Over the past couple of months I’ve done some very informal research on what it means to be an actuary. From reading the Wikipedia article and also the Be An Actuary website it seems like a pretty interesting job. Here is where it gets surprising, though: nearly everyone I know in the insurance industry has communicated that it is a very lonely and boring job. This leaves my question to you: what is so bad about being an actuary?
Here are two other links I’ve yet to research: Society of Actuaries and Casuality Actuarial Society (thanks Dr. Rowe), and clearly I need to do more.
Author: grant
fmt 0.7 Released
fmtis
A library of procedures for formatting Scheme objects to text in various ways, and for easily concatenating, composing and extending these formatters efficiently without resorting to capturing and manipulating intermediate strings.
This release also addresses a long-time pet peeve of mine – you can now format exact non-integral rationals to arbitrary precision. Rationals provide extended precision, but until now it was always difficult to see that precision in a human-readable manner.
(via ikarus)
The Adventures of a Pythonista in Schemeland
A Library for Conditional Module Inclusion and Compilation in PLT Scheme
Dynamically Requiring Code at Runtime
Here is a good thread on conditional inclusion of code in PLT Scheme. Basically the OP wanted to use platform-specific module code (think development versus on the cluster). The recommended solution was to use dynamic-require.
Happy Halloween with PLT
Happy Halloween with PLT! 🙂
Mid Term Probability Update
In the first half of the semester in the Probability course I am taking we learned (among other things) how to, given the probability distribution function for any distribution, derive, if possible, the:
- Commulative Distribution Function
- Population Mean
- Population Variance
- Population Standard Deviation
- Population Median
- Population Mode
- Moment Generating Function
Everyone seems to be excited about the second half of the semester when we will start building on this foundation.
Hamming's Insight
Implicitly Concurrent Scheme
Aubrey Jaffer, author of SCM and SLIB, wrote that:
There has been a lot of concern over how to harness the speed potential of multi-core processors without a disrupting reinvention of software engineering. Implicit concurrency is a solution.
His proposal for implementing this solution is a simple addition to the standard:
Implicitly-Concurrent-Scheme is a minor modification to Scheme Report semantics which allows, but does not require, both interpreters and compilers to simply parallelize the execution of programs. No new primitives are introduced. In order to write ICS programs which produce the same output irrespective of concurrent evaluation order requires a regime very similar to the that required of RnRS programs to produce the same output irrespective of serial evaluation order.
It has a pretty good selling point: no new language constructs. Everything works the way you already expect (unspecified order of evaluation == concurrent evaluation of arguments). Read everything in-between those quotes here
The First Scheme iPhone App
Check it out here.