Linear Digressions

Ever found yourself wasting time reading online comments from trolls? Of course you have; we've all been there (it's 4 AM but I can't turn off the computer and go to sleep--someone on the internet is...

7 Aug 201512min

Imagine a language that is mostly spoken rather than written, contains many words in other languages, and has relatively little written overlap with English. Now imagine writing a machine-learning-ba...

3 Aug 201512min

In a fun historical journey, Katie and Ben explore the history of the Manhattan Project, discuss the difficulties in modeling particle movement in atomic bombs with only punch-card computers and ingen...

6 Jul 201515min

Let's talk about randomness! Although randomness is pervasive throughout the natural world, it's surprisingly difficult to generate random numbers. And even if your numbers look random (but actually a...

19 Jun 201510min

Following up on our last episode about how experiments can be performed in political science, now we explore a high-profile case of an experiment gone wrong. An extremely high-profile paper that was...

9 Jun 201521min

The first of our two-parter discussing the recent electoral data fraud case. The results of the study in question were covered widely, including by This American Life (who later had to issue a retract...

5 Jun 20159min

In the first of a few episodes on fraud in election research, we’ll take a look at a case study from a previous Presidential election, where polling results were faked. What are some telltale signs...

1 Jun 201517min

There’s a big difference between a table of numbers or statistics, and the underlying story that a human might tell about how those numbers were generated. Think about a baseball game—the game stats...

20 Mai 201511min