Publications by Frank Portman
Comparing Quality of Life, Income Inequality, and Nobel Laureates per capita
Now that I’m done with finals, I finally have time to update my blog. I managed to find three separate Wikipedia entries: one about the Quality of Life Scores of several different countries, one about the number of Nobel Laureates per capita, and one that is a List of Countries by Income Inequality which uses Gini index to rank countries. I the...
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Project Euler in R Problem 9
In Problem 9 of Project Euler we are tasked with finding the product (abc) of the Pythagorean Triplet (a, b, c) such that a + b + c = 1000. A Pythagorean triplet is a set of three natural numbers such that a2 + b2 = c2. To solve this problem, we first see that c = (a2 + b2)1/2. Without loss of generality, we can only run the for loop for a and b,...
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Visualizing McDonald’s’ Global Expansion
I was inspired by a few animated gifs that I saw recently so I decided to make one of my own. For this project, I sought out a way to effectively visualize how Mcdonald’s expanded throughout the world. To do this, I created a heatmap of the world and using animations I was able to efficiently map out how McDonald’s became more popular over ti...
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Exploring GDP per Capita vs. Educational Attainment
The inspiration for this post came as I was browsing texts and articles about USA’s GDP and I wondered what might have a positive relationship to GDP that would be interesting to graph and explore. I stumbled upon two datasets: US States by Educational Attainment and US States by GDP. The data looked clean enough so I decided to write up a quic...
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Fun with Twitter
I’ve been playing around with the ‘twitteR’ package for R ever since I heard of its existence. Twitter is great and easy to mine because the messages are all-text and most people’s profiles are public. This process is made even easier with the ‘twitteR’ package, which takes advantage of the Twitter API. After exploring some of the pac...
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Facebook Hacker Cup – Beautiful Strings
Now that the Facebook Hacker Cup is coming to an end I figured I’d post my solution to one of the challenges. Unfortunately I only made it to Round 1, but I was able to answer this rather interesting Qualification Round problem. The Problem: When John was a little kid he didn’t have much to do. There was no internet, no Facebook, and no prog...
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Normalized Frequency of Terrorism in the US
I’ve been using the Global Terrorism Database a lot lately so I decided to share an interesting plot I made with the data. The GTD provides over 100,000 observations of terrorist incidents between 1970 and 2011. Of these, there are about 2400 observations in the USA. While this is not a large number, the graph still provides some interesting an...
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Fractal Fern
I’m gonna share a short code snippet that I thought was interesting. This post is inspired by one of my engineering computation classes at Rice. The program initializes a pair of coordinates ‘z’ and iteratively updates z by matrix multiplication based on some random number generation criteria. After each successive coordinate update, the ne...
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Stock Market Predictions with Artificial Neural Networks
Many of my research and personal interests lie in the realm of Machine Learning for several reasons. To me, it is the perfect blend of mathematics, statistics, and computer science. Also, it is extremely pervasive in today’s society. Everything from improved web-search to self-driving cars can be attributed to developments in Machine Learning. ...
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Let’s Go to Rome
Although virtually obsolete, Roman Numerals are subtly embedded into our culture. From the Super Bowl and Olympics to royal titles, Roman Numerals refuse to fully be extinguished from our every day lives. And that’s not without reason. All numbers are beautiful and Roman Numerals are no exception, even if they are written a little differently f...
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