I’ve been needing to lookup the geo-coordinates of a number of places lately, and couldn’t really find the perfect solution for what I needed; MapQuest is from 1995 and none seem to provide a bounding box. I have to say that the Yahoo Maps AJAX API is dead simple, and making my own only took [...]
Since I’ve started using my mobile phone more often for web browsing I have become painfully aware of how many damn key presses it takes to enter some of my favorite URLs. It’s great that so many sites are offering stripped-down versions for quick mobile browsing, of course with the added expense of entering the [...]
In response to the recent post by Simon Goodway, I threw together a simple implementation of the keystroke-approach to comment spam blocking:
MT-Keystrokes
It’s quick to install (one small file and one quick change to templates with a comment form). So far I’ve seen a 100% decline in spam, so much so that I’m thinking about turning [...]
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 under [...]
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, [...]
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 number [...]