Government Trying Something New Two months after I graduated college, I moved to Berlin to start a civic technology fellowship sponsored by the German Chancellery. As one of the first fellows at Tech4Germany, I had the opportunity
Bookshelf My Reading List Since I was a very tiny human, reading has been my entertainment, stress relief, and education. In 2012 I started tracking the books I read in a list, as part of an effort
The Ugly Truth of Online Advertising In recent months, Facebook has pledged to make itself “more transparent,” including new, limited disclosures around advertising. However, Facebook still tells its 2 billion users very little about how it targets them for
Projects Building Ground Truth Using natural language processing with the Associated Press to make relevant news stories easier to find
Bookshelf On Truth, Trust, and Confidence In “On Bullshit” Harry Frankfurt argued that bullshitting constitutes a more insidious threat to civilized life than lying. “On Truth” was written to provide an explanation (hopefully convincing) why truth is so important.
User Experience A Product That Takes My Breath Away As someone who takes pride in being well-informed, I used to frequent Reuters, Reddit, and everything in between. Unfortunately, between my NPR app, my New Yorker subscription, my morning Politico newsletter, and dozens
Bookshelf Why I Read Papers The research process is about identifying important new problems. It seems that, like many skills, one of the best ways to learn how to do this is by observing first hand how more
Projects Trust, Control, and News Let’s talk about trust. When I was growing up, my parents, perhaps like yours, drilled a mantra into my head: never get into a car with a stranger. Don’t take food
Neuroscience When to Avoid Coffee When I"m headed into an important meeting, I've been known to down a cup or two of coffee without thinking much of it, in the hopes that the caffeine will give my
On Leaving Facebook Lately I've been trying to determine how feasible it is to quit Facebook. The first time I deactivated my Facebook account in a spiteful rage about the inevitable corruption of the human social
Bookshelf Finding the Engram Josselyn et al. - 2015 The authors discuss primarily the process of finding the cellular basis for memory (the "engram") via circuit neuroscience in mice. They compile a body of evidence based on
Bookshelf How Does the Brain Solve Visual Object Recognition DiCarlo et al. - 2012 Core object recognition (something primates are great at) is the ability to rapidly distinguish/identify an object visually without prior information, even when the object changes context. This
User Experience User Interviews Are Awesome The first rule of user research: never ask anyone what they want.— Erika Hall, Just Enough ResearchUser interviews are awesome. They’re cheap (see: free), potent (you get more than what you ask
Projects Artistic Style Transfer with Tensorflow Lately I've been fascinated by the idea of what computer-generated creativity could look like. In this post I want to explore five different techniques for style transfer and implement them using Tensorflow. We're
A Note To all my friends graduating this week: congratulations! I love you. You've worked so hard for this moment, and I hope you enjoy it.To all my friends who thought they'd be graduating
AI Finding Purpose in a Post-Work Society The thought of never working again is a tempting one. Maybe that's why millions of people play the lottery – for a chance to become wealthy enough to live with complete freedom, doing whatever,
Projects Closing the Last Mile Earlier this year, after hearing about a classmate's struggle using ridesharing apps while in a wheelchair, I wanted to investigate Uber's accessibility. I conducted a qualitative study of rider-driver interactions, as well as
Computer Science Preserving Privacy on Public Transit Public transit farecards use unique identifiers that allow for the intrusive tracking of an individual’s movements. Initially, it seems necessary for a transportation system to identify an individual to collect the appropriate
Music Style in South Indian Music Style can be an ambiguous concept; some believe it is a way for an audience to interpret and categorize certain practices, while others consider it to be the nature of a cultural unit,
Bookshelf Team Reasoning and Intentional Cooperation for Mutual Benefit Sugden’s defense of deliberate socially-conscious decisions in a marketplace combines game theoretic toy examples with virtue ethics, social psychology, and philosophy. Beyond relying on Revealed Preference theory, Sugden provides convincing explanations for
Bookshelf Cognition in the Wild Hutchins’ anthropological study of a team involved in the navigation of a Navy ship reveals the manner in which complex computational tasks are executed via a social organization. His observations of the way
Music An Introduction to Karnatak Music The Karnatak musical tradition possesses unique characteristics that are distinct not only from Western music but also from the North Indian style of music as well. Karnatak music shares some basic elements with
Bookshelf The Origins of Cultural Cognition Tomasello et al. - 2005 The perennial favorite question of philosophers and biologists alike--"What makes humans human?"--gets extra mileage from a team of evolutionary anthropologists. The authors address the problem that
Bookshelf Bayesian Models of Human Action Understanding Baker et al. - 2006 The authors address the challenge that trying to infer plans, which, according to the previous paper is a necessary skill of collaboration. They do so by comparing their
Bookshelf A Framework for Consciousness Crick and Koch - 2003 The authors present the following 10-point framework that characterizes the neural correlates of consciousness as a theory of competing cellular assemblies. The “front” of the cortex is an