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Computer Science

A collection of 39 issues

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

A Quick Scan: From Paper to Digital

Additional Note: See this presentation on paper to digital (pdf). There are two ways of converting paper to digital data: ‘human OCR and input,’ and machine-assisted. Here are some useful pointers about the latter. Scanning Since the success of so much of what comes after depends on the quality of

Bad Weather: Getting Data on Weather in a ZIP Code on a Particular Date

High-quality weather data are public. But they aren’t easy to make use of. Some thoughts and some software for finding out the weather in a particular ZIP Code on a particular day (or a set of dates). Some brief ground clearing before we begin. Weather data come from weather

help(R): matrix indexing

In R, some want to treat matrix like a data frame. It is a bad idea. And no – one cannot use the dollar sign to pick out a column of a matrix. The underlying data structure for a matrix in R is a vector, whereas data.frame object in R

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

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

From Satellites to Streets

There has been a tremendous growth in satellite-guided navigation systems and secondary applications relying on GIS systems, like finding shops near the place you are, etc. However, it remains opaque to me why we are using satellites to beam this information when we can easily embed RFID/or similar chips

End of Information Hierarchy

Today, people have a variety of ways to explore a collection via the Internet as opposed to carefully orchestrated explorations in a brick and mortar museum with a curated exhibition. A curator comes up with a story along with other contextual information about the exhibit and arranges the exhibition so