openware

For under $1 million, every high school student in Punjab can have access to a computer. Number of high schools = 5600 (source) Price per computer = 16500 PKR (source) Total = 92,400,000 PKR = 976,206 USD Imagine a whole generation growing up on Khan academy lectures and the Gutenberg library. Imagine these kids using Wikipedia to get both sides of an argument and playing around with Wolfram|Alpha. Imagine them falling in love with physics by appreciating the mysteries of light and getting high on chemistry by designing molecules....

Last night, I took a look at the federal budget for 2012-2013. Apparently we will be spending about 25% in “Servicing of Domestic Debt”. Take a more detailed look here

With the increasing number of “opinion-dispensing apps” which enable Urdu users to write in Unicode out there on the web, there is (or will soon be) a need for getting some meaningful statistics out of the ever-present sentiment of the masses (or at least the web-savvy subset). This calls for resources which enable automatic processing of sentiment, one of which is a sentiment lexicon for Urdu. (For people uninitiated in computational linguistics, a lexicon is just a list of words)....

Twitter API has changed a bit so this post had to be updated. Check the updated post here Topic modelling means detecting “abstract” topics from a collection of text documents. The most common text book technique to do that is using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Simply put, LDA is a statistical algorithm which takes documents as input and produces a list of topics. One catch is that you have to tell it how many topics you want....