The Davebrand Monthly Visitor

And in big news, my thesis proposal is turned in and being read by my committee. March 19 is the day of the defense. Whoo hoo!

In very exciting news, I’ve received a travel grant from the Association of American Geographers to present my thesis research, “Innovation diffusion in Geographic Information Science Research”, at the 31eme Congres Internationale de Geographie, otherwise known as the 31st International Geographical Union Conference in Tunisia in August. See you there!

Hi all, I’ll be giving a poster presentation for SXSVD (South by Singular Value Decomposition) on Friday, February 29 in the ACES atrium at UT. My poster is entitled “Who Wrote Shakespeare’s Plays? Analyzing Unstructured Texts with LSA”. The presentation is in honor of Gene Golub, a mathematician who popularized SVD. His birthday, coincidentally enough, is February 29.

And, as a twist, SXSVD is a pun on SXSW, the annual Austin music, film, and computer arts festival, which itself is a reference to North by Northwest (perhaps the Hitchcock movie (my favorite!), or the brewery). The phrase “North by Northwest” comes from Shakespeare, in Hamlet: “I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.”

Now you know!

I heard a rumor that Barack Obama fathered a black child!

Prada’s latest: