This week has been mostly devoted to understanding singular value decomposition (SVD) and latent semantic analysis (LSA), and the relevance they might have to this problem. I've been reading tutorials in order to understand theses, in order to understand scholarly articles. I understand the math behind SVD now (which I'm pretty excited about), but implementing it is tricky. I've found a couple of Ruby gems that do it automatically, but I've been running into problems with them. Right now, I can either try to write it myself, which is no trivial task, switch to another language and use some other package, or keep trying to solve the issues with the Ruby gems. I've tried a little of each of these things, but I think I'm just going to keep working with the Ruby gems.
On Friday, I worked from my apartment since it was the 4th of July. At night, there were fireworks at the college campus. I didn't go, but I watched them from right outside the apartment building and had a pretty good view even though they were about 2 miles away. On Saturday, I went with Professor Colunga and her family to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and the Denver Art Museum, which was very exciting. The museums were probably the biggest I've ever been in, and I think this was also my first visit to a state capital.