Most of the cutting edge data mining I've seen is done using R (which acts as a scripting wrapper for the C or Fortran code that the fast analysis libraries are coded in), or alternatively in python. Some people swear by MatLab if they have trained in it (so your octave would come in handy there). Have a look at some discussions at places like kaggle.com to see what the competitive machine learning community uses (if that is what you mean by data mining).
National security was damaged by sharing national secrets with a foreign power who shared them with a private company who shared them with a private citizen. The fact that a national newspaper then reports what the private citizen had access to is only appropriate.
The open question is what is a private citizen employed by a private company employed by an agency of a foreign power doing with access to British secrets. If Britain shares its secrets with foreign citizens then it seems only appropriate for the Guardian to share them with British citizens.
What is MI5/GCHQ doing giving access to UK secrets for a private citizen employed by a corporation subcontracted to an agency of a foreign government (the US?). If Snowdon had access to UK secrets it is the fault of the UK's agencies for failing at security.
I think your stats on number of accidents reinforce the point I was making - there have been very few nuclear accidents over a long period, so the mean rate of accidents is very poorly understood (the estimate of the mean rate we have so far has very large error bars). Not the same with wind is my guess, where accidents are likely to be much more frequent but less costly in lives.
Interesting table from Forbes, but they don't include error bars, which I imagine are pretty huge for nuclear (rare events, high impact), but not so much for the smaller scale renewables. I would conclude from their table that wind and nuclear energy are equally unlikely to kill people, compared to other technologies, but that the deaths from wind energy are more likely to be predictable, hence potentially preventable through increasing safe practices in construction (which are fairly well-understood), whereas catestrophic failures of nuclear plants are always going to happen and likely to be injurious to human health. In conclusion I don't think we can conclude that nuclear is safest, I think wind looks safer from those Forbes figures.
Probably the British Empire was the first global corporation, and that predates the 19th Century considerably, and you are right it worked out very badly for a lot of people all over the world. The modern corporations do not exist for the benefit of the people of Europe any more than the British Empire existed for the benefit of the people of Africa or anywhere else. I am not a nationalist, far from it, but we don't currently have a democratically elected world government which can legislate in any way over the activities of multinational corporations. I don't understand how anyone would think it is best to hand over power to unelected boards of corporations rather than elected officials. We developed democracies to bring the rule of law to our neighbourhoods, and the corporations tried to sidestep all that by becoming stateless, to make an extra buck by avoiding tax regimes and labour laws they didn't like. I think maybe France wants to stand up for the rule of law in the world.
You seem to have some kind of quaint idea that multi-national corporations are a good thing for everyone concerned, and that elected politicians are there for the benefit of making things easy for the corporations.
Perhaps single-country corporations would be better for the people of most countries. I guess we might find out if this tax has legs.
That's right. It's always better to know where you are going in life, and if you don't then stop, park up, and find out, before you even switch the car on. It's a way less stressful way to behave and much less likely to get anyone killed.
I saw an HTC one the other day, and I thought, wow, Linux has finally arrived in shiny boxes after being predicted for so long. I might go wow next time a company is brave enough to market a smartphone secure from eavesdropping.
Go tell that to the "Caffeine Delivery" business. Coca Cola seem to be OK with this, and not many governments are talking about banning them or taxing them just because their product is addictive.
For some reason the headline on here is the wrong way round. The study actually found that ecigarettes were more effective than nicotine patches, but the study lacked statistical power to determine whether they were significantly more effective or not.
and yet this research concludes the opposite http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23033998
Governments are so dependent on tax from tobacco and funding from big pharma and big tobacco you have to question their motivations in proposing bans
Slashdot Mirror
Not flamebait, vi works everywhere
We use a lot of perl too. I mentioned python instead in the post above as I hear a lot of labs use it, but perl is faster and I prefer it personally.
