TED talk: Teaching kids real math with computers | Video on TED.com

Conrad Wolfram: Teaching kids real math with computers | Video on TED.com

I like this.

Starting to get some dissertation results...

Apologies for the long delay between posts. Stock excuse: "Dissertation... blah blah blah..."

Actually, I'm starting to get some nifty results from my dissertation. I've spent a long summer writing surveys and software, and in the next few weeks I hope to have something to show for it. Exhibit A: a word cloud for an automated classifier of political content.


Orange words are associated with political content, and blue words are disassociated. The size of a word denotes the strength of association -- essentially, the size of each word corresponds to the absolute value of the beta value of the word in a logistic regression with "political-ness" as the dependent variable. The layout of the words is done by computer algorithm to conserve space; it doesn't carry any important information.

I used wordle for the layout. The classifier runs regularized logistic regression using the scikits.learn package for python. The training data is from a team of undergraduate research assistants.

Daily Beast's Election Oracle

Here's a nifty new application in sentiment analysis: the Daily Beast's "Election Oracle." It's based on an engine called WiseWindow, which apparently scrapes the Web in real time, searching for content relevant to all the midterm elections, then makes predictions. One interesting touch is that DailyBeast pipes in RealClearPolitics' latest poll numbers, inviting head-to-head comparisons.

If the screen-scraping works the way it's intended, you would expect WiseWindow's numbers to change a little faster than the polls, since polls are only conducted every so often, and usually include a rolling average.

I'm skeptical. Not because I don't believe that it can be done, but because I've read up on the top-of-the-line opinion mining algorithms, and they're still full of holes. Computer scientists are smart people, but they haven't absorbed the lessons that pollsters have spent almost 100 years learning.

My particular brand of procrastination

On procrastination

"Victor Hugo would write naked and tell his valet to hide his clothes so that he’d be unable to go outside when he was supposed to be writing."

If only I didn't have to do so much work from the CAP lab...

Here's a great, well-sourced article in the New Yorker on the psychology, philosophy, economics, and history of procrastination. Worth a read for all grad students.