I won’t be having regularly scheduled office hours this week at the usual times, but if you need a face-to-face, we can set that up over email. Most convenient for me is tomorrow (Tuesday) afternoon, from say noon-4pm, during which I will, in fact, physically be in Farmer. If you drop on by at that…

If you haven’t already physically handed me your XP cards, you can simply bring them to the final exam and staple them to it. (If you’re not planning on taking the final, email me and we’ll work something out about your XP cards.) As for what the final will cover, everything we’ve learned this semester…

It’s easy to overlook, but there is a tab labeled “My XP” on the scoreboard which will allow you to see an exhaustive list of all the XP you’ve gotten this semester, for all the different assignments. Please do look at that to verify nothing from you slipped through the grading cracks.

As promised, the last quiz of the semester has been posted, and isn’t due until the end of finals week. Good luck!

I hate to have to do this, but it looks like I’m not going to be able to make it to campus at all tomorrow due to a last-minute kerfuffle. It’s especially a bummer since it was our last scheduled time to meet and now the Granovetter model kind of ends on an anticlimax. As…

You can earn: +1XP for each additional interesting modification (not mentioned in class) to the Binary Voter Model you can come up with which would prevent eternal uniformity. To claim these point(s), send me (stephen_AT_umw) an email with subject line “DATA 420 BVM extension ideas” and with each such idea expressed in a short, understandable…

Today my office hours will only be from 3:15-4pm, as I have an honors defense I need to attend.

to the class repo, in the usual place.

The last homework of the semester has been posted, and is due at the stroke of midnight before Finals Week commences. Good luck!

For questions 8 and 9 on the quiz, use a Moore neighborhood. Also, always (on all questions) assume “torus” is OFF.

It’s due on April 18th, and covers no material later than last week.

It is due the last day of class. Be creative, be insightful, and challenge yourself to deeper thinking!

To test your trend detector, I did the following: Give you +2XP for turning it in, no matter what. Change the name of your turnin file to “yourfirstname_trend_detector.py“, and change the import line at the top of my test script to match. Run my test script against it. This tests nine sequences: three rising ones…

For up to +10XP, create a function called trend_detector() which accepts a 1-dimensional NumPy array of floating-point/decimal/double numbers (of any length), and returns one of the three string values “UPWARD”, “DOWNWARD”, or “STEADY”. These should correspond to whether you think the numbers are showing an upward trend (like we fear global temperatures are), or a…

This semester has progressed more slowly than I’ve anticipated, in terms of the amount of material we’ve covered and the amount of project work I’ve assigned. We aren’t going to have seven programming assignments, as it says in the syllabus: only five. And we aren’t going to have eight quizzes, as it says in the…

Kenzie figured out that if you add “bbox_to_anchor=(1,1)” as an argument to your plt.legend() call, it will helpfully plot the legend to the upper-right, and outside the plotting area used for the grid.

If you’re using sns.heatmap() to draw your animation, and you have colors mapped to integer values (like no-agent-here = 0, susceptible = 1, infected = 2, recovered = 3), be sure to set the range to fixed values via the vmin and vmax arguments. In this case, you would want to set vmin=0 and vmax=3…

For those who haven’t used Pandas… let’s say you have a DataFrame called df with columns myIndepVar and myDepVar. If you want to average all the myDepVar values for each distinct value of myIndepVar, and plot that, here’s one way you could do that: grouped = df.groupby(‘myIndepVar’).myDepVar.mean() plt.plot(grouped.index, grouped.values)

A lot of people were struggling getting their SIR ABM simulations running (and the animation appearing) in office hours today. So I think for today we’ll cancel normal class and just devote that time to office hours. I’ll start out in the classroom at the normal time, to make sure there’s enough seats (yesterday not…

I need to move my office hours for tomorrow (Thu Apr 4) to 3:30-4:30pm instead of their regularly scheduled 11-2pm. I apologize for any inconvenience.

I guess I didn’t say this anywhere in the assignment (will fix now) but as part of your “basics” stuff for part 1, I want to see your time plot of S’s, I’s, and R’s. You’ll recall it looked something like this for the “perfect” SD model: For the agent-based model, you should get the…

Some people are getting “freeze support” error messages when they try to do batch runs for the ABM II homework. I have little idea what this means, but the following fix was discovered that at least worked for two people: In your code, first import: from multiprocessing import freeze_support Then, before you call batch_run(), put…

I need to move my office hours for tomorrow (Wed Apr 3) to 4-5pm instead of their regularly scheduled 10-11am. I apologize for any inconvenience.

Quiz #4 is posted, and is due Sunday April 7th at midnight. Unlike some of the previous quizzes, this one is closed-Python. It is timed at 45 minutes.

I asked Tom Pike (one of the core Mesa developers and a great guy) whether it was safe to blow through the ugly “the AgentSet is experimental” warnings that Mesa is giving some folks. He said: “Yes you can ignore it, we are just prepping to release Mesa 3.0 which will switch to agentset for…

As promised, your next homework assignment has been posted, and is due a week from Friday. It contains varying levels of challenge and difficulty, depending on your wants and needs. You can turn in just the basics (part 1) for half credit; or both parts 1 and 2 for the full +40XP; and/or either of…

I strained my back pretty badly this weekend, and I think I need to give it another day’s rest before I consider leaving the house or walking anywhere. So office hours tomorrow will be virtual; same Zoom link as always (see the announcements in Canvas).

There was some confusion (my fault) about when my Thursday office hours would normally be. So I hereby do solemnly state for the record that from now on this semester, they will be at 1-2pm. Sorry for the mixup about this!

Shane told me today “hey Stephen, I didn’t see a grade for my quiz #3 on the scoreboard. Was it missed?” The answer, unfortunately, is that I haven’t added anybody’s quiz #3 yet (nor the last-day turnins for the SD II homework) because I’ve just been so swamped. I promise I’ll get to it as…

I’ve posted the code from today’s class (boltzmann.py) to the class github repo for your edification and enjoyment.

I think I miscommunicated (and am even confused myself) about my Thursday office hours. I was in from 1-2pm today, and had a fair crowd (three students). But I just got an email from a student saying they thought I was having them at 3:30pm. I don’t even know myself anymore. :\ Anyways, I’m home…

Here’s a link to the Mesa API documentation, which will come in handy this semester.