Smart Barbie Puts Child’s Play In The Cloud
Mattel is trying another angle on the talking doll, with what many are referring to as a ‘smart’ Barbie. Earlier this year, at International Toy Fair in New York, it unveiled Hello Barbie. The doll is slated to launch this fall at a suggest retail price of $75. Hello Barbie is capable of responsive speech, courtesy of a voice recognition application and WiFi technology developed by ToyTalk. As the CEO of ToyTalk wrote on the company’s blog: ‘Barbie will talk with children about their aspirations, share their stories, and best of all, listen to and remember the things they say.’ The memory is not in the doll’s plastic head, but in ToyTalk’s cloud servers, which analyze the record of what children have said to the doll to hone the accuracy of the doll’s responses.

Python: Soupy
Soupy is a wrapper around BeautifulSoup that makes it easier to search through HTML and XML documents.

Finding Group Structures in Data using Unsupervised Machine Learning
In this post, we’ll use an unsupervised machine learning technique called kmeans clustering to find naturual structures in our data. In the other blog posts, we used supervised machine learning techniques like logistic regression and linear regression to predict car prices or delayed flights.

Models for Repeated Measures Continuous, Categorical, and Count Data
Lately, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about learning how to run models for repeated measures data that isn’t continuous. Mostly categorical. But once in a while discrete counts. A typical study is in linguistics or psychology where each subject is asked to answer some Yes/No question on each of many trials. Each trial contains a different stimulus, each of which represents some combination of conditions. For example, the participant may be asked to pronounce a word on each trial. The outcome is whether or not they pronounce it correctly and each word is either common or uncommon and either long or short. So one question I’ve been asked a lot is whether we cover these models in our upcoming Repeated Measure Workshop, and if not, how to learn them.

April 2015 Membership Webinar: Confidence Intervals
An article in the Science News from July, 2014 was titled ‘Scientists’ grasp of confidence intervals doesn’t inspire confidence’. Perhaps that is why only 11% of the articles in the 10 leading psychology journals in 2006 reported confidence intervals in their statistical analysis. How important is it to be able to create and interpret confidence intervals?