January 2010
2 posts
Quote of the day
Crowdsourcing is like MapReduce: Split, parallel process, aggregate. Mechanical Turk does the Map. Need better Reduce and a Pig-like language on top.
Panagiotis Ipeirotis via Twitter.
December 2009
1 post
“In this study we introduce a new indicator for private consumption based on...”
– Forecasting Private Consumption: Survey-based Indicators vs. Google Trends
November 2009
1 post
TEDxSV 2009
I’ll be at the TED event at Stanford on Dec 12, 2009.
You should too!
October 2009
6 posts
livejamie:
Tom Hodge - Aerodynamic
Who knew...
ylizabeth:
kids in technicolour - coldplay vs....
copycats:
Night Beatle by Go Home Productions...
Elements of Statistical Learning (New Edition) now...
Holy crap. This is awesome. Profs Hastie, Friedman and Tibshirani have put the new (2009) version of their definitive text, Elements of Statistical Learning, online for free. At 700+ pages (and a lot of megabytes), its still far easier to use the paper copy. Hopefully something will appear in Google Books soon.
Given that a professor in my department has just won the Nobel Prize in Economics — now seems like a good time to mention: I’ve left full-time employment at Google to start a PhD at Berkeley.
September 2009
3 posts
Best (and most succinct) defense of the Economics...
Economists have come under a lot of scrutiny for having not predicted the recession and financial crisis (and for not offering useful advice once the panics were underway). Here are some interesting thoughts from Hal:
Many economists recognized that housing prices were out of line. What we didn’t recognize is how screwed up the mortgage market was. If you had ask 100 economists, “what...
Unfortunate Quote of the Day
“‘She lost her husband. Her job. Her identity,” she said. ‘She’s working on getting that back, and she’s a beautiful woman, inside and out. She did get the shaft really bad.’” — San Francisco Weekly on Ruby Rippley Tourk. Emphasis mine.
Quote of the day
“Have you ever seen a preference? If you have, please take a picture of it for me. Since we like to assert that economics is an emperical science, we would like the theoritical primitives to be observable, at least in principle, otherwise we’re only engaged in a very mathematically rigorous form of theology.” David Ahn’s PhD microeconomics course notes.
July 2009
2 posts
Google's R Style Guide
Here are the rules we’ve come up with at Google for our programs running in R. The goal of the R Programming Style Guide is to make our R code easier to read, share, and verify. The rules below were designed in collaboration with the entire R user community at Google. Style guides are often useful for larger groups of people collaborating on code together. Have a look at the style guide...
"The Golden Age of Statistical Graphics"
Cool paper in Statistical Science from Steve the Bayesian arguing that the golden era of statistical graphics was about a century ago. Abstract. Statistical graphics and data visualization have long histories, but their modern forms began only in the early 1800s. Between roughly 1850 and 1900 (±10), an explosive growth occurred in both the general use of graphic methods and the range of topics to...
June 2009
4 posts
Google App Engine
I probably shouldn’t review my own employer’s products too often here, since I suppose I have a conflict of interest. However, I tried Google App Engine today. If you’re a moderately competent Python programmer (or, in the future, Java), this is an easy way of creating a highly scalable web application. Impressive.
Why I love Google Voice
I’ve been raving about Google Voice to whomever will listen. Its time I put into writing why I think its so great. Before I go there, let me address the #1 concern people have when they hear about the service: “Do I have to change my number?”
The answer is no. Google Voice is essentially a fancy forwarding service, with a few cool features added on top. You’ll get a new...
Digitizing Itemized Receipts: Someone Solve this...
Thanks to services like Mint and Wesabe, my credit card statements and bank bills are much more useful. But they could be even moreso.
When my credit card says I spent $40 at Target, thats aggregated over a whole lot of different items. It’d be totally useful to have those individual purchases separated out online somewhere between the toothpaste, office supplies and magazines I bought....
May 2009
2 posts
Boss/Team in Wired
My boss/team got a big article in Wired. They interviewed me for it, but I didn’t make it into the article :(
Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability
Doesn't that feel nicer?
This website has had the same design almost since 2003. It was time for change.