Author Archives: Andrew T. Fiore

New paper on online dating behavior

Our research team at UC Berkeley wrote a paper this year about stated preferences for a mate and actual communication behavior in an online dating system. It’s called “Who’s right and who writes: People, profiles, contacts, and replies in online dating,” and I’ll be presenting it HICSS 43 in January. Here’s the abstract:
In [...]

Adding median() to MySQL

For long-tailed data, the median is often more appropriate than the mean for characterizing central tendency. MySQL (and most relational databases) don’t have a built-in aggregate function for median like they do for mean, which MySQL calls avg(). Of course, smart people on the Internet have written User-Defined Functions (UDFs) that add this functionality.
Originally, [...]

64-bit RMySQL on Mac OS X 10.6

I’ve recently started working with R on 64-bit Macs with enough RAM to make a 64-bit binary worth using. You can download R compiled for the x86_64 platform here. (It will install a new GUI application called R64.app. Make sure you run that one.) But when I went to load one [...]