Whether you’re on Twitter or stay away from social media altogether, these platforms affect us all — from shaping public discourse to entertainment to spreading information.

The existence of bots on these platforms has gained a lot of attention in recent years, and yet many people are still unaware of or misunderstand their presence and purpose on platforms like Twitter.

And so it’s important that we start with a simple working definition of a bot:

A Twitter bot is a software bot that controls a Twitter account via the Twitter API. …

Predictive modeling

A year ago my partner and I were looking for a new apartment. We weren’t looking for anything fancy, just a one bedroom that allowed dogs, with an outdoor space for a garden, and didn’t cost an arm-and-a-leg.

If you live in the Bay Area, or likely any hub city in the U.S., you know where this story is going: multiple home viewings in which you wait in a line of prospective renters all vying for the landlord’s attention and favor.

I have never hated perfectly nice strangers more than in this moment.

The competitive nature of apartment hunting means…

I recently learned about Benford’s Law through the Netflix series Connected, with Latif Nasser. Episode 4: ‘Digits’ explores how this phenomenon applies to music, social media, tax fraud, and more. It’s a fun show and I’d highly recommend checking it out if you’ve got the time.

A quick primer on Benford’s Law from Wikipedia:

Benford’s law, also called the Newcomb–Benford law, the law of anomalous numbers, or the first-digit law, is an observation about the frequency distribution of leading digits in many real-life sets of numerical data. The law states that in many naturally occurring collections of numbers, the leading…