Notes

LCSweb was designed to allow researchers and those seeking to use Learning Classifier Systems within applications access to material on LCS and discussion between members of the LCS community. The site served this community since its was started by Alwyn Barry in 1997. Enhanced and maintained later by Jan Drugowitsch, LCSweb became a valuable community resource. The site was completely community-driven and allowed members to contribute to the content of the site and keeping it up to date. Later on in 2005, I started “LCS and other GBML” Blog to cover a gap providing information information regarding the International Workshop on Learning Classifier Systems (IWLCS), the collection of LCS Books available, and GBML related news. Some of you may have realized that after Jan’s move to Rochester and Alwyn’s retirement from research activities, LCSweb has vanished. Will Browne took on himself to take LCSweb to Reading, but technical circumstances have made that move rocky despite his best efforts. Jan and Will however still have a local copy of LCSweb contents. After talking to Jan and Will, I proposed to merge LCSweb with the LCS and other GBML blog, and host the new site at NCSA where dedicated resources has been made available. Jan and Will agreed with the idea. We are happy to announce that the merged site (still under the update cycle) can be reached at http://lcs-gbml.ncsa.uiuc.edu. More information about the process can be found here or at there LCS & GBML Central site. ...

Lately I have been thinking about how to effectively communicate ideas over presentations. This has turned to be a key element when trying to convey the benefits of jumping on the Meandre wagon. Presentation Zen is a very interesting resource for methods, techniques, and example on how to convey and communicate ideas. I am working on revamping some of my Meandre presentations trying to be able to get the points across easily.

R has gained a lot of traction on the scientific community for data analysis, modeling, and exploratory work. I just run into a post by Michael E. Driscoll in his Data Evolution blog about how R is used in Google and Facebook. Nothing new, but what got my attention was ParallelR. If you have been using R for large problems, I am pretty sure you have been wishing that there was some parallelization capabilities. ParallelR targets the problem, and it definitely an option to check out. ...

One of the main handicaps I keep running over and over with Twitter is that there is no concept of groups. The usual story goes along these lines: You get forced to create accounts that behave as groups, make their updates private, and then ask the members to request to follow, and once they follow, that’s it. Yes, a bit convoluted. Yesterday, I ran into GroupTweet that basically automates this process. It still creates a new user account that works as a group fan but, at least it makes the process easier. ...

Since summer 2007 I have been twittering. It started as way to have a conversation with a bunch of friends scattered all over. Since we were not discussing any world-changing topic, my updates have been kept private. Lately, I have been receiving requests to follow me. So, instead of polluting my original intent, @xllora is now my public Twitter. Hope this gets things a bit simplified. I still wish that Twitter would one day allow you to have a better access control, but, oh well, it is what it is right now. Also, I added my @xllora tweets below :D ...