Blog entries




Follow-up on "How random can you be?"
I have collected thousands of outcomes and used them to evaluate the performance of the guesser.



A battle for net neutrality in Canada — analysis of popular opposition to an application to disable on-line access to piracy sites
A coalition of organizations involved in production and distribution of digital content in Canada has proposed to create an agency endowed with the right to disable access to internet resources deemed pirated. An application was filed with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. The CRTC collected public comments ("interventions") and made them available online.



Who gets to be a member of Amazon Vine?
Amazon Vine is a program that matches companies/sellers with select reviewers among Amazon customers. Membership is given by invitation only. According to Amazon, reviewers are selected based on the helpfulness of their reviews, but the exact criteria are not revealed to the public. I decided to investigate what it takes to get an invitation to Amazon Vine by analyzing the publicly available data for the top 10,000 reviewers...



Is Toronto getting warmer these days?
Toronto residents like to complain about weather. For some, Toronto winters are too cold. For others, Toronto summers are too hot. Older people say it used to be colder in general. Who's right and who's wrong? Let's find out the answer using factual data.



Analysis of submissions to /r/dataisbeautiful
Browsing reddit is a popular pastime for many people. Besides being an endless supply of entertainment, reddit is also a source of inspiration — especially /r/dataisbeautiful, a community of visual connoisseurs. Let's see if we can learn anything by analyzing 4716 submissions made over approximately 4 months.