The Secret life of Pronouns

Ever noticed how you try to mimic the person you are interested in?
I know I do it, but I didn't know that it's true for everybody.

Pennebaker and his team did a study on speed dating conversation and found that our language changes when we are around people we like; in the speed dating case, "when the language style of two people matched, when they used pronouns, prepositions, articles and so forth in similar ways at similar rates, they were much more likely to end up on a date."

 Full story

How to fool the ETS essay rater?

Construct your prose with superfluous dunandunate words or phrases, although incoherent and ambiguous, which might cause xenolexica in human grader but impress the e-rater nonetheless. This is how Les Perelman fooled the e-rater.

My "cool" craigslist scammer

Sarah Lawrence (sarah.law03@yahoo.com) wrote:

Hi,

Thank you very much for the response but before we move forward,i will like you to know the full information about me. I was born and raised in Wyoming,i am quiet and easy going person to live with. I'm 26 years of age... I am extremely clean,quiet and respectful, I am sensitive, intelligent and am easy to get on with. ..I am a faithful and committed person, who is very considerate of other people's feelings. I don't drug and i dont smoke or drink.. I enjoy going out with my friends to movies, plays, parks, hikes, anything to do with the ocean and horses but i'm cool living with people.

Right now, am working for a Non Government Organization on a program on children with orphans and heart related probs.My next program/seminars will be in your town and I will need a room to stay for these seminars, so I want to secure a room before my arrival.

I must confess that i'm comfortable with the area of the house/apt and i am ready to pay for the room. I will like to make the payment for the first month ahead of my arrival, and then i will make subsequent payment thereafter as i plan to stay for 6-12months.I have told my boss about this and he promised to make sure that he will meet up with the payment so that I can depart from here as scheduled.He also said I will have the advantage to make payment for deposit .I should arrive to your place on or before the 24th of April(Willing to pay for the whole month of April),so pls keep the room for me till my arrival.He also said my mode of payment will be the Most acceptable,safer and reliable means of payment which is United state certified money order/Cashier Check so get back to me with your name and address so that i can send you the payment as early as possible.

Kindest Regards,
Sarah Lawrence.

===========================================================
I wrote:

Hi Sarah,
Sorry I cannot rent apartment from April. The earliest you can move in is --.

===========================================================

Sarah Lawrence (sarah.law03@yahoo.com) wrote:

Hi,

Thanks for the response...I am cool with everything and i will like to pay you the first month rent before my arrival...You can therefore get back to me with your name and address so that my Boss can send you the payment as soon as possible Ok..

Thanks again
Sarah Lawrence.

===========================================================

So cool!
So I wrote:

You know, scamming (or whatever you are trying to do here) needs some more intelligence than this.

===========================================================
Or may be not!
I wonder how many people fall for this and what exactly do they do after they get the address.
I guess, they were going to ask for my account number for direct deposit :P.
I should have gone few more steps to see what happens!
May be next time :D.

Other incidents of the same scam are here and here.

"The idea of capturing the intelligence of the readership -- that's a joke."

Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker media, made that remark on cnn.
Of course it is, just as raw gold in gold mine is dust!

I am currently analyzing comments from jezebel.com, the most commented site among the Gawker media sites, to see if we can predict comment quality using machine learning. It is actually surprisingly simple to translate most of the commenting guidelines into features that a machine learning algorithm would use to assess comment quality. Though some features are harder to determine than the others, for example, finding relevance of a comment with the original post or funny comments.

I made this graph with 2000 comments from jezebel that shows the timing effect on crowd rating. The x-axis shows time difference of the comment with the original post and y-axis shows number of comments made within that time interval. That is, 100 comments within 20-30 means that 100 comments were made within 20-30 minutes after the post was published.

On jezebel best quality comments are "promoted" by the trusted users. This graph shows that most  highly rated comments were made within 2 hours of the posts. So if you are late to make your awesome comment, there will be hardly any crowd to judge it.

I found two things that online communities value the most in comment assessment are timing and reputation. If you are late at making your comment, no matter how high quality the comment is there won't be any crowd to read your comment to rate it. If you have a good reputation of making good comments or if you have lots of friends in the community, your comment that says "wow!!!" would be "liked" by 100 people. The comment rating process seems democratic but it's very biased.

Automated comment filtering research has been done on many communities, yet I don't think any of the online communities uses it. Does anybody know of any community that uses some kind of machine based moderation?

