Category Archives: Uncategorized

At some point, I put extra email addresses on Facebook because I thought it was necessary for something, but didn’t want to show them, so in the privacy settings marked their visibility as “Only Me.” It turns out that right … Continue reading →

There are an increasing number of systems that attempt to allow the user to specify a probabilistic model in a high-level language — for example, declare a (Bayesian) generative model as a hierarchy of various distributions — then automatically run … Continue reading →

Earlier this week I asked the question, How are “art” and “pharmaceuticals” similar? People sent me lots of submissions! Some are great, some are a bit of a stretch. Overpriced by an order of magnitude. The letters of “art” are … Continue reading →

A lexical semantics question: How are “art” and “pharmaceuticals” similar? I have a data-driven answer, but am curious how easy it is to guess it, and in what sense it’s valid. I’ll post my answer and supporting evidence on Tuesday.

update 2012-10-25: I’ve been informed there is a new maintainer for Mawk, who has probably fixed the bugs I’ve been seeing. From: Gert Hulselmans [The bugs you have found are] indeed true with mawk v1.3.3 which comes standard with Debian/Ubuntu. … Continue reading →

I’ve been reading several somewhat recent finance papers (Antweiler and Frank 2005, Das and Chen 2007) that use Rainbow, the text classification software originally written by Andrew McCallum back in 1996. The last version is from 2002 and the homepage … Continue reading →

Dan Goldstein sends word they’re doing another Stackoverflow R flashmob today. It’s a neat trick. The R tag there is becoming pretty useful.

I haven’t done a paper review on this blog for a while, so here we go. Coreference resolution is an interesting NLP problem.  (Examples.)  It involves honest-to-goodness syntactic, semantic, and discourse phenomena, but still seems like a real cognitive task that … Continue reading →

A while ago I moved my blog from Blogger (socialscienceplusplus.blogspot.com) to a custom WordPress installation here (anyall.org/blog).  Wordpress has a nice Blogger import feature, but I also wanted all the old URL’s to redirect to their new equivalents.  This is … Continue reading →

R is notoriously hard to learn, but there was just an effort [1] [2] to populate the programming question-and-answer website StackOverflow with content for the R language. Amusingly, one of the most useful intro questions is: How to search for “R” materials? … Continue reading →