Linear Digressions

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Survival Analysis Feb 19, 2016

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Survival analysis is all about studying how long until an event occurs--it's used in marketing to study how long a customer stays with a service, in epidemiology to estimate the duration of survival of a patient with some illness, and in social science to understand how the characteristics of a war inform how long the war goes on. This episode talks about the special challenges associated with survival analysis, and the tools that (data) scientists use to answer all kinds of duration-related questions.

Gravitational Waves Feb 15, 2016

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All aboard the gravitational waves bandwagon--with the first direct observation of gravitational waves announced this week, Katie's dusting off her physics PhD for a very special gravity-related episode. Discussed in this episode: what are gravitational waves, how are they detected, and what does this announcement mean for future studies of the universe. Relevant links: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/ligo-gravitational-waves-black-holes-einstein.html https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20160211

The Turing Test Feb 12, 2016

Show notes

Let's imagine a future in which a truly intelligent computer program exists. How would it convince us (humanity) that it was intelligent? Alan Turing's answer to this question, proposed over 60 years ago, is that the program could convince a human conversational partner that it, the computer, was in fact a human. 60 years later, the Turing Test endures as a gold standard of artificial intelligence. It hasn't been beaten, either--yet. Relevant links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test http://commonsensereasoning.org/winograd.html http://consumerist.com/2015/09/29/its-not-just-you-robots-are-also-bad-at-assembling-ikea-furniture/

Item Response Theory: how smart ARE you? Feb 08, 2016

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Psychometrics is all about measuring the psychological characteristics of people; for example, scholastic aptitude. How is this done? Tests, of course! But there's a chicken-and-egg problem here: you need to know both how hard a test is, and how smart the test-taker is, in order to get the results you want. How to solve this problem, one equation with two unknowns? Item response theory--the data science behind such tests and the GRE. Relevant links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Item_response_theory

Go! Feb 05, 2016

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As you may have heard, a computer beat a world-class human player in Go last week. As recently as a year ago the prediction was that it would take a decade to get to this point, yet here we are, in 2016. We'll talk about the history and strategy of game-playing computer programs, and what makes Google's AlphaGo so special. Relevant link: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2016/01/alphago-mastering-ancient-game-of-go.html

Great Social Networks in History Feb 01, 2016

Show notes

The Medici were one of the great ruling families of Europe during the Renaissance. How did they come to rule? Not power, or money, or armies, but through the strength of their social network. And speaking of great historical social networks, analysis of the network of letter-writing during the Enlightenment is helping humanities scholars track the dispersion of great ideas across the world during that time, from Voltaire to Benjamin Franklin and everyone in between. Relevant links: https://www2.bc.edu/~jonescq/mb851/Mar12/PadgettAnsell_AJS_1993.pdf http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/index.html

How Much to Pay a Spy (and a lil' more auctions) Jan 29, 2016

Show notes

A few small encores on auction theory, and then--how can you value a piece of information before you know what it is? Decision theory has some pointers. Some highly relevant information if you are trying to figure out how much to pay a spy. Relevant links: https://tuecontheoryofnetworks.wordpress.com/2013/02/25/the-origin-of-the-dutch-auction/ http://www.nowozin.net/sebastian/blog/the-fair-price-to-pay-a-spy-an-introduction-to-the-value-of-information.html

Sold! Auctions (Part 2) Jan 25, 2016

Show notes

The Google ads auction is a special kind of auction, one you might not know as well as the famous English auction (which we talked about in the last episode). But if it's what Google uses to sell billions of dollars of ad space in real time, you know it must be pretty cool. Relevant links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_auction http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/2006/position.pdf http://www.benedelman.org/publications/gsp-060801.pdf

Going Once, Going Twice: Auctions (Part 1) Jan 22, 2016

Show notes

The Google AdWords algorithm is (famously) an auction system for allocating a massive amount of online ad space in real time--with that fascinating use case in mind, this episode is part one in a two-part series all about auctions. We dive into the theory of auctions, and what makes a "good" auction. Relevant links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_auction http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/2006/position.pdf http://www.benedelman.org/publications/gsp-060801.pdf

Chernoff Faces and Minard Maps Jan 18, 2016

Show notes

A data visualization extravaganza in this episode, as we discuss Chernoff faces (you: "faces? huh?" us: "oh just you wait") and the greatest data visualization of all time, or at least the Napoleonic era. Relevant links: http://lya.fciencias.unam.mx/rfuentes/faces-chernoff.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Joseph_Minard

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