I recently switched from shared hosting to a VPS, expecting to get an immediate and automatic performance boost. I was overly optimistic and ran into memory trouble right away. After endlessly struggling with Apache and mod_php configuration, I was ready to give up. Then on a whim, I switched to nginx/fastcgi to see the average response time drop from 1500ms to 300ms:
I signed up to do one month of paid research at CMU|Portugal before spring classes start. My task boils down to creating interesting visualizations. The bad news is that I have no experience visualizing data and the dataset I’m to visualize hasn’t yet been collected. Fortunately, I’ve always been theoretically interested in data visualization, so I was happy to have a solid excuse to explore the subject. All I needed was a sufficiently rich data set, mad skills and a bit of inspiration. read more…
As a follow up to my last post, I posted a HIT on Mechanical Turk asking 20 turkers if they know Java. I paid them 5 cents to answer the question. Surprisingly, 9 of 20 claimed to know. I was amazed at how strong selection bias was in this case, since surely not 50% of turkers know how to program!
I then asked those turkers who know Java to complete the following trivial Java method. If they wrote it correctly, I paid them a 45 cent bonus. read more…
Last semester at CMU, I was involved in a research project involving Mechanical Turk. The goal was to get Mechanical Turk users (turkers) to collaborate on creating online wikipedia-style articles. Prior to my team’s involvement, an undergraduate created a mediawiki-based platform to allow turkers to collaborate on articles. Despite a high compensation, few turkers completed the task. My team tackled the problem and came up with some interesting videos on the way. read more…
Look at the riders of any city bus. Many of them are plugged into their music players, tapping away to the beat. I propose to augment our natural love of rhythm into a ubiquitous wearable drum system. The target user of this system isn’t only the typical rhythm loving bus rider, but also an amateur drummer. Drum kits are heavy and unwieldy, making them difficult to transport to a jam session. The proposed system can also act as a stand-in for a full drum-kit for quick, impromptu jamming. read more…