Rethinking my Facebook friend acceptance policy

My Facebook-friend-acceptance policy is this.
Actually more restricted than that. If I don't share my personal detail with you in real life, I don't want to share it with you on Facebook.

The Facebook data team recently published this study which basically tells that if you want to receive interesting diverse news from your social network you should add people you hardly talk to. People with whom we have strong ties are similar minded, so they share things that we'd have shared. If you social network only contains similar minded people it'd become an "echo chamber." The more diverse your network is the more diverse and novel information you'd get from it.

I find the study very interesting. People with weak ties are good for getting interesting information, but if I have too many of them then I'd have to add extra privacy settings on my photo albums and status updates or be extra cautious about things I share. I'm not sure if people use facebook for getting news, it's an added benefit. News or no news, with my friends literally staying all over the world, I'd use Facebook anyway.

latex on mac

http://guides.macrumors.com/Installing_LaTeX_on_a_Mac#First_.28easier.29_option
And I love texmaker, so awesome!

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I watch the stars from my window sill
The whole world is moving, and I'm standing still

How far I am from home!

How far I am from home, originally uploaded by sheetal_shundori.

Feeling homesick

Surprisingly, all my worst days are actually my best days in disguise.

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don’t much care where--" said Alice.
"Then it doesn’t matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"--so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you’re sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

I couldn't open file name `*.aux'

If you have more than one bib file, add them like this:
\bibliography{bibliography_1,bibliography_2,bibliography_3}

Open up the .tex file and compile it using Latex (Shift+Apple+L) then compile it using Bibtex (Shift+Apple+B)

Gender Guesser

Gender Guesser Script: http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php
This script can guess gender from writing sample.
It's not 100% accurate but it predicted me as a female!!
It's so weird that how much information we reveal about ourselves without even thinking about it.

Project Implicit

Project Implicit (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/) is about our conscious and unconscious preferences and biases. For example, most people connote blondes with "dumbness", and tall and handsome with "intelligence"; we don't do it consciously, or we don't want other people to know about our true biases. But even when we try to hide our preferences, we end up revealing them through our attitudes or actions.

The Implicit project tries to measure these unconscious biases. In the test you have to categorize words into different groups, generally two. For example, the gender-science test will ask you to categorize different words into two groups: male/science and female/arts. Then it will ask to categorize words into other two groups: female/science and male/arts. If you are biased about man and science, then you'll take more time to classify science words as female/science than to classify them as male/science. The test will measure your response time and figure out your true preference.

I read about this project in "Blink." Then I took several tests and got very weird results. Like, I don't have any preference for female and science over male and science. But my test suggested that I do. I took another test about preferring self over others, whose result was contradictory as well. I feeling a little confused about myself now.

But it was fun!

Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love.

Full poem

Crypto codes: GGH public key cryptosystem

Download code from here
I only did the decryption part, using Babai's algorithm (for homework :D)

Crypto codes: Elliptic ElGamal

Download code from here

Crypto codes:Miller Rabin Primality test

Download code from here

Output: (exercise 3.14 in the Introduction of Mathematical Cryptography)

1105 is composite with witness 2
294409 is composite with witness 2
118901509 is prime
118901521 is composite with witness 2
118901527 is prime
118915387 is composite with witness 2

Crypto codes: Elliptic curve cryptography

Download code from here
Code includes:
Elliptic curve addition,
Point in Elliptic curve over finite fields
double-and-add algorithm for Elliptic curves

Output:

Points in E(F13) are :
(-Infinity,-Infinity)
(1.0,5.0)
(1.0,8.0)
(2.0,3.0)
(2.0,10.0)
(9.0,6.0)
(9.0,7.0)
(12.0,2.0)
(12.0,11.0)
Addition test->
(9.0,7.0) + (1.0,8.0) =(2.0,10.0)
double-and-add algorithm for elliptic curve->
947*(6.0,730.0) mod 3623= (3492.0,60.0)

Crypto codes: Pollard’s p − 1 factorization algorithm

Code here
It uses prime factor code from square root

Output shows the steps of the algorithm with results:

Find prime factors of 48356747:
2^19! -1 = 13944673 (mod 48356747)
gcd(2^19!-1,48356747) = 6917
factors of 48356747, p=6917, and q=48356747/6917=6991
The prime factorization of 6916 is: 2, 2, 7, 13, 19

The prime factorization of 6990 is: 2, 3, 5, 233