week four

Hi!

In the beginning of this week, I decided that my program was (1) too slow, and (2) not user-friendly enough. So, I decided to make my program more interactive by adding a “menu” option and putting stuff in functions. This way, the data can be processed just once, manipulated only when needed, and accessed as often as necessary.

The menu option to access the frequencies of classes.

After finishing the menu options, I spent much of my time reading. To do the “real” stuff, I need to understand what it is I am doing. To understand it, I need to read papers. Fun! In all seriousness, though, the contents of the papers were really interesting, even if I needed to search up the meaning of just about every other word.

Since the “real” stuff entails working with enormously large data sets, my adviser said that I could tap into the cluster! This is a huge relief since I’d rather not continue to crash my computer with every run of the program. Basically, the cluster allows people to access the power of many computers from their own computer. This would allow them to handle larger files and other such things without crashing their computers.

This week, I setup RStudio, the platform I will use to mess with the data. RStudio uses R, a programming language that I am not too familiar with, so I will need to learn how to use it.

Still reading those papers.

See you next time!