brendan_oconnor_ai brendan_oconnor_ai-2004 brendan_oconnor_ai-2004-3 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Is social science even worth doing when things like this get funded with hundreds of millions of federal dollars? Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person’s genitals “can result in pregnancy,” a congressional staff analysis has found. … Among the misconceptions cited by Waxman’s investigators: • A 43-day-old fetus is a “thinking person.” • HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can be spread via sweat and tears. • Condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse. … When used properly and consistently, condoms fail to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) less than 3 percent of the time, federal researchers say, and it is not known how many gay teena
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1 Is social science even worth doing when things like this get funded with hundreds of millions of federal dollars? [sent-1, score-0.529]
2 … Among the misconceptions cited by Waxman’s investigators: • A 43-day-old fetus is a “thinking person. [sent-3, score-0.096]
3 ” • HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can be spread via sweat and tears. [sent-4, score-0.487]
4 • Condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse. [sent-5, score-0.751]
5 … When used properly and consistently, condoms fail to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) less than 3 percent of the time, federal researchers say, and it is not known how many gay teenagers are HIV-positive. [sent-6, score-2.096]
6 The assertion regarding gay teenagers may be a misinterpretation of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found that 59 percent of HIV-infected males age 13 to 19 contracted the virus through homosexual relations. [sent-7, score-1.612]
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same-blog 1 1.0000001 3 brendan oconnor ai-2004-12-02-go science
Introduction: Is social science even worth doing when things like this get funded with hundreds of millions of federal dollars? Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person’s genitals “can result in pregnancy,” a congressional staff analysis has found. … Among the misconceptions cited by Waxman’s investigators: • A 43-day-old fetus is a “thinking person.” • HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can be spread via sweat and tears. • Condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse. … When used properly and consistently, condoms fail to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) less than 3 percent of the time, federal researchers say, and it is not known how many gay teena
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Introduction: This interactive histogram is brilliant. The NYT data visualization folks never fail to impress. margins.swf (application/x-shockwave-flash Object)
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Introduction: Sometimes it seems bad countries come with long names. North Korea is “People’s Democratic Republic of Korea”, Libya is “Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya”, and the like. But on the other hand, there’s plenty of counter-examples — it’s the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” and “Republic of Cuba”, after all. Do long names with good-sounding adjectives correspond with non-democratic governments? Fortunately, this can be tested. First, what words are out there? From the CIA Factbook’s data on long form names, here are some of the most popular words used by today’s countries, listed with the number of occurrences across all 194 names. I limited to tokens that appear >= 3 times. A majority of countries are Republics, while there are some Kingdoms, and even a few Democracies. (146 of) (127 Republic) (17 Kingdom) (8 the) (8 Democratic) (6 State) (6 People’s) (5 United) (4 and) (4 Islamic) (4 Arab) (3 States) (3 Socialist) (3 Principality) (3 Is
4 0.043255586 63 brendan oconnor ai-2007-06-10-Freak-Freakonomics (Ariel Rubinstein is the shit!)
Introduction: I don’t care how lame anyone thinks this is, but economic theorist Ariel Rubinstein is the shit. He’s funny, self-deprecating, and brilliant. I was just re-reading his delightful, sarcastic review of Freakonomics . (Overly dramatized visual depiction below; hey, conflict sells.) The review consists of excerpts from his own upcoming super-worldwide-bestseller, “Freak-Freakonomics”. It is full of golden quotes such as: Chapter 2: Why do economists earn more than mathematicians? … The comparison between architects and prostitutes can be applied to mathematicians and economists: The former are more skilled, highly educated and intelligent. To elaborate: Levitt has never encountered a girl who dreams of being a prostitute and I have never met a child who dreams of being an economist. Like prostitutes, the skill required of economists is “not necessarily ‘specialized’” (106). And, finally, here is a new explanation for the salary gap between mathematicians and eco
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Introduction: Experimental philosophy: Suppose the chairman of a company has to decide whether to adopt a new program. It would increase profits and help the environment too. “I don’t care at all about helping the environment,” the chairman says. “I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let’s start the new program.” Would you say that the chairman intended to help the environment? O.K., same circumstance. Except this time the program would harm the environment. The chairman, who still couldn’t care less about the environment, authorizes the program in order to get those profits. As expected, the bottom line goes up, the environment goes down. Would you say the chairman harmed the environment intentionally? in one survey, only 23 percent of people said that the chairman in the first situation had intentionally helped the environment. When they had to think about the second situation, though, fully 82 percent thought that the chairman had intentionally harmed the environment. There’s plen
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Introduction: Is social science even worth doing when things like this get funded with hundreds of millions of federal dollars? Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person’s genitals “can result in pregnancy,” a congressional staff analysis has found. … Among the misconceptions cited by Waxman’s investigators: • A 43-day-old fetus is a “thinking person.” • HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can be spread via sweat and tears. • Condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse. … When used properly and consistently, condoms fail to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) less than 3 percent of the time, federal researchers say, and it is not known how many gay teena
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Introduction: OK, everyone loves to run dictionary methods for sentiment and other text analysis — counting words from a predefined lexicon in a big corpus, in order to explore or test hypotheses about the corpus. In particular, this is often done for sentiment analysis: count positive and negative words (according to a sentiment polarity lexicon, which was derived from human raters or previous researchers’ intuitions), and then proclaim the output yields sentiment levels of the documents. More and more papers come out every day that do this. I’ve done this myself. It’s interesting and fun, but it’s easy to get a bunch of meaningless numbers if you don’t carefully validate what’s going on. There are certainly good studies in this area that do further validation and analysis, but it’s hard to trust a study that just presents a graph with a few overly strong speculative claims as to its meaning. This happens more than it ought to. I was happy to see a similarly critical view in a nice workin
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Introduction: Sometimes it seems bad countries come with long names. North Korea is “People’s Democratic Republic of Korea”, Libya is “Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya”, and the like. But on the other hand, there’s plenty of counter-examples — it’s the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” and “Republic of Cuba”, after all. Do long names with good-sounding adjectives correspond with non-democratic governments? Fortunately, this can be tested. First, what words are out there? From the CIA Factbook’s data on long form names, here are some of the most popular words used by today’s countries, listed with the number of occurrences across all 194 names. I limited to tokens that appear >= 3 times. A majority of countries are Republics, while there are some Kingdoms, and even a few Democracies. (146 of) (127 Republic) (17 Kingdom) (8 the) (8 Democratic) (6 State) (6 People’s) (5 United) (4 and) (4 Islamic) (4 Arab) (3 States) (3 Socialist) (3 Principality) (3 Is
4 0.46023729 144 brendan oconnor ai-2009-06-14-Psychometrics quote
Introduction: It is rather surprising that systematic studies of human abilities were not undertaken until the second half of the last century… An accurate method was available for measuring the circumference of the earth 2,000 years before the first systematic measures of human ability were developed. –Jum Nunnally, Psychometric Theory (1967) (Social science textbooks from the 60′s and 70′s are rad.)
