Classifiers in the news

Here's a first for me - a blog post consisting of an actual decision tree. It classifies counties as going Clinton vs Obama. Wonder what the weights for a linear classifier would look like?

Somehow this seems more appropriate the day after

I was hoping for Obama to have a knockout win in Pennsylvania, just to end the madness...but no. Apparently, as the Three-Toed Sloth says, the voting will continue until morale improves.

Oh well, at least the telerobots will stop calling my house for a while....

Valuable resource for sentiment analysis?

I didn't make it through last night's debate but it's an ill wind...one result seems to be a list of 11000+ comments that appear to be almost entirely negative in tone.

Sunday Forum: Nation of bridges

If you like Pittsburgh, baseball, Michael Chabon, and Barack Obama - and who doesn't? - there was a lovely essay in my Sunday paper: Nation of bridges

Sterling interview

Via Dave Farber's "Interesting Persons" list, an interview with Bruce Sterling on Life, the Internet and Everything, in which he discusses the role of colleges

A college is supposed to civilize the young. If you remove those functions merely in order to pump ones and zeros at student eyeballs, you are going to lose a lot of valuable cultural capital. An educated citizen is not a friction-free technocratic philistine myrmidon with an ISO rating. Those guys exist, don't get me wrong, but they bear the relationship to education that the Ron Paul campaign had to political reality.

and himself

They say that those who worship the Muses end up running the Museums. Similarly, all futurists are doomed to become historians. The avant-garde becomes the gray eminences...

After hearing the David Evan's excellent talk "What Elements of an Online Social Networking Profile Predict Target-Rater Agreement in Personality?" I now know there there are three things I could tell you about that would (roughly speaking) help you more reliably assess my true personality. Here they are....

1. Something I'm proud of.
2. Something I'm kind of embarrassed by.
3. A humorous video.