Category Archives: Projects

Stopping comment spam with keystrokes

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 thinkingContinue reading “Stopping comment spam with keystrokes”

The final presidential debate

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 insuranceContinue reading “The final presidential debate”

Presidential Debate Redux

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,Continue reading “Presidential Debate Redux”

Vice Presidential Debate Analysis

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 changedContinue reading “Vice Presidential Debate Analysis”

Presidential Debate Analysis

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 theContinue reading “Presidential Debate Analysis”