I sometimes spot colleagues making design decisions that seem really bad to me. A common pattern is building something that already exists in much better form as open source software. I usually try to get them to realize the error themselves by asking questions like "how does this compare to open source library X" but it doesn't always work. How do you deal with things like this, keeping in...
Japan is a series of volcanic islands with, historically, a very limited indigenous supply of large poop producing creatures like like cows, horses, and pigs. The result is that there was a great scarcity of fertile soil. To supplement their soil they instead relied on human feces. So valuable was it that back in the day you could sell your poop to professional manure collectors who walked around town with large pots.
The cultural legacy extends well beyond toilets. You may have seen recent articles about people creating meat from poop, and poop powered motorcycles. It's no coincide that those are Japanese inventions. Funny how a thing like geography affects things.
There have been some huge developments in neural networks in the last few years, particularly with respect to deep learning. If you missed out on that you might want to try this class. Hinton has been involved in many of these advances.
The second half of the course appears to focus on deep learning topics so you might want to start there if you already know the basics.
The syllabus, draft though it is, indicates the second half of the class will focus on deep learning, a field of machine learning that has demonstrated huge potential.
Reminds me of Eastman Kodak circa 1975 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Kodak#Shift_to_digital.
That said, this is pretty weak evidence of collusion.
If you're committed to learning and improving yourself, you don't need the ivy league's approval.
With these rectangle/tree map things, I never know what to think: well this one is wider, but this other one is taller; you have to do multiplication just to compare 2 market shares.
1) The people drawing up these contracts know nothing about software. They are often non-technical, elderly, upper-management types that have never written a line of code in their life. For all they know, adding a link to a webpage is a 2 week project.
2) Congress punishes federal agencies for not spending all of their budget each year by cutting their budgets. As a result, towards the end of the fiscal year every federal agency goes on a crap buying spree to make sure they've spent every last penny.
The focus of the article and most of the comments here suggests it's government power. There's hardly a peep about the fact that credit card companies have giant databases filled with information about everything you've ever purchased, which they gladly sell to anyone, that retailers like Target know your daughter is pregnant before you do, or that Google knows so much about your personal emails that you get ads from 1-800-flowers while reading an email about a friend passing away.
Many of the comments here seem to treat privacy as some pure moral good, some innate human right. If that's the case, shouldn't government officials have complete privacy, after all, they're human aren't they? Shouldn't they be allowed to take unlimited amounts of money from unknown people without anyone knowing? Shouldn't they be allowed to make secret laws that are kept private? What about your employees and your co-workers? Shouldn't everything they do at work be completely private?
The obvious answer is no, there are clearly situations where some limitation of privacy is warranted. Society does not function with complete anonymity and it never has. There are reasonable arguments about where that dividing line should be drawn, but surely we can agree that privacy has both and bad, right?
Perhaps some of the misunderstanding is due to the broad definition of anonymity I'm using. Anonymity as I use it is the inability to link a person's actions to their identity. This type of anonymity breaks a lot of our social institutions. For example, if you don't know that a person committed a crime it's hard to arrest them.
If Anders Breivik was anonymous he would still be wandering Norway because no one would know that he was responsible for the murders. Some of the information I've read suggests that he wanted (or at least expected) to be caught. In such situations anonymity may actually discourage crime. I would guess, however, that most criminals would rather not be caught.