gne1963

I never left my Blackberry... when I first saw my buddy finally whip out his BB after struggling for 5 mins to find a location on a map... a knew i'd keep mine...

Then I meet my best friend for lunch to weeks in a row. Both days, he's having iPhone problems and just can't bring himself to return it...

But the more I think about it, I'd have to give Dijkstra's shortest path routing algorithm my highest marks... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm it probably was used to route this message to all you who are reading this... and also used in the routing of the board design on which your screen is attached.,,and is the basis of many other technology and efficient scheduling applications in common use today...

russell... I would perhaps nominate bubble sort above quicksort...for us old timers, it was easy to understand, code, and install in our programs where ever we need a sort... bubble sort I would argue first brought sorting to our discipline.

Yes me too. I still believe that the godfather is Knuth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth think But as you highlight Sedgewick to me was more readable and applicable to the code I was writing in the early 90s.

The point in polygon problem for arbitrary polygons I believe was first solved by Robert Sedgewick and published in his awesome algorithms book... it is discussed here... http://bit.ly/i1u1 In most computer applications today we assume we can easily tell whether or not a point is within (or without)... But I think Robert published the first algorithm on how...

>I'd guess that the actual uncertainty >in the total is more a function of the >uncertainty in the numbers than it is in >the sampling.

totally agree. As with any indicator there is quite a bit of uncertainty. And as you suggest "there are the hires that happen without a listing..." Most career counselors would agree that there are actually more hidden jobs than what the boards suggest...

So... your argument might just boost the number if we add some multiplier into the model based on the jobs actually posted.

thanks! gne1963

Thanks!

So what if I did another 100 random sample resulting a "better" (lower) std dev? At what level of std dev could one assume a normal distribution out to 1000?

gne

So here is the methodology: 1. Hit http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2008/full_... 2. Randomly pick a company from the list... for instance: Pick Paychex Systems... company 921 on Fortunes list...On their career site they list 137 current job openings... 3. Add that to your total... 4. Repeat until you have a representative sample. 5. Extrapolate to 1000...

Question: Using an appropriate random number generation between 1 and 1000, what is the sample size required to then estimate the total job openings on the 1000 sites?

So here is the methodology: 1. Hit the site above. 2. Randomly pick a company from the list... for instance: 3. Pick Paychex Systems... company 921 on Fortunes list... 4. On their site they list 137 job openings... 5. Add that to the total... 6. Repeat until you have a representative sample size

Question: Using an appropriate random number generation between 1 and 1000, what is the sample size required to then estimate the total job openings on the 1000 sites?

You can see my confusion is somewhat born out by hitting this link... it is labeled 500 when actually it lists the top 1000...

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2008/full_...

Thanks, nice catch and that post needs to be changed... momentarily... The universe was truely from the Fortune 1000 from the list publish online... not the top 500 only...

The samples were taken from a random selection of 100 of the top 1000 firms. The real question is how to make that selection of 100 firms so that statistically the sample size is a representative sampling. The goal is not to determine whether or not the jobs are available to those folks who may have just been laid off. The goal is to determine just how many job opening do exist in the Fortune 1000 without needing to hit every single job board of every one of those 1000 companies... surely there is a statistician who can solve that one? ;-)

Totally agree with the conclusions: "The science paradigm has not been part of the mainstream perception of computer science. But soon it will be."

GNE, BS in Computer Science