Slow few weeks

Let’s face it, I have made little progress in the past few weeks.

Although not “none”, either.

For one, I’ve been playing around with iMovie (I have never cared about it before, but I am expected to produce a video summarizing my project for the University, so…). It seems easy enough.

In that same spirit, I decided I would create a Shiny application to help me explain in a more interactive way the project concepts and results. First few animations and buttons are working, but it’s far from done, and that’s additional work.

Then I also let my computers run calculations anew for four different networks to be able to later analyze the results with different topologies. I already knew the overall concepts it would show, but now I have visualizations that demonstrate the results graphically, to support the explanations.

I have also of course lost myself in more books, notably starting one by S. Wolfram that appears to be about cellular automata, although I’m only at chapter 4, and it seems like it will take some time to read through it all (apparently it’s upwards of 1200 pages, that book, I have an electronic – bought legally of course – version (also, a kindle version that won’t open on a Kindle device… a bit of a bother, I must say…) – I would buy the physical version if it weren’t for the shipping costs being higher than the book itself… Anyhow!)

That and reviewing some concepts about cybernetics (Ashby’s Introduction is still my preferred option here), and well some fiction to try to keep it light…

If you add holiday season, swimming and Netflix and such, that accounts for my slight loss of focus on my project for the past few weeks…

Next up

I owe my Project Tutor to implement a Markov Chain version, inspired on his past work, of the whole SIS simulation part. If I manage (and I have past code that is running something very similar), then the good news is approximating the results with this different approach could reduce processing times tenfold…

But the other thing I need to do is collect my thoughts and put together the project Dissertation paper. I have started it some time ago, and this blog will definitely help laying out the timelines and such, but the difficulty is to put things in an orderly fashion, present the original question, then the concepts, mention similar works, explain the implementation, present the observation, make the analysis and offer consistent conclusions. Then hint at future work, annexes, presentation.

All of it with visualizations and fitting it all under 80 pages. Somehow I feel making it concise is going to be the hardest part for me.

But that’s what I gotta do now, and I have delayed enough focusing on the dissertation that it is starting to bother me.

So that’s the status update.