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algorithms(5)

Building Better Algorithms Requires Human Judgment (and Values)

At the end of last week Facebook announced that it would stop having humans write summaries of trending news stories. This follows previous allegations that the selection of trending stories had been changed to remove conservative ones. This is a good time to revisit some foundational questions about the spread of information in a digital world. First, it is too easy for information cascades to occur. It takes much less effort to like, share, retweet than it does to read, think and possibly e...

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Tech Tuesday: Algorithms (Introduction)

We have covered a lot of ground in the previous Tech Tuesday posts on programming. Now it is time to return to the original definition that I provided in the introductory post, where I wrote that programming is “telling a computer what to do.” We have all the pieces we need: we have covered the syntax and semantics of programming languages; we have learned about variables and the data types they can hold; we have looked at reserved words and the control structures we can form with them; we ha...

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Tech Tuesday: Algorithms (Implementations)

Last week in Tech Tuesday, we continued our introduction to algorithms by looking at a first implementation. As a reminder we are trying to find out whether a sequence of integers contains a number that is repeated four times in a row. Here is that Python code together with a bug fix for dealing with empty number sequences:

Tech Tuesday: Algorithms (Wrap Up)

Today’s Tech Tuesday post will wrap up the algorithms mini-series. Last Tuesday I presented implementations of the same algorithm in five different languages. I had mentioned in an earlier post that the particular problem we are solving – seeing if a sequence of numbers contains a number that is repeated at least four times in a row – belongs to a class of problems known as pattern detection or pattern matching. Now there are much more general algorithms for this class of problems and instead...

Ethics of Algorithms

Slightly belated we have another topic of the over at usv.com: The Ethics of Algorithms. I have written a bunch about this topic in the past, for instance when discussing the need for an opposing view reader or the danger of information cascades. Both the people working on algorithms, such as filtering a feed and making recommendations, and the endusers of these applications need to weigh in on the discussion. So head on over to usv.com and join in. PS If you don’t really know what an algorit...