FM Waves

After reading a lot of posts patronising Numb3rs I decided to have a taster. Regretfully in Spain was a total disaster (where’s our education system going?), and in Brazil, where I’m currently living, I think it’s on cable (however, from the last news appeared on press, the education system for maths is as bad as an 8th grader, about 14 years old, having problems calculating percentages). Well, but that’s not the point; the thing is I bought the First Season DVD Set and watched the first two chapters. Here we go!.

Minuses:

_ The acting is not very good…, I imagine… yet. It’s just the first two.

_ Why the mathematician has to be presented as a troubled mind?.

Pluses:

_ I liked the way maths is inserted into the action…, natural, we do use maths everyday and this is shown.

_ The most I liked was the way they try to introduce “humanity” within maths. I think our colleagues from INFORMS Section, Behavioral Process Management, will be happy.

Thanks! And remember, It’s just my opinion.

The Netflix Prize is in the company’s own words the”quest” for “substantially improve(ing) the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences”.

I read about the prize last february on Michael Trick’s blog and the first thing I saw was the $1 Million for the winner. However, although we’re on it for the money (YES!) we don’t thing we gonna get it. So, let’s mess about it!:

_For all of you that are, like me, amateur OR-ers, I’m starting a series of posts showing where the heck I am.

……………………………………………………….

1) The data: the training set (data you have to use to create the model) is made up of more than 17 thousand text files. So, although some experts are advising on Netflix’s forums not to group them, I’ll do.

Following my own weaknesses and economist-like-mind I’m going to group the data in a single file, in order to dump it into a database (PostgreSQL, probably). Even more, as I don’t have time to learn any other language, I’ll be using VBA for Excel.

Here we go…

Sub AgrupaDatos()

Dim N As Double
Dim TextoArchivo As String

Open “C:\training_set.txt” For Output As #1

For N = 1 To 17770
Open “C:\training_set\mv_00″ & Format(N, “00000″) & “.txt” For Input As #2

Do While Not EOF(2)
Line Input #2, TextoArchivo
Print #1, TextoArchivo
Loop

Close #2

Next N

Close #1

End Sub

The module above takes about 30 minutes (Pentium 1.73 Ghz, 1GB RAM) to process the data into a file with a size of 1,92GB.

Next, the database.

Some of them have nothing to do with OR…; what the heck!?: everything has to do with OR!

I’ve just been listening to “In a Gadda da Vida” from “Iron Butterfly”, you know, the guys from the sixties that performed one of those wonderful more-than-seventeen-minutes song (yeah you’ll know!).

Well, when I was near to the end I decided to write this post. I remembered some articles I read time ago in the press, browsed INFORMS pages and… ta, tah…

2004 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers

…operations researchers that mixed (as good DJ’s) music and OR (normally both are lifestyles!).

Hi dear all,

Let me tell you what I’m reading at the moment. It’s “Company: A novel”, by Max Barry.

If you hate management books (as I do) you’ll love it. Mr Barry, an ex-HP employee, gives successfully and satiracally interesting answers to all our questions about management by means of the characters/employees of a holding company named Zephyr.

I’m not saying anything else (I’m not the type of guy that would tell you that in “Backbroke Mountain” one of the couple dies at the end of the movie). I’ll let you discover yourself. However, I’m giving you a warning: beware of HR, they’re everywhere…

Are you taking the challenge?.