kids have too much grey matter. My dad once said that “smart people just explain things away” when I tried giving him excuse one time as to why I forgot to replace the window stickers inside my car last year. I had trouble understanding what he meant but I think he meant that when scientists come up with explanations for these phenomena (in this case, why kids can’t stay on task), people use these explanations as excuses for their bad behavior. Thanks, Dad. Stay tuned for next week’s posting!

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