# Blog

## Deriving the power of Wald test for a single parameter

Posted by on Jun 22, 2016 in Blog | 0 comments

While studying from Larry Wasserman’s “All of Statistics”, I’ve found that the exposition of the Wald test was a little confusing to me, so that I struggled a bit in trying to derive a key result. Given that I didn’t find much on the internet to help me, and that I finally figured it out after a while, I thought of writing a small post for other confused students. Given a scalar parameter $$\theta$$ of the distribution underlying the data, the Wald test uses its estimate $$\hat{\theta}$$ to compute a statistic $${W}$$, which is then used to pit a null hypothesis $${H}_0$$ against an alternative hypothesis $${H}_1$$. The distribution of the...

## Minimum Edit Distance in Python

Posted by on Jan 21, 2016 in Blog | 0 comments

While I’m going through the NLP course by Jurafsky and Manning on coursera, I coded a small python implementation of the Wagner-Fischer algorithm presented in lecture 6, 7 and 8. And here it is! Please refer to the lectures for a more in-depth explanations of the algorithm. I’ll just go quickly through the basics and then present the code. Introduction “How similar are these two strings?” Many people from different fields often end up asking themselves this question: the computational biologist comparing sequences of bases to see if they contain similar information; the computer scientist implementing speech recognition, trying to make sense of...

## On the objectivity of Morality and Beauty

Posted by on Jan 7, 2016 in Blog | 0 comments

For the holidays, I made two resolutions: to fill my belly with quality food, and to fill my mind with quality thoughts. Both have been a success; the first one thanks to a girlfriend with a knack for cooking, the second one thanks to the local bookstore applying a very timely 20% off everything. Importantly, most of the quality thoughts that popped inside my holiday mind were brought about by one particular book. Sometime before Christmas, a friend pointed me to a great conversation between Sam Harris and Quantum Computation maven David Deutsch. Their discussion revolves on the ideas presented in the physicist’s book “The beginning of infinity”,...

## Heteroclinic Switching simulator and visualizer

Posted by on Nov 15, 2015 in Blog | 0 comments

I’ll very soon be pleased to give a talk about my work on heteroclinic dynamics to other heteroclinic people with heteroclinic interests at the Heteroclinic dynamics in neuroscience workshop this December in Nice. In this heteroclinic setting, I thought it would be worth it to have a simple interactive simulation to play with while I illustrate my findings, as I don’t want the talk to be boring, and nothing boosts understanding like a good visualization! So I spent the last few days programming a simple visualizer in Python for the switching dynamics in the system described here, built upon the simulator I am using to produce the Terabyte of data needed for...

## Putting some make up on my org-mode flashcards

Posted by on Jul 16, 2015 in Blog | 1 comment

Lately I’ve been playing with org-drill, an extension to Emacs org-mode implementing a spaced repetition algorithm for flashcard drills. That is, org-drill lets you write flashcards in the form of org outlines plus  special syntax, and have study sessions where the cards are presented to you using some special algorithms that should improve retention. The flashcards can have hidden text/images, present hints, have multiple faces, together with other useful settings.     One of the main points of org-drill is of course its integration in org-mode, letting you keep your flashcards together with your other plain-text notes. The flashcards are no different from any...