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Probably the best parenting advice I ever received...well actually, it was more like parenting absolution, came from my Aunt Darlene.  She's my Dad's oldest sister and also my confirmation sponsor and also one of my favorite mom role models. (Hi Aunt Dar!).  I always feel like talking to her is within a space of non-judgment which is so very refreshing in this world of mom-eat-mom parenting out there. There are so many rules and guidelines and expectations these days on what being a 'perfect parent' looks like, and to be quite honest, going into motherhood for the first time with Greyson, I was all about those rules and my own expectations.   My kids will never ...., I will make sure my kids always ... were thoughts I actually had and believed in as a first time mom.  Aaaaand then I had a baby and hahhahhhha, to those thoughts.  I often wish now that I could go back to that pre-motherhood version of myself and give her a little hug and a kiss on the cheek and say, '

With the usage of laptops increasing, doctors are beginning to see more pains, strains and injuries coming from hunching over to see the low screen. Kantek LCD Protect Deluxe Anti-Glare Filter for 19 to 20 Inch Widescreen LCD Monitors (LCD20W) Laptops have become so convenient with the efficiency of the components, allowing you to get work done or movies watched without having to get

The aim of image mining is to extract valuable knowledge from image data. In the context of supervised image classification, we want to assign automatically a label to image from their visual content. The whole process is identical to the standard data mining process. We learn a classifier from a set of classified images. Then, we can apply the classifier to a new image in order to predict its class membership. The particularity is that we must extract a vector of numerical features from the image before to launch the machine learning algorithm, and before to apply the classifier in the deployment phase. We deal with an image classification task in this tutorial. The goal is to detect automatically the images which contain a car. The main result is that, even if I have a basic knowledge about the image processing, I can lead the analysis with a facility which is symptomatic of the usability of Knime in this context. Keywords : image mining, image classification, image processing, featu

A glimpse into what it's like to live in our home just this minute.     Intentional Hours Outdoors  228 hours (of 1000) Boy, I'm not doing so great with this small babe and these early weeks of newborn hood, only up 12 hours this week.  I'm still trying to get a handle on the whole 'while he sleeps' to do checklist...and unfortunately, not often is the highest priority on that list 'get outside' yet.  waah.  On Sunday, we had our first intramural alumni kickball game, and then we were lucky to hang outside at the grandparents' houses though this weekend when we visited -Rustin's first time to both of their houses this week!  I also took the kids to the elementary school parking lot and playground to play for the first day of summer.  It was hot and very sunny and everyone turned out to kind of tired and cranky (including me) so it was kind of a bust - but I tried.  Reading The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo  the newborn exhaustion has lowered my reading c

The "gradient boosting" is an ensemble method that generalizes boosting by providing the opportunity of use other loss functions ("standard" boosting uses implicitly an exponential loss function). These slides show the ins and outs of the method. Gradient boosting for regression is detailed initially. The classification problem is presented thereafter. The solutions implemented in the packages for R and Python are studied. Keywords : boosting, regression tree, package gbm, package mboost, package xgboost, R, Python, package scikit-learn, sklearn Slides : Gradient Boosting References : R. Rakotomalala, " Bagging, Random Forest, Boosting ", December 2015. Natekin A., Knoll A., " Gradient boosting machines, a tutorial ", in Frontiers in Neurorobotics , December 2013. 

What it feels like to live in our home just this minute. Intentional Outdoor Hours  216 hours (of 1000) I  did okay this week, up 8 hours (and the kids are getting waaay more outside time than me, but this is my personal count, so I'm only including my own hours) but I'm still anxious to spend more time outside as Rustin grows and my energy increases...ever so slowly.  Thanks to this great tent from Coleman , I've been taking Rust out for short little bursts protected from the sun and strong winds. (thanks to one of my fav friends JP for letting me copy her! heehe) Grey and I took both dogs for an almost 2mile walk one night and they were so very happy about it.  Grey needed it too as he has been totally stir-crazy since school has let out.  I keep saying that between the four of them - Grey has been the most challenging because he has so much energy - he wants to play all.the.time.  Roller hockey in the garage, baseball catch, one-on-one kickball games, bike rides, climbin

Rustin,  you're here.  finally.  It was a long time to get you out into the world.  Actually, it felt like a really long time considering I was ready for you to be born at about the 32 week mark.  And then on the day you were to be born, I so hopeful that it would be quick and you'd be in my arms by lunchtime.  Alas, you had other plans and we ended up having to wait all day for you to arrive.   In my rose-rimmed glasses of my mother's heart, I knew it should be special and cherished, this last go at labor and delivery.  And I really did want to hold on to each little piece of your birthday.  But I'll be honest with you, Rust, there were several times that it was just Dad and I in the room and I looked at him with tear soaked eyes and whimpered, "I just want this to be over.  I just want him to be here and to be done with this." And then, like all hard things in life, suddenly the enduring part was over and the doing part had arrived...and then... you were the