Digging through 11 years worth of backed-up computer files

I present to you some old, archived pictures from back in the day.  Yet, first is the back story:

Over the years, I've had many items stolen from me -- from my apartment being broken into, car broken into in LA and Boston, hostel staff in Cambodia, to dorm staff at MIT (yes, it was confirmed, and I was reimbursed).  I don't have many material possessions which would cause me to be upset if they were stolen, but one of them is my hard drives (i.e., my photos, videos, etc).

Photography is one of my biggest passions, and I go through great lengths to not only backup and organize on an OCD-like level, but I also even parannoyingly (paranoid + annoyingly) hide all of my external hard drives through my apartment, in the event that my place is broken into again.  By the next time I go to backup my files, it's usually like a nerdy Easter Egg hunt, as I've forgotten where I hid them.

I recently realized I've fortunately never lost any computer file ever since I started started college in 2002.  Yep, 11 years ago.  1.5 terabytes.  500,000 files.  19,000 folders.  It sounds nerdy, but since 2002 I have:

• every single photo I've ever taken -- 1st camera in 2005 (70,000 photos)
• every document I've ever typed (e.g., resume, draft of hand written love letters, journal entry, tax document, etc)
• every class assignment from every university I've attended (70 classes)
• every song I've ever downloaded
• every webpage I've ever made

Alas, after much deliberation, the organization is, as Outkast would say, so fresh and so clean clean.  Here's a glimpse into the 'pics' folder for 2012:

Having caved to the temptation to dig through my old photos and cringe-worthy text documents, I give you a sample:

Junior year at FIT (2005).  I look 13.

Junior year, I took my 1st flight ever.  Solo visited San Fran and Berkeley for Spring Break 2005.  Was getting world-renowned Stuart Russell to sign my AI book.  One's Spring Break doesn't get much wilder than that.

The SlackWear movement I created at FIT :-)

Hawaiian Luau at FIT (2005)

Hawaiian Luau at FIT (2005)

Olin, our engineering building at 2am (2006)

Pictured: Kazi.  We studied hard... (2006)

The signature sub for late night sessions (2006)

Good ol' Damian (2006)

Clearly not impressed with the sushi (2006)

All of us RAs.  Senior year, we've finally gone through puberty and are starting to look like proper to-be adults (2006)

I just wish I owned a camera before 2005.  This stuff is a goldmine.  And, despite how trivial some of the text files (e.g., notes, thoughts, letters) may seem, it's awesome to scan through some of the old stuff.  There are memories I had totally forgotten, moments of accomplishments, failures, happiness, and upsets that I can barely recall which at the time seemed so monumental, and they provide glimpses into a former self which has evidently slowly evolved over the years.

My point: backup everything!  Whether it's to the ever-elusive cloud or locally, imagine having such files when you have grand-kids.

A statistical approach to predicting my getting sick

During my recent trip to Iceland, I thought to myself how grateful I am that I haven't been sick, and that it's surprising because "it's about time I got sick again."  Days later, I randomly got sick (sore throat, constant 102 temp, coughing); I should be fine in 3 more days, though.  In the meantime, just for fun during the winter break, I decided to see if I can define some formalism for this supposed intuition.

Disclaimer: I know this is some rough, make-shift calculations, but given the nature of having so little data, and that the real, useful data is all immeasurable and not at my disposal, this is what you get :-)

I get a sore throat about 5 times each year -- which always lends me voiceless for about a week -- despite the fact that I:

• eat healthy
• workout regularly
• have good hygiene practices (shower at least once a day, brush teeth & floss twice a day, wash hands frequently, etc)
• have no known allergies or health issues (have seen several docs at MIT regarding this)

I've been tempted to just go to NYC and lick every bus pole and escalator handrail I can, in attempt to go ahead and get it over with by subjecting my body to every known bacteria and virus out there.

Obviously, there's a myriad of variables that can cause one to get sick:

• stress
• germs being spread from air, physical contact, etc
• weakened immune system (i.e., from over-training in the gym, stress, etc)

Clearly, these things are easily intertwined and impossible to accurately monitor and model.

However, in late 2007, I wanted to get to the bottom of it and was curious if there were any patterns in my getting sore throats.  So, for the past 5 years, I've quickly logged every time I get sick (a rating of the severity, how many days, and symptoms).

In the following picture, I plot every time I've gotten a sore throat, rounding to the closest week.

Looking at any patterns over time will only show possible correlations, not causes, I know.  Yet, the times I get sick are highly consistent from year to year:

• I pretty much always get sick on Jan 1
• I essentially never get sick from April 1 - July 31
• my sore throat always lasts exactly 6 or 7 days.
• I get sick roughly 5 times every year from August 1 - March 31.
• 100% of the times that I fly overseas, I either get sick while there or soon as I come back -- but it's not always sore throats.  Here, I'm only concerned with sore throats.

