1,516 karma · joined November 22, 2011
Most of my colleagues do data analysis in Python given Numpy+SciPy. I like Python, but if possible, I'd rather do as much of my development in a single language, and I prefer Scala.
This library certainly does not replicate the extensive functionality offered in Python for data analysis, but it does have the potential to seed Scala development. I for one will be perusing the code this weekend, and picking an avenue for subsequent exploration.
Most people have exposure to death when they are young, but for some people -- for whatever reason -- it's more traumatic. It can become corrosive, subtly or not so subtly, affecting the decisions you make in a harmful way. Personally, I had cancer at a young age, and for years it screwed up the way I saw the world, without me even recognizing it. It took another crisis-type event for me to recognize it. Trust me, if it is something you are already cognizant of, it's better to deal with it now to prevent future crises, then to wait until then.
WARNING
Tinké is NOT a medical device. Tinké and its associated
applications should not be used to diagnose, treat, or
prevent any disease or medical condition. Always seek
the advice of a qualified medical professional.
Also, some of the recent treatment modalities are genuinely revolutionary. For example, Gleevec (subsequently exposed problems aside) is pretty damn amazing. Obviously, new things are becoming possible because of a long-growing body of research. The question is whether we have reached the tipping point. As I said previously, I'm optimistic -- I think we have. That being said, cancer is fucking complex and even if we were at some tipping point, progress is measured in years and decades, not weeks as the breathless popsci articles always seem to imply.
My instinct would be that (biological) immortality is (mostly) non-existant not only because there is no evolutionary pressure not to die, but because there is evolutionary pressure to die after begetting offspring. Very long lived progenitors would homogenize the gene pool, if not by incest then by sheer number of offspring. This would make them fragile in the face of both genetic errors and environmental shifts.
To counter this fragility, child birth might be infrequent. However, if child birth is infrequent, there is an increased probability of death before child birth.
What would be more interesting to see, in this particular context, is the mortality associated with different disease groups for different age cohorts. For example, how has the treatment for cancer progressed for people between 40 and 50, rather than all cohorts at once.
Unfortunately, I agree with you that it is difficult to judge the efficacy of "less than 4 hops" without providing some network metrics. By eye-balling figure 3b, it looks like the graph diameter is in the 30s, and the average degree of a community appears to be about three. Given an outbreak, less than 4 hops given (initially) limited surveillance could be important.
Since you said you're a programmer, my advice would be to find or collect some data you are interested in, and play with Python's networkx.[1] For some starter data, check out Stanfords Large Network Dataset Collection.[2]
[1] http://networkx.lanl.gov/ [2] http://snap.stanford.edu/data/
(Why were people down-voting this? It looked like a sincere question.)
Edit:
* http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/118 proposes run-time storing of parameter names -- not what is desired, but in the same ballpark.
* http://web.archiveorange.com/archive/v/bobySzLnuDWgr47zqwU9 proposes named arguments for making clean code.
It's a well known problem. Considering AdWords is Google's primary source of revenue, they work hard at it. For a tiny bit more directly from Google, see: http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...
The game is as jiggy said. Force competing ad buyers to pay for what appears to be non-productive traffic by forcing ad clicks. Since the real views are dominated by false views, the conversion rate on whatever is being sold appears to be horrible. The competitor goes elsewhere, and the scammer maintains access to artificially cheap ad inventory, since there are fewer bidders.
(At least, I think it's erb; twitter still uses rails for the front-end, I think.)
Of the two I have been to, I've had some pretty interesting (and wild) conversations.
(Although it would typically be cause for a downvote, I'm going to point out that they have good buffalo wings.)
Right now, I often will minimize (metaphorically) my ST2 editor; open up a copy of my code in gEdit; print it out; close gEdit; and, maximize ST2. That's not cool.
For a trivial example, if you can't remember the name of some function you wrote in another module, it may be the case that the function was poorly named or the code you are currently writing is trying to do too many things. In an full-blown IDE, it doesn't feel wrong; in a simple text editor, it actually hurts. (Yes, ST2 has autocomplete, but IIRC, it's based on a tokenizer, not a parser. In either case, I operate with it disabled.)
IMHO, it's a trade-off. It requires marginally more mental effort to compose code without the features of a full-blown IDE. This marginal increase in effort may slow me down considerably in the beginning to middle parts of a project compared to someone using a full-blown IDE; however, by the time I "catch up," my code will probably be more conducive to safe expansion and maintenance, and for all but trivial projects, that's the majority of development time.
Overwhelmingly, it is my experience that researchers in computational disciplines publish papers with half-finished code "available on request" -- and requests are often ignored. It's refreshing to hear someone say, "Yes, the code needs work, but it should be available."
Given the prospect of a severe revenue dip once Sortfolio is detached from the 37 signals brand, the asking price (450,000) is very high. Moreover, as far as I can tell, they didn't respond to bidder questions on flippa. To me, it seems like the bidders and the auction were ancillary to their actual intent. Like other posters, I think their actual intent was to gain publicity for the 37Signals brand (not Sortfolio).
I expect they will follow through on their original pronouncement by shutting down Sortfolio soon; however, I don't think they ever had any intention to sell it. I think they are smart enough to know that someone with 450,000 in cash is also probably smart enough to know that it was a bad deal. By providing a spectacle by way of flippa, the narrative is now more impressive, they reaped a lot of positive press, and they reinforced their commitment to their core products.
The fear that there will be a lot of customers who fail to reenroll after the transfer is well founded. Ditto to the idea that it wouldn't survive independent of the 37signals brand. Consequently, an opening bid at greater than one year revenue is much too high.
If these scientists are right, and I think they are, the most advanced civilizations in the universe have transcended biology and moved on to a post-biological phase of their evolution. If we want to become an advanced civilization and colonize the stars, this is what we must do.
I think the more important point is that knowledge of the underlying distribution -- normal (Gaussian), log-normal, exponential, power law, Weibull, etc -- is very important. The more skewed the underlying distribution, the less relevant the mean becomes -- and it can cause you to make some very bad inferences.
It's a new form of an old pattern: getting people motivated to learn something by re-framing it. (See: SmallTalk, Logo, Processing, etc.)