Most of the cutting edge data mining I've seen is done using R (which acts as a scripting wrapper for the C or Fortran code that the fast analysis libraries are coded in), or alternatively in python. Some people swear by MatLab if they have trained in it (so your octave would come in handy there). Have a look at some discussions at places like kaggle.com to see what the competitive machine learning community uses (if that is what you mean by data mining).
National security was damaged by sharing national secrets with a foreign power who shared them with a private company who shared them with a private citizen. The fact that a national newspaper then reports what the private citizen had access to is only appropriate.
The open question is what is a private citizen employed by a private company employed by an agency of a foreign power doing with access to British secrets. If Britain shares its secrets with foreign citizens then it seems only appropriate for the Guardian to share them with British citizens.
What is MI5/GCHQ doing giving access to UK secrets for a private citizen employed by a corporation subcontracted to an agency of a foreign government (the US?). If Snowdon had access to UK secrets it is the fault of the UK's agencies for failing at security.
I call bullshit. Does anyone know anyone this really happened to? Pics or it never happened.
engineering == engineering
I think your stats on number of accidents reinforce the point I was making - there have been very few nuclear accidents over a long period, so the mean rate of accidents is very poorly understood (the estimate of the mean rate we have so far has very large error bars). Not the same with wind is my guess, where accidents are likely to be much more frequent but less costly in lives.
Interesting table from Forbes, but they don't include error bars, which I imagine are pretty huge for nuclear (rare events, high impact), but not so much for the smaller scale renewables. I would conclude from their table that wind and nuclear energy are equally unlikely to kill people, compared to other technologies, but that the deaths from wind energy are more likely to be predictable, hence potentially preventable through increasing safe practices in construction (which are fairly well-understood), whereas catestrophic failures of nuclear plants are always going to happen and likely to be injurious to human health. In conclusion I don't think we can conclude that nuclear is safest, I think wind looks safer from those Forbes figures.
this^1000
Probably the British Empire was the first global corporation, and that predates the 19th Century considerably, and you are right it worked out very badly for a lot of people all over the world. The modern corporations do not exist for the benefit of the people of Europe any more than the British Empire existed for the benefit of the people of Africa or anywhere else. I am not a nationalist, far from it, but we don't currently have a democratically elected world government which can legislate in any way over the activities of multinational corporations. I don't understand how anyone would think it is best to hand over power to unelected boards of corporations rather than elected officials. We developed democracies to bring the rule of law to our neighbourhoods, and the corporations tried to sidestep all that by becoming stateless, to make an extra buck by avoiding tax regimes and labour laws they didn't like. I think maybe France wants to stand up for the rule of law in the world.
You seem to have some kind of quaint idea that multi-national corporations are a good thing for everyone concerned, and that elected politicians are there for the benefit of making things easy for the corporations. Perhaps single-country corporations would be better for the people of most countries. I guess we might find out if this tax has legs.
That's right. It's always better to know where you are going in life, and if you don't then stop, park up, and find out, before you even switch the car on. It's a way less stressful way to behave and much less likely to get anyone killed.
{Answer = No;}
I saw an HTC one the other day, and I thought, wow, Linux has finally arrived in shiny boxes after being predicted for so long. I might go wow next time a company is brave enough to market a smartphone secure from eavesdropping.
Water carries health risks. Dosage is important.
I don't understand how you gauge the probability that it has health risks. p=?
Go tell that to the "Caffeine Delivery" business. Coca Cola seem to be OK with this, and not many governments are talking about banning them or taxing them just because their product is addictive.
For some reason the headline on here is the wrong way round. The study actually found that ecigarettes were more effective than nicotine patches, but the study lacked statistical power to determine whether they were significantly more effective or not.
There is reasonable evidence to conclude that they are not harmful http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23033998
and yet this research concludes the opposite http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23033998 Governments are so dependent on tax from tobacco and funding from big pharma and big tobacco you have to question their motivations in proposing bans
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23033998
So this is probably the NSA botnet they've been bragging about you think?
It isn't art or science, it's engineering. It is different from both, and requires proficiency in both approcahes to problem solving.