I will refer to August 1 - March 31 as the sick period/months, which spans 32 weeks.  For all calculations, we are only concerned with getting sick during the current sick period, and that each one is independent of the previous years'.

Again, since it's impossible to model the aforementioned variables that are the actual causes of getting sick, I figured why not play around with the time-series data and treat it as indications as to when I'll get sick.  So, here we are making the large assumption that all of the underlying sick-causes variables are consistent and uniformly distributed during the sick months, and that I get sick on average 5 times per sick period.  I think this is reasonably fair as a high-level approximation.

If we model my sickness as a Poisson distribution, we see that the probability of getting sick N number of times during a sick period is:

N	probability of getting sick N times
1	0.033689734995427
2	0.084224337488568
3	0.140373895814281
4	0.175467369767851
5	0.175467369767851
6	0.146222808139876
7	0.104444862957054
8	0.065278039348159
9	0.036265577415644
10	0.018132788707822

I like that distribution; it seems to fit my sickness history pretty well... although places a little too much weight on getting sick more than 5 times.

For each one of these possible outcomes (and including all N up to however many weeks we have left... not just N >= 10), there's a chance of getting sick next week, which is simply N/(# of weeks remaining).... again, assuming uniform distribution of everything, including the times I get sick within the sick period.

Further, if we wish to calculate the overall probability of getting sick next week (i.e., summed over each possible N), we simply combine these two things, and weight and normalize by the Poisson probabilities listed in the above table.

As a real life example, last week:

m = 13 (meaning 13 weeks left until March 31 aka end of 'sick period')

n = 2 (meaning I've been sick twice so far)

lambda = 5 (meaning on average I get sick 5 times each year)

Per the above equation, the probability of getting sick this week (which I did) was roughly 42.10%.

Further, if I did not get sick this week, the probability of getting sick the following week would be 45.43%

Further, not getting sick in the 2 upcoming weeks, but getting sick on the following would be 49.14%

Thus, the probability of NOT getting sick during the current week and upcoming 2 weeks was only 16%, which agrees with irking feeling I got: "sweet; I'm not sick... it's been a while though..." 

In the meantime, if anyone is down for my NYC-immunity-deplete-boost idea, let me know.  I'll let you go first as the guinea pig.

Brown is amazing

This week, I officially matriculated as a PhD student at Brown University.

For the past 6 years I've flirted with the idea of pursuing a PhD -- applied to a several schools back during my senior year of college in 2006.  Brown was actually one of those schools.  They rejected me.  As a shot in the dark, I casually sent them an informal email simply asking if I could be considered for their Master's program.  This was very unorthodoxed, as the Master's and PhD programs have separate applications and are examined differently by the admissions committee.  To my surprise, they replied 3 days later with the following opening line:

Dear Christopher,

Congratulations! On behalf of the Department of Computer Science, I'mdelighted to inform you that your application for admission to the Sc.M.program has been approved by this department.

However, I ended up enrolling at UCLA for my Master's.  The future communication I had with Brown would all prove to be equally impressive, genuine, and caring.

In short:

• my undergrad, Florida Tech, was a great school for me, as it served as the perfect stepping stone and challenged me appropriately as I developed foundations in Math and Computer Science.
• UCLA was great and very different from Florida Tech in every way: 40,000 students instead of 4,000.  More Olympic medals and NCAA championships than any other university.  Tons of crazy overachieving high schoolers who are all very diverse in their interests and talents.
• Brown seems to be the best of all worlds, as I briefly explain below.

Brown has the incredibly smart student body, world-class researchers, and over-achieving everybody.  However, the university is small (6,000 ugrads and 2,000 grads) and is within the quaint town of Providence, Rhode Island, which is like the smaller, like-able little brother of Boston.  Moreover, I've never witnessed such genuinely caring professors, staff, and students.  It really is like a tight-knit community, and in short, they do education right here.

Brown is consistently ranked as the #1 college in terms of happy students, and I can now see why.

There's an open-curriculum, where undergrads get to draft their own program.  No other major university in America has this [1].  Classes can be pass/fail if they want.  And surprisingly, the professors -- at least the ones I've had thus far -- are all excellent teachers, which is naturally rare amongst research universities.  Moreover, it is appears common for strangers to first ask you, "How do you like it here so far?" to which both parties then say, "I love it."  It's eerie how often this seems to happen.

I could ramble for a while about little situations that have risen thus far, and how it's been really cool and impressive.  However, I'll just conclude with two very small events that I encountered during my 3 days.  These events were tiny, but yielded a surprising "oh wow" response:

1. In my first Computational Biology class, the very energetic professor was giving motivation for studying the field and provided a very quick intro to biology.  In passing, and just an incidental part of one sentence, he stated, "by the way, just a few years ago, someone won the Nobel Prize in this area... oh yea, and he was a Brown undergrad here"
2. While walking across campus, I stumbled upon a building that had tons of students who were packed in (and even hanging around outside), as everyone watched some intense dancing.  I caught the latter half of some dramatic African dancing which included Bongo drums!  What a diverse and cool student body.

