Who am I?
I am a 30-something Information Scientist living in Durham and working at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Stuff
Random JavaScript and other Stuff
This is a general repository for stuff that I code that may be of interest, either because it's educational (from either a coding perspective or that of a user), I found it fun, or it's a good example of my work. For the most part, it'll either be fun or it'll relate to things I've blogged about. I'm starting you off in the "Random" section, but you can use the tabs above to navigate to some more specific areas of interest.
Twitter Search
This fairly simple tool uses the Twitter API to allow you to search for tweets (geographically if you're discoverable!) that contain one more more keywords that you type in. Curious who's "bored" within 10 miles of you? How about who's "bored" and at "Starbucks"? Or maybe who's "bored" and wouldn't mind a game of "chess"?
Click here to Search for Tweets.
NSSE Holiday Cards
I've been trying to make creative interactive holiday cards for my office each winter for the last three years. Not sure how much longer I'll be with them, but hopefully you'll get a kick out of the three that I've created so far!
Monty Hall Problem
If you've seen the movie "21" with Kevin Spacey, or you've taken a stats or probability class, you may very well have heard of this problem. Monty Hall was the host of "Let's Make a Deal". A typical "deal" would involve letting the player pick a door out of three, behind two of which were two "goats" (either real goats or other relatively undesirable "prizes"), and behind one of which was something nice like a car. Once the player picked, Monty would eliminate one of the remaining doors as a definite loser and ask if the player wanted to switch for the remaining door. Seemingly based on a desire to avoid appearing unsure (or perhaps feeling it was a trick, or that they'd feel silly if they gave up the winning door that they'd already picked), many (perhaps more often than not?) would stick with their original choice, believing that they had a 1/2 chance of winning. In fact, because new information had been introduced into the game, they were more likely to win if they chose to switch (2/3 chance). This was because there was a 2/3 chance that they had ORIGINALLY picked the wrong door, and Monty had just removed the only remaining loser.