Viewing profile — rgoddard

When my 5 year old was recently asked what was his favorite chip, his response was "chocolate chip". So that shortage may be just around the corner.

Any sort of bias present in the training data will be replicated in the model. If the police are biased in whom they target, that group will naturally show a higher crime rate. Whi…

The drop in crime happened nationwide during this same time in places which did not include NYC. [1] The timing of this seemed to have been more coincidental with the drop in crime…

I have worked as a health actuary for the past 6 six years with degrees in both math and computer science. I am happy with my career choice. Prior to this I did work several years …

The cost of insurance is largely driven by the underlying cost of what you are insuring. Unless they are able to lower the cost of care significantly, the price difference between …

The measure by itself is not sufficient. Which is why all the additional analysis was needed. 1. Using the current district map the last set of elections show that Wisconsin had a …

I am familiar with NY medicaid. They do publish a way to calculate the Medicaid default rate. Insurers do not have to pay exactly this but it provides a decent base line. Here is a…

Mostly due to all of the variables that go into pricing a claim. And that logic on lives in the insurer's claim processing system. Pieces that can impact the price. Your insurer an…

Given the many different features this is not surprising. My approach was to focus on learning one set of features at a time. I used http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html as a guide. …

One possible place to check is your local university. I know the one by me has a good clinical psych program and they run a clinic that is open to the public. They charge on a slid…

A couple additional pieces to keep in mind. Insurance companies are essentially capped at how much profit they can make on average per subscriber. For large groups 85% of every dol…

Realize that it is a skill that can be trained. The current environment does encourages short attention spans. Working on your attention span needs to be deliberately. First unders…

Being risk-adverse with retirement spending is perfectly rational. Most people will have to take into minimum expense amounts. Pursuing a strategy which will have the more likely o…

One issue which is neglected when this topic comes up is confusing the method of teaching vs what you are trying to teach. What you are trying to teach is the value of working hard…

The electrons in the graphene take on a special shape where they behave as if they had no mass. This means they can travel at a high speed and gives graphene its high electrical co…

I would highly recommend learning some of agenda mode. I originally started with only using the tree editing features. But one of the coolest features is the agenda mode and the fa…

I also find that it tends to be more concise which lends to denser code. The density can be a bit off putting until you become accustom to reading it. The other part that is weird …

I think this is related to the fact that our own internal parsers that have been trained upon c-style code falls about when trying to read list code. So the dislike is not due to t…

Basically re-balancing a tree. In this case it required adding a new root now to maintain the optimal branching factor.

When talking about a diet you want to break it down into several dimensions. 1) Does this diet lead to weight loss? This boils down to burning more calories then consumed. As menti…

Another cause of this is that services are generally not priced on a case by case basis. Hospital inpatient claims are priced based off of DRGs (Diagnostic-related group). An insur…

One of the difficulties of improving the overall healthcare system is there are very few ways of making systematic improvements. This article talks about a single hospital. They de…

I am currently working as an Actuarial Analyst, but I have also worked several years as a programmer. As an analyst the tools I use are excel, access, SAS Enterprise guide and Orac…

Clojure is an interesting model where you have the company Cognitect built around the language. You have the product arm with Datomic, the consulting arm creating client projects i…

Data scientist - Here is a metric ton of data, find something useful from it Scientific Programmer - Here is a set of physical laws and differential equations which govern this che…