Amorphous, blob-like patterns of neural activity form and move over the eye during visual development in animals. Why do such patterns exist? We show that these patterns are this way to better prepare the visual system for natural vision. Essentially, these are movies played in the eyes to refine the visual system before the eyes even open. We use python to model the developing visual system, produce an efficient code based on those patterns, and show how that code matches what is seen biologically. In this way, we show that during your early development you are learning from innately generated patterns - a unique twist in the debates of nature and nurture.

In my view, the core of Data Science is the development of predictive models (recommendation engines, fraud detection, churn prediction, etc.). While predictive models can be built in a number of languages I choose to do my work in Python because the Data Science Pipeline is more than just building models. I'll talk about the larger model development process and how I use Python to automate and document my work.

Journey into the world of poorly formatted code to beautiful written pep8 styled goodness.

Robot framework (robotframework.org) is an automated acceptance testing framework written in python. It can be used for a wide range of testing activities, from web, mobile and desktop UI testing, to database testing, RESTful and SOAP services, and much more. Bryan will give a brief overview, do some demonstrations, and answer questions.

Government legislation is not designed for readability, and their volumes of text are not easily analyzed. Advocacy and research groups would like a way to digest bills quickly, filtering out the bureaucratic jargon and leaving the important details. The Sunlight Foundation is a nonpartisan nonprofit that uses technology to make governments more accountable. Their API for federal bills are valuable streams of legislative text that can be used for analysis given the right tools.

The World Bank Group lends billions of dollars every year to fund large infrastructure projects around the globe. Project-related contracts are awarded to companies and entities via open and competitive bidding processes. Such processes can sometimes be subject to collusion and corruption risks.

Young, low-income, first-time mothers and their babies often face dramatically increased risks to their health, education, and economic self-sufficiency. Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP), a national nonprofit organization, intervenes by pairing these mothers with specially-trained, registered nurses. Expectant mothers receive regular home visits from pregnancy until the baby is two years old. The result: healthier pregnancies, more stable families, and better developmental outcomes for children.

The maternal deaths in Mexico from pregnancy, childbirth or postpartum complications have decreased from 89 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1990 to 43 in 2011. Despite this improvement, the rate of decline has significantly slowed and Mexico is not on track to achieve its Millennium Development Goal of reducing maternal mortality 75% by 2015.

Conservation International (CI) is a non-profit organization that works to protect nature through scientific research and partnerships with communities, industry, and governments. A key aspect for evaluating the impact of conservation projects is to account for natural capital – ecosystem goods and services, such as fresh water, flood control, agriculture, and forest products.

At Braintree, we use Tornado to send thousands of simultaneous webhook requests and Pika to pull incoming webhooks from RabbitMQ. Learn about how we've set it up and problems we've had to overcome with this approach.