Relationship between Ames Straw Poll and Iowa Caucuses results

Aug

2011

August 13, 2011

Tags: MATLAB, Politics, Programming, Statistics

In recent weeks, there have been a lot of people decrying the importance of the Ames Straw poll, likely because the mainstream media is worried that Ron Paul will win it. Here's one prominent example, titled "The Ames Straw Poll Has Limited Predictive Value". Of course, if you actually read the article, it doesn't really demonstrate what is claimed in the title. So, I wanted to look at this issue a little more systematically. Unfortunately, I got scooped by that bastard Nate Silver who wrote an article about this exact issue this morning, after I had already almost finished mine. So instead, this will be an exercise in open source journalism.

Progress monitor (or progress bar) within a MATLAB parfor loop

Jun

2011

June 11, 2011

Tags: MATLAB, Programming

In MATLAB, it is really easy to do parallel processing of trivially parallelizable problems with a parfor loop. I do it all the time. It's great. A problem with this is that, if you need to parallelize something in the first place, it's typically something that takes a really long time to run. Some type of progress monitor is normally easier to make, but because parfor does not iterate in order and the workers cannot communicate with one another, it's a little tricky to do in the parallel case.