Posts from — February 2004

Dean is tumbling.. Dean is out of cash. Somehow he blew through $40 million and still managed to leave the first Super Tuesday without a first or second place finish, anywhere. No mistake about his Meet the Press interview, though, which was felt as an incredibly strong and persuasive performance. It's obvious that Dean overestimated his grass-roots support, which has currently dried up, but the amount of publicity he has generated is surely a huge advantage. Two options come to mind: blow out the Washington Insiders (as he alluded to in his latest interview), or become more of a traditional candidate. [MetaFilter]

How to make spam unstoppable. A researcher has found a way to get past the filters many people use to stop junk mail reaching their inbox. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

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this isn't really a find or a discovery the logic of bayesian filtering in spam dictates that it works like this, which is why i'm only for end user filtering, not in transit filtering, all in transit spam should be managed via rbl.

these are great little houses

Freaky ceramic figurines from the '60s [bOing bOing]

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some of these are scary…..

THE EXIT POLLS. Taegan Goddard has them: South Carolina: Edwards 44, Kerry 30, Sharpton 10Oklahoma: Edwards 31, Kerry 29, Clark 28 Missouri: Kerry 52, Edwards 23, Dean 10… [OUTSIDE THE BELTWAY]

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otb said it… dean is done.

Nihilist Bear

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oh not really a nihilist… but it's somehow related i'm sure

the kids and cars safety act, it's right and it's worth it.

Ochs tree.

Sheila Lennon still carries a torch for Phil Ochs. As do I. Nobody's music ever influenced me more. Outside of a small circle of friends still haunts me. Here's his site.

More importantly, here's a story about The Ballad of Phil Ochs, the one-person musical performed by Zachary Stevenson.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

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Billy Bragg has a song about phil ochs. it is worth listening too. as is phil ochs himself, though the 20th century masters album doesn't do him justice from what i'm told.

CBS, NFL a Bunch of Hypocrites. Okay, I was done with the Justin/Janet thing about a half-hour after the boob came out. But the statements being published in the news today are far more offensive to me than the tacky dance numbers of the half-time medley… [Eat Your Vegetables]

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as i've said before, CBS is the most conservative TV network in the U.S. It doesn't help that the NFL is trying to appeal to a younger demographic, but it ddidn't match with CBS, at least not well. However, seeing a breast, even decorated, should not be an issue in the United States.

luckily the Canadian Press is more reasonable….:)

Sophisticated software for analyzing OA literature. Mike Martin, Iridescent Software Illuminates Research Data, NewsFactor, January 27, 2004. On Iridiscent, sophisticated text analysis software developed at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center to help “scientists easily identify obscure commonalities in research data and directly relate them to their own work, saving money and speeding the process of discovery.” Like other intelligent text analysis software, Iridescent applies first and best to the ocean of free data on the public internet. In this case, Iridescent is optimized for reading Medline abstracts. Quoting Harold “Skip” Garner, one of the program's authors: “Many new high-throughput technologies, such as microarrays for gene-expression analysis, generate so much data that it is often hard to interpret. Iridescent can do a much better job because it emulates the scientific thought process. Having assimilated all of Medline [12.7 million records], Iridescent can compile diverse facts to present a list of 'hypotheses' to the user for finding hidden knowledge in the data.” For more details, also see the Texas press release. There seems to be no web site for Iridescent itself or the team that developed it, Jonathan Wren and Skip Garner, but the program is available from Etexx Biopharmaceuticals. (Thanks to ITRU.)

(PS: If I may quote myself from October 2002: “As we move further into an era in which serious research is mediated by sophisticated software, commercial publishers will have to put their works into the public internet in order to make them visible to serious researchers. In this sense, the true promise of [open access] is not that scientific and scholarly texts will be free and online for reading, copying, printing, and so on, but that they will be available as free online data for software that acts as the antennae, prosthetic eyeballs, research assistants, and personal librarians of all serious researchers.”) [Open Access News]

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this sounds really handy for the sciences, and i can see how it might be used in the humanities too, by using it to identify common conceptual constructions and differences, not unlike some of the analysis software i've been developing when i have time.