It’s gradually getting closer to the three year PhD deadline in which I intend to submit, meaning I’ve got two and a half months to not only finish up my experiments but write up my entire thesis. To help motivate myself to work on this huge document (and definitely not as a form of procrastination) I’ve started recording my writing progress and am publicly displaying the data here. The idea is that I won’t want people (family, supervisors, colleagues) to notice that I’m slacking. Also it’s given me a good opportunity to practice some web data visualisation tools, in particular I’m using the popular JavaScript HighCharts library. While it looks nice, it isn’t as easy to use as the standard offline tools I use, and it doesn’t provide much in the way of manipulating data. For future such work I’d be tempted to experiment with Shiny which provides an interactive interface to R. However for that I’d need full control of the server which I currently don’t have.
I haven’t written anything in the last three weeks as I’ve been running a lot (~200k) experiments that will comprise the bulk of the data for my thesis, as you can imagine running such a number of simulations takes considerable computational time. Once I’ve got these results underway I should be able to write up the methodology as well as substantial data analysis. These results will also indicate to me whether my current hypothesis is looking to be true.