May 2009

Distribution of Swine Flu Cases by Weekday

How will you expect swine flu cases to be distributed by weekday? More specifically, will you expect more cases distributed in weekdays or in weekends? My first reaction is that there will be more cases if there are more social gatherings.

Following this logic, the reasons for supporting more cases in weekdays may include that susceptible population have more contacts with infected population in weekdays, either through school or through work, etc. In addition, as people are more likely to travel in weekends, it means that they will have more contacts with infected subjects during...

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Debates on government transparency websites

A few weeks ago my friend Aaron Swartz wrote a blog post called Transparency is Bunk, arguing that government transparency websites don't do what they're supposed to do, and in fact have perversely negative effects: they bury the real story in oceans of pro forma data, encourage apathy by revealing "the mindnumbing universality of waste and corruption," and lull activists into a false sense of accomplishment when occasional successes occur. It's a particularly powerful piece because Aaron uses the platform to announce he's done...

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Natural Languages

The social sciences have long embraced the idea of text-as-data, but in recent years, increasing numbers of quantitative researchers are investigating how to have computers find answers to questions in texts. This task might appear easy on the outset (as it apparently did to early researchers in machine translation), but, as we know, natural languages are incredibly complicated. In most of the applications in social science, analysts end up making a "bag of words" assumptions--the relevant part of a document are the actual words, not their order (this is not a unreasonable assumptions,...

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Dobbie and Fryer on Charter Schools in the Harlem Children's Zone

David Brooks wrote a column a few days ago about Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer's working paper on the Harlem Children's Zone charter schools, which the authors report dramatically improved students' performance, particularly in math. Looking at the paper, I think it's a nice example of constructing multiple comparisons to assess the effect of a program and to do some disentangling of mechanisms.

The program they study is...

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