mathbabe

My friend Matt DeLand teamed up recently with Jared Chung to enter a data mining hacking contest sponsored by Donors Choose, which is a well-known online charity connecting low-income classrooms across the country to donors who get to choose which projects to support.

Their goal was to figure out how many of the thousands of projects up for funding were directly related to career preparation, and they performed a nifty Bayesian analysis to do it. Turns out it’s less than 1%!

Here’s their report. It’s really well explained in the 5-page pdf, if you have a few minutes.

Speaking of Donors Choose, it was featured at a HackNY Summer Fellows event I went to last week. The Summer Fellows is essentially like the math camp I taught at for high school students except it’s a computer camp for college students – same level of nerdy loveliness though. The event was a showcase for the fantastically nerdy student hackers, and there were some very impressive exhibits.

The hack involving Donors Choose shows a movie of how the donations are being given from some location to the classroom that’s benefitting on a big map of the country, and shown quickly from 2005 or so really exhibits how quickly the concept grew. It’s not unlike this visualization of the history of the world through the lens of Wikipedia.