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.

A minute to learn, a lifetime to master

My family was in town last weekend (new baby--very exciting) and my brother Sam and I got to talking about board games, and what makes a good game. One reasonable standard comes from Othello's tagline: "a minute to learn, a lifetime to master." For strategy games, at least, we like the idea of complex gameplay emerging from simple rules.

Following that idea, we pulled up a list of ~30 well-known games and rated them for "game complexity" (How complicated are the rules?) and "strategy complexity" (How complicated are strategies for winning?). We came up with our ratings separately, but they were strongly correlated (R-squared values of .68 and .73, respectively).

The strength of this correlation surprised me at first. In retrospect, board games have been such an important part of brotherly bonding that I shouldn't have been taken aback. Case in point: we had agreed to use 1 to 10 scales, but we both independently decided that War and Candyland should score zero for strategy complexity, because neither game ever presents players with a choice.

With data in hand, I averaged our scores and then plotted game complexity against strategy complexity. The two dimensions of complexity are correlated (R2 = .494). Note that both my favorite game (Go), and his favorite game (Texas holdem) are strong positive outliers.

Apologies for the ugly graph. If I had the time, I'd have plugged in logos for all the games. Still, the picture mostly comes through.

Link mishmash

Interesting post by Dan Hopkins on the Monkey Cage: Spin and the economy -- Can newspapers convince people the economy is better or worse than it really is? No.

Also from the MC: predictions for the 2010 elections. We're short of complete consensus, but the Dems are likely to lose the House.

From FlowingData: a beautiful delayed-shutter picture of fireflies in a forest. See also the delayed-shutter picture of a Roomba.

From NYTimes: folk wisdom about study habits -- some of it masquerading as scientific -- is often dead wrong. This whole article is worth reading, but let me spoil a few of the punch lines. Designated study rooms -- bad. (What about designated study times?) Learning styles (e.g. "I'm a visual learner") -- very little supporting evidence. Testing -- often beneficial.

An xkcd wedding cake. I love this web comic.