In Pursuit for Impeccable Veracity

I study the institution of avoiding hiring one’s own Ph.D. graduates for assistant professorships. I argue that this institution is necessary to create better incentives for researchers to incorporate new information in studies, facilitating the convergence to asymptotic learning of the studied fundamentals.

A survey of location inference techniques on Twitter

The increasing popularity of the social networking service, Twitter, has made it more involved in day-to-day communications, strengthening social relationships and information dissemination. Conversations on Twitter are now being explored as indicators within early warning systems to alert of imminent natural disasters such earthquakes and aid prompt emergency responses to crime. Producers are privileged to have limitless access to market perception from consumer comments on social media and microblogs. Targeted advertising can be made more effective based on user profile information such as demography, interests and location. While these applications have proven beneficial, the ability to effectively infer the location of Twitter users has even more immense value. However, accurately identifying where a message originated from or author’s location remains a challenge thus essentially driving research in that regard. In this paper, we survey a range of techniques applied to infer the location of Twitter users from inception to state-of-the-art. We find significant improvements over time in the granularity levels and better accuracy with results driven by refinements to algorithms and inclusion of more spatial features.

STARD 2015: an updated list of essential items for reporting diagnostic accuracy studies

Incomplete reporting has been identified as a major source of avoidable waste in biomedical research.
Essential information is often not provided in study reports, impeding the identification, critical
appraisal, and replication of studies. To improve the quality of reporting of diagnostic accuracy
studies, the Standards for Reporting Diagnostic Accuracy (STARD) statement was developed. Here
we present STARD 2015, an updated list of 30 essential items that should be included in every
report of a diagnostic accuracy study. This update incorporates recent evidence about sources of
bias and variability in diagnostic accuracy and is intended to facilitate the use of STARD. As such,
STARD 2015 may help to improve completeness and transparency in reporting of diagnostic accuracy
studies.