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Reviewing the Peer Review

Update: Current version is posted here. Science is a process. For a good deal of time, peer review has been an essential part of the process. When looked at independently by people with no experience with it, it makes a fair bit of sense. For there is only one well-known

Where's the Porn? Classifying Porn Domains Using a Calibrated Keyword Classifier

Aim: Given a very large list of unique domains, find domains carrying adult content. In the 2004 comScore browsing data, for instance, there are about a million unique domains. Comparing a million unique domain names against a large database is doable. But access to such databases doesn’t often come

Toward a Two-Sided Market on Uber

Uber prices rides based on the availability of Uber drivers in the area, the demand, and the destination. This price is the same for whoever is on the other end of the transaction. For instance, Uber doesn’t take into account that someone in a hurry may be willing to

Rape in India

According to crime reports, in India, rape is about 15 times less common than in the US. A variety of concerns apply. For one, the definition of rape varies considerably. But differences aren’t always in the expected direction. For instance, Indian Penal Code considers sex under the following circumstance

Enabling FOIA: Getting Better Access to Government Data at a Lower Cost

Freedom of Information Act is vital for holding the government to account. But little effort has gone into building tools that enable fulfillment of FOIA requests. As a consequence of this underinvestment, fulfilling FOIA requests often means onerous, costly work for government agencies and long delays for the requesters. Here,

When the Cost of Misclassification is Higher for the Customer than for the Business

Consider a bank making decisions about loans. For the bank, making lending decisions optimally means reducing prediction errors*(cost of errors) minus the cost of making predictions (keeping things simple here). The cost of any one particular error, especially the denial of a loan when eligible, is typically small for

The Human and the Machine: Semi-automated approaches to ML

For a class of problems, a combination of algorithms and human input makes for the most optimal solution. For instance, three years ago, software to recreate shredded documents that won the DARPA award used “human[s] [to] verify what the computer was recommending.” The insight is used in character recognition

Big Data Algorithms: Too Complicated to Communicate?

“A decision is made about you, and you have no idea why it was done,” said Rajeev Date, an investor in data-science lenders and a former deputy director of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau From NYT: If Algorithms Know All, How Much Should Humans Help? The assertion that there is no