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Sex, Race, and Politics in Online Dating
With Valentine’s Day two weeks away, there’s still plenty of time to find your soul mate. But daters beware: nearly 50 years after the Supreme Court ruled bans on interracial marriage unconstitutional, race still matters. Among newlyweds, only 9% of whites and 17% of blacks married outside their race. Several recent studies, moreover, have shown that... »
1000 Days of User-Visible Improvements
A version of this article appeared on the Beeminder Blog. This is the rest of the story, about how Beeminder bet $1000 on bettering Beeminder every day, then failed and had to actually cough up the $1000 to a lucky user. But only after making 1000 improvements in 1000 days... »
Popping the Filter Bubble
In his provocative TED talk and bestselling book, the progressive internet activist Eli Pariser tells the story of how one day he noticed that the Facebook posts from his politically conservative friends began disappearing from his newsfeed. Pariser traces this phenomenon back to Facebook’s recommendation algorithms, which looked at the links he clicked, effectively... »
Yootles Postmortem
I introduced the social currency (or scrip) Yootles in 2006 with the (needless to say, quixotic) goal of changing the social norms about money. We had two specific reasons for an alternative currency: We wanted to run prediction markets and needed a way around anti-gambling laws in the US Many people find the idea of using money... »
Forecasting Elections with Dirty Data
During the 1936 U.S. presidential campaign, the popular magazine Literary Digest conducted a mail-in election poll that attracted over two million responses, a huge sample even by today’s standards. Unfortunately for them, size isn’t the only thing that matters. Literary Digest notoriously and erroneously predicted a landslide victory for Republican candidate Alf Landon. In reality,... »
