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Idealog

A collection of 19 issues

Reading Readers' Needs

With Gaurav Gandhi The books people pick to learn from often fail them. All too often, the book has intimidating jargon, or the examples are irrelevant to the reader, or there is too much duplication. Or the content is just wrong. Readers make poor choices about books because finding a

Campaigns, Construction, and Moviemaking

American presidential political campaigns, big construction projects, and big-budget moviemaking have a lot in common. They are all complex enterprises with lots of moving parts, they all bring together lots of people for a short period, and they all need people to hit the ground running and execute in lockstep

Incentives to Care

A lot of people have their lives cut short because they eat too much and exercise too little. Worse, the quality of their shortened lives is typically much lower as a result of avoidable' illnesses that stem frombad behavior.’ And that isn’t all. People who are not feeling

Clarifai(ng) the Future of Clarifai

Clarifai is a promising AI start-up. In a short(ish) time, it has made major progress on an important problem. And it is rapidly rolling out products with lots of business potential. But there are still some things that it could do. As I understand it, the base version of

I Recommend It: A Recommender System For Scholarship Discovery

The rate of production of scholarship has never been higher. And while our ability to discover relevant scholarship per unit of time has never kept pace with the production of knowledge, it has also risen sharply—most recently, due to Google scholar. The efficiency of discovery of relevant scholarship, however,

Some Aspects of Online Learning Re-imagined

Trevor Hastie is a superb teacher. He excels at making complex things simple. Till recently, his lectures were only available to those fortunate enough to be at Stanford. But now, he teaches a free introductory course on statistical learning via the Stanford online learning platform. (I browsed through the online

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,

Idealog: Creating A Leaky Internet

Recent Wikileaks episode has highlighted the immense control national governments and private companies have on what content can be hosted. Within days of being identified by the U.S. government as a problem, private companies in charge of hosting and providing banking services to Wikileaks withdrew support, largely neutering organization’

Idealog: Surveys in Exchange for Temporary Internet Access

Recruiting diverse samples on the Internet is a tough business. Even if one uses probability sampling, one must still think of creative ways of incentivizing response. For example, Knowledge Networks samples uses RDD (one can use ABS) and then entices selected respondents with free Internet access (or money) in exchange