Boris Smus

Lightweight Wordpress on Slicehost

Boris Smus — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:18:28 +0000

I recently switched from shared hosting to a VPS, expecting to get an immediate and automatic performance boost. I was overly optimistic and ran into memory trouble right away. After endlessly struggling with Apache and mod_php configuration, I was ready to give up. Then on a whim, I switched to nginx/fastcgi to see the average [...]

Visualizing MTurk Requesters

Boris Smus — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:39:41 +0000

I signed up to do one month of paid research at CMU|Portugal before spring classes start. My task boils down to creating interesting visualizations. The bad news is that I have no experience visualizing data and the dataset I’m to visualize hasn’t yet been collected. Fortunately, I’ve always been theoretically interested in data visualization, so [...]

Crowdsourcing Code

Boris Smus — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 21:46:01 +0000

As a follow up to my last post, I posted a HIT on Mechanical Turk asking 20 turkers if they know Java. I paid them 5 cents to answer the question. Surprisingly, 9 of 20 claimed to know. I was amazed at how strong selection bias was in this case, since surely not 50% of [...]

Crowdsourcing Articles with Mechanical Turk

Boris Smus — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:07:08 +0000

Last semester at CMU, I was involved in a research project involving Mechanical Turk. The goal was to get Mechanical Turk users (turkers) to collaborate on creating online wikipedia-style articles. Prior to my team’s involvement, an undergraduate created a mediawiki-based platform to allow turkers to collaborate on articles. Despite a high compensation, few turkers completed [...]

Ubiquitous Drums

Boris Smus — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:22:15 +0000

Look at the riders of any city bus. Many of them are plugged into their music players, tapping away to the beat. I propose to augment our natural love of rhythm into a ubiquitous wearable drum system. The target user of this system isn’t only the typical rhythm loving bus rider, but also an amateur [...]