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There are dragons that would likely make Tolkien despair that no glimpse of Fairie could be found in their multicolored hides. And that’s natural; those of us who grew up with Smaug and his increasingly numerous successors will inevitably twist and turn dragons into new forms. But it’s worthwhile to look back at that older version of the modern dragon and think about what we can learn about heroism from a potent, if fallible, foe. Perhaps Smaug’s most worthy successors can be found less among the population of dragons than among the wider spectrum of science fiction and fantasy antagonists. At first glance, for example, the xenomorphs from the Alien franchise could hardly be more different from Smaug; they lack his mythological heritage and his fondness for conversation. But they share that “bestial life” that Tolkien found so lacking in Beowulf, that sense that exist as more than mere antagonists and possess their own interior lives, even if those interior lives are completely foreign to us humans. And while they seem nearly impossible to kill, they can bring out hidden strengths in the right protagonist.
A dragon may be more of an idle fancy now than it was in Tolkien’s day, but that doesn’t detract from the magnificence of Smaug. Smaug doesn’t necessarily offer a template for dragons, but he does remind us to be thoughtful about our approach to monsters and to find worthy—and sometime unexpected—heroes to challenge them.
via Why Smaug Still Matters.

bamboo is an application that systematizes realtime data analysis. bamboo provides an interface for merging, aggregating and adding algebraic calculations to dynamic datasets. Clients can interact with bamboo through a REST web interface and through Python.
bamboo supports a simple querying language to build calculations (e.g. student teacher ratio) and aggregations (e.g. average number of students per district) from datasets. These are updated as new data is received.
bamboo uses pandas for data analysis, pyparsing to read formulas, and mongodb to serialize data.
bamboo is open source software released under the 3-clause BSD license, which is also known as the “Modified BSD License”.
via Welcome to the bamboo documentation! — bamboo 0.6.3 alpha documentation.

Overview
BayesDB, a Bayesian database table, lets users query the probable implications of their data as easily as a SQL database lets them query the data itself. Using the built-in Bayesian Query Language (BQL), users with no statistics training can solve basic data science problems, such as detecting predictive relationships between variables, inferring missing values, simulating probable observations, and identifying statistically similar database entries.
BayesDB is suitable for analyzing complex, heterogeneous data tables with up to tens of thousands of rows and hundreds of variables. No preprocessing or parameter adjustment is required, though experts can override BayesDB’s default assumptions when appropriate.
BayesDB’s inferences are based in part on CrossCat, a new, nonparametric Bayesian machine learning method, that automatically estimates the full joint distribution behind arbitrary data tables.
via BayesDB.

Unfortunately, the place where our first creative ideas go to die is the place that should be most open to them—school. Studies show that teachers overwhelmingly discriminate against creative students, favoring their satisfier classmates who more readily follow directions and do what they’re told.
Even if children are lucky enough to have a teacher receptive to their ideas, standardized testing and other programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top (a program whose very designation is opposed to nonlinear creative thinking) make sure children’s minds are not on the “wrong” path, even though adults’ accomplishments are linked far more strongly to their creativity than their IQ. It’s ironic that even as children are taught the accomplishments of the world’s most innovative minds, their own creativity is being squelched.
via Creativity is rejected: Teachers and bosses don’t value out-of-the-box thinking..

A guide to practical data mining, collective intelligence, and building recommendation systems by Ron Zacharski.
About This Book
Before you is a tool for learning basic data mining techniques. Most data mining textbooks focus on providing a theoretical foundation for data mining, and as result, may seem notoriously difficult to understand. Don’t get me wrong, the information in those books is extremely important. However, if you are a programmer interested in learning a bit about data mining you might be interested in a beginner’s hands-on guide as a first step. That’s what this book provides.
This guide follows a learn-by-doing approach. Instead of passively reading the book, I encourage you to work through the exercises and experiment with the Python code I provide. I hope you will be actively involved in trying out and programming data mining techniques. The textbook is laid out as a series of small steps that build on each other until, by the time you complete the book, you have laid the foundation for understanding data mining techniques. This book is available for download for free under a Creative Commons license (see link in footer). You are free to share the book, and remix it. Someday I may offer a paper copy, but the online version will always be free.
via A Programmer’s Guide to Data Mining | The Ancient Art of the Numerati.

