Articles of the Week
Pubbies of the Week
Machine Learning in a Nutshell
Categories: Tech | Pubby Cash Received:
0
Have you used Siri, Alexa, or any other chatbot? I'm sure you have. Now many people wonder how on earth could a person inside that phone talk to you whenever you want. First of all, there's no person. It's all artificial intelligence. What's artificial intelligence, you ask? It's intelligence demonstrated by machines, unlike the knowledge displayed by humans and animals. The bot in your phone is demonstrating intelligence by communicating with you (picking up and understanding what you tell it). Some people don't stop there. How can a non-living "thing" be able to speak and understand? That all comes down to the art of coding. Which kind of coding? Machine learning is where you should look. It's the process of machine learning (basically how to train your "bot"). First, there is data collection. Your machine learning model will need lots of data to train it. Think of it like this: how would you learn a new language? You would learn each word, one by one until you know the entire language, right? The same goes for training your machine learning model. You feed it thousands (even millions) of samples so it can get a deeper understanding. However, there is one little note: don't feed it all of the data. People recommend using 80% of the data for training and the remaining 20% for testing. It's because when you're testing the data, you want to see how accurate the model is at predicting the values for the data. If the model has already seen the entire data set, then it will get 100% every time. (It's kind of like cheating in a sense) The second step is to choose the model. This step can get tricky, but you can also be creative. A machine learning model is a file that was trained to recognize certain types of patterns. You train a model over a set of data, providing it an algorithm that it can use to reason over and learn from those data. One of the most common models out there is the linear regression model. A linear regression model will draw a line given your data and predict the relationship between two variables or factors. The factor that is being predicted (the factor that the equation solves for) is called the dependent variable. (Just a quick note: if you like machine learning, then you must be into a lot of math!) Anyways, the third step is to evaluate the model. It's when the test data you set aside, in the beginning, will be used. Now you will see how accurate your model is. In most cases, the more you train your model, the more accurate it will be. If your model is performing at where you want it to be, it is time to use that model in your projects. Let's say you wanted to understand the relationship between drug dosage and blood pressure of patients. Here, you would collect samples of drug dosage and blood pressure and train your linear regression model.... Read more
Kinect Games for the Xbox 360
Categories: Tech | Pubby Cash Received: 0
Do you like to play video games, but you realize that you don't get enough exercise. Well, Kinect games for the Xbox 360 is the right thing for you. Kinect games are video games, but instead of using a controller, you use your body to play. You can jump, kick, slide, and more to play the game it is fun and it also gets you into good shape. It will now mention a few Kinect games that I would recommend. The first one is Kinect Sports. This game features six different sports to play. The six sports are soccer, bowling, track and field, boxing, volleyball, and ping pong. Kinect Sports is fun because you can play with multiple people. The maximum amount of people that can play is four. You can play with someone against the computer or go head to head against someone. This is why Kinect Sports is a game that I would recommend. The second game that I would recommend is Kinect Adventures. This game features five modes of gameplay. These five are 20,000 Leaks, River Rush, Rally Ball, Reflex Ridge, and Space Pop. This game requires running jumping and dodging. I like this game because there is a lot of action and you can play with more than one person. All in all, Kinect games for the Xbox 360 are really fun and I recommend you to get it. ... Read more
Effectively Using APIs
Categories: Tech | Pubby Cash Received: 0
There's a product you want really bad, but it's sold out. And every time it becomes available again, you're always too late. Sounds like you need to do some coding that will track that website and whenever that product becomes available, your code will email you, letting you know. But doing so isn't that straightforward, as popular websites know this and will block you from scraping their data. That's when you turn to their API (or application programming interface). Most popular websites provide you with an API key which you can use in your code to query their data. However, there is a catch. Websites do not like programs (like the one you're going to make) that repeatedly access their website. It gets annoying very fast because that website has to serve other people and programs, not only you. So when such occurs, the website will block you yet again, saying that you have gone over the limit. This is why it is important to continuously monitor and revise your code so there aren't any uncontrolled infinite loops, for example. APIs are hosted on web servers. When you type www.google.com in your browser’s address bar, your computer is asking the www.google.com server for a webpage, which it then returns to your