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Computer Science

A collection of 35 issues

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

Conversation With Bill Thompson: Fragmented Information

This is the fourth and concluding part of the interview with BBC technology columnist, Mr. Bill Thompson. part 1, part 2, part 3 This kind of completes two of the major questions that I had. I would now move on to digital literacy and fragmented informational landscape. Google has made

Conversation With Bill Thompson: Copyright Law

This is part III of a four-part interview with Mr. Bill Thompson, noted technology columnist with the BBC. part 1, part 2 “Copyright is not a Lockean natural right but is a limited right granted to authors in order to further the public interest. This principle is explicitly expressed in

Conversation With Bill Thompson: The Political Economy of the Internet

This is part 2 of the interview with Bill Thompson, technology columnist with the BBC. part 1 When I look at the Internet, there is this wonderful sense of volunteerism. It is incredible to see the kind of things that have come out of recent technology like the open source