Samasource

Samasource:

'via Blog this'

In his IJCNLP keynote address, among many other things,
Matt Lease mentioned a crowdsourcing service that is more focused on ethics than many
others. If I do crowdsourcing, I would like to consider using this.

Please call me, Ishmael
In my quest for the white wael
I lost your voicemael

How to master and command the eRiots.

The Dear knows that the Napoleonic era has much to teach us, especially on penal policy. In responding to the British consumer-oriented flash mob eRiots and eRobberies [1] we should  follow the policies that Jack Aubrey, MP, would suggest.

Captain Aubrey highly values social order, but tempers his opinions with as much compassion as his situation allows.

He would be reserved in his use of eFlogging, and that only in cases of drunkenness (by naval standards), sodomy and damaging the paintwork. He would certainly withdraw grog from repeat offenders, and would perhaps allow the use of an ePillory and/or eStocks. Mutineers and murderers could expect no mercy, but thieves would not be hanged. Instead they would either be ePressed into the eNavy or subjected to eTransportation to eBotany eBay.

Dr. Maturin was unavailable for comment, having been distracted by a piece of nondescript wildlife.

[1] US and EU Patents Applied for: Communication apparatus and coordination method for transgressive social communication among the yoof

New Job

I just moved to the Educational Testing Service, to work on their cRater project, which is like the famous eRater essay-grading project, except with more semantics, and for short answers instead of essays. I THINK the c stands for content, but it could stand for "constructed response", which is a psychometrics and educational testing thing. Learning fast, having fun, working with a great group of people. Note that the cRater link describes cRater as it was in 2004, not as it is now.

"You can observe a lot by just watching" Yogi Berra

While it isn't always easy, I can usually tell where people were raised as well as where they were born. Koreans raised in Los Angeles have a style completely different from those born in Seoul; the English, en masse, look different from the Scots, and it just takes one look at those wacky triangular eyeglasses for me to know that a young lady is either French or getting that way. In the same way, just by looking, I can pretty much diagnose the families waiting for the Newark to Gatwick flight. Here's one, prematurely greying father with John Lennon glasses, slightly older  mother with shoulder length hair, three blond boys with backpacks and crew cuts. I'm like, O.K. , he's British, she's American, all three boys born in the USA. Or, Asian looking father, fiftyish, no mother in the party, two young teen daughters, one classically Eurasian looking, the other blonder. Sure, I can do that: he's born in Hong Kong, but doesn't speak Cantonese well, one kid born in Shanghai, the other in canoe transit up the Amazon. Same father, I think, but the first girl's mother is definitely working as a dogcatcher in Evansville, Indiana, and the second one's mother once had that unfortunate accident with a hairnet and an avocado. Could these be the same person? Very likely, but I'm not infallible, while I know for sure that the father is part-time seal tamer and computer science professor, I can't be be sure whether he's a bigamist. It's just a matter of assessing the evidence.

I can also tell what language people speak, because the patterns of vowels and consonants shape the face. Turkish oral surgeons spend 47% of their time unsticking the tongue tip from the roof of the mouth. "Who put the gluten in this agglutinative language?", they cry. And did you know that Mick Jagger was raised Basque? His English accent is a fake: he stole it from a classmate at LSE, using 1960s recording technology and a hypnopaedic pillow. You don't get those lips from an Indo-European language, let me tell ya! Angela Lansbury is Swedish, and Dick van Dyke really is a cockney. As a young man Rex Harrison sang Wagner's Parsifal with Maria Callas in the Italian premiere at La Scala: the My Fair Lady thing is a front. Not many know that, but you can see all this in their faces.

Just by looking, I can tell whether your dog will develop cataracts (and whether your cat will develop doggeracts, should you care). Show me your friend's wardrobe, and I can predict the mean rainfall over the Andes for the next two weeks. Two glances inside your purse and I can diagnose your psychological problems to eight decimal places AND predict your fashion preferences. Just from your diet, I can tell you not only your height, weight and hat size but your views on a wide range of social issues and the three last digits of your social security number. If you were raised by wolves, I can tell. If you were kept locked in a cupboard by your neglectful parents, I will spot it, and be able to offer career advice, speech therapy and a range of inexpensive  after-care options. If your father married his half sister and you were raised by a vengeful dwarf in the forest, I will know, and be the first to offer you a place to lay your sword. And advise you on whether the local fire brigade is any use for your unknowingly genetically suspect purpose. But I'm not special, I think most people could do that, just by looking.

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How to do comparisons between machine learning schemes

Nice paper comparing 16 model selection and weighting schemes. Includes 58 benchmark datasets. The data analysis was done in the following way - for each dataset, rank the schemes. Then average the ranks. - use the Friedman test to test whether ranks are all equal ( - if ranks are not all equal, use the Nemenyi test (covered in papers by Demsar, Garcia et al  http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/papers/volume9/garcia08a/ Ying Yang, Geoffrey I. Webb, Jesús Cerquides, Kevin B. Korb, Janice R. Boughton, Kai Ming Ting: To Select or To Weigh: A Comparative Study of Linear Combination Schemes for SuperParent-One-Dependence Estimators. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 19(12): 1652-1665 (2007), ISSN: 1041-4347 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.134.8561