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Structural Inequality

Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, recently spoke about social mobility. He said, My particular focus is on inter-generational social mobility – the extent to which a person’s income or social class is influenced by the income or social class of their parents. Social mobility is a measure of

On Love

Mothers spend a great deal of their time and energy on their kids, especially newborns. They spend far more time thinking and working to ensure the welfare of another human being (their kid) than most humans will spend on any other human being, say their romantic partner or sibling. Add

'Automatically' Summarizing Articles and Judicial Opinions

While many of the articles and judicial opinions are never cited, a system can be established to build summaries of those that are. The idea is straightforward- harvest sentences just before the citation in academic articles citing the article of interest. One can learn from the summaries of the articles

The Perils of Balancing Scales

Randomization of scale order (balancing) across respondents is common practice. It is done to ‘cancel’ errors generated by ‘satisficers’ who presumably pick the first option on a scale without regard to content. The practice is assumed to have no impact on the propensity of satisficers to pick the first option,

Join Or Die

How to join datasets correctly is well understood. But we continue to do it badly. Here are notes on how to do fuzzy joins and long to wide transformations starting with some general preprocessing advice. Preprocessing Keys and Tables 1. Remove stuff irrelevant to matching, e.g., font style, spaces,

Learning about Delhi: A Second Look at The Delhi Walla

In Delhi, one is surrounded by history, but oblivious of it. Worn stone and brick arches with peeling MCD plaster, whitewashed either white or the color of basic clay pots, soot-blackened and carrying crudely carved avocations of love, appear suddenly across noisy traffic-filled roads but don’t jolt one into

Complimentary Spam

Those who don’t read this blog are its biggest fans. No surprise there. Here below is a selection of comments left by spam-bots. Spelling and grammatical ‘errors’, likely deliberately put in by spammers, have been left untouched. The word ‘errors’ has bunny ears because you can’t really call

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