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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

Idealog: 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 has 18% of the daily value of sodium. I discovered it just recently. The discovery followed my reading an article discussing serious negative consequences of excess sodium for heart health. In turn, the discovery was followed by two others: I realized that I insufficiently assimilated 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

Flawed Analyses in Deliberative Polls

A Deliberative Poll works as follows: A random sample of people are surveyed. Out of the initial sample, a random subset is invited to deliberate, given balanced briefing materials, randomly assigned to small groups moderated by trained moderators, allowed the opportunity to quiz experts, and in the end surveyed again.

Idealog: Internet Panel + Media Monitoring

Media scholars have for long complained about the lack of good measures of media use. Survey self-reports have been shown to be notoriously unreliable, especially for news, where there is significant over-reporting, and without good measures, research lags. The same is true for most research in marketing. Until recently, the

Coding Issues in the ANES Cumulative File

I have, on occasion, used American National Election Studies (ANES) cumulative file to do over time comparisons. Roughly half of those times, I have found patterns that don’t make much sense. Only a small fraction of the times when the patterns didn’t make sense have I chosen to

Prospect Theory in Retrospect

Tversky and Kahneman, in “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice”, “describe decision problems in which people systematically violate the requirements of consistency and coherence, and [â€¦] trace these violations to the psychological principles that govern the perception of decision problems and the evaluation of options.” They start