Category Archives: Uncategorized

With my friend Doug, I just finished making a game — PalinSpeak.com — where you can chat with a Sarah Palin simulator. Check it out, it’s the best thing to hit the Internet since sliced bread. I’ll post more the … Continue reading →

The Stanford Engineering school has put up videos and course materials for several programming, AI, and optimization courses online. They did get some of the ones that are taught by excellent lecturers — e.g. introductory programming (the CS dept has … Continue reading →

The latest on the world ideologies front – In the light of Russia’s Georgia adventures, there’s been lots of talk whether this represents a new rise of authoritarian Russia, which is presumably another nail in the coffin for U.S.-led liberal … Continue reading →

Update: Charles Franklin (of Pollster.com) kindly emailed me with many interesting points on this post. One important note is that my technique isn’t really “no smoothing” — rather, there is now implicit smoothing within the polling houses, by assuming that … Continue reading →

Great anti-pop-science article of the moment — Mark Liberman does a take-down of David Brooks’ apparently careless column on cultural psych experiments that purport to show that East Asians are collectivist while Westerns are individualist. From Liberman: Question to Language … Continue reading →

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

(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 →

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 →

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

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 →