Somethink to Chew On

The Meetup phenomenon, which is now substantial and longstanding enough to be more of a cultural change than a flash in the pan, continues to impress me. Even more so than tools like LinkedIn, Meetups have changed the nature of professional networking, making it more informal, diverse, and decentralized. Last night, statistics consultant (and cheap eats guru) Jared Lander and I presented a talk on a statistical technique tangentially related to my professional work (more closely associated with Jared’s). The origin of this presentation is worth noting. On Meetup’s web site, members of a group can suggest topics for meetings. Before even attending a single NYC Predictive Analytics event, I posted several topics that I thought might be interesting for the group. A bit later, the organizers (Bruno and Alex) contacted me to see if I’d be willing to present on prediction with Multilevel models. I said that I would, but only if I could co-present with someone who actually knew something about the topic a complementary set of skills and experiences. Knowing Jared from the NYC R Meetup group, and knowing that he learned about multilevel models from the professor who wrote the best book on the topic, and knowing that he’s pretty good in front of an audience, I suggested we collaborate.

Despite requiring a lot of work, and a lot of learning of details on my part, we managed to throw together a pretty decent talk. (As of this morning, there’s four ratings of the event on Meetup, and we got 5/5 stars! Yay us! Not statistically conclusive, though…) We used as an example topic for data analysis the difficult and critically important problem of predicting reviews of pizza restaurants in downtown NYC. Jared is actually an expert on this topic, having written his Masters thesis on ratings from Menupages.com. For the talk, Jared would present a few slides, then I’d present a few. In a few cases we’d both try to explain topics from slightly different points of view. I’d repeatedly try to use the keyboard instead of the remote-control gadget to control Powerpoint, causing the computer to melt down into a pile of slag and refuse to change the slide. Jared would send me withering glares when I started to move towards the keyboard. It ended up OK, though, we got through everything, and even answered about half of the (excellent) questions! Oh, and shout-out to the AV guy at AOL HQ. I don’t know how they pay his salary, but he rocked.

Jared has posted the slides from the talk here (ppt), and I’ve put the data we made up (for pedagogical purposes) and the code we used to analyze it and generate graphs for the talk here on Github. Alex video-recorded the presentation, and I’ll update this sentence to link to the video once it’s posted somewhere. Hope folks find it valuable!

As more and more people get smartphones that can play MP3s or streamed music, like the iPhone or Android phone like the upcoming HTC Evo 4G (I’m gettin’ one!), fewer and fewer people are buying standalone MP3 players. Why have two gadgets when you can have just one? But I think there are good reasons to do so, but I don’t think the right combination of products are currently on the market. Here’s my thinking. Read more…

A few months back I gave a presentation to the NYC R Meetup. (R is a statistical programming language. If this means nothing to you, feel free to stop reading now.) The presentation was on ggplot2, a popular package for generating graphs of data and statistics. In the talk (which you can see here, including both my slides and my patter!) I presented both the really great things about ggplot2 and some of its downsides. In this blog post, I wanted to expand a bit on my thinking on ggplot, the Grammar of Graphics, and how peoples’ conceptual representations of graphs, data, ggplot, and R all interact. ggplot is both incredibly elegant and unfortunately difficult to learn to use well, I think as a consequence of the variety of representations. Read more…

Turnout at Pete’s Candy Store’s Quizz-Off was thin last, night, likely due to the Yankee game. But it was fun anyway, particularly as our team was hosting! We had six rounds of brilliant trivia, two of which were audio rounds. Hear them below…

Read more…

Hah, it rhymes! The fall haul (hah!) from the CSA inevitably means two things, root vegetables and ungodly numbers of pears. I love root vegetables, but tend to find pears to be pale imitations of apples. But when poached in red wine, or cooked with butter and sugar, pears can have some redeeming value. Recently, for the cooking club, I teamed up to make a dessert with the theme “Fall Harvest.” We were inspired by a recent recipe from the late, lamented Gourmet magazine, Beet and Pear Napoleons with Ginger Juice Vinaigrette. Roasted beets layered with pears, with flavors of ginger, citrus, tarragon, and poppy. In fact, we were so inspired by the dish, that we made it too, and started the dinner with an amuse of the original recipe:

For the dessert itself, we took these flavors and turned them on their heads. The formerly raw pear circles were now lightly carmelized with sugar and butter. The beet, instead of being roasted, was boiled, pureed, and folded into a chocolate cake batter. The ginger juice was mixed into a buttercream instead of a vinagrette. The texture and visual impact of the poppy seeds was replaced with cocoa nibs. The result was an almost perfectly balanced mixture of fruit and butter flavors, sweet and tart, creamy and crunchy. (If I were to make it again, I’d actually add more pear!) We were very happy with the result:

(recipe outline here)

The problem of how to monetize online publishing, particularly news publishing,  is neither new nor all that surprising. But the ongoing lack of a solution is steadily eating into news organizations across the country. Yesterday, the Times announced it was going to buy out or lay off 8% of its newsroom staff, despite being the best national newspaper in the country and probably the one making the best use of Internet technologies. (Their interactive graphics are some of the best around.) How can newspapers make money on the web? Ad revenue is inadequate, and people won’t generally pay for content. This post from a journalism blog at Harvard discusses why micropayments will never work:

Apple can charge for music because it controls access to the songs from all the major record labels. Phone companies and cable companies can charge usurious rates for text messaging and Internet because they have little or no real competition. How does any of that apply to newspapers? … Newspapers have spent the past 100 years or so with a stranglehold on both the tools of mass publishing and the means of distribution, and much of what has happened to them over the past decade is a result of them losing both of those things. The unfortunate reality is that even the best micropayment system is not going to recreate that system of artificial scarcity and control…

But I think there’s a way that might work, a way that leverages human psychology. People like to feel like they’re in control, and they like to feel like they have a voice in the system. Micropayment systems that require you to pay 10 cents to read an article, based on a headline or a link, or subscription systems that take your money and give you something you can get elsewhere for free, just make you resentful. So instead, design the system so that you associate feeling good about what you have just read with giving money to the people who produced the content. Here’s how it might work.

If I decide I want to read content from a consortium of providers (say, anything owned by The New York Times Company, or Time-Warner, or Seed Media Group, or a group of publishers that set up their own consortium), I set up an account, pay my $50/year, and get access. If I like a piece of content (article, podcast, interactive graphic, whatever), I click the “Tip the Author(s)” button, and a chunk of my $50, maybe 10 cents, gets redirected to the actual people creating the content I actually like (not just start to read). If I don’t use up my $50 for the year, the balance just gets split internally by the consortium. This way, readers have a feeling of control and an association of paying with pleasure, providers get cash, and the best providers get the most cash.

Information management for this would be straightforward, and it would (I think) work. People like to tip for good service. Let them tip for informative, well-reported news.

Welcome to my new web page and new blog! I will have various references about me (so far, a list of publications and a list of other sites I can be found on), as well as a blog about things I’m working on or thinking about. Posts will be categorized as Personal or Professional (or both, like this one!), and I think there’s a way to subscribe to an RSS feed of just one or the other, in case you’re uninterested in statistics or food or whatever. (google, google…) Ah, yes, you can. Here’s the Personal feed and here’s the Professional feed. I’ll figure out how to put links to them in the sidebar at some point!