Posted by: admin 6 days, 3 hours ago (Comments) Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a large-scale physics experiment to detect gravitational waves. LIGO is a joint project between scientists at MIT, Caltech, and many other colleges and universities. Scientists involved in the project and the analysis of the data for gravitational-wave astronomy are organised by the LIGO […]
Over-optimizing: a story about Kaggle.
I recently took a stab at a Kaggle competition. The premise was simple, given some information about insurance quotes, predict whether or not the customer who requested the quote will follow through and buy the insurance. Straight forward classification problem, data already clean and in one place, clear scoring metric (Area under the ROC curve). […]
Hacking the Worcester Wave thermostat in Python – Part 2
In the previous part we had established that the Worcester Wave thermostat app communicates with a remote server (run by Worcester Bosch) using the XMPP protocol, with TLS encryption. However, because of the encryption we haven’t yet managed to see the actual content of any of these messages! To decrypt the messages we need to do […]
Python Mocking 101: Fake It Before You Make It
In Python, mocking is accomplished through the unittest.mock module. The module contains a number of useful classes and functions, the most important of which are the patch function (as decorator and context manager) and the MagicMock class. Mocking in Python is largely accomplished through the use of these two powerful components.
Deploying Python Web Applications with nginx and uWSGI Emperor
You just wrote a great Python web application. Now, you want to share it with the world. In order to do that, you need a server, and some software to do that for you. The following is a comprehensive guide on how to accomplish that, on multiple Linux-based operating systems, using nginx and uWSGI Emperor. […]
Thumbs Up for the Cognitive Watson Services
Over the last weeks I had to pleasure to investigate most of the Watson services on Bluemix. Below is a series of articles I published on my personal blog. In the articles I describe the different services, most of the times by providing simple samples including code snippets and screenshots. Overall I really like the […]
EARL London 2016 – Call for Abstracts
We are pleased to announce a call for abstracts for presentations for this year’s London EARL (Effective Applications of the R Language) Conference – 13th – 15th September 2016 Abstracts should be submitted online; the deadline for submissions is the 29th April 2016. We welcome submissions on any topic around the application and usage of R in […]
Usage of Underscores before and after function name in Python
Posted by: admin 2 days, 21 hours ago (Comments) We often find underscore(s) before and after the function name in python while reading the source code. Do you know why and where it has to be used? I’ll impart the use of underscore in Python’s function name. There are three possibilities of underscore occurred in function name, one […]
BaselR User Group – 13th April 2016
Click to join our mailing list and receive automatic updates on all future BaselR events. Be a speaker Volunteering to speak at a BaselR event is a great way to share your ideas and experiences with other group members and also looks good on a CV. The events are friendly and welcoming and we’d be […]
Django: Run Multiple Update Queries Faster with Database transaction
Posted by: admin 3 days, 22 hours ago (Comments) Django’s default behaviour is to run autocommit mode. Each query is immediately committed to the database unless a transaction is active. Django provides a single API to control database transactions. atomic allows us to create a block of code or a function within which the atomicity of the database is guaranteed. If […]
Hacking the Worcester Wave thermostat in Python – Part 1
When we bought a new boiler last year, we decided to install a ‘smart thermostat’. There are a wide range available these days, including the Google Nest, the Hive (from British Gas), and the Worcester Bosch ‘Wave’. As we had a Worcester Bosch boiler we got the Wave – and it wasn’t much more expensive […]
Descriptive Statistics using Python
Descriptive Statistics After data collection, most Psychology researchers use different ways to summarise the data. In this tutorial we will learn how to do descriptive statistics in Python. Python, being a programming language, enables us many ways to carry out descriptive statistics. Pandas makes data manipulation and summary statistics quite similar to how you would […]
Electron Release Manager
Recently we released a new version of our Rodeo, our data science IDE. In the past this meant our users would have to go to our homepage, click on the Rodeo page, download Rodeo again, and then reinstall it. But luckily this is no longer the case! As of the v1.1 release, we’re officially supporting […]
Weighing options with python and petersburg
In the past few weeks I’ve posted a number of examples of applications for petersburg. You can check them out here, here and here. It is, in short, an extension of probabilistic decision graphs and Bayesian networks that allows for some interesting analysis on decision theoretic problems. The interesting thing that arises out of this […]