Clik here to view.
256 colors in your xterm!
Have you ever used emacs or vim from the command line in GNU/Linux and been offended by the horrible color scheme you saw? I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve been through tons of vim color schemes and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Twitter Papers at the WWW 2010 Conference
This past week at WWW 2010 has resulted in quite the spread of Twitter papers. Topic included systems, novel uses, and studies of tweets and users. I’ve made an attempt to provide a taste of each...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Comments as content: The medium hinders the message
When articles were published in hard-copy newspapers, reader response was left to the ultimate in asynchronous communication: letters to the editor for differences of opinion, and corrections when a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Evening Project: What Would Hacker News Say?
What Would Hacker News Say (WWHNS) is a bookmarklet that allows you to see if there is a Hacker News (HN) discussion about a page you are currently viewing.I often find a link through a feed reader or...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Database papers at CHI
There is little I like more than a fine cheese and fresh-baked bread. Still, to fill the rest of my day without expanding my waistline, I go for a mix of databases and human-computer interaction....
View ArticleClik here to view.
I'm a (STEM) Graduate Student: Please Tax Me
Over the past month, a petition has been circulating asking the Obama administration to bring graduate student stipends back to their pre-1986 tax-exempt status. I urge you to not sign this petition,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Human-powered Sorts and Joins
(Cross-posted on the Crowd Research Blog)There hasbeen a lot of excitement in the database community about crowdsourced databases. At first blush, it sound like databases are yet another application...
View ArticleClik here to view.
John Glaser on Healthcare Information Technology
I recently sat in on a lecture for Professor Peter Szolovits’s Biomedical Computing course. The lecture was open to a greater audience, given the prominence of the speaker. As a non-expert, I found it...
View ArticleClik here to view.
One Gray Lady
I consume content through many aggregators, but The New York Times (The Gray Lady) is the single source of content I go to directly at least daily to know what’s happening in the world. While it’s good...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What Should be Included in a Data Science Curriculum?
(I recently wrote an answer to What Should be Included in a Data Science Curriculum? on Quora. Here’s a subset of that answer)Eugene Wu and I recently taught a 6-day (3 hours per day) course on data...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Locu
Life update: I’ve defended my thesis and I’m now the Director of Data at Locu. This doesn’t change much on the blog, as I’ll still periodically update it with random thoughts. I’m also doing a bit of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
My N=1 Guide to Grad School
A little delayed, but I put together a guide of advice I’ve given other students in grad school. Send feedback, or write your own!
View ArticleClik here to view.
Locu has a new home
On Monday, we announced that Locu has been acquired by GoDaddy. As a friend, technologist, or researcher, the acquisition might initially surprise you. Rather than repeat myself a thousand times, I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Web Scraping Tools for Non-developers
I recently spoke with a resource-limited organization that is investigating government corruption and wants to access various public datasets to monitor politicians and law firms. They don’t have...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reproducibility in the age of Mechanical Turk: We’re not there yet
There’s been increasing interest in the computer science research community in exploring the reproducibility of our research findings. One such project recently received quite a bit of attention for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The N=1 Guide to Startups after Grad School
About 2.5 years ago, I finished a Ph.D. with Sam Madden, David Karger, and Rob Miller, with my thesis at the intersection of Databases and Crowdsourcing. April marked my third year since joining Locu,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A data differ to help journalists
I recently read an article that reminded me of a type of reporting I’ve seen a few times now. In this article, the reporters compare a medical expenses dataset from this year to the one from last year....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Argonaut: Processing Complex Work with the Crowd
One of my favorite times of year at a company is when interns join for the summer. Internships are great avenues for those fun projects you’ve had in the back of your mind but haven’t had time to test...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Crowdsourced Data Management: Industry and Academic Perspectives
A few years ago, Aditya and I were catching up at Voltage cafe in Kendall Square when he asked if I’d be interested in writing a book on crowd-powered data processing systems. At the time, he was a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fun with Voter Data
Since elections are on everyone’s mind, I played around with some voter data. Your name/address/phone/party affiliation/participation is available in public voter data. I created an example of how it...
View Article