“We think of creative people in a heroic manner, and we celebrate them, but the thing we celebrate is the after-effect,” says Barry Staw, a researcher at the University of California–Berkeley business school who specializes in creativity.
Staw says most people are risk-averse. He refers to them as satisfiers. “As much as we celebrate independence in Western cultures, there is an awful lot of pressure to conform,” he says. Satisfiers avoid stirring things up, even if it means forsaking the truth or rejecting a good idea.
Even people who say they are looking for creativity react negatively to creative ideas, as demonstrated in a 2011 study from the University of Pennsylvania. Uncertainty is an inherent part of new ideas, and it’s also something that most people would do almost anything to avoid. People’s partiality toward certainty biases them against creative ideas and can interfere with their ability to even recognize creative ideas.
via Creativity is rejected: Teachers and bosses don’t value out-of-the-box thinking..

The two men were compared with Timothy Ray Brown, also known as the “Berlin Patient.” Brown is thought to be the first person ever “cured” of HIV/AIDS.
In 2007, Brown had a stem cell transplant to treat his leukemia. His doctor searched for a donor with a rare genetic mutation called CCR5 delta32 that makes stem cells naturally resistant to HIV infection.
Today, the virus is still undetectable in Brown’s blood, and he is still considered to be “functionally cured.” A functional cure means the virus is controlled and will not be transmitted to others.
The stem cell transplant procedure, however, is very dangerous because a patient’s immune system has to be wiped out in order to accept the transplant.
Using a stem cell transplant to treat HIV is not for most patients, and only 1% of Caucasians — mostly Northern Europeans — and no African-Americans or Asians have the CCR5 delta32 mutation, researchers say.
The transplant is still not a practical strategy for the majority of HIV patients, and the risk of mortality is up to 20%, Henrich says.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, agreed.
“This is not a practical approach for someone who does not need a stem cell transplant since the transplant and its preparation and its subsequent need for chronic immunosuppression is a risky procedure,” Fauci said.
“If you have an underlying neoplasm (tumor) like these patients had, then the risk outweighs the benefit,” he said. “However, if you are doing well on ARVs and you merely want to get off antiretroviral therapy, then the risk seems greater than the benefit.”
via HIV returns in two Boston patients after bone marrow transplants – CNN.com.

Mankind’s attitude to gold is bizarre. Chemically, it is uninteresting – it barely reacts with any other element. Yet, of all the 118 elements in the periodic table, gold is the one we humans have always tended to choose to use as currency. Why?
Why not osmium or chromium, or helium, say – or maybe seaborgium?
I’m not the first to ask the question, but I like to think I’m asking it in one of the most compelling locations possible – the extraordinary exhibition of pre-Columbian gold artefacts at the British Museum?
That’s where I meet Andrea Sella, a professor of chemistry at University College London, beside an exquisite breastplate of pure beaten gold.
He pulls out a copy of the periodic table.
via BBC News – Why do we value gold?.

Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today’s academic system because he would not be considered “productive” enough.
The emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or even made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964.
He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today’s academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: “It’s difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964.”
Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.
Edinburgh University’s authorities then took the view, he later learned, that he “might get a Nobel prize – and if he doesn’t we can always get rid of him”.
Higgs said he became “an embarrassment to the department when they did research assessment exercises”. A message would go around the department saying: “Please give a list of your recent publications.” Higgs said: “I would send back a statement: ‘None.’ ”
By the time he retired in 1996, he was uncomfortable with the new academic culture. “After I retired it was quite a long time before I went back to my department. I thought I was well out of it. It wasn’t my way of doing things any more. Today I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that. I don’t think I would be regarded as productive enough.”
Higgs revealed that his career had also been jeopardised by his disagreements in the 1960s and 70s with the then principal, Michael Swann, who went on to chair the BBC. Higgs objected to Swann’s handling of student protests and to the university’s shareholdings in South African companies during the apartheid regime. “[Swann] didn’t understand the issues, and denounced the student leaders.”
He regrets that the particle he identified in 1964 became known as the “God particle”.
He said: “Some people get confused between the science and the theology. They claim that what happened at Cern proves the existence of God.”
An atheist since the age of 10, he fears the nickname “reinforces confused thinking in the heads of people who are already thinking in a confused way. If they believe that story about creation in seven days, are they being intelligent?”
He also revealed that he turned down a knighthood in 1999. “I’m rather cynical about the way the honours system is used, frankly. A whole lot of the honours system is used for political purposes by the government in power.”
He has not yet decided which way he will vote in the referendum on Scottish independence. “My attitude would depend a little bit on how much progress the lunatic right of the Conservative party makes in trying to get us out of Europe. If the UK were threatening to withdraw from Europe, I would certainly want Scotland to be out of that.”
He has never been tempted to buy a television, but was persuaded to watch The Big Bang Theory last year, and said he wasn’t impressed.
via Peter Higgs: I wouldn’t be productive enough for today’s academic system | Science | The Guardian.