Predicting Google Shutdowns. "In the following essay, I collect data on 350 Google products and look for predictive variables. I find some while modeling shutdown patterns, and make some predictions about future shutdowns. Hopefully the results are interesting, useful, or both."
Gwern exhaustively analyzes Google products past and present with an eye to establishing what's not long for the bitverse. tl;dr?
Results.
posted by mwhybark
on May 4, 2013 -
87 comments
"The internationalized art world relies on a unique language. Its purest articulation is found in the digital press release. This language has everything to do with English, but it is emphatically not English. It is largely an export of the Anglophone world and can thank the global dominance of English for its current reach. But what really matters for this language—what ultimately makes it a language—is the pointed distance from English that it has always cultivated. " -
Triple Canopy magazine on why do artists' statments and press releases sound so utterly odd and confusing.
posted by The Whelk
on Apr 26, 2013 -
45 comments
We've all seen it. The off-white UAV is seen side on, nose tilted slightly down, a stubby missile caught at the moment of launch beneath it, a blue and grey landscape of treeless mountains behind it. There's no motion blur and none of the markings on the aircraft have been obfuscated. It's a perfect shot. Except for one or two details.
[more inside]
posted by mwhybark
on Mar 19, 2013 -
56 comments
For the release of the Hobbit,
Lindsay Ellis of the Nostalgia Chick (
previously) has decided to look back at all the LOTR films in order to analyze how they changed genre film-making, expected movie length, extended cuts, the problems of adaptation, and why Eowyn and Merry are made for each other. (
Fellowship Of The Ring,
Two Towers,
Return Of The King Part 1,
Part 2) Still need more? Then why not watch Kerry Shawcross and Chris Demarais of Rooster Teeth (
previously) try to walk the 120+ mile journey across New Zealand from the filming location of Hobbiton in Matamata to the filming location of Mount Doom, Mount Ngauruhoe in
A Simple Walk Into Mordor.
posted by The Whelk
on Feb 1, 2013 -
29 comments
"The screenplay keeps so many balls in the air that everything feels lively and inventive and fun, even when the plot isn’t being forwarded, or especially when the plot isn’t being forwarded. "
Todd Alcott, director, actor and screenwriter, is known for his
exhaustive analysis of screenplays (
previously,
previously) turns his eye to the modern Superhero Genre with a complete break down of Marvel's The Avengers Part
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posted by The Whelk
on Jan 11, 2013 -
60 comments
The author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a
popular MetaFilter topic, was
born 177 years ago today (November 30th 1835)
in Missouri. The printer, riverboat pilot,
game designer, journalist, lecturer,
technology investor, gold miner, publisher and
patent holder wrote
short stories, essays, novels and non-fiction under the
pen name Mark Twain. This included
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (recently
adapted into a musical), one of the top five
challenged books of the 1990s, published in 1884-85 to a
mixed reception and with an
ending that still causes debate.
[more inside]
posted by Wordshore
on Nov 30, 2012 -
42 comments
A Vast Left-Wing Competency: "How Democrats became the party of effective campaigning — and why the GOP isn’t catching up anytime soon." Sasha Issenberg, author of
The Victory Lab, has been writing a series of posts on Slate that focus on different aspects of "the new science of winning campaigns".
[more inside]
posted by flex
on Nov 8, 2012 -
103 comments
The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point has
released its analysis of 17 de-classified documents captured during the Abbottabad raid where Osama Bin Laden was killed. They also released the documents themselves, available in the original Arabic as well as in English translation. A
Pastebin version of the English translations has been posted for easy searching.
posted by gemmy
on May 3, 2012 -
12 comments
Is The Shining really about the gold standard? Using unpublished info from the Stanley Kubrick Archives as a key source,
Kubrick's Gold Story [part 1 of 4] is a film analysis that uncovers economic themes encoded in The Shining with regard to gold vs fiat monetary systems. Written, narrated and edited by
Rob Ager [
Previously].
posted by albrecht
on Feb 8, 2012 -
75 comments
Datamining Shakespeare ---
Othello is a Shakespearean tragedy: when the hero makes a terrible mistake of judgment, his once promising world is led into ruin. Computer analysis of the play, however, suggests that the play is a comedy or, at least, that it does the same things with words that comedies usually do.
On October 26, 2011,
Folger Shakespeare Library Director
Michael Witmore discussed his recent work in Shakespeare studies which combines computer analysis of texts, linguistics, and traditional literary history. Taking the case of Shakespeare's genres as a starting point, Witmore shows how subtle human judgments about the kinds of plays Shakespeare wrote — were they
comedies,
histories or
tragedies? — are connected to frequent, widely distributed features in the playwright's syntax, vocabulary, and diction. (approx. 30 minute lecture.)
