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Bayesian inference grew out of Bayes' theorem, a mathematical result from English clergyman Thomas Bayes, published two years after his death in 1761. In honor of the 250th anniversary of this publication, Bradley Efron examined the question of why Bayes' theorem is not more widely used—and why its use remains controversial among many scientists and statisticians. As he pointed out, the problem lies with blind use of the theorem, in cases where prior knowledge is unavailable or unreliable. Nate Silver used Bayesian inference... for sports and politics. Here's how.
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A quick glance through the article states "In the case of the 2012 United States election, Silver used successive polls from various sources as priors to refine his probability estimates."
Has anyone used the data from the previous election to see how that stacks up? The US election polls are so widely analysed and dissected that the data from those is probably recorded somewhere.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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There were some interesting profiles of Nate's methods around the time of the last election, but I can't put my hand to the links right now. Short version as I understand it: Nate back analyzed individual pollster results against election results and used this to weight party bias of polls on state-by-state basis. He's not the only one doing this kind of analysis, just the most famous and, I think, the most accurate.
Of technical note, his highly regarded sports stats analysis was apparently done in a huge, unwieldy XLS. There was much gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair when he sold that business and other people had to figure out how it worked.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: apparently done in a huge, unwieldy XLS
Perhaps he sold his IP knowledge to them, for a fee? I relate a story from a company I worked at in the UK and all developments teams were made redundant in 2009. One developer-cum-analyst had a critical understanding of how several interconnecting systems exchanged transactions. The company completely overlooked his value and he wasn't included in the knowledge transfer sessions to the outsourcing company. He was in the first wave to be pushed out of the front door. Many months later the offshore team made some changes that broke the transaction flow between the systems. The company asked the original developer they made redundant if he could come back for three months contract to help fix the problem and maintain continuity during testing and so on. He did, but he had an iron-clad contract drawn up that paid him an I-have-you-over-a-barrel rate of £2000 per day and he also had a lunch expense as well. The company had no choice but to pay that or he stayed where he was. They did and he laughed all the way to the bank. Sometimes it pays not to talk too much. The company screwed up when they made him redundant. He cashed in. Job's a good'un. 
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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What’s Google TV? Turned out that Google is also doing its own thing for the 10-foot screen. Google announced 2 versions of their famous new TV, the first is called the Buddy Box which is currently an expensive box manufactured by Sony and the second is an Integrated TV built right into the TV set that will be announced soon. Hackers & makers like to re-invent the wheel, and it’s always fun when you do. So we’re going to build our own version of the Google TV using the following open source technologies... Tune in a mobile-enabled TV experience.
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For all the talk of artificial intelligence and all the games of SimCity that have been played, no one in the world can actually simulate living things. Biology is so complex that nowhere on Earth is there a comprehensive model of even a single simple bacterial cell. And yet, these are exciting times for "executable biology," an emerging field dedicated to creating models of organisms that run on a computer. Last year, Markus Covert's Stanford lab created the best ever molecular model of a very simple cell. Before you model something, you need a very good idea of how it works.
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Windows 8 is gaining traction in the marketplace and is forcing developers to adapt and evolve. Along with the adoption of new technology come lessons and steep learning curves. Here, we seek to provide insight into best practices and issues to be aware of when making the shift to Windows 8. When developing Windows Store apps, language options include HTML5/CSS3, DirectX/C++ and XAML/C#. If you are a .NET Web Forms developer, the XAML/C# option usually makes the most sense, so that will be our focus. Let's get started. Great tips, from setting up your dev environment to pushing out updates.
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List comprehensions are an excellent concise, readable way to do search when the search is reasonably small and when you don’t really care about performance. That said making any judgements about core.logic and its utility for solving problems based on blog post code written by someone having a bit of fun makes little sense in my opinion - imagine judging the utility of object oriented or functional programming this way. What follows is an explanation of how I would approach the problem. The main insight here is the original problem is a finite domain problem in disguise. Surprisingly similar to solving sudoku!
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The jobs we hire a PC to do are being increasingly done by dedicated devices. If Adobe wants to be relevant in a world where users interact with as many as five different devices in a day, then a per-device licensing model is clearly unsustainable. Enter the SaaS model for desktop applications.
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I’m Brian Kernighan. I spent 30-plus years at Bell Labs in the group that produced Unix, C, C++ and other odds and ends of useful software. While there I wrote a few books with some super co-authors. Since 2000, I’ve been teaching in the computer science department at Princeton University. If you’re going to have a second childhood, a good university is a great place to have it. The tools Mr. Kernighan uses to get his work done.
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With our modern architecture, Xbox One games will load more quickly, will be always accessible from the cloud, and there is no physical limit to the size or scope of the content provided. Here are our platform policies and capabilities for game licensing – all of which will be made available when Xbox One launches later this year... Buy, download, trade, resell... even give away games to your friends.
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Reports this week that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is close to finalizing a giant reorganization — reshaping the company’s divisions and internal reporting structures — might seem like odd timing. It’s practically summer, after all. But actually, it makes perfect sense. Microsoft’s new fiscal year begins in July, and the company would need to get any new structure in place before then to make a clean transition. Ballmer’s attempt to make Microsoft a “devices and services” company.
