DIY: 10 Amazing Homemade Terrariums That Make Perfect Holiday Gifts! 1. Ornament Terrarium Spruce up boring glass ornaments by turning them into terrariums. You can use any clear glass ornament that has a removable hanger. We suggest repurposing an old ornament, or finding on at your local thrift store, but you can also find them at craft stores. Fill the hollow area with soil and small plants to complete the look. 2. Get the look of a “ship in a bottle” by building your terrarium into a repurposed bottle laid on its side. LIONlab - intelligent-optimization.org Millennials, Civic Engagement and Civic Tech This post is written by Tamir Novotny, Senior Policy Associate at Living Cities, and is cross-posted from livingcities.org/blog. We’re (Living Cities) working with the City of Louisville, Ken. to develop technology to engage low-income young adults in the city’s long-term planning. Here’s what we’re learning. We recently kicked off in earnest a project in Louisville to develop a piece of technology aimed at engaging low-income Millennials (young adults ages 18-30) in city planning processes. We came into this process with a few questions in our minds: Who exactly are Millennials and what does it take to engage them in civic process? Here are some things we are learning. Millennials and Traditional Civic Participation: Out of syncThe relationship between Millennials, technology and civic participation is not as straightforward as one might think The verdict on Millennials (a group to which I belong) is mixed. Questions?
The Google Technology Stack Posts PageRank and MapReduce Data mining and machine learning About Part of what makes Google such an amazing engine of innovation is their internal technology stack: a set of powerful proprietary technologies that makes it easy for Google developers to generate and process enormous quantities of data. The Google File System: a simple way of accessing enormous amounts of data spread across a large cluster of machines. Together, these technologies make it easy to run large parallel jobs on very big data sets. Web Crawling PageRank and may describe more, including statistical approaches to spell checking and machine translation, and recommendation algorithms. In addition to understanding how these technologies work, we’ll also: Develop toy implementations of some of the technologies. I’ve never worked at Google. Exercises and problems: The posts will contain exercises for you to do to master the material, and also some more challenging and often open-ended problems. Related resources include:
Budget Calculator Budget Calculator Enter the items and services you think you might need on our nearly comprehensive list, then click for an estimated total budget and cost per attendee. Room Cost (Use this section for attendees, guests, and staff who will be on Master Account) Convention Marketing (teaser, pre-registration kit, reminder, etc.) (not including staff) Convention Office and Registration Area (usually a good idea to get two) (signage for entire convention) (binders, pocket agendas, etc. (copier, fax, phone lines, etc.) (usually $20/day/radio) (registration desk, special chairs, etc.) (staff only — don't forget the AV crew!) Gifts (registration packet, in-room, etc.) (average cost between all of them) Awards Entertainment (name act, dance band, etc. (wandering strings, piano, jazz trio, etc.) (not including theme parties or offsite events) (training packages, group/experiential activities, etc.) General Session (usually $15/hour) (average costs = $600 - $1,500) Breakout Sessions (per session: basic setup = $450/day )
Six categories of Data Scientists We are now at 9 categories after a few updates. Just like there are a few categories of statisticians (biostatisticians, statisticians, econometricians, operations research specialists, actuaries) or business analysts (marketing-oriented, product-oriented, finance-oriented, etc.) we have different categories of data scientists. First, many data scientists have a job title different from data scientist, mine for instance is co-founder. Check the "related articles" section below to discover 400 potential job titles for data scientists. Categories of data scientists Those strong in statistics: they sometimes develop new statistical theories for big data, that even traditional statisticians are not aware of. Most of them are familiar or expert in big data. There are other ways to categorize data scientists, see for instance our article on Taxonomy of data scientists. Implications for other IT professionals Are data scientists a threat to your job/career? Related articles
Taxonomy of Data Scientists This is a first attempt at classifying data scientists. I invite you to produce a more comprehensive, better solution. The 10 pioneering data scientists listed here were identified as top data scientists in our previous article entitled data science equation, based on their LinkedIn profile. Note that the correlation between machine learning and analytics is very negative (-0.82). Notes: (1) Kirk Borne skill sets is highly fragmented. Big Data (x-axis) / Machine Learning (y-axis) scatter-plot The big data / machine learning combo exhibits the strongest cluster structure among the 6 potential scatter-plots. Comments Is this a "big data" analysis? Who is the purest data scientist? I compared the 4-skill mix of each of these 10 data scientists (as found in the above table), with the generic data science skill mix identified in the previous article (Data Science = 0.24 * Data Mining + 0.15 * Machine Learning + 0.14 * Analytics + 0.11 * Big Data). Related article The data science equation
