• EdX, the non-profit started by Harvard and MIT, is releasing some software to automagically grade human-written essays. Some see this software as just another tool for educators to use for more immediate feedback to students, while others are worried that these algorithms will be used incorrectly and lead to disastrous educational policies and outcomes. [url]
• There are studies that show algorithms are statistically comparable to humans when it comes to ranking essays on a 5 point scale. There are things machines can do better and things humans do better -- just make sure you know the differences and automated essay grading can be done productively in the right context. [url]
• Automated essay readers can grade 16,000 essays in 20 seconds. The Educational Testing Service is testing out automation, so students may soon be facing algorithmic grading for their college entrance exams. [url]
• Grading a few sentences can be harder than it might look. Professional (human) teachers are obviously better at interpreting the insights and ideas behind the words a student writes, but computers scale much better and never tire of horrible spelling mistakes or misplaced modifiers.... [url]

Journalist Ken Schwencke has occasionally awakened in the morning to find his byline atop a news story he didn’t write.

No, it’s not that his employer, The Los Angeles Times, is accidentally putting his name atop other writers’ articles. Instead, it’s a reflection that Schwencke, digital editor at the respected U.S. newspaper, wrote an algorithm — that then wrote the story for him.

Instead of personally composing the pieces, Schwencke developed a set of step-by-step instructions that can take a stream of data — this particular algorithm works with earthquake statistics, since he lives in California — compile the data into a pre-determined structure, then format it for publication.

His fingers never have to touch a keyboard; he doesn’t have to look at a computer screen. He can be sleeping soundly when the story writes itself.

This robonews tsunami, he insists, will not wash away the remaining human reporters who still collect paychecks. Instead the universe of newswriting will expand dramatically, as computers mine vast troves of data to produce ultracheap, totally readable accounts of events, trends, and developments that no journalist is currently covering.

Schwencke says the use of algorithms on routine news tasks frees up professional reporters to make phone calls, do actual interviews, or dig through sophisticated reports and complex data, instead of compiling basic information such as dates, times and locations.

“It lightens the load for everybody involved,” he said.

The Narrative Science team also lets clients customize the tone of the stories. “You can get anything, from something that sounds like a breathless financial reporter screaming from a trading floor to a dry sell-side researcher pedantically walking you through it,” says Jonathan Morris, COO of a financial analysis firm called Data Explorers, which set up a securities newswire using Narrative Science technology. (Morris ordered up the tone of a well-educated, straightforward financial newswire journalist.) Other clients favor bloggy snarkiness. “It’s no more difficult to write an irreverent story than it is to write a straightforward, AP-style story,” says Larry Adams, Narrative Science’s VP of product. “We could cover the stock market in the style of Mike Royko.”

“People are already reading automated data reports that come to them, and they don’t think anything of it,” said Ben Welsh, a colleague of Schwencke’s at the Times.

Welsh says that responsibility for accuracy falls where it always has: with publications, and with individual journalists.

“The key thing is just to be honest and transparent with your readers, like always,” he said. “I think that whether you write the code that writes the news or you write it yourself, the rules are still the same.”

“You need to respect your reader. You need to be transparent with them, you need to be as truthful as you can… all the fundamentals of journalism just remain the same.”

• Psychologists have pointed out that matching algorithms for long-term relationships are not significantly better than random. Dating algorithms aren't actually so bad at excluding potentially "bad dates" -- but that's not what most online dating services offer. [url]
• The Secret Diamond Club takes advantage of some economic tricks to try to match up rich men with attractive women. The real secret, though, is that it probably doesn't work at all -- and it preys on lonely people with money. [url]
• Recently, the Nobel prize for economics was awarded for work on matching markets. The Gale-Shapely algorithm has been used for matching organ donors and doctors with hospitals, but maybe someday it'll be used for finding romantic partners, too. [url]

Is there a compelling argument that computerized decisions should be considered speech? As a matter of legal logic, there is some similarity among Google, Ann Landers, Socrates and other providers of answers. But if you look more closely, the comparison falters. Socrates was a man who died for his views; computer programs are utilitarian instruments meant to serve us. Protecting a computer’s “speech” is only indirectly related to the purposes of the First Amendment, which is intended to protect actual humans against the evil of state censorship. The First Amendment has wandered far from its purposes when it is recruited to protect commercial automatons from regulatory scrutiny.

Consider an argument for denying First Amendment protection to movies and video games. Human beings, we all agree, have constitutional rights—but mere machines do not. When the computer in your game console or DVD player “decides” to display certain images on a screen, therefore, this is not protected speech, but merely the output of a mechanical process that legislatures may regulate without any special restrictions. All those court rulings that have found these media to be protected forms of expression, therefore, are confused efforts to imbue computers with constitutional rights—surely foreshadowing the ominous rise of Skynet.

