Looking back over 2008, there have been a lot of changes in my life. Many of those are reflected in my blog, but few are reflected in the posts that have gotten the most traffic. But for the hell of it, here are the top posts anyway. Post Hits in 2008 Old English Translator 10,589 [...]
Archive for December, 2008
Top posts of 2008
Posted: 31 December 2008 in UncategorizedTags: 2008, blagoblag, blogging, top posts, year in review
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GUI interface for VB to track IP addresses
Posted: 29 December 2008 in UncategorizedTags: csi new york, stupidity, television, visual basic
Television shows seldom get computer stuff right, so I shouldn’t be surprised. But then I heard this humdinger on CSI New York during the 1 minute I was watching it. After I simultaneously guffawed and snorted in derision, I changed the channel.
Definition of computational linguistics #87
Posted: 29 December 2008 in UncategorizedTags: computational linguistics, definitions, dictionaries
According to the somewhat suspect Definitions.net (suspect by default, since I haven’t evaluated it otherwise): 1. (noun) computational linguistics the use of computers for linguistic research and applications This particular definition came to my attention thanks to a Google alert and I thought it was about the shortest definition of computational linguistics I’ve ever seen. [...]
clerk dogs
Posted: 18 December 2008 in UncategorizedTags: brazil, clerk dogs, dark comedy, jinni, movie genome project, movie recommendations, movies, netflix, recommender systems, sci-fi
I happened on clerk dogs, a new movie recommender, the other day. They are still in beta and are missing data in many key areas of film, but they are definitely worth checking out. Like Pandora, clerk dogs uses human editors to classify movies along several dimensions. Indeed, the founder Stuart Skorman (also founder of [...]
Just a few books and stuff I wouldn’t mind getting for Christmas. Just sayin’. Note: sort by priority.
Forrester’s straw-man study on media trust
Posted: 10 December 2008 in UncategorizedTags: blagoblag, blogging, corporate blogging, evil corporations, forrester research, information sources, media, personal development, rants, stupid studies, trust, user-generated content
Comparing “personal blog” or some random “corporate blog” to “personal email sent from a friend” is pretty much like comparing “advice from gin-soaked hobo” to “what your mama always said.” The fact that Forrester can get away with presenting something like this and suggesting businesses act on it to shut down their blogs bothers me.
Dogs don’t want to be left out
Posted: 9 December 2008 in UncategorizedTags: dogs, fairness, werewolves
A recent finding by a University of Vienna team shows that dogs have a sense of fairness when it comes to getting treats. If you treat one dog in the presence of another and don’t treat that dog, it knows you did it wrong. Yep, no surprise there. And is it just me or is [...]
Group effort
Posted: 8 December 2008 in UncategorizedTags: academia, computational linguistics, credit, effort, einstein, heroic science, intelligence, multiple discovery, praise, science
Hal Daume has a nice post that deals with credit in academia among other things. What I took away from this comment is essentially the realization that we are all working toward some vague future goal, which has to do with computationalizing language processing (or some other topic, for the non-NLP audience). Progress is good. [...]
The spammers have been working hard to infiltrate Facebook. I just got this (below) today, and it tripped my mental spam alarm. These sorts of messages were commonplace on Friendster. I would get messages from girls with near-pornographic profile pictures wanting to chat or asking me inane questions like which was the better hair color. [...]