The Data Science Equation I present here the results of a data science study about data science. Based on LinkedIn data (top people listed when you do a people search for data science, from a LinkedIn account with 8,000+ data science connections), we identified the fields most frequently associated with data science, as well as top data scientists on LinkedIn. The statistical validity of data science related fields is strong, while validity is weak for top data scientists. Skill Set Found on Profile of Most Popular Data Scientist on LinkedIn The following lists were created by searching for data scientists with 10+ data science skill endorsements on LinkedIn (see above image as an illustration), and analyzing the top 5 skills that they list, as in the above picture. Here's the list of data science related fields (DS stands for Data Science): In short, you could write the Data science formula Data Science = 0.24 * Data Mining + 0.15 * Machine Learning + 0.14 * Analytics + 0.11 * Big Data + ... Parameters in the formula
Most Influential Tableau-Related Blog Posts For Tableau Blogging Month, I wanted to focus on the back-catalogue of amazing blog posts written, perhaps, before you'd heard of Tableau. You should go get a cup of tea, sit down, and read all of these posts. If these posts are new to you, these are seminal posts that will inspire your Tableau journey. And maybe they will inspire you to start up your own blog? How long have there been Tableau blogs? Since then, which posts have been the most influential? I gathered this list by asking Tableau Zen Masters, and a bunch of Tableau employees for contributions. This list is ordered by publish date, oldest to newest. The Ring of Fire… by Robert Morton, June 2009 Tableau’s Community Manager, Dustin Smith, says, “It was the first time it dawned on me that data was literally lying all around us and that all I had to do was point Tableau at it and the story within would come tumbling out.” “Charts inside a tooltip? Hey! Blue things and Green things, Tom Brown, Sep 2011 Hands up?
Rank of Rank {This is the fourth blog post in the #TableauStatsMonth series, and is a guest post by Tableau Zen Master Jonathan Drummey. Jonathan gives us a basic introduction to Rank, and then dives into a special use case of sorting a list based on average rank across a number of categories.} I’ve got several favorite new features in Tableau version 8.1: performance improvements, full-screen presentation mode, R integration, and the new built-in rank functions. This post will cover the new rank functions, some ways they can be used and differ from existing functions, and finish up with how they’ve let me replace a whole bunch of SQL, a temporary table, and several different worksheets with a single one-line calculation, and maybe help save some feet, too. The (blinded) data I’ll be using is based on a real-world use case from the integrated healthcare system I work for. Here are some sample rows: And the download the data in .xls And here’s the view: [Moment of Silence] Ok, now onto more ranking fun!
Team:Copenhagen/Safety Safety Synthetic Biology and Safety By combining biology and engineering, Synthetic Biology is seen as the design and construction of new biological functions and systems not found in nature. Rapid advances within this new emerging field have the potential of greatly benefitting mankind, though posits tremendous dangers in the wrong hands or if mistakes are made. Biosafety and Biosecurity The Danish laws for working with GMO’s are set forth by the Danish Labour Inspectorate, Arbejdstilsynet, and apply to both commercial and academical institutes. The WHO defines biosafety as the prevention of unintentional exposure to pathogens and toxins, or their accidental release, whereas biosecurity is the prevention of loss, theft, misuse, diversion or intentional release of pathogens and toxins. Biosecurity: It is important to keep unqualified personnel and trespassers away from the laboratory and the samples. Biosafety: iGEM Questionnaire1. The oximes our E. Pathogenicity, infectivity, or toxicity?
Team:UNIK Copenhagen/Attributions We would like to thank all the people and teams that collaborated with us. In this way, they helped us to progress towards our goals and to achieve an enrichment in knowledge and skills. In particular, we want to thank the people and teams listed below. Anna Illum Høgh, who drawed the logo that we successively digitalized. Inbal Lieblich, for helping us with the realization of the stop motion part of our video. Michael Hansen, who helped us to take images using the confocal microscope. Aske Mottelson, B.Sc. in Computer Science at University of Copenhagen, for writing the script for the image slider at the home page of our wiki. Michel Christian Nèmery, senior consultant at Radiology Department X at Herlev Hospital, for his medical feedback on our project and for his statement to the Danish magazine "Ingeniøren". Maria Constantin, M.Sc. student in Biology-Biotechnology at University of Copenhagen, who wrote the safety page on the wiki.