Eric J Ma's Website

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On Learning Math

written by Eric J. Ma on 2017-01-05 | tags: data science education graduate school

Though I will admit to being somewhat algebra-blind (more on that later), I wasn't necessarily bad at math concepts. I did have one big problem with the way I was learning math, though - it always seemed to be more theoretical and less... (read more)

(367 words, approximately 2 minutes reading time)
On "Openness = Source Code Inspectability"

written by Eric J. Ma on 2017-01-03 | tags: open science open source peer review

One tenet of open science is the notion of "being able to inspect the source code". It's a good, lofty goal, but it comes with a big assumption that I think needs to be made clear.

This assumption is that scientists who are reviewing papers... (read more)

(355 words, approximately 2 minutes reading time)
My Flask app-building sprint

written by Eric J. Ma on 2016-12-27 | tags: software engineering side projects flask python

Overview

This winter, I decided to embark on a coding project purely for fun. In preparation to build my own Raspberry Pi photo display, I wanted to build an easily-installable, portable (across operating systems) and... (read more)

(2416 words, approximately 13 minutes reading time)
How to make your Python scripts callable from the command-line

written by Eric J. Ma on 2016-12-24

So you've written this awesome Python module/script that does awesome stuff, but now you want to call it from the command line. I'm going to show you how to make this happen.

First off, create your Python script. Below, borrowing from the (read more)

(299 words, approximately 2 minutes reading time)
Female Doctors are Better than Male Doctors - For Real?

written by Eric J. Ma on 2016-12-20 | tags: data science statistics

For real. Read on for the statistical perspective on why.

I saw this article published by JAMA, posted by a number of my friends on Facebook. The claim here was that patients treated by women doctors show lower readmission rates than... (read more)

(571 words, approximately 3 minutes reading time)
Experimenting with GitHub Pages

written by Eric J. Ma on 2016-12-15

I've been playing a ton with GitHub pages recently, and so far, I've been impressed! My main use case has been in creating places where I can host Reveal.js slides online, and showcasing some writing that I've put together that doesn't fit in my... (read more)

(400 words, approximately 3 minutes reading time)
Scientific Inquiry, Layman's Version

written by Eric J. Ma on 2016-12-08 | tags: science

Today on Facebook, I saw a link shared by the friend of a professor at Berkeley whose group I nearly joined 6 years ago. (Life would have been very different if I did.) It was a link to a (read more)

(347 words, approximately 2 minutes reading time)
The Renaissance Researcher

written by Eric J. Ma on 2016-12-01

This is the computational biologist who knows how to design, execute, and analyze wet lab experiments and the generated data. This is the wet lab scientist who knows how to develop software that crunches the massive amounts of data that her... (read more)

(614 words, approximately 4 minutes reading time)
Book Thoughts: The Theory That Would Not Die

written by Eric J. Ma on 2016-11-10

One of two eBooks I bought to read on this trip to Vienna was "The Theory That Would Not Die". It was a good read, and I definitely have come to appreciate more the history behind Bayes' rule and its multiple deaths and resurrections.

Three... (read more)

(291 words, approximately 2 minutes reading time)
Vienna & IMED 2016 Reflections

written by Eric J. Ma on 2016-11-10

This trip & conference was a productive one! I'm glad I went for it and didn't have to miss out on much (even though WebJet/Turkish Airlines (still can't sort out which) messed up my initial flight booking big-time).

My biggest takeaways... (read more)

(462 words, approximately 3 minutes reading time)
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