Zero to One-Eighty » voting

Nobody thinks of the pencils

Adrian Cooke — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 15:54:50 +0000

Ed Felten on the acquisition of one company’s e-voting computer division by another:

Yesterday Diebold sold its e-voting division, known as Premier Election Systems, to ES&S, one of Premier’s competitors. The price was low: about $5 million.

ES&S is reportedly the largest e-voting company, and Premier was the second-largest, so the deal represents a substantial consolidation in the market. The odds of one major e-voting company breaking from the pack and embracing up-to-date security engineering are now even slimmer than before. Premier had seemed like the company most likely to change its ways.

Democracy FTW.

Cassini’s travels

Adrian Cooke — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 12:00:38 +0000

You can vote for your favourite Cassini photo. I like Tethys and Tital, Rhea and, especially, Enceladus. Long-time fan.

Via Jeremy Keith

Skewed data

Adrian Cooke — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 12:00:09 +0000

Satnam Alag on why it’s difficult to improve the Netflix recommendation system, even when you have a million dollar incentive:

The data set for the competition consists of more than 100 million anonymous movie ratings, using a scale of one to five stars, made by 480,000 users for 17,770 movies. Note that the user-item data set for this problem is sparsely populated, with nearly 99% of user-item entries being zero. The distribution of movies per user is skewed. The median number of ratings per user is 93. About 10% of users rated 16 or fewer movies, while 25% of users rated 36 or fewer. Two users rated as many as 17,000 movies. Similarly, the ratings per movie are also skewed: almost half the user base rated one popular movie (Miss Congeniality^†); about 25% of movies had 190 or fewer ratings; and a handful of movies were rated fewer than 10 times.

So regarding users: there is rich data about atypical users, and sparse data about the majority. And regarding movies: there is copious information about popular movies, and little about the long tail.

† WTF?

Not your average Tuesday

Adrian Cooke — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 05:00:32 +0000

How much longer can you, personally, delay your voter registration if you are a United States citizen?

Adrian Cooke — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 19:57:02 +0000

Voter registration deadlines for the U.S. presidential election begin today. Google has a tool for finding voter registration info by ZIP code.