Hands-on Tutorials
Can the 170k #gamestop tweets from Jan 25th-29th gives us an insight into the ensuing market chaos?
On Jan 26th at 4:08 PM EST, Elon Musk tweeted “Gamestonk!!” in reference to the “wallstreetbets” Reddit page, which now has over 9 million subscribers. Interestingly, this was just a few minutes after the stock market closed, one has to wonder if Musk timed this. The following day, Gamestop stock (NYSE: GME) jumped 2.5x. We know how the stock market reacted to Musk, the data is out there. Just google NYSE: GME and you will see the day to day changes in Gamestop stocks.
The Olympics are where the world comes together. And Twitter is where the world shares views. Let’s use Graphia and NetworkX to see how Twitter is reacting to Simone Biles’ decision
What Simone Biles did is extremely brave. Or at least, that is an opinion — which I share. I also passionately believe that what she did will help go a long way in moving our society towards less prejudice and more equality. There are certain false expectations and biases in our society; whether in regards to race, gender, or in this case — what top class athletes should or should not do. We are slowly starting to see that these siloed views do not tell the whole story, and can cause great stress. Simone Biles is standing up for herself…
This week’s cyber-physical news takes a deep dive into recent high profile cyber-attacks, the Biden administration’s response, and a typo in Biden’s executive order!
2021 is already proving to be a record year for cyber-attacks. It’s not so much that the cyber-attacks are particularly sophisticated, but that these attacks are having societal consequences that no-one anticipated. There is also the rise in geopolitical tensions that is evident through the enablers of these cyber-attacks. The SolarWinds attack in which the attackers obtained access to U.S. governmental networks was attributed to Russian state actors. DarkSide is a Russia based ransomware organization, which took responsibility for the Colonial Pipeline attacks. The Biden administration recently came out with a statement accusing China of the recent Exchange cyber-attacks.
Today, more than ever — the Internet of Things is changing our lives. The COVID pandemic has only accelerated this trend, and is uprooting traditions that were founded centuries or just decades ago. We have a chance to reform the inflated educational system and dramatically reduce costs through online education. Artificial intelligence has the potential for life-saving changes through intelligent transportation, healthcare innovations, and improved accessibility. Already, the internet has reduced inequalities in developing nations: artificial intelligence could usher in a new era of opportunities.
However, the same technological innovations have a dark side. Recent trends to connect everything to…
Thoughts and Theory
A tutorial on advanced traffic simulations in complex urban networks using SUMO and python
Understanding, predicting, and ultimately — reducing traffic congestion in urban networks is a complex problem. Even understanding the emergence of traffic congestion in the most simple case — a single lane road, is challenging. The Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) platform is an open source platform that enables simulation of traffic flows in complex environments. But apart from the SUMO documentation, a few Stack Overflow posts, and some YouTube videos, there aren’t many tutorials I’ve come across that teach you how to create a complex traffic simulation from start to finish. This article is going to do this exact thing…
https is a big deal when it comes to security, professional look, and SEO rankings
I’ve been using the minimal mistakes theme on GitHub to create a website. So far I’ve loved it for my use cases. Originally I was using Wixsite for a website. But I’m so used to writing on editors that I like, or Medium’s WYSIWYG editor, that I became quite annoyed by Wix. Wix is like Powerpoint for a website. Yes everything is customizable and there’s movable boxes. But I prefer something minimalist and robust, for blogs. I could have gone ahead and made a WordPress site, but GitHub pages is free! And I love the idea of coding in interfaces…
I was pleasantly surprised this financial best seller emphasizes the mindset of creating value for the life you want, rather than running after money.
Kiyosaki’s birth father was an intellectual man, but apparently lost his money because of poor financial decisions. The rich dad was Kiyosaki’s friend’s dad, who taught him lessons in financial literacy and financial freedom, through allowing Kiyosaki to follow in his footsteps. Through the book, Kiyosaki illustrates the financial lessons he learned by working for his friend’s father. One such lesson is that the rich don’t work for money. To me this statement makes sense as Kiyosaki explains it — the middle class is caught in a never ending trap of making stable but low wages. As a result, many…
Thoughts and Theory
A novel comparison between KMeans, DBSCAN, Hierarchical clustering models in machine learning, applied to urban networks
Take a look at the popular machine learning toolbox in Python, scikit-learn’s page on different clustering algorithms — and you will see comparisons between 10 different algorithms. The package developers have done an excellent job in comparing and visualizing different clustering algorithms applied to different toy scenarios. The strength of these visualizations is that you for sure know the ground truth — 3 blobs are supposed to be 3 clusters, for example. However, this does not explicitly tell us how these algorithms will fare with geospatial data, which can be quite complex. …
The importance of mental discipline and the never-ending search for truth
Reading Gandhi’s autobiography last year opened up my eyes to the importance of mental discipline and training, which is not often as discussed as physical training. But I would argue that mental training is as important (if not more) than physical training. The difference is that when you train your body, you see improvements when you look at yourself in the mirror. This positive feedback gives you motivation to continue exercising as part of a weekly regimen. In most cases, the mirror is a true physical reflection of your physical self. However, there is no such reflection of an improving…
Let’s use data to understand the role of the Colonial pipeline in the larger U.S. petroleum-product pipeline network.
The impacts of the recent Colonial pipeline ransomware cyber-attack are being felt across the entire southeast of the United States. The perpetrators — a well known ransomware group known as DarkSide—have claimed that their goal was never to disrupt the society:
“Our goal is to make money, and not creating problems for society. From today we introduce moderation and check each company that our partners want to encrypt to avoid social consequences in the future.”
But one wonders if this is entirely true. After all, DarkSide is based in Russia, and the recent SolarWinds cyber-attacks that originated from Russia resulted…
Skanda Vivek
Scientist at the interface of data science, cybersecurity, and society. For data based perspectives on societal issues → https://skandavivek.substack.com/
