In the sleepy college town of Davis, California where I grew up, there were Iranians who were religious […]
Category Archive: Essays
When I get fed up with the ongoing reality TV show, I spend a day driving around Virginia. I go shopping for vintage homewares, find bluegrass, & listen when the woman with the TV tuned to FOX News…
This piece was originally shared on my facebook feed on November 12th, 2016. It is also shared on Medium. […]
Friends, in just under a month, I’m hosting a benefit for the Caltech Y, a service organization that […]
I must say yesterday’s conversation about Caltech professor Alice Huang’s advice column in Science magazine largely missed the point. In case you missed it, Dr. Huang responded to a woman postdoc writing in for advice about her advisor who keeps staring down her shirt. In Huang’s response, since retracted by Science but available through internet archives, she says “As long as your adviser does not move on to other advances, I suggest you put up with it, with good humor if you can.”
Many years ago, I went to Farsi Saturday school with Zahra Noorbakhsh, the author of this column about […]
From time to time, I hear from researchers – from graduate students to economists working in industry to established tenured professors—interested in applying natural language processing tools in the context of serious, rigorous economics. The questions are usually multiple and combine gently personal inquiries (Whatever inspired you to pursue these two skill sets that are frequently described in opposition to one another? How can I build a career that does that too?) with technical ones (How can I measure sentiment in a corpus of news documents? How do I demonstrate that what NLP algorithms find is statistically significant?).
Cross-posted from the Open Knowledge Foundation Blog. This past spring, I spent a few months at the crowdfunding […]