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Gaurav

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Monetizing Websites using Mechanical Turk

Mechanical Turk, a system for crowd-sourcing complex Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) through parceling a large task and putting the parcels on a marketplace, has seen a recent resurgence, partly on the back of the success of easier to work with clones like crowdflower.com. Given that on the Internet people

Personal Milestone Campaigners

We have all read about beautiful women undressing to raise awareness about cruelty to animals (less handsome women just don’t care about the animals), men and women strutting on runways wearing fashionable clothes to raise awareness about global warming, intrepid souls sailing across vast oceans to raise awareness about

The Myth of Knowledge

People frequently overestimate how much they know. They also confidently share things they don’t know. But why? One reason is social desirability—the motivation to appear knowledgeable in front of others and perhaps ourselves (our ability to fool ourselves deserves closer inspection). Another is that conversations are typically not

Lifting the Veil on Some Issues Around The Burka Debate

For the unfamiliar, the BBC guide to Muslim veils. The somewhat polemical: Assuming that God has recommended that women wear the burka, assuming that burka has no impact on a woman’s ability to communicate or quality of life, as has been suggested by its supporters, then here’s a

Opening Interfaces to Websites and Software

Imagine the following scenario: You go to NYTimes.com, and are offered a choice between a variety of interfaces, not just skins or font adjustments, built for a variety of purposes by whoever wants to put in the effort. You get to pick the interface that is right for you

Q-Tips For R

Distance Between Sounds library(stringdist) > stringdist("ham", "jam", method ="soundex") [1] 1 > stringdist("ham", "banana", method ="soundex") [1] 1 This is pretty bad. Character-wise cosine distance or some other distance based on Soundex codes may be

Expanding the Database Yet Further

“College sophomores may not be people,” wrote Carl Hovland, quoting Tolman. Yet research done on them continues to be a significant part of all research in Social Science. The status quo is a function of cost and effort. In 2007, Cindy Kam proposed using the university staff as a way

An Appetizing Question: Why Don't We Read Nutrition Labels?

A single wheat tortilla contains 18% of the daily recommended sodium—a fact I discovered only after reading about sodium's cardiovascular risks, despite years of purchasing tortillas and regularly checking food labels. This personal observation raises a broader question: why do we systematically avoid easily accessible health information

Macaulay's Confessions

One of the people who has benefited the most from Macaulay’s reforms recently sent an email, part of a larger email chain that now generally implies some travesty, which quoted Macaulay as having spoken the following (on Feb 2nd, 1835 in India, the same day his gave his Minute