Bill Lampos

Our latest work, where we predict flu rates from the content of Twitter, has been featured in the media.

The primary article was published in MIT Technology Review:
"How Twitter Could Better Predict Disease Outbreaks" (July 14, 2010)
by Christopher Mims

It was also reproduced in or pointed by New York Times, Communications of the ACM, Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence  and Federal News Radio.

A departmental press release about it is also available:
"Predicting Flu from the content of Twitter" (July 1, 2010)
in the news of Computer Science Department, University of Bristol

Flu detector is available at http://geopatterns.enm.bris.ac.uk/epidemics/ and will be presented to the public in ECML PKDD 2010 (September 20-24).

Do you think that a presentation in LaTeX looks better than what is produced by a WYSIWYG editor? Then start using the beamer class! Beamer is a LaTeX class which provides a lot of easy commands - tricks - libraries for producing presentations. Yes, the ones that you were used to author using Microsoft Powerpoint or similar WYSIWYG editors. I was searching the web for a proper and easy-to-follow example of the beamer class, but it took me some time, so when I finally compiled a LaTeX presentation, I thought it might be useful to make it publicly available. Therefore, the attached documents are only good for beginners!

If you are using MiKTeX in WinEdt, my source code should be considered as plug and play! There is no need to download the beamer class, WinEdt will do it for you automatically (at the compilation time). My sense is that in any modern LaTeX setup scenario the .tex LateX source code for the presentation should compile OK.

All the files (a .tex file and 2 figures) are included in this archive:
-- Presentation using beamer class in LaTeX

The final outcome is the pdf file:
-- LaTeX presentation pdf

Those files are a very good starting point (template). There is always a lot of information available online about everything. You can do magic, if you want to do more!

Here is a list of expressions that people use to describe or talk about rainy weather:

• A thunder woke me up last night
• Be careful! The weather forecast mentioned sleet
• I enjoy rain showers
• It is a real toad choker
• It is chucking it down
• It is coming down like a cow pissing on a flat rock
• It is drizzling
• It is foul weather today
• It is hailing
• It is pissing it down
• It is pouring rain
• It is raining
• It is raining cats and dogs
• It is raining hard
• It is raining pitchforks and plowhandles
• It is raining to beat sixty
• It was a drizzly day
• It was showery today
• My umbrella was useless today
• Nice weather for ducks
• Not this drizzle again
• Sometimes I enjoy sudden rainfalls
• The buckets are coming down
• This is a big storm
• This is a thunderstorm
• We are flooding

Suppose that you have to execute a Java program which is fairly unstable and sometimes hangs on and never terminates. Is there a simple way to make it terminate (actually by killing the process) after some time? Yes, of course. There is always a way for such things. Ways for everything do not exist though.

So, let's say you have a program.jar to execute but you want to kill its process after 5 minutes in case it does not terminate. A very easy way to do this is the following:

#!/bin/bash

# here you set the time you want to wait before killing the process
time=5m

# then you run your program in the background
java -jar program.jar &

# you are waiting for the time you have set 
sleep $time

# some printing - for fun
termination="\nTerminating the process...!!\n"
echo -e $termination

# and now you are about to kill it
kill %1

You can create a script.sh file, just copy paste the code above, and then run the script.sh file (by using the command > sh script.sh).

Camel - Stationary Traveller ...