The third and final presidential took place tonight, and while I felt undecided on the results, an early CNN poll gave Kerry a substantial margin with a 59% to 39% victory over Bush. But first, a few words from our candidates (thanks to Microsoft Word): Kerry in 100 words: 82,000 Arizonians lost their health insurance [...]
I’m a pretty harsh critic when it comes to telemarketing. I’m especially unhappy when these slimey creatures get my cell phone number. I can also be a bit unhappy when they wake me up on a Saturday. I’m not a housewife, I’m a grad student, and grad students need their sleep on the weekends. Doesn’t [...]
Breaking news.. Christopher Reeve has just passed away. So sad. Superman, RIP. The strange thing about this news is that I immediately pasted that link to my blog and everyone in my buddy list still awake at the time without really considering why. It’s a flashbulb event, the kind of thing that, for whatever reason, [...]
I’ve rerun my presidential debate analysis (see analyses from the first presidential debate and the vice presidential debate) on the scripts of the second presidential debate. I’ve also updated the Debate Spotter to include the new text. But this time I’ve taken a slightly different approach to the analysis. Instead of some complicated weighting scheme, [...]
I’ve been keeping a list of low threshold, or daily links here for over a year. My links were largely inspired by Joshua Schachter’s link list (Muxway) which he later turned into the popular del.icio.us social bookmarks engine. I remember trying the system out not long after I started my linkstream, but for some reason [...]
Akin to my last entry, I’ve run the transcript of the Vice Presidential Debate through a part of speech tagger and identified the most popular noun phrases for each speaker (listed below). I’ve also updated the Debate Spotter to handle both scripts. Simply change the debate field and the transcript and speakers will be changed [...]
Whenever I watch a televised debate, I always wonder what percentage of the speaker’s message is actually thinking on the feet and how much is canned material. With the advent of available transcripts, these sorts of questions can be addressed with various computational methods. A simple way to identify repeated statements is to count the [...]