Anatomy of a Django-driven Data Server

I haven’t had time to write anything this week because I am up to my neck in this Seven-Samurai-style software engineering project. You know, where a bunch of untrained villagers (that’s me) need to defend themselves against marauding bandits (that’s the Global Burden of Disease 2005 Study), so they have to learn everything about [...]

Welcome to National Public Health Week

Since 1995, presidential decree has designated the first full week of April to be National Public Health Week in the United States. The American Public Health Association is kicking things off with an online “viral video” campaign. Public health has much more experience trying to stop the spread of viruses, so this campaign [...]

ACO in Python: Minimum Weight Perfect Matchings (a.k.a. Matching Algorithms and Reproductive Health: Part 4)

This is the final item in my series on Matching Algorithms and Reproductive Health, and it brings the story full circle, returning to the algorithms side of the show. Today I’ll demonstrate how to actually find minimum-weight perfect matchings in Python, and toss in a little story about .

Items of Interest

MIT faculty makes scholarly articles freely and openly available to the entire world.
Google Summer of Code returns, and suggested Python projects. (A nice way for students to spend the summer, especially during an “economic downturn”).
And for those of you that are looking for NSF grants to apply to: Foundations of Data and Visual Analytics.

Gowers’s Polymath Experiment: Problem probably solved

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the exciting experiment in online math collaboration, where Tim Gowers invited the world to set out and develop a combinatorial proof of the density Hales-Jewitt theorem (DHJ). Big congratulations to them, because the problem is solved, probably. Summarizing why he spent his time on this particular [...]

ACO in Python: PADS for Minimum Spanning Trees

Sometimes, instead of working, I like to see what search terms are bringing readers to my blog. The most common search that healthyalgorithms has been most useless for is “minimum spanning tree python”. Today, I’ll remedy that.
But first, dear searchers, consider this: why are you searching for minimum spanning tree code in python? [...]

Hurrah for Free/Open Software like PyMC

A few posts ago, when I told you how amazingly simple it turned out to be to sample independent sets with PyMC.  Remember when I said that it was working a little differently than I expected, though?  I sent an email to the pymc-users mailing list, and, in just a few days, one of the [...]