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Ross, the cult intervention specialist, agrees that the media has a responsibility to its viewers. Oprah brought James Arthur Ray into millions of homes, asking her audience to trust him. She made him wealthy and famous. When James Frey admitted to fabricating portions of his Oprah-endorsed memoir, she publicly chastised him for duping her. When three people died following a teacher Oprah endorsed, the Browns point out, she remained silent. According to Ross, she failed her viewers, and without apology continues to promote “these kind of fringe people that could do the public harm.”
And in the United States, it’s largely caveat emptor when it comes to choosing a teacher. As Ross points out, the $11 billion “self-improvement” industry is largely unregulated (which even market researchers admit is probably hampering it). First Amendment protections offer broad protection for self-help claims. Kevin Trudeau, a late-night infomercial pitchman who claimed mystical connections similar to James Arthur Ray’s, was recently jailed for contempt of court after the Federal Trade Commission accused him of false advertising — including the idea that “coral calcium” cured cancer. But he’s an exception. Most self-help promoters make claims so vague as to be beyond the reach of the FTC or fraud laws.
The Browns worry that their daughter’s death has changed nothing
That puts the burden of being informed on consumers, and the Browns worry that people will find it too easy to blame their daughter for her own death. They fear that people might consider her to be naive or gullible. “‘A middle-aged woman in Sedona, Arizona, who was an idiot, did this stupid thing and is dead,’” George Brown says. “We weren’t going to stand for that.” Kirby was curious, ambitious, and hardworking. As Ginny describes it, she was “drunk on life.” Like Ray, she was constantly reinventing herself. Those characteristics led her to James Arthur Ray.
via The Death Dealer | The Verge.

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?.