I just returned from the SciPy 2011 conference in Austin. Definitely a different experience than a theory conference, and definitely different than the mega-conferences I’ve found myself at lately. I think I like it. My goal was to evangelize for PyMC a little bit, and I think that went successfully. I even got to meet PyMC founder Chris Fonnesbeck in person (about 30 seconds before we presented a 4 hour tutorial together).
For the tutorial, I put together a set of PyMC-by-Example slides and code to dig into that silly relationship between Human Development Index and Total Fertility Rate that foiled my best attempts at Bayesian model selection so long ago.
I’m not sure the slides stand on their own, but together with the code samples they should reproduce my portion of the talk pretty well. I even started writing it up for people who want to read it in paper form, but then I ran out of momentum. Patches welcome.
Healthy Algorithms 