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Comment Re:2015 (Score 2) 57

by Desler (#49723293) Attached to: Forecasting the Next Pandemic

Or you know, you could just put a condom on and forget about whole "dying" story.

Ignoring numerous people like Arthur Ashe and Isaac Asimov who got AIDS via blood transfusion, right?
AI

Forecasting the Next Pandemic 57

Posted by samzenpus from the I-don't-feel-so-good dept.
sciencehabit writes: A new study led by Barbara A. Han, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, suggests a computer model that incorporates machine learning can pinpoint, with 90% accuracy, rodent species that are known to harbor pathogens that can spread to humans. Sciencemag reports on the study: "Han and her team first used their program to identify lifestyle patterns common to rodents harboring diseases like black plague, rabies, and hanta virus and found that their model had an accuracy rate of 90%. After the machine had 'learned' the telltale signs, the researchers searched for new rodents that fit the profile but were not previously thought to be carriers. So far, the model has identified more than 150 new animal species that could harbor zoonotic diseases, the researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The computer program also predicted 58 new infections in rodents that were already known to carry one zoonotic disease."

Comment Re:Agile. (Score 1) 507

by Desler (#49691475) Attached to: Is Agile Development a Failing Concept?

If the definition of a scrum meeting has "short amount of time" and you are not taking a "short amount of time"... Are you still scrum/agile or some else with scrum/agile aspects?

Once again propagating the "NoTrueScotsman" argument. It is impossible for a large team to have a scrum in a "short amount of time" unless they talk for only 5 seconds.

Comment Re:.txt (Score 4, Informative) 200

by Desler (#49691453) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Is the Best Open Document Format?

Then you end up with Microsoft inserting garbage characters at the start of each text file to make their job easier, breaking scripts and confusing both users and other editors alike.

It's not a garbage character. It's a BOM and it's part of the Unicode standard. If your scripts and text editors can't read the BOM in 2015 then they are the things that are horribly broken.

Comment Re:Agile. (Score 1) 507

by Desler (#49691391) Attached to: Is Agile Development a Failing Concept?

Better to have long drawn out useless meetings dictated by management that try to give direction that hardly resembles the work being done vs a short: this is what i have done, what i am doing, and this is what is stopping me.

Scrums mostly are long, drawn-out, useless meeting dictated by management. You must work at one of the only handful of companies where this isn't the case.

Comment Re:If you can't make it work, it's you (or your wo (Score 1) 507

by Desler (#49690521) Attached to: Is Agile Development a Failing Concept?

It's never the tool, but the wielder. Give a process to a good engineer, and he will find a way to get things to work. Give any process to a code monkey, and you are just going to get a lot of shit flinging irregardless of the process of choice.

Then you haven't been in software development for very long or how little ability to discern a good tool from a bad one. Shitty tools are foisted upon software developers all the time in the form of buggy and/or poorly documented frameworks, databases, IDEs, etc.

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