browser. Now when you want to track the price of a product, of course, you're not going to do that! You would write a neat program that does all of the tiring work for you. This data is usually returned in JSON format, but it can come in other formats too. To get the data, you have to request a web server. The server then replies with our data. Let's say you want to track the price of a motherboard you want on Amazon. First, you would need to create an AWS account and activate your Marketplace subscription. Once you get your API keys from there, it's time to use them. We are going to do this using Python. Pop open your Terminal or Command Prompt and type 'pip install amightygirl.paapi5-python-sdk' or 'pip3 install amightygirl.paapi5-python-sdk' to install the API package. Then, use the following Python 3 code and fill in the appropriate blanks with your API keys. In this example, we are searching for products with the name "Harry Potter" on it. Click this link to view the code for this program on GitHub.... Read more
COVID-19 Testing in Wastewater - P/A Test Kit in Urgent Need
Categories: Tech | Pubby Cash Received: 10
It has been found that people who are infected with COVID-19 shed the virus in their stool even before they show any symptoms. This generates a necessity of establishing a wastewater surveillance program of testing wastewater periodically and mapping the results to the number of infected people by predictions. I am invited to participate in such a program today for the Borough of Indiana. As the fall semester is approaching, the Borough and the University are worried about the outbreak in a second wave as students are returning to campus from all over the country. In today's Zoom meeting, I proposed to collect time-series of raw wastewater samples from the residence halls and academic buildings, and then to test the presence of the COVID-19 virus in the samples. With sufficient numbers of binary data on presence and absence, an approach of using statistical tools combined with the data on the numbers of people who are using the buildings will be able to give projections on the number of infected people. This sounds promising. However, the problem is how to quickly do the testing with the raw wastewater samples? There is no test kit available so far. According to this EPA webpage, such standard method of concentrating and quantifying SARS-CoV-2 with molecular and live, or infectious, assays in wastewater is still under development. With regard to the non-standard methods, the MedRxiv has this paper, which has not gone through a peer-review process. The method introduced by this paper involved processes of wastewater pasteurization (at 60 deg C for 1-1.5 hrs for virus inactivation), 0.2 um membrane filtration (40 mL filtrate is stored at 4 deg C for further analysis), filtrate centrifugation (precipitated viral particles collected and resuspended), RNA extraction, and then quantitative PCR (qPCR). The process is labor-intensive. For individual's home uses, it is just useful for each individual to know the binary data - presence or absence of virus. Quantitatively giving the copies of RNA segments is not that meaningful for each home, despite that it is indeed important to know the proprietary models (by BioBot Analytics Inc - the affiliation of the paper's authors) of mapping the copies of RNA segments from wastewater samples to the actual number of infected people coupled with confirmed clinical cases as validation data points on the larger scale at the Borough or the University. With that said, qualitative methods for COVID-19 testing in wastewater are highly desirable. If there are any P/A test kits available on the market, I will buy it. ... Read more
Building a PC: Choosing the Right Power Supply
Categories: Tech | Pubby Cash Received: 0
It's always a pain when settling on a power supply, especially when it's the first time building a PC. There is no correct way or path to take when it comes to buying a power supply, but these helpful tips could save you some cash or preventing another trip to your nearest Micro Center. Buy a power supply from a reputable manufacturer, and look for reviews of it before you buy it. Corsair, Seasonic, and Antec are three manufacturers with reputations for producing high-quality power supplies, though even they may offer a few duds among all the studs. You don't want your PC to malfunction just because of some crappy PSU you picked up for 40 bucks. It is also important to understand the wattage rating of your power supply. If the maximum power of your combined system’s parts is 300 watts, a 600-watt PSU would be a good fit. Now if you have higher-ended components in your PC, maybe a 1200-watt PSU would work better in this case. You can get by with lower-capacity units if you don't think you'll ever need to extend your framework, but if you can afford it, choosing a higher-capacity PSU is a better bet. Another consideration is cabling. Power supplies are available with hard-wired cabling, with partially modular cabling, or with fully modular cabling. In modular power supplies, you can add or remove cabling from the PSU as needed to avoid case clutter. Make sure that your power supply provides you with everything you need to power your PC. That includes sufficient PCIe cables, plenty of SATA connectors, maybe some MOLEX wires, and all of the other necessities. With a well-functioning and satisfactory power supply doing its job in the computer case, there's no need to stress about explosions or smoke in your office.... Read more