So, in short, my first week has been great.  I love Brown.

[1] http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/brown-university-3401

Things I'll miss and not miss about Boston

When I was a senior in high school, I got rejected from some colleges and heard that the valedictorian got rejected from MIT but accepted to Harvard.  I hadn't heard of MIT but at this time I decided to take education really seriously and that this MIT school would be my goal.  It was a childish goal, but that's how I first come to learn about MIT and Boston.

For spring break in 2006, during my senior year of college, I visited Boston with a great friend.  We enjoyed Boston a lot, which further attracted me.

In 2009, I finished my Master's at UCLA and happily accepted an Associate Staff position at MIT Lincoln Lab.  I moved to the heart of Boston -- the Beacon Hill neighborhood.

Now that I've been here for 3 years, I'm leaving for the next stage.

Things I'll miss about Boston:

• work: without going into specifics, the world-class researchers, resources (from computing to textbooks to journal libraries), and freedom have been phenomenal.  I still proclaim that MITLL is the #1 place in the world to work.

• personal relationships: words cannot express

• location:
• living 1 street from the #1 hospital in the nation
• living 1 street from the subway
• living 1 street from the charming Charles River and Longfellow Bridge
• living .8 mile from Boston Common (the oldest park in the nation)
• living 1 subway stop from MIT, where I can see doctors for medical things
• 10-minute drive to Logan Airport (international airport)

Little nuisances I WON'T miss about Boston:

• tiny/expensive apartment (approx $1,000/sq ft for buying)
• no cell phone reception (at home or at work)
• parking: 
• takes 10-20 minutes to find a parking spot by my apartment (sometimes upwards of 45 minutes or longer)
• must move car often due to street cleaning and whatnot.  on those days, you must move car by 7 or 8am.  if you fail to do so, your car will be towed.  luckily, i've avoided this for 3 years, but it surely involves a lot of effort to stay on top of the situation.
• cars get broken into.  mine did, and all i had visible was a cheap $100 after-market CD player installed.
• commute: 30-minutes to drive to work; 1 hr or more via public transportation
• rudeness: unspecific to Boston, large cities have enough people that there often exists at least a few really rude people in any large crowd, and that such rudeness has a platform for many to see.  unfortunately, i was a direct or indirect audience participant a few times.  oh, and driving in my car is like front-row seats for the show.  related, i'm convinced taxis have no brakes or turn signals.  oddly, they use the horn as a substitute.

I'm packin up and moving out in 1.5 weeks.  Bye bye, Boston!

The Great Safari - Day 1 (From Nairobi to Maasai Mara)

Last year, I went by myself on an African safari for 2 weeks with Good Earth Tours, Inc.  I'm finally going through the video.

Here is day 1 (please watch in 1080p):

Panorama of Boston from the sky!

Okay, not quite "the sky," but I took a 24-shot panorama from Boston's Prudential Tower's Sky Walk, which is on the 50th floor.

Here is the picture at 3 different sizes:

1. Tiny (600 x 385 pixels wide):

2. Medium (6,000 x 3,853 pixels): click here for the picture (23 mbs)

3. Huge/Full-size (13,312 x 8549 pixels): click here for the picture (87 mbs)


The green area is the Boston Common (Park) and Public Garden.  My apartment is to the left of it, in the dark area (but before you see bright lights again).  You'll also notice:

• The capital at the edge of the Boston Common (green area)
• Hancock Tower (the big building in the center)
• Highway 90
• Highway 93
• The Hatch Shell (at the very left side)
• An airplane taking off

Bringing back the fruit smoothies!

For the past 3 years, every morning I make & eat two of the following:

• 2 scrambled eggs with deli meat and sprinkled cheese
• oatmeal with walnuts, cranberries, cinnamon, splenda, with applesauce mixed in
• cereal (optionally with yogurt or banana as another side item)
• 1.25 liter fruit smoothie (during Spring and Summer only)

Spring is now here!  So, once again, the produce at my local farmer's market is now better and more plentiful.

My typical smoothies fill my 1.25 liter blender (42 oz) and are comprised of ~6 of the following items, which I try to change up each time:

• ~7 strawberries
• banana
• mango
• kiwi
• blueberries
• apple
• frozen raspberries
• milk
• vanilla or strawberry protein (casein or whey)
• oats
• chobani or oikos yogurt (usually strawberry, vanilla, or blueberry)
• chopped ice

Here's a sample of one in the making:

From above:

Finished product makes 32oz - 42oz:

Each spring/summer, I try to improve over the previous year's by perfecting the combinations of fruit so that it tastes just right.  It's nothing amazing, but pretty tasty :-)