A few days ago, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released some unprecedented data on the US healthcare system. The data consists of 9 million rows showing how much each doctor in the US charged Medicare, for what, and how much Medicare paid out. It doesn't quite cover everything (for example, services with less than 11 beneficiaries were removed for privacy reasons), but its the best thing we've…
Sometime today, I got the idea to try to do automatic speech recognition. Speech recognition, even though it is widely used (and is on our phones), still seems kind of sci-fi-ish to me. The thought of running it on your own computer is still pretty exciting. I looked for open source libraries, and was pleasantly surprised to find Sphinx, a CMU project. It has python bindings, and even lets you…
Sometime today, I got the idea to try to do automatic speech recognition. Speech recognition, even though it is widely used (and is on our phones), still seems kind of sci-fi-ish to me. The thought of running it on your own computer is still pretty e...
Wow, it's been way too long since I have updated this blog! I am going to start making more frequent updates, and I have some cool things in the pipeline, so bear with me. Last year, I wrote this post on automated essay scoring. This was essentially distilling my experience with automated essay scoring and trying to introduce it to people unfamiliar with it. I got a lot of great…
I’ve had a lot of different jobs over the past 4 years, and I’ve had some incredible experiences along the way. Lately, I’ve been struggling with what to do next. Or perhaps more accurately, I’ve been struggling with how to de...
I've had a lot of different jobs over the past 4 years, and I've had some incredible experiences along the way. Lately, I've been struggling with what to do next. Or perhaps more accurately, I've been struggling with how to decide what to do next. Decisions that seem obvious in hindsight are tough to come to grips with beforehand, and it's led me to think about what metric I am…
I haven’t blogged in a while, mostly because I have been trying to figure out what I should do next. One thing that I have been working on lately that I am very passionate about is Movide. Movide is a student-centric learning platform. You mig...
I haven't blogged in a while, mostly because I have been trying to figure out what I should do next. One thing that I have been working on lately that I am very passionate about is Movide. Movide is a student-centric learning platform. You might yawn at this point and wonder why Movide matters. It's a natural reaction, given the crowded learning tools marketplace. Movide, matters, I think, because it…
I recently posted about visualizing the voting patterns of senators. In the post, I scraped voting data for each senator on every vote in the 113th Congress from the Senate website, and then assigned a code of 0 for a no vote on a particular issue, 1 ...
I recently posted about visualizing the voting patterns of senators. In the post, I scraped voting data for each senator on every vote in the 113th Congress from the Senate website, and then assigned a code of 0 for a no vote on a particular issue, 1 for a yes vote, 2 for abstention, and 3 if the senator was not in office at the time of the vote (ie,…