5 0.43593621 105 brendan oconnor ai-2008-06-05-Clinton-Obama support visualization
Introduction: This interactive histogram is brilliant. The NYT data visualization folks never fail to impress. margins.swf (application/x-shockwave-flash Object)
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Introduction: Is social science even worth doing when things like this get funded with hundreds of millions of federal dollars? Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person’s genitals “can result in pregnancy,” a congressional staff analysis has found. … Among the misconceptions cited by Waxman’s investigators: • A 43-day-old fetus is a “thinking person.” • HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can be spread via sweat and tears. • Condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse. … When used properly and consistently, condoms fail to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) less than 3 percent of the time, federal researchers say, and it is not known how many gay teena
2 0.9509868 110 brendan oconnor ai-2008-08-15-East vs West cultural psychology!
Introduction: Great anti-pop-science article of the moment — Mark Liberman does a take-down of David Brooks’ apparently careless column on cultural psych experiments that purport to show that East Asians are collectivist while Westerns are individualist. From Liberman: Question to Language Log: Is it correct that if you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing, while if you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim? Answer: In principle, yes. But first of all, it wasn’t a representative sample of Americans, it was undergraduates in a psychology course at the University of Michigan; and second, it wasn’t Chinese, it was undergraduates in a psychology course at Kyoto University in Japan; and third, it wasn’t a fish tank, it was 10 20-second animated vignettes of underwater scenes; and fourth, the Americans didn’t mention the “foca
3 0.74311697 90 brendan oconnor ai-2008-01-20-Moral psychology on Amazon Mechanical Turk
Introduction: There’s a lot of exciting work in moral psychology right now. I’ve been telling various poor fools who listen to me to read something from Jonathan Haidt or Joshua Greene , but of course there’s a sea of too many articles and books of varying quality and intended audience. But just last week Steven Pinker wrote a great NYT magazine article, “The Moral Instinct,” which summarizes current research and tries to spell out a few implications. I recommend it highly, if just for presenting so many awesome examples. (Yes, this blog has poked fun at Pinker before. But in any case, he is a brilliant expository writer. The Language Instinct is still one of my favorite popular science books.) For a while now I’ve been thinking that recruiting subjects online could lend itself to collecting some really interesting behavioral science data. A few months ago I tried doing this with Amazon Mechanical Turk , a horribly misnamed web service that actually lets you create web-based tasks
Introduction: This is a good idea: in a search engine’s query logs, look for outbreaks of queries like [[flu symptoms]] in a given region. I’ve heard (from Roddy ) that this trick also works well on Facebook statuses (e.g. “Feeling crappy this morning, think I just got the flu”). Google Uses Web Searches to Track Flu’s Spread – NYTimes.com Google Flu Trends – google.org For an example with a publicly available data feed, these queries works decently well on Twitter search: [[ flu -shot -google ]] (high recall) [[ "muscle aches" flu -shot ]] (high precision) The “muscle aches” query is too sparse and the general query is too noisy, but you could imagine some more tricks to clean it up, then train a classifier, etc. With a bit more work it looks like geolocation information can be had out of the Twitter search API .
5 0.19217539 203 brendan oconnor ai-2014-02-19-What the ACL-2014 review scores mean
Introduction: I’ve had several people ask me what the numbers in ACL reviews mean — and I can’t find anywhere online where they’re described. (Can anyone point this out if it is somewhere?) So here’s the review form, below. They all go from 1 to 5, with 5 the best. I think the review emails to authors only include a subset of the below — for example, “Overall Recommendation” is not included? The CFP said that they have different types of review forms for different types of papers. I think this one is for a standard full paper. I guess what people really want to know is what scores tend to correspond to acceptances. I really have no idea and I get the impression this can change year to year. I have no involvement with the ACL conference besides being one of many, many reviewers. APPROPRIATENESS (1-5) Does the paper fit in ACL 2014? (Please answer this question in light of the desire to broaden the scope of the research areas represented at ACL.) 5: Certainly. 4: Probabl
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