[more inside]
posted by crunchland
on Dec 8, 2011 -
29 comments
"When legal teams need to prove or disprove the authorship of key texts, they call in the forensic linguists. Scholars in the field have tackled the disputed origins of some prestigious works, from Shakespearean sonnets to the Federalist Papers."
Decoding Your E-Mail Personality
Ben Zimmer, of Language Log discusses the Facebook case and
forensic linguistics in the NY Times.
[more inside]
posted by iamkimiam
on Aug 2, 2011 -
13 comments
A corpus analysis of rock harmony [PDF] -
The analyses were encoded using a recursive notation, similar to a context-free grammar, allowing repeating sections to be encoded succinctly. The aggregate data was then subjected to a variety of statistical analyses. We examined the frequency of different chords
and chord transitions ... Other results concern the frequency of different root motions, patterns of
co-occurrence between chords, and changes in harmonic practice across time. More information, analysis, and explanation
here.
posted by Wolfdog
on Jul 29, 2011 -
33 comments
R.M. Berry on Samuel Beckett's peculiar writing style: "It's as though the narrator's words were almost thoughtless, accidental, written by someone paying no attention to what he or she says." Beckett is best known for his play
Waiting For Godot, in which "nothing happens, twice", but he was also an accomplished writer of prose, ranging from the relatively simple
Three Novels to the extremely minimal
Imagination Dead Imagine. Some of Beckett's more challenging short plays are available on YouTube:
Play (
pt. 2),
Not I (the famous "mouth" play), and
Come and Go, one of the shortest plays in the English language (ranging between 121 and 127 words, depending on translation).
Once he interviewed John Lennon and found out who the eggman really was. Beckett's final creative work was his poem
What Is the Word.
posted by Rory Marinich
on Jun 25, 2011 -
41 comments
Mining the Mother of all Data Dumps We now have a relatively massive haul of digital data from the OBL strike. There are several forensic toolkits in use by the private
(commercially available) and
public sector as well as
open-source.
Best practices include inventorying all the sources, cloning the sources so as to not damage pristine data, recovering any partial or damaged content, making the cloned sources read-only, adhering to legally-admissible tools standards, and documenting everything. There is an excellent source titled Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content from the Council on Library and Information Resources [
pdf,
Resource Shelf]. But what to do next*?
[more inside]
posted by rzklkng
on May 4, 2011 -
40 comments
In an age of information wealth, how do we decide what's true & what's not? Allow me to introduce the world of discussion mapping. First up we have
zest (
demo here), a simple tool for threading mailing lists for easier navigation. It lacks the advanced features of the others but it's an easy starting point for structuring your discussions.
[more inside]
posted by scalefree
on Jan 10, 2011 -
6 comments
Measure-theoretic probability: Why it should be learnt and how to get started. The
clickable chart of distribution relationships. Just two of the interesting and informative probability resources I've learned about, along with countless other tidbits of information, from statistician
John D. Cook's
blog and his probability fact-of-the-day Twitter feed
ProbFact. John also has daily tip and fact Twitter feeds for
Windows keyboard shortcuts,
regular expressions,
TeX and LaTeX,
algebra and number theory,
topology and geometry,
real and complex analysis, and beginning tomorrow,
computer science and
statistics.
posted by grouse
on Dec 5, 2010 -
17 comments
This may only occur to the obsessive student of The Parent Trap, but once the subtleties are noticed, hints start stacking up, and a creeping sense of the mythic pervades the film...
Join Chris Stangl,
King of the Beanplaters, as he obsessively studies
The Parent Trap,
Little Shop of Horrors,
Beetlejuice,
Teen Wolf, the original
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and
more.
posted by Iridic
on Oct 28, 2010 -
33 comments
The Rise of the Pseudo-Conservative. Out of context, one could be forgiven for reading the following words as a critique of the political philosophy embraced by the modern-day Republican party and the various Tea Party groups organized around it: "It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative. . . because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions. . . Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways — a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive clinical evidence."
[more inside]
posted by saulgoodman
on Aug 5, 2010 -
91 comments
It has applications in
Economics,
Biology,
Pharmaceuticals, and
is rooted in State Space Modeling, which with
Kalman Filtering (
paper,
breakdown [warning: long]) was used in the
Apollo program.
Dynamic Linear Models are gaining in popularity. There exists an
R package, and both
a short doc and
a really great (read: worth buying) book (sorry, not a download, but
here's chapter 2) by
Giovanni Petris,
Sonia Petrone, and Patrizia Campagnoli with
its own little website.
posted by JoeXIII007
on Jul 30, 2010 -
14 comments
