October 15th, 2008, 5 Comments »
We were in the US this past long weekend, so we only got news of last night’s election when I logged into the AT&T wifi at SeaTac. To no one’s surprise, we got ourselves another Conservative minority government. I have read just about zero analysis of the results, but it seems to me that most of the parties hopped on the fail boat:
- The Liberals, obviously, were the biggest failure. They haven’t won so few seats since 1984. Adieu, Monsieur Dion.
- The Conservatives failed to secure a majority.
- The Greens failed, yet again, to win a single seat.
- Jack Layton failed to become Prime Minister. Though, admittedly, the NDP’s showing was one of its strongest ever.
I guess the Bloc Québécois has to be reasonably happy with their 50 seats, as the best they’ve ever done is 54.
Personally, I don’t mind minority governments. They feel democratic. And I don’t mind that the average Canadian is asked to pay attention to national issues every couple of years. Is it really that much of a burden to have to vote every 18 months instead of every five years?
UPDATE: Apparently the folks at Comedy Central agree with me.
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October 9th, 2008, 10 Comments »
I’m a big fan of Wordle. Everybody likes pretty tag clouds, but until recently, I’ve had no practical use for the tool.
What with the forthcoming election and all, and being in marketing, I thought it might be interesting to use Wordle to distill each of the four national parties’ websites into a tag cloud. The cloud would reflect the terms that the party uses most frequently on their English-language websites. With an assist from Ask Metafilter, I got them done. I’ll explain a little more about how after the clouds.
As usual, click for larger versions:
What Conclusions Can We Draw?
That’s more a question for you than me, as I haven’t spent much time trying to grok what these clouds tell us (yes, I used ‘grok’). What jumps out at you?
How Did We Make Them?
First, I grabbed a complete copy of each party’s website. I just stuck with HTML files, so if a party hosts a lot of PDFs with unique content, then that’s not reflected. The sites, of course, ended up being different sizes, and I’m relying on my site-copying software, so I can’t be certain I got all the pages.
Then we concatenated each set of HTML files into one gigantic file. Using some scripty-magic, we generated the top 100 or 250 words, each appearing as many times as they appear in the original site.
I went through each of these to clean out most or all of the leftover HTML code, navigational terms like ‘email’ or ‘newsletter’ and French words. The French is why we used 250 words in some cases. For some sites, I downloaded both the French and English version of the site, so I needed to remove the French. By working with a 250 word file, I was able to clean out the French and still have a sizable database of words.
In short, it’s somewhat unscientific, but I’m optimistic that the clouds represent a reasonably fair reflection of each site’s top content. If anyone wants to work with the content I copied, I’m happy to share it. I’m not going to publish the complete sites here, though, as I expect that would constitute a copyright violation.
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August 11th, 2008, 5 Comments »
I was watching some Olympics coverage yesterday, and started thinking about rituals of celebration:
- In indoor volleyball, the team converges after every successful point. There’s a momentary huddle where, I assume, encouraging and congratulatory remarks are exchanged.
- In gymnastics, the girls (for, yes, they’re mostly still girls) of the American team gave each other the most cursory of hugs after each routine.
- Basketball seems to reflect what occurs in the NBA. There’s very little reaction after the average basket, and just some macho posturing after a particularly righteous slam dunk.
- I didn’t see what happened in water polo, but I think it’s much like basketball.
In games where teams accrue points, there’s a correlation between the frequency of scoring and the amount of celebration. In hockey and football (that is, soccer), the entire team congregates around the scorer to congratulate them. At the other end of the scale, there’s very little reaction from teammates in basketball or doubles tennis.
Is there a threshold where the group-to-congratulate stops? Maybe it’s not that simple. There’s potentially 25 points in a volleyball game, though there’s easily 75 to 100 in a match. That’s actually more ’scores’ that the average basketball game, so I guess there’s no hard and fast rule.
Can you think of other high-scoring sports where the team celebrates after every point?
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December 19th, 2007, No Comments »
Registration for the fourth annual Loose Moose festival of social media fun is now open. Travis provides some pricing details:
You can attend one day for $40, or come to both days for only $60. That’s an amazing deal: it’s just the price of a single cup of coffee that also costs $60!
I’m really proud of the fact that we’ve been able to keep the conference ridiculously cheap. Four years ago, the one-day conference cost $20 in advance or $30 at the door.
There’s some exciting new stuff planned for this year. I’ll let the other–far more active–organizers announce all of that, and then I’ll post about it here.
I’m also pleased not to be the guy wrangling the registration process this year. Three years of that was enough.
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September 18th, 2007, 10 Comments »
Knowing that I’m a hockey fan, somebody asked me today which rookie he should pick in his pool. I haven’t been following the training camps and pre-season very closely (though I’ve been enjoying the FanHouse’s team-by-team previews), so I had to go do a bit of research. These five rookies seem to be likely to make their respective teams and shine in 2007-08:
- Jonathan Toews - Chicago
- Nicklas Backstrom - Washington
- Benoit Pouliot - Wild
- Peter Mueller - Coyotes
- Jack Johnson (D) - Blues
And these three seem less certain, but likely candidates as well:
- Bobby Ryan - Ducks
- Igor Grigorenko - Redwings
- Erik Johnson (D) - Kings
Like I say, I’m no expert–who are you picking?
10 Comments »
June 22nd, 2007, 2 Comments »
This photo, via Digg, thrills me way more than it should:
I rank Raiders of the Lost Ