Yes the Dallas-OIS homework is due by the end of today. If you are still struggling with it, and are not close to finished with it, well, it's because it's nearly impossible, even for a good programmer, to cram on a project on deadline. And it's much more difficult if you haven't been practicing regularly.
At the very least, show that you can:
– and turn in what you have. Then work on your final projects.
Most of you aren't competent programmers at this point. Luckily, that wasn't the main point of the class. The main point was to understand how computers work with information, and to realize their power and their limitations:
Understanding that is the key to at least not being a passive consumer in a society that is increasingly being dominated by computational processes.
Bash is a pretty tough language to learn; while it's very easy to do things very quickly, it's also unforgiving if you've failed to do things step-by-step and really think through what you actually wanted to do.
So try Python, and web stuff:
Some scattered notes for this last week:
Nate Silver's Bayesian example using the Sept. 11 attacks:
Consider a somber example: the September 11 attacks. Most of us would have assigned almost no probability to terrorists crashing planes into buildings in Manhattan when we woke up that morning. But we recognized that a terror attack was an obvious possibility once the first plane hit the World Trade Center. And we had no doubt we were being attacked once the second tower was hit. Bayes's theorem can replicate this result.