I’ve also been looking at how to use Spark Structured Streaming with Kafka, a new streaming platform from Spark.

I’ll show here an example of using Spark Streaming to process Avro formatted data from Kafka.

I’ve been looking at how to use Spark with data streaming from Kafka, a data streaming platform.

One of the nice perks about working at a University is the opportunity to go to a wide variety of all kinds of classes and workshops. I just went to a really great workshop about Image Analysis in Python, given by Brian Keating, a UChicago RCC staff member. The materials for the class are on the lecturer’s Github:

I recently held a press conference with a colleague for NASA’s Kepler mission. In it we announced two items, with my colleague announcing (1) and myself (2):

I’ve started to train for a half marathon, just finishing week 5 of the 12 week Nike+ running coach half marathon program. I just want to know- how quickly can I expect to improve my running pace?  I’m NOT a runner, and I’m very slow. By “not a runner”, I mean I had never run more than 4 miles at once before this program and not a single mile at all in the last two years.  By “slow”, I mean that I am a 5’2″ girl who has a hard time keeping up with people I walk next to.  To clarify further, because I recently read a comment somewhere on the interwebs about someone who was “slow” with a “sluggish pace” of 9’45” (HA, that’s my fastest mile!), I’ll just let you also know that my all time average pace with Nike+ Running app so far is 13’12”.

In the search for exoplanets, we have primarily focused on finding planets around stars like our Sun, called G-dwarfs. While it makes sense to search around what we’re familiar with, the problem is that stars like our sun are in the minority — the vast majority of stars in our galaxy are smaller, cooler stars known as M- and K-dwarfs. Furthermore, recent discoveries by the Kepler Mission have shown that M- and K-dwarf stars are more likely to harbor rocky, terrestrial planets like Earth, compared to gaseous giants like Jupiter and Saturn. Thus, wouldn’t it make sense to expand our horizons and focus more on M- and K-dwarfs in our search for Earth-like planets?

Recently, I’ve been working on analysis of geospatial data. I found that there was a bit of a sharp learning curve just to be able to do some preliminary visualizations of spatial data, so this post will be a tutorial in some simple map visualizations with R. Note that this is really just useful for exploratory visual analysis.