Week Four: June 7 - June 11

This week has gone so fast. I rewrote my Java programs to handle both 6-month period and 12-month period analysis. That took some time to finish, and I also had new stuffs coming up. Professor Lerman and Rumi suggested that I should write informal reports to keep track of what I have done and explain the algorithm I used to estimate parameters. As the work started piling up, I felt like I needed to prioritize tasks better.

Rumi had suggested another method of the computations of chains and asked me to test it on small samples. I like to do experiment and understand how things work, so I spent Wednesday and Thursday working on this. At the end of the week, I received a request from Professor Lerman to take a look at another dataset from Physical Review and do some statistical analysis on it. The data come in XML format which means I had to parse it into MySQL server. I was hoping I could spend some time over the weekend learning about XML and how to properly parse it into other format like CSV or Excel. Since the dataset is pretty big so I have to be careful about memory usage when reading and parsing files especially in Java.

Lessons Learned:
1) w3schools.com is a great place to learn XML.

Weekend:
Nothing special. I stayed home, cooked, learned XML, and watched 2010 FIFA world cup. I grew up in Thailand where people are crazy about soccer, so I can't miss the world cup. I'm a big fan of Spain by the way. =)