Author Archives: brendano

Link: Today’s international organizations

Fascinating — a review of the current international system, focusing on international organizations (that is, organizations of states). Who runs the world? | Wrestling for influence | Economist.com

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Bias correction sneak peek!

(Update 10/2008: actually this model doesn’t work in all cases.  In the final paper we use an (even) simpler model.) I really don’t have time to write up an explanation for what this is so I’ll just post the graph … Continue reading

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Turker classifiers and binary classification threshold calibration

I wrote a big Dolores Labs blog post a few days ago. Click here to read it. I am most proud of the pictures I made for it:

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Pairwise comparisons for relevance evaluation

Not much on this blog lately, so I’ll repost a comment I just wrote on whether to use pairwise vs. absolute judgments for relevance quality evaluation. (A fun one I know!) From this post on the Dolores Labs blog. The … Continue reading

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Clinton-Obama support visualization

This interactive histogram is brilliant. The NYT data visualization folks never fail to impress. margins.swf (application/x-shockwave-flash Object)

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Sub-reddit for Systems Science and OR

I’ve been a big fan of Reddit’s Programing subsite for a while. Just this morning I found another sub-reddit:SYSOR: Systems Science, Operations Research and Everything In Between, and I’m loving it. Lots of links on data mining, graph software, image … Continue reading

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conplot – a console plotter

This has to be the most quick-and-dirty data visualizer out there: I wrote an ascii art plotter script that takes a column of numbers on stdin and throws out a plot on your console. I’ve been using it for several … Continue reading

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The best natural language search commentary on the internet

With Powerset’s launch, there’s an awful lot of hot air and crappy blog posts about natural language search being written. Instead of contributing to that mess, I prefer to direct the reader to the best writing on the topic that … Continue reading

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Are women discriminated against in graduate admissions? Simpson’s paradox via R in three easy steps!

R has a fun built-in package, datasets: a whole bunch of easy-to-use, interesting tables of data. I found the famous UC Berkeley admissions data set, from a 1970′s study of whether sex discrimination existed in graduate admissions. It’s famous for … Continue reading

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a regression slope is a weighted average of pairs’ slopes!

Wow, this is pretty cool: From an Andrew Gelman article on summaring a linear regression as a simple difference between upper and lower categories. I get the impression there are lots of weird misunderstood corners of linear models… (e.g. that … Continue reading

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