OCR’d Exhibit A – List of Closing Stores from Borders Chapter 11 Filing
Here's an OCR'd version of the list of Borders stores that are closing. Now you can copy-paste that table into Excel. Borders Chapter 11 Exhibit A - List of Store Closures (OCR)
Pre-processing text: R/tm vs. python/NLTK
Let's say that you want to take a set of documents and apply a computational linguistic technique. If your method is based on the bag-of-words model, you probably need to pre-process these documents first by segmenting, tokenizing, stripping, stopwording, and stemming each one (phew, that's a lot of -ing's). In the past, I've relied
Dataset: 5 Days of #25bahman
What do 88,831 tweets about protest and revolution in Iran look like? Following in the success of Egypt's #jan25 tag, protesters have piled onto the #25bahman tag to discuss Iran's own prospects for "revolution" (25 Bahman 1389 is the Hijri date for February 14, 2011). Curious to analyze and compare these movements, I've started collecting
Plotting a Revolution: Time Series Comparison of #feb12 vs. #fev12
I wondered yesterday whether one of the Algeria/Yemen hashtags would dominate. In order to bring some numbers to the discussion, I grabbed all public tweets on #feb12 and #fev12 through this afternoon. You can see the results below: First off, note that all timestamps are UTC. Second, based on the scale, it's pretty clear that
DNS-Based Internet Censorship and IPv6
I've been watching the #feb12 tweets on the movements in Algeria and Yemen. One of the most common types of tweets explains how to avoid the current censorship of Twitter, Facebook, and Google by directly entering IPs. This got me thinking - while it may be fairly easy to memorize and disseminate IPv4 addresses, what
Paper: Quantifying and Modeling Long-Range Cross-Correlations in Multiple Time Series with Applications to World Stock Indices
Here's another econophysics paper from H. Eugene Stanley and crew: D. Wang, B. Podobnik, D. Horvatić, H. E. Stanley. Quantifying and Modeling Long-Range Cross-Correlations in Multiple Time Series with Applications to World Stock Indices. In my opinion, the primary contribution of the paper isn't really their method. The "global factor model" seems like the same
Twitter Hashtag Battle Royale – #(feb|fev)12 vs. #12(feb|fev)
Algeria and Yemen seem to be pushing a #feb12 revolution hashtag like Egypt's #jan25 tag. In the Egyptian case, the French abbreviation of January didn't vary from the English, and so we really only saw two varieties of the tag - #jan25 and #25jan. I don't have hard numbers on this yet, but from my
Nixon in China and reusable phrases
I'm not really big on modern opera, but I just caught the first act of Nixon in China on Sirius/XM. According to Wikipedia, the opera's premier was met with such glowing reviews as "Mr. Adams does for the arpeggio what McDonald's did for the hamburger." I'll be working hard to use that as an insult
What’s an instruction anyway?
I really like this Wired article and the underlying study in Science because the research brings computing and storage into context, both historically and with respect to types of devices. From the abstract, "In 2007, humankind was able to store 2.9 × 1020 optimally compressed bytes, communicate almost 2 × 1021 bytes, and carry
First Post
Last month, I decided to take a leave of absence from my Ph.D. program at Michigan. I'll be pursuing opportunities in the private sector, and it's very likely that I won't be returning to academia. As a result, I've begun to transition my web presence off of University servers. This domain is a big part