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Archive for December, 2006

Attention not paid

Wednesday, December 27th, 2006

In a Boston Globe op-ed, “A two-state solution for Iraq?”, economist David Apgar suggests splitting Iraq into two countries, one in the northwest that would include Baghdad and the Sunni and Kurdish areas, the other in the southeast that would be exclusively Shi’ite. “Amazingly, no one has talked much about a two-way partition,” he states.

Of course, if he were a Discourse DB reader, he’d know that, as listed in the “Iraq should be split up” page, at least two journalists have already advocated just such a thing: Jonathan Last in The Philadelphia Inquirer, and James Kurth in The New Republic (more have advocated leaving it as one country, but that’s a different story).

Discourse DB: avoid preventable op-ed mistakes!

Posted in Discourse DB | 86 Comments »

Gerald Ford

Wednesday, December 27th, 2006

Gerald Ford, former President of the United States, is dead at age 93. In New York he might be most famous for telling a near-bankrupt New York City in 1975 to, in the words of the Daily News, “drop dead”. (He changed his mind a few weeks later and created a federal bailout for the city, though his instincts might have been right the first time.)

For the last year or so he took on the mantle of being America’s oldest-ever former president. You know you’ve lived a full life when you’ve outlived some of your obituary writers.

Posted in Uncategorized | 81 Comments »

Betocracy mentions

Tuesday, December 26th, 2006

Happy belated Christmas and Hanukkah to everyone. Season’s greetings! Yes, I should have written this a week ago.

So anyway… Betocracy got some mentions from various blogs, including one at CNNMoney.com, last week; if you’re interested, you can read them, and my thoughts on what they had to say, on the Betocracy blog, here.

Posted in Betocracy | Comments Off

Form follows function

Friday, December 22nd, 2006

I created a form for entering new items (that would be editorials and other opinion pieces) into Discourse DB; you can see it here. The page should hopefully make it a lot easier for people to add content to the site. You no longer need to know anything about the MediaWiki templating syntax, which, though it’s not very complicated, I’m sure has scared off a lot of people. You just have to enter the relevant data into the form and hit two “OK” buttons. And thanks to the nifty “autocomplete” feature, you don’t need to worry about getting the names wrong (is that “Los Angeles Times” or “The Los Angeles Times”? “George Will” or “George F. Will” or “GEORGE WILL”?). And it makes it a whole lot easier to find the correct topics and positions for an item’s opinion, instead of having to do a search through the site and then copying and pasting. For any field, you just have to type the first few letters of the name, and, if what you’re looking for is already in the database, the correct version will show up somewhere in a dropdown below the entry box. The autocomplete feature was created using the Scriptaculous Javascript library, which has lived up to its name in every way.

I consider this another step forward in having wiki databases match the functionality of regular database-driven sites or CMSes (content-management systems). Discourse DB has multiple views of data, searches based on fields, data export to the outside world, and now forms for entering data. That’s all in addition to the natural benefits of wikis. I think it’s a strong combination, but we’ll see if others agree.

Posted in Discourse DB, Semantic Forms 1ffc | 2 Comments »

Finally?

Wednesday, December 20th, 2006

Oh, damn. I don’t know if anyone heard this already, but the first columns for New York’s new “Freedom Tower” were finally installed yesterday. I hope many more are on the way.

Posted in NYC | 7 Comments »

Discourse DB, now with timelines

Friday, December 15th, 2006

I finally upgraded all the MediaWiki code on Discourse DB to the latest version. I mention this because one of the neat features of the new Semantic MediaWiki code (which is essentially what our site runs on, with some of our own modifications) is timelines. It’s a plugin of the Timeline tool developed by MIT’s Simile project, and it lets you see items with dates along a scrollable graph of time, as opposed to just in a list or table.

As a test of the capability, I set it up for a timeline to appear by default at the bottom of the page for each “topic”. As an example, you can see it at Military Commissions Act of 2006; just scroll to the bottom. If you click on either one of the bars to scroll the timeline sideways, you can see all the editorials/posts/etc. that were written about the act, by publication date. Clicking on any name pops up the basic information about it.

When you show the data this way, various trends become apparent. You can see, for instance, that there’s a large “clump” in which almost all of the commentary was written, basically from early September to early October, 2006; that corresponds to when Congress was discussing and voting on the bill. The other topic pages all show this same pattern of clumping during a period of days or weeks. You can also the days in which nearly everyone is talking about that topic; those tend to correspond with real-life news events.
Another way to visualize the data, for what it’s worth.

