Plotting Hubway trip data
Hubway opened up in Cambridge this summer, a bike-rental service. $5 for a half-hour trip, buying a yearly membership gets you unlimited half-hour trips. Not a bad idea. I’ve used the service exactly...
View ArticleHubway Trip Data Continued
The winners have been announced, and the challenge is over. The winning entry did something very clever. They used MBTA data and calculated the amount of time saved by using Hubway versus public...
View ArticleObesity Policy Interventions
This will be the final entry in my series on obesity. I looked at demographics and causes, now the big question: What to do? People have proposed a tax on fatty foods, which sounds somewhat reasonable....
View ArticleCrazy things on which to spend money
Modern society is full of marvels. Computers with more storage and processing power than existed 50 years ago are available to everyone. Flying across the world may not be “cheap”, but it’s doable. We...
View ArticleIt’s the end of the world again
In a move that surprised very few people, the world did not end today. Or yesterday. Slightly more surprising was that it didn’t end Friday, but only slightly. Newton was apparently not a fan of the...
View ArticleTheoretical maximum of the Bechdel Test
Background: For those that may not know, the Bechdel test has 3 criteria. A movie/TV show/book/whatever must have at least 1 scene where there exist: 0. 2 female characters 1. talking to each other 2....
View ArticleThe comments of the few outweigh the comments of the many
The Pareto Principle for businesses states that 80% of sales come from 20% of customers. Social media has the same skew; the majority of content comes from a minority of users. I’ve always been curious...
View Article(Hyper) Rational Travel Planning
There’s an expression floating around the rationalist corner of the interwebs: “If you’ve never missed a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports”. The idea is that to be sure of making a...
View ArticleClassifying text with Keras: Visualization
This is part 3 of a three-part series describing text processing and classification. Part 1 covers input data preparation and neural network construction, part 2 adds a variety of quality metrics, and...
View ArticleClassifying and visualizing with fastText and tSNE
Previously I wrote a three-part series on classifying text, in which I walked through the creation of a text classifier from the bottom up. It was interesting but it was purely an academic exercise....
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