Friday, January 11, 2013

New Year's Resolutions Failings

The start of a new year brings along a lot of promise, maybe this will be the year in which I graduate! I didn't make any for myself, but I was thinking about what sort of shape the number of people keeping their resolutions is as a function of time. If you look at is as the number of people left to break their resolutions it becomes clear that it just looks like a decay; i.e.: $$d N(t)=-\lambda N(t)$$ where N(t) is the number of remaining people at time t who haven't broken their resolution. While maybe not strictly accurate (the decay constant has to be some sort of average - or you could write it out as a sum of many different decays), I think that this provides a good idea of the gym population over the next few weeks. The next step is to verify this with data, for that I am trying to use twitter to do some data-mining of tweets (maybe a simple keyword search on resolutions).

In other news, I have passed my Master's defense and have one more class (nuclear chemistry) until I have fulfilled my coursework for graduation. Trying really hard to get excited to start another semester, but mostly just eating a lot of ice cream to drown my sorrows of still being in school.

EDIT (01/11/2013):
Aww man, someone already is doing something similar:
New Years #Resolution Twitter Map
New Years #Resolution Twitter Map infographic by ccantey.

But at least I have twitter working from MATLAB!

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