An Amended Quote

Today on The Writer's Almanac, Garrison Keillor read a quote by Gustave Flaubert:

"I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it."

I thought this could use some amending for programmers:

I spent the morning putting in a parenthesis and the afternoon removing it.

Or for you SAS programmers:

I spent the morning putting in a semicolon and the afternoon removing it.

How about SQL:

I spent the morning putting in a column and the afternoon removing it.

Or if you write HTML:

I spent the morning putting in an escaped ampersand and the afternoon removing it.

Why not Python:

I spent the morning importing a library and the afternoon removing it.

Essentially, though, these all boil down to:

I spent the morning putting in (an) arbitrary character(s) and the afternoon removing it.

For all you programmers during this holiday season: May your parentheses be matched (your quotes too!), special characters escaped, and code executable on the first run.

Two Special Notes

A few weeks ago we were packing up all our stuff to move to our new house. During this process, I found two notes from former coworkers, delivered on my last day of work at different jobs. Here's the first:





Here's the transcription in case the image does not appear:

Dear Chris —
     I have enjoyed watching you learn and grow over the last couple of years. You have become and excellent analyst — UWMF is lucky to have you. I will miss your superb work, smiling face and Luca stories! Best of luck to you on this exciting step in your career! I wish you, Kyra and Luca much happiness!
     Sincerely,
     [name]

And here's the second:





with the text:

Chris
     I really appreciate the time and dedication and professionalism that you offered to the [organization's] projects and my RA project in particular. You pressed on to make this all possible, and I am grateful. Regrets for the frustrations along the way, but know that your contribution will be remembered.
    All the best with your next personal + professional pursuits! Congrats on the well deserved Scientist position!
    Thank you,
    [name]

I kept both notes because they are very meaningful to me, and I think this highlights how important it is to write hand-written notes of thanks to you colleagues: It can be touching, powerful, and memorable for the recipient, and the writer has earned a relatively permanent place in memory. It's a perfect way to not only show genuine gratitude, but also earn a positive place in the recipient's mind, whether for the purpose of networking, friendship, or simple kindness.

New House

I haven't been posting much lately because we've been looking for, buying, and moving to a new house! Hopefully once things settle down I'll be back to posting as usual. Stay tuned!

An Attempt to Answer a Quiz Question

Kyra heard the NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle on the radio the other day: "Think of a common French word that everyone knows. Add a 'v' (as in 'violin') to the beginning and an 'e' at the end. The result will be the English-language equivalent of the French word. What is it?"

I thought, well, I don't know French, but I do know how to write a Python program that can look up the answer. Unfortunately, the puzzle appears to be a bit of a trick. I thought as much as I was writing the code. I was thinking, "I bet some people are going to be mad about the answer, because the question was worded in such a way as to be tricky."

At any rate, the code definitely does not result in the right answer, but it was a good exercise for me. First, I had to find two dictionaries robust enough to have a lot of words in English and French. Then I had to find dictionaries: I located the Debian operating system dictionary on my local computer, did a search in the package manager Synaptic for the French equivalent and any other English dictionaries that might help, and downloaded both. (The English alternative is labeled "insane" for its size, which "possibly contains invalid words (as well as words that are very uncommon)." [1])

Next I had to convert certain French characters into their English equivalent. To answer the question, I looked up all English words that start with "V" and end with "E", then removed those two letters, looking up the "word" in the modified French dictionary. It didn't work, as can be told from its output:

a
a
ah
aire
alu
an
ange
ares
as
er
erg
es
es
il
o
t

Yep, those are definitely not the answers. Some, when you add V and E back, aren't  even really English words. "Vte"? What is that? Oh, and I think A is listed twice due to the missing diacritics.

For anyone who's interested, I posted the code online. (It's not pretty posting a lot of code on Blogger, so here it is in a document.) Keep in mind I'm a new programmer, so I might not have done this task very elegantly. It is a short piece of code, though, and it could have worked.

One other note: If you attempt to run it, it may not work on your system. It's designed for Debian GNU/Linux, as it relies on dictionaries in a Debian system and it uses the "/" as the directory delimiter. Additionally, the "insane" dictionary makes it run a bit slow, and I did nothing in the code to help with that, like buffering the file, so you could run out of RAM or peak the CPU. It works on my system, which is all that mattered to me at the time.

Of course, a more robust program should be more careful and actually take user input in some fashion. Perhaps look up words that with other characters or use different languages. As it is, it's more of a "script" that does one thing and non-interactively. In any case, it doesn't even return the "right" answer!

[1] http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/wamerican-insane

Update in May 2012

Last year around this time I had decided to take a risk and leave my position at the University of Wisconsin Medical Foundation for a position at the UW School of Medicine, where I was hoping to be more involved with research. This endeavor hasn't turned out as I expected, so I've decided to move on. Starting later this month, I'll be working with CPM HealthGrades, a marketing firm that is offering more and more data services to their customers.

I accepted the position at CPM HealthGrades as a Data Scientist. This is a pretty cool opportunity in a relatively new field of data analysis, using some of the same technologies behind IBM's Watson computer, the computer that bested two top-rank Jeopardy winners. I'll be learning the programming languages Python and R, and I'm really excited to put these skills to commercial and research use.

As you may know, I attended the SAS Global Forum conference last month, and I plan to keep up with the SAS community as well, by writing papers, presenting, staying in touch with user groups, and maybe even writing a book. So I plan on keeping my SAS site up-to-date; however, I may not be developing much new. Perhaps I'll come out with a Python or R site to go along with it, with translations of code back and forth between the languages. Heck, maybe I'll write a SAS macro to write Python, or a Python module to write SAS. We'll see! Stay tuned for more details!