It’s generally impossible to only use services, private or government, that perfectly align with one’s values, so one must opt to choose one’s battles. The controversy over GitHub’s contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the latest such battle in the open-source software world. GitHub employees and users are trying to pressure GitHub to drop the contract, as a way to place greater pressure on ICE and the U.S. government to curtail crimes and human rights abuses. A letter to GitHub signed by many open-source maintainers has raised the profile of this campaign. It stops short of calling for users to abandon GitHub, but many users concerned about this issue are searching for alternatives and considering how much they are locked in to GitHub’s ecosystem. I realize that I’m fairly locked in myself, in both personal and professional projects. While I’m not prepared to leave GitHub entirely, I wanted to see how hard it would be to set up a system where I have greater control. So here is documentation of setting up a git hosting service with using Gitea and nearlyfreespeech.net.

I’m recruiting a Research Software Engineer to join my team at EcoHealth Alliance in New York. Details and how to apply can be found at https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/career/research-software-engineer.

For a number of reasons I’ve been trying out GitLab as a replacement for for both GitHub and various continuous integration systems, and have been exploring configurations useful for model-fitting pipelines. I turned one of these into an example repository that shows how to use GitLab together with the Rocker Docker images and the drake build system to reproducibly run a project pipeline, using the cacheing functionality across all three tools to make things reasonably speedy and enable both local and remote builds.

For me, the task of building a personal website is fraught with so many of my technical, aesthetic, and personal hangups that I hadn’t updated mine since mid-graduate school. Thanks to consistent pestering by Maëlle, though, I finally got around to re-building this one using a modern toolkit. Hopefully I can keep it up to date. Here are some of the pieces that I used to build it:

See my original post for background and updates. I was glad to see the announcement from the DataCamp Board that, after a long period of silence and inaction, the company is taking seriously an incident of sexual misconduct and re-examining its approach to the issue and its relationship with concerned instructors. The CEO’s leave of absence and the engagement of Ms. Bhargava indicate a turn in the right direction.

_Please note there are MANY updates below, and aseparate post following DataCamp’s April 24th announcement_. Last week (April 4, 2019) DataCamp published a blog post stating that “one of DataCamp’s executives danced inappropriately and made uninvited physical contact with another employee,” an action meeting many definitions of sexual assault. While the post makes the claim that DataCamp does not condone this behavior, it also makes clear that the disciplinary actions against the executive were limited to “sensitivity training, personal coaching, and a strong warning.”

I made a little demo package to experiment with the use of WebAssembly to use compiled code from R packages and htmlwidgets. More here: https://noamross.github.io/wassa/inst/doc/adventures-in-webassembly.html.

I had to go shopping for a family birthday and new apartment stuff this past weekend. I entered the big, bright department store and froze, with instant regret and dread, because I heard the foreboding sounds of this phenomenon: Now I don’t know about other countries, but in America the tinsel-laden commercial Christmas season stretches starts the day they break down the pop-up Halloween shops and eventually consumes all of popular culture for two months.

This function feeds a high-amplitude sine function through a logit, offsetting so as to have the pulse start and stop at arbitrary times. It has an integral of one per period for large \\(L\\). \\[f(t) = \frac{c}{a - b} \frac{1}{1 + e^{L \left(sin(2\pi((t-a)/c + \xi)) - sin(2\pi\xi)\right)} }\\] where \\[\begin{aligned} t &= \text{time} \\\ a &= \text{time at start of pulse} \\\ b &= \text{time at end of pulse} \\\ c &= \text{period length} \\\ a &< b < c \\\ L &= \text{an arbitrarily large number} \\\ \xi &= \frac{3}{4} - \frac{b - a}{2c} \\\ \end{aligned}\\]

Last Friday at the Davis R Users’ Group, Mallory Johnson gave a presentation on RQDA, an R-based GUI tool for doing coding on documents for use in qualitative text analysis. Here’s the video, and you can view the slides here. [Sorry about reverb in the video] Resources The RQDA home page More RQDA instructional videos