Posted in Discourse DB | 66 Comments »

ISG elicits controversy

Thursday, December 14th, 2006

The Iraq Study Group’s report has rapidly shot up to near the top of the “most controversial positions” list, on the Discourse DB analysis page (I have it set to refresh every day now). It’s also tied for third place among most-written-about positions. 7 authors are for its recommendations getting implemented, 14 are against and 12 are mixed on the subject (see the position itself here). The report supposedly has 79 recommendations, so it’s no surprise that there are so many in the “mixed” category. It’s why we made it policy when designing Discourse DB to break down topics by their most basic positions. Even the idea of negotiating with Iran and Syria over the war in Iraq, for instance, is really two positions, and some commentators have in fact felt more strongly about the idea of negotiating with one country than with the other. But we made a single position for the ISG report, since it was presented as a single document.

The single biggest point of contention appears to be the Israel issue: in brief, Baker, Hamilton et. al. feel that countries like, well, Iran and Syria are more likely to help turn Iraq into a stable country (and presumably stop funding insurgents there) if the U.S. is able to negotiate an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. This seems to strike the right-wing side as outrageously treacherous, the left-wing side as sensibly holistic.

Posted in Discourse DB | 24 Comments »

Study: the thought of money makes us anti-social

Wednesday, December 13th, 2006

A study released last month suggests that when people think about money they’re less interested in talking to strangers. Like, 50% less interested.

Pretty dramatic… is it really the money, though, or is it that thinking about money causes anxiety, and it’s the stress that makes people anti-social? I would have liked to see a control group in which people are made to think about something else stressful; I don’t know, avian flu or something.

Posted in Uncategorized | 90 Comments »

Thoughts conveyed

Monday, December 11th, 2006

The appropriately-named Mike Linksvayer thinks that Semantic MediaWiki will be the “killer application for the Semantic Web”, and discusses Discourse DB. I agree that wikis are the best (and maybe only good) way to create online semantic data, although I think we disagree about whether that should come through a single, comprehensive site like Wikipedia or a large set of specialized sites (I go with the latter). On that note, he set up a site on Betocracy and I’m tickled at the market he created.

Alright, now I’m plugging two of my sites at once, which may be crossing the line in terms of self-promotion. Hey, at least no one asked about apartment rentals in New York…

Posted in Betocracy, Discourse DB, Semantic wikis 1f67 | 173 Comments »

Bug zapping

Wednesday, December 6th, 2006

The last few days have been taken up almost entirely with bug fixes on Betocracy - issues I hadn’t noticed until random people started using the site and emailing me with problems. I remain hopeful that I did the right thing by launching a site that was still buggy; I took a cue from my favorite book on web development, “Getting Real”, especially the section called “Test in the Wild”, and its emphasis on speed (of development) over perfection. I do hope the existing users can hang in there until the last set of issues (at least, that I know of) get sorted out.

Posted in Betocracy | 75 Comments »

The discourse is foiled again

Monday, December 4th, 2006

Anyone who’s been using Discourse DB to follow current events (I’d like to think maybe such a person exists) must have been surprised at the news today that John Bolton has given up his attempt at a Senate confirmation to be the U.S.’s UN ambassador. After all, according to the analysis page, the opinion that he should have been confirmed is the fifth most popular one on the site! It’s almost as much of a surprise as… the failure of the second- and third-most popular opinions. Those are both against the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (the two are about two slightly different versions of the act), and that act ultimately passed. Which might suggest that the volume of commentary in favor of a specific action is to some extent a function of the nervousness people have about that action not happening, and not necessarily an indication of how popular that action is.

Then again, maybe there’s only so much that can be extrapolated from this case; the rejection of Bolton was an issue of internal politics and didn’t even reflect the views of a majority of the Senate. On the two issues that have substantial commentary about them on the site that have gone in front a popular vote, the 2006 Connecticut Senate election and the 2006 California gubernatorial election, the direction of the commentary has matched the eventual outcome. So maybe it is an indicator of popularity.

Speaking of the analysis page, I neglected before to thank Greg Williams here, who not only wrote the RDF::Query Perl library that I used to create the page, but also was very personally helpful when I wrote him with some questions about using the library.

Posted in Discourse DB | 1 Comment »

Random things

Friday, December 1st, 2006

Random things I’ve seen recently online…

Ari reminisces on her college years, which apparently included swallowing a goldfish.

Someone put on YouTube a clip of Serge Gainsbourg’s infamous encounter with Whitney Houston on a French talk show in 1986.

The New York Times commits one of my pet peeves in this editorial - they use “disinterested” to mean “uninterested”.

That notorious Borat “Throw the Jew Down the Well” clip? The people shown at the bar said later that they were aware the man on stage was a comedian… and one of them was even Jewish. Hm.

Sitting up straight is bad for your back! Leaning either back or forward is better.

Posted in Linkfests | 202 Comments »

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