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This is a blog on artificial intelligence and "Social Science++", with an emphasis on computation and statistics. My website is brenocon.com.
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Author Archives: brendano
Statistics vs. Machine Learning, fight!
10/1/09 update — well, it’s been nearly a year, and I should say not everything in this rant is totally true, and I certainly believe much less of it now. Current take: Statistics, not machine learning, is the real deal, … Continue reading
Calculating running variance in Python and C++
It’s fairly obvious that an average can be calculated online, but interestingly, there’s also a way to calculate a running variance and standard deviation. Read all about it here. I’m playing around with the Netflix Prize data of 100 million … Continue reading
Python bindings to Google’s “AJAX” Search API
I couldn’t find this anywhere on the web, so I threw together a quick Python binding for Google’s “AJAX” Search API (or rather, JSON-over-HTTP). (There are bindings out there for the old SOAP interface; I heard that was discontinued though.) … Continue reading
Netflix Prize
Here’s a fascinating NYT article on the Netflix Prize for a better movie recommendation system. Tons of great stuff there; here’s a few highlights … First, a good unsupervised learning story: There’s a sort of unsettling, alien quality to their … Continue reading
The Wire: Mr. Nugget
One of my favorite scenes of wisdom from The Wire: D: Nigga please. The man who invented them things, just some sad ass down at the basement of McDonald’s, thinkin’ of some shit to make some money for the real … Continue reading
Correlations – cotton picking vs. 2008 Presidential votes
From the neat blog Strange Maps — a map of the U.S. South, overlaying where cotton was picked in 1860 versus Presidential voting in 2008. The claim is that the causal pathway is through high African-American populations.
Disease tracking with web queries and social messaging (Google, Twitter, Facebook…)
This is a good idea: in a search engine’s query logs, look for outbreaks of queries like [[flu symptoms]] in a given region. I’ve heard (from Roddy) that this trick also works well on Facebook statuses (e.g. “Feeling crappy this … Continue reading
Obama street celebrations in San Francisco
In San Francisco, it’s no secret who everyone wanted to win in this election. Shortly after Obama’s victory speech last night, people started celebrating in the streets near my house in the Mission. At Valencia and 19th, a big party … Continue reading
Is religion the opiate of the elite?
Andrew Gelman claims religion is the “opiate of the elite,” from this graph: He says: Religious attendance predicts Republican voting much more among the rich than the poor. This is a really interesting phenomenon — condition on wealth and see … Continue reading