This month's tip is by our Research Database Analyst, Christine Rivera:

We have come across a useful API, NamSor, to classify personal names by gender, country of origin, or ethnicity. NamSor (...

We are excited to annnounce that we are in the process of installing some additional software on the grid to make the environment more research-friendly. This will include: 

• PDF viewers, such as xPDF and Evince 
• GitKraken, a Git GUI for version control
• Atom, a lightweight, full-featured text editor

If you have suggestions/requests for other types of software, please send us an email at research@hbs....

Based on both research computing trends and recommendations from the HBS research computing environment assessment, RCS in partnership with HBS launched the Grid 2.5 last December. This new compute grid provides a number of updates and enhancements that improve compute capacity with fewer restrictions, increased work safeguards, and both GUI and command-line programs to increase research capabilities for programming, statistics, and research data management.

How could you benefit from using the compute grid?

...

Natural Language Processing (NLP) assists computers with processing and understanding natural human language, such as speeches, tweets, and newspaper articles. NLP can range from counting the number of times a word appears in text to analyses that assess attitudes (e.g., positive, negative). NLP can be conducted on a variety of platforms, including the robust NLTK package in Python and several libraries in R.

For an introduction and hands-on experience using the NLTK in Python, DataCamp provides a free module as part of their NLP fundamentals course:...