- Last 7 days
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republicofletters.stanford.edu republicofletters.stanford.edu
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We began with questions that were literally about collisions in space: when did people encounter each other physically during the 18th century? How did travel and correspondence intertwine to generate Enlightenment intellectual and social networks?
This line stands out because it reframes historical analysis through the lens of spatial proximity, treating physical encounters as data points, which is a clever way to reconstruct ephemeral social interactions using digital tools.
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republicofletters.stanford.edu republicofletters.stanford.edu
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Mapping the Republic of Letters deals pri-marily with the metadata about letters or travels rather than with their actual content.
This line is fascinating because it reveals how analyzing metadata, not just content, can unlock hidden patterns in historical communication, echoing modern data surveillance methods in an academic context.
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It shows the shortest path between the two most distant nodes in the networks. It provides inference about the path it needs to travel to get to all sides of the network. Jackson’s study shows us that the diameter and the average distance do not change as the homophily increases in random networks[4].
This line is particularly thought-provoking because it challenges an intuitive expectation, one might assume that increasing homophily,where similar actors preferentially connect,would lead to significant shifts in overall network structure, such as larger diameters or altered average distances. Instead, Jackson’s finding implies that some global properties (like diameter and average distance) remain robust even under strong tendencies for similar nodes to connect, which prompts deeper questions about the resilience and fundamental nature of network structures.
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- Mar 2025
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tedunderwood.com tedunderwood.com
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Although it may be legible locally in SF, genre is usually a question about a gestalt, and BERT isn’t designed to trace boundaries between 100,000-word gestalts
This highlights how BERT’s fixed window limits its ability to capture the full, nuanced scope of entire texts
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arxiv.org arxiv.org
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Our experiments with two open source LLMs (Llama 2 andZephyr) show that, compared to more traditional opinion pollsand exit polls, LLM-based predictions can come much closerto the actual election outcome
This line demonstrates the promising edge of LLMs in surpassing conventional polling methods for election forecasts.
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arxiv.org arxiv.org
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In other words, the same system that solved the above reasonable analogies will offensively answer “man is tocomputer programmer as woman is to x” with x=homemaker. Similarly, it outputs that a father is to a doctoras a mother is to a nurse.
I found this alarming because it starkly reveals how gender biases inherent in our data can be amplified by machine learning systems.
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serokell.io serokell.io
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The shallow neural network of Word2Vec can quickly recognize semantic similarities and identify synonymous words using logistic regression methods, making it faster than DNNs.
I found this fascinating because it succinctly illustrates how complex linguistic relationships are transformed into a computational framework.
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www.geeksforgeeks.org www.geeksforgeeks.org
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1980s: The development of backpropagation by Rumelhart, Hinton, and Williams revolutionized neural networks by enabling the training of multi-layer networks. This period also saw the rise of connectionism, emphasizing learning through interconnected nodes.
I found it interesting because this breakthrough transformed neural network training by unlocking the ability to learn complex patterns through deep, multi-layered architectures.
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- Feb 2025
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americaspublicbible.supdigital.org americaspublicbible.supdigital.org
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Rather than specify arbitrary thresholds, a more accurate approach is to teach an algorithm to distinguish between quotations and noise by showing it what many genuine matches and false positives look like.
This line encapsulates a key insight into the shift from rigid, rule-based methods to a more flexible, data-driven machine learning approach. It raises a question about the subjectivity involved in labeling data: How do we decide which matches are genuinely significant, and how might these decisions influence the algorithm's learning process?
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www.jstor.org www.jstor.org
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We realizedthat the changes we were making were not “corrections” that would “clean up” theoriginal dataset, but rather formed an additional information set with its own datamodel.
This line struck me because it challenges the conventional view of data cleaning as merely a process of correction. Instead, it suggests that the act of cleaning can create a new layer of information—a distinct data model that carries its own implications for analysis and interpretation. It raises a question about the epistemological role of these transformations: When we ‘clean’ data, are we simply removing errors, or are we actively reshaping the knowledge contained within the dataset?
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www.publicbooks.org www.publicbooks.org
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I went looking for book sales data. I’m a data scientist and a literary scholar, and I wanted to know what books people were turning to in the early days of the pandemic for comfort, distraction, hope, guidance.
What are the implications for literary research and public discourse when essential data is controlled by private interests? How might open data change our understanding of literary trends?
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post45.org post45.org
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classic?
I find it interesting that while academics may dismiss the term, everyday readers still passionately use it. Why does this discrepancy exist?
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www.frontiersin.org www.frontiersin.org
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The risk, which I consider in this contribution, is that the availability of data more or1 less easily affects so much the way digital research is done, resulting in some platforms being “over-studied,” others being neglected by research, regardless of their popularity.
This sentence raises a crucial point about the uneven landscape of digital research. It suggests that when data is easily accessible for some platforms but not others, scholars may inadvertently focus on those that are ‘API friendly,’ skewing the overall picture of online behavior. This bias could lead to an incomplete understanding of digital phenomena, where influential platforms without accessible data remain understudied, potentially distorting our insights into the broader social media ecosystem.
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www.publicbooks.org www.publicbooks.org
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Even where social media companies have been more forthcoming with their data—opening their APIs and sharing their data with researchers more freely—they have still made it especially difficult to find information about the most popular digital content.
The author emphasizes that even when platforms appear transparent by sharing data, they still restrict access to the content that truly drives public engagement. This selective openness not only hampers academic research but may also skew our understanding of what content shapes our culture, ultimately reinforcing power imbalances in digital society.
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Twitter has been invaluable for collecting real-time data and generating crucial maps to direct the response, says Ünver, a computational social scientist at Özyeğin University in Istanbul.
This section really caught my attention because it demonstrates how Twitter's real-time data is used for life-saving efforts during emergencies, such as mapping disaster areas to guide aid workers. It highlights the powerful intersection of technology and humanitarian work—showing that tools designed for social interaction can also serve critical public safety functions. At the same time, it raises concerns about how sudden changes to data access (like the API policy shift) might inadvertently jeopardize these emergency responses. This made me think about the broader implications of corporate policies on public welfare and the importance of ensuring continued access to such vital data streams during crises.
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