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When American analysts hunting terrorists sought new ways to comb through the troves of phone records, e-mails and other data piling up as digital communications exploded over the past decade, they turned to Silicon Valley computer experts who had developed complex equations to thwart Russian mobsters intent on credit card fraud. The partnership between the intelligence community and Palantir Technologies, a Palo Alto, Calif., company founded by a group of inventors from PayPal, is just one of many that the National Security Agency and other agencies have forged as they have rushed to unlock the secrets of “Big Data.” Cliche, but apparently true: ALL YOUR DATA ARE BELONG TO US.
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The above problematic code snippets aren’t the only types of code you should watch out for, but it is a good start and should hopefully open your eyes to some of the common pitfalls you could run into when developing your application. To review here are some concepts you should keep in mind... 6 different errors that accidentally make JavaScript code hard to test.
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Time Machine has been an integral component of my backup system since its inception in OS X 10.5. Despite its utility, I dislike how backup snapshots are handled when Time Machine’s hard drive is full.... This post is about my backup tool called Time Warp and how I use it to modify Time Machine’s backup behavior using weighted reservoir sampling. I built Time Warp to preserve important backup snapshots and prevent Time Machine from deleting them. It's just a jump to the left. And then your snapshot is right.
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The Web Audio API turns your browser into a powerful synthesizer. One question I’ve been asked about the Web Audio API is how to play single, one-shot sounds using the oscillators, in other words how to play notes or tunes. I’ll show one approach in this post and along the way we’ll look at how some early analogue monophonic synths worked. It's got a good DOM and I can dance to it.
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Hello there. Thank you for stopping by. Now, about the growing group of people teaching themselves software development or computer programming, there is no doubt they may miss certain skills that college education might offer. I am very confident that most people would like to go to school if they could afford it. That being said however, not all is lost because after knowing what you lack, you can then go about learning the skills. The most dangerous thing is not knowing what you need. The top 5 skills you should have, starting with an opinion about tabs versus spaces.
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Damn you, Elisha! You were supposed to keep the skills we learned in school a secret so we'd have a competitive advantage over the unschooled. 
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Wonde Tadesse
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AspDotNetDev wrote: to keep the skills we learned in school a secret so we'd have a competitive advantage over the unschooled.
If you're referring to binge drinking, then yeah. But if you're referring to C.S. skills learned in school, I would have to say, I've never needed them, and the PhD's that had them simply wrote horrible, inefficient algorithms that expressed the algorithmic theory but none of the practicality. I hope things are different now than 25 years ago when that was my experience. But somehow I doubt it, given my continuing experience with people with one or more of Bullshit, More of the Same, and Piled Higher and Deeper degrees. 
Marc
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I'm pretty sure I'm a more sophisticated developer than I would have been had I not gone to college. For example, I'd probably have no appreciate for compiler construction and have any idea why semicolons to end a line are a good idea. Also, getting my CS degree gave me a lot of time to contemplate algorithms and patterns freely, without the restrictions of work deadlines (which can lead you to the quick/easy solution, rather than the best one).
Sure, I've seen some "interesting" styles from PhD CS graduates (note: I just got a BS), but not nearly as garbled and lacking as what I've seen from non-graduates.
Still, comparing somebody fresh out of college against somebody with the same number of years of experience on the job, and the on the job programmer may very well be superior (in terms of productivity). However, compare them both after another 2 years on the job, and I would guess the graduate will have an advantage or will be learning practical skills much faster than the non-graduate.
Marc Clifton wrote: bullsh*t, More of the Same, and Piled Higher and Deeper
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And the top 5 skills lacking in programmers coming out of college:
1. Being able to write something other than "Hello World"
2. Using a modern IDE like Visual Studio.
3. Having concrete (vs. theory) experience in database design
4. Having the skills for reasoning out problems before they happen
5. Having the skills for reasoning out why a problem happened when it happens
I've encountered all of the above issues with people fresh out of college, including prestigious colleges / universities, most notably #1 and #2. I kid you not regarding #1. We had hired this kid out of college with a Computer Science degree, he knew all the stuff mentioned in that blog, and actually, could not write a "Hello World" program in C++ sitting in front of the computer. WTF? Granted, that was many years ago, and I have had experiences that are exceptions, but they still seem rare.
Marc
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Agree. But generally we could say lack of experience.
Wonde Tadesse
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This is the worst piece of junk I have ever seen written by an opinionated but clueless idiot.
Sixty years ago, there was no BS program in Computer Science in any University. PhD, yes, maybe MS.
People with degrees in Engineering, Math, Philosophy, Music or Psychology were employed as programmers.
They put man on the moon and brought him back.
Just because someone has a BS in Computer Science doesn't mean he has half an ounce of brain.
In fact, you can pretty much say that these are the folks who run after the latest frameworks, languages, application packages, etc.
The only thing they can say are the crappy names (they think they are cute) such as Java, Java Beans, Coffee Script, etc.
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