I haven’t had time to write anything this week because I am up to my neck in this Seven-Samurai-style software engineering project. You know, where a bunch of untrained villagers (that’s me) need to defend themselves against marauding bandits (that’s the Global Burden of Disease 2005 Study), so they have to learn everything about being a samurai (that’s writing an actual application that people other than this one villager can use) as quickly as possible.
I guess this analogy is stretching so thin that you could chop it with Toshirō Mifune’s wooden sword. But, if anyone knows how a mild-mannered theoretical computer scientist can get a web-app built in two weeks, holler. If you prefer to explain in terms of wild-west gunslingers, that is fine.
Here’s my game plan so far: I’m going to make the lightest of light-weight Python/Django apps to hold all the Global Disease Data, and then try to get my epidemologist doctors to interact with it on the command-line via an interactive python session.
The rest of this post is basically a repeat of the Django tutorial, but specialized for building a data server for global population data. As far as interesting theoretical math stuff, hidden somewhere towards the end, I’ll do some interpolation with PyMC’s Gaussian Processes using the exotic (to me) Matérn covariance function. Continue reading
Healthy Algorithms 