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Computer Science

A collection of 32 issues

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

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,

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

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

Idealog: 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

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

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

The Future Of Comments

The comments sections of blogging sites suffer from a multiplicity of problems – they are overrun by spam or by repeated entries of the same or similar point, continue endlessly, and are generally overcrowded with grammatical and spelling mistakes. Comment sections that were once seen as an unmitigated good are now