RECENT TOPICS

Mexico By: *Ben Yuhas, Julius Adebayo, Nick Eng, Eric Potash, Layla Pournajaf
Date: Aug. 14, 2014, 8:30 p.m.
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.
Sunlight Foundation By: *Varun Chandola, Nadya Calderon, Scott Cambo, Christopher Lazarus, Raphael Stern
Date: Aug. 14, 2014, 8 p.m.
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.
World Bank By: *Eric Rozier, Jeff Alstott, Dylan Fitzpatrick, Carlos Petricioli, Misha Teplitskiy
Date: Aug. 14, 2014, 7:30 p.m.
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.
Conservation Institute By: *Varun Chandola, Nadya Calderon, Scott Cambo, Christopher Lazarus, Raphael Stern
Date: Aug. 14, 2014, 7 p.m.
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.
Nurse-Family Partnership By: *Young-Jin Kim, Sarah Abraham, Jeff Lockhart, Sarah Tan, Rafael Turner
Date: Aug. 14, 2014, 9 p.m.
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.
Webhooks @ Braintree By: Brian Lesperance
Date: July 10, 2014, 7 p.m.
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.
Engineering at Groupon - Beyond the Daily Deal By: Tyler Jennings
Date: June 12, 2014, 7 p.m.
Tyler Jennings, Director of Engineering at Groupon, will be providing a high level overview of the unique problems our domain presents and the systems we've built to overcome them.
You Down With EPP? Yeah, You Know Me! By: Jason Wirth
Date: June 12, 2014, 7 p.m.
You Down With EPP? Yeah, You Know Me! In this talk I'll discuss the Embarrassing Parallel Problems and introduce the basics of GPU computing with Python.
Computations comparisons between pure Python vs using numpy, or PyPy, or a C extension... By: Brad Martsberger
Date: June 12, 2014, 7 p.m.
Brad will talk on computation comparisons of collection of tools "Logistic Map Bifurcation Diagram" (https://github.com/martsberger/LogisticMapBifurcationDiagram) for creating pretty images of the bifurcation diagram of the logistic map.
PyCon Lightning Talks By: Jason Wirth
Date: May 8, 2014, 7:25 p.m.
Let's go over what people saw at PyCon