Probably nobody finds this argument very convincing, and it hardly takes a legal scholar to see what’s wrong with it: Computers don’t really autonomously “decide” anything: They execute algorithms that embody decisions made by their human programmers.

As the alumnus of a college that proudly rejects the proposition that the quality of educational institutions can be “measured by a series of data points,” I will take any opportunity to denigrate the Useless News and World Distort rankings of colleges, law schools and institutions of higher education.  But it would never have occurred to me to offer a “speech by computer” theory as a basis for denying that the ranking is speech or that it is protected opinion.  Maybe a stupid opinion, but that is not a basis for shutting the raters down, or enjoining them to change their rating criteria.  Indeed, this theory seems to me absurd — it is not the computers that have free speech rights, any more than printing presses have free speech rights.  It is the media companies that own the printing presses that have free speech rights, and by the same token it is the people and companies who program the computers and publish the results of their calculations that enjoy protection under the First Amendment.

• Online dating sites claim to be able to find soul mates, but studies suggest they can only provide introductions -- and more often than not, they instill a "shopping mindset" which is not conducive to building lasting relationships. Some psychologists even doubt the possibility of creating algorithms that could successfully match people for real romance. (But experts also scoffed at the first chess-playing computers, too.) [url]
• In 2005, Steven Carter, the director of research at eHarmony, described how his work to create predictive models for compatibility became the basis of his dream job. Carter is probably a bit biased, so where is some peer review for eHarmony's research? [url]
• Perhaps some intense linguistic analysis can predict dating success. Apparently, people who have similar speech patterns are more likely to date each other. Watch your use of pronouns, folks.... [url]
• To discover more interesting tech-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

• A billboard at a London bus stop determines (or tries to) people's gender and present ads accordingly. The system apparently is about 90% accurate, and it doesn't apologize for its mistakes. [url]
• Eyetracking billboards haven't exactly caught on, but the technology exists with cameras that can tell when your retinas are aligned for optimal ad delivery. If these eye-trackers do catch on, there might be a new market of ad-blocking sunglasses... [url]
• Immersive Labs has a prototype ad system that tries to personalize and target its promotions using a collection of software tools that include face recognition and machine learning to figure out the demographics of its audience. The creators of this system say their product will only deliver the ads that people want to see. [Ahem.] [url]
• To discover more interesting advertising-related content, check out what's floating around on StumbleUpon. [url]  

Amazingly, when I reloaded the page the next day, both priced had gone UP! Each was now nearly $2.8 million. And whereas previously the prices were $400,000 apart, they were now within $5,000 of each other. Now I was intrigued, and I started to follow the page incessantly. By the end of the day the higher priced copy had gone up again. This time to $3,536,675.57. And now a pattern was emerging.

On the day we discovered the million dollar prices, the copy offered by bordeebook was1.270589 times the price of the copy offered by profnath. And now the bordeebook copy was 1.270589 times profnath again. So clearly at least one of the sellers was setting their price algorithmically in response to changes in the other’s price. I continued to watch carefully and the full pattern emerged.

Once a day profnath set their price to be 0.9983 times bordeebook's price. The prices would remain close for several hours, until bordeebook "noticed" profnath's change and elevated their price to 1.270589 times profnath's higher price. The pattern continued perfectly for the next week.

"I've got no problem with a competitor developing an innovative algorithm. But copying is not innovation, in my book."

In other words, Wolfram Research is claiming that each page of results returned by the Wolfram Alpha engine is a unique, copyrightable work, like a report or term paper. That makes Wolfram Alpha different not just from classic search engines, but from most software. While software companies routinely retain sole ownership of their software and license it to users, Wolfram Research has taken the additional step of claiming ownership of the output of the software itself. It's a bold assertion, and one that could have significant ramifications for the software industry as a whole.

Suppose you have an Excel spreadsheet full of numbers that you input, but then you ask Excel to generate a series of complex graphs based on rules, formulae, and templates designed by Microsoft. Or what about pivot tables? What about mash-ups or tools like Mozilla Jetpack? If unique presentations based on software-based manipulation of mundane data are copyrightable, who retains what rights to the resulting works?

You want an algorithm, here it is:
1.) Sites that are useful to visitors will rank high.
2.) Popular sites that are useful to visitors will rank higher.
3.) Sites that don't offer any value to the web or are irrelevant to the query won't rank well.
4.) Sites that are harmful or spammy won't be included in the index.

Seriously, that's Google’s algorithm in plain English. There's your disclosure. The weighting factors and code behind it don't matter -- these principles are all you really need to know.