Popcorn Sutton

I made a new object in python which is probably going to be standard for smart, dispositionally sensitive, highly specialized artificial agents. Here's the word- Dicceptionary (dik.sep.shin.ery)- a dictionary where every definition is another dictionary.

I believe that politicians are extremely smart depending on their history and where or with who they are located. I was wondering though, will the next presidential candidates (or any candidate for that matter) be involved in data science? Our world is changing very rapidly. "[People tend to think that the change is linear, but it's actually exponential.]" -see Ray Kurzweil, law of accelerating returns. We need to be on top of our game, absolutely. The data that we are getting from all the people connected across the globe is growing exponentially. I hear that we make as much data in 10 minutes now that has ever existed in the history of humanity up until the year 2009 (don't quote me on that, ). I sincerely believe that our population here in the US is ignorant of the philosophy that brought us to this point. We need to find a way to help our citizens understand the reasons behind our political actions. There's a lot more depth to politics than what the average person thinks (and I am no expert on this subject). The layman usually thinks that our government is "corrupt". They probably have good reasons to believe that, but I've never been involved in conspiracy theories. I make it a point to steer clear of conspiracy theories, and my reason for that is because I will not allow my brain/mind to specialize in something that is NOT productive and will bring paranoia and hate into ones mentality. I believe that our politicians are very concerned with not only keeping our citizens safe, but maintaining safety for the sake of itself. This planet is too precious and humanity is the best and most intelligent species to ever exist on the face of this planet (not to mention that we still haven't found life on any other planet [unless you believe the mars life experiment that was suppressed by NASA]). Big data is insane. The progression of the amount of data that we are gathering is FAR beyond our capability to analyze it. It may not be beyond our capability to analyze it, but the demand for Data Scientists is ASTRONOMICALLY HIGH. As in the video that I posted of the Ted Talk, the speaker says that when he graduated, there were approximately 100 applicants for every job... that formula has been flipped upside down for data science. There are approximately 100 jobs for every applicant in data science. It's pretty insane huh? He says that by the end of the year (2013) there [will be] more than a million jobs for data scientists that will just not be filled. I'm employed as a data scientist and I love every moment of it. There are very few people who meet the qualifications for this type of field. The skills required of data scientists consist of an array of extremely interdisciplinary intelligence. I, personally, think that philosophers are most suited to handle this type of work (as Philosophy superordinates every known field of study and directly superordinates Science and Politics). Here's a few examples of the skills required of data scientists- Machine Learning Pattern Recognition Scripting languages (such as Python, Perl, Ruby, etc.). Low level languages (Java, C#, C++, etc.) MySQL, NoSQL, Hadoop, Hive, Pig, MapReduce, ETL, etc. Data Mining Data Cleansing Parsing Natural Language Processing Statistics Regression Hierarchical Decision Trees Advanced degrees in quantitative analysis or a related field. These are just the skills that I remember. You'd be lucky as hell to find someone qualified for this type of work. No one truly knows how to interview for a person of this stature. Most employers know that the chances of finding someone qualified for this type of work is astronomically low and, if you do find one who is qualified, they're extremely difficult to retain. These people are in demand, and the people who get involved in this type of work are probably known by people who are pretty high up there in the political hierarchy. I wonder, how important are Data Scientists? How far will someone go to retain a Data Scientist? I don't know, but I think that it's something worth looking into.

LOL this is so pessimistic that it's on the verge of disturbing. It's funny though. This is probably the single most amazing sentence that I have ever read on these forums because of its depth. Thank you for your insight. I also see that you said that judges say that we have a "choice" and I know that that is not the case. Sam Harris said that there was a recent (and I don't know how recent) consensus by the NATIONAL SUPREME COURT of the United States that the free will DOES NOT exist. I love it. I know that freedom is an illusion, and I think that you know this too. I know that you know this. Your title here is "Neuroscientist". Any neuroscientist who keeps up with the trends of their field will probably believe that there is no such thing as free will (and maybe even take it to extent that there is no such thing as freedom, as I have). If the judges and politicians understand this, then they will also understand that NO ONE can be held responsible for their actions. Their actions are not a "choice"; it's something that happened to them. I know this pretty well by now just from personal experience. I think you're wrong here. I hope that you are wrong.

While I was studying Philosophy in school, I learned that Philosophy is a study that superordinates every other known study (and directly superordinates Science and Politics). I wonder, does being a philosopher mean that you will inevitably be integrated into the studies that subordinate Philosophy? Lately, I've been attracting a lot of attention to myself from a scientific perspective and, now, even though I love politics I don't want to get too involved. Politics scares me. I used to think that politicians work in order to make society a better place (which is true to an extent), but, from what I've learned since starting my career and getting my degree, politicians are very strong minded people. Politicians do not sit at a computer and try to collect data so they can adjust society based on significant points of interest (as they would be by utilizing a scientocratic protocol). Politicians are (correct me if I'm wrong) purely involved in legal matters. To give an example, in my business, people who fail to appear at court and do not get apprehended within 30 days of the failure to appear, my company needs to get the state governors permission to extend our investigation for another 30 days (and we can only get two 30 day extensions before we have to forfeit the bond). If politicians were focused on making our society a better place, I'd imagine that they wouldn't be spending their time contemplating licensures, fugitives, and bond forfeitures. The reason I say that is because by contemplating those things, you are focusing on individualism. Being a data scientist, I absolutely will not waste my time trying to fix one specific problem. As a data scientist, I need to be crafty. I need to not only solve the problem for one specific occurrence, I need to uncover the pattern that underlies the single occurrence so that by running my program on a ton of data, it can solve that one problem by also solving that same type of problem on all the other data where the problem may occur. It's amazing, but it's difficult. My dream is to make politics more about data and less about individualism. If there's a million people that one person is governing, don't you think that spending time on solving one individual issue is futile? Data Science has reduced crime rates in LA (and across the USA and even in the UK) by approximately 26%. It's amazing and it's something worth fighting for.

I'm having a database contamination issue. I've attached a file of my problem. I'd like to be able to do with Python specifically, but I'm also looking into just using MySQL to complete the task. Check the picture at this point please. Ok, as you can see, I've highlighted the portion that is giving me trouble. What I want to do is make the program find the '$' (left-most character) and shift that row (and all values after that column value) to the right. Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

I haven't tried that. I was looking into smbclient to help with the process but there is no documentation. Every example that I've found are not thorough enough. Looks like I got some homework to do.

I've been searching how to enumerate files from a network directory for a couple hours now with no luck. I need to be able to do this with Python for an application that I am working on. Methods tried so far- import os >>> print os.path.splitext from os import listdir >>> from os.path import isfile, join >>> onlyfiles = [f for f in listdir("smb:///dw_fileserver/") if isfile(join("smb:///dw_fileserver/", f))] os.walk("smb:///dw_fileserver/") I don't think that anyone will be able to help, but I'm taking a shot in the dark at this point. I'm using Samba to connect to the file sharing network. There's either no answer to this question or I'm searching the wrong question. GRRRRRRR rawr!

This weekend turned out to be another busy weekend for me. I'm putting it off for another day.

Anything that can be hazardous to your health. So, if you smoke or drink or do drugs or eat unhealthy, you might have nanobots measuring chemical, fat, cholesteral, or whatever it may be while sensors watch your activity to give you an estimate of how many Micromorts you are dealing with, I.e a measurement of longevity reduction (seconds, minutes, age, etc).

Wow swansont, I didn't even think of writing a book about this until now. I'll probably slap one together over the weekend. It's going to be called "Creatures of Imagination" with a subtitle of some sort.

I have this belief that nothing is impossible. That belief, coupled with what I've heard about alien encounters suggests that there may be creatures who can traverse space without advancing in time. One of the witnesses descriptions was that they saw a craft in the air but it wasn't moving smoothly; it was skipping as if there was a latency issue. Maybe that craft was traveling through space without advancing in time except to take another momentary snapshot. It would also imply that they may send communication signals all simultaneously which would be too fast to detect from a radio telescope and, even if we did detect it, we wouldn't be able to make sense of it, for one, and for two, the people in charge may not have even thought that this type of communication would even exist. It's just a strange idea to contemplate.

It's like Micromorts. I've been seeing people take age tests and I was contemplating the future of this technology. It will measure the flow of Micromorts into your body so it can get the closest estimate of when you're going to die. It sounds horrible but it can also help.

Take a quiz, find out what your real "age" is relative to max number and let the person know.