There have been a few requests lately for the results of the MIT Weblog Survey that I conducted last summer, so I figure I should respond publicly. I’m sorry for the delay, and I admit I was hopeful in my assessment of the time it would take me to release the results. In the pastContinue reading “MIT Weblog Survey Update”
Category Archives: Research
comScore weblog report
I am obviously always on the lookout for weblog statistics, as it has become a core part of my thesis. Today a marketing company by the name of comScore has released a report detailing a number of different statements about the weblog community. I’d like to take a moment to remind people that this isContinue reading “comScore weblog report”
Thesis: defended
For those wondering whether or not I’ve died in my apartment in a vat of sweet-smelling liquid that masked the smell of my rotting body, the answer is NO! I’m alive and well, just in the wake of one of the more excruciatingly painful periods of work-induced anti-social behavior. And as a consolation, I neverContinue reading “Thesis: defended”
Survey 2, Electric Boogaloo
For some reason I expected my survey to spread much further and wider than it actually did. At the current moment, the individuals who were emailed about taking the survey (the random sample) outnumber webloggers at large 3 to 1. I really expected things to go in the other direction. To rectify this situation, IContinue reading “Survey 2, Electric Boogaloo”
Cognitive dissonance
I haven’t been dumped in quite a while. Usually my relationships just fade away until a decision is made. Besides putting Gloria Gaynor and malt liquor into higher rotation, I’ve been doing a little bit of introspection about the topic. Getting dumped is a classic case of cognitive dissonance, a theory first proposed by LeonContinue reading “Cognitive dissonance”
Hedonic treadmill
I’m just about to return a book to the library, something I read a while back and have been meaning to post about for centuries. In their article “Hedonic Relativism and planning the good society**,” Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell give a name to the ongoing state of happiness that we all experience. Despite theContinue reading “Hedonic treadmill”
Academic conference spam
About two years ago I started getting peculiar messages from unknown academics about conferences I’d never heard of. They all follow a standard form, with a subject like “inviting you to participate in BLAH-05.” Some address me as “potential speaker,” some “Dr. Cameron A. Marlow,” and some simple “Dr. Marlow.” This isn’t all that surprising,Continue reading “Academic conference spam”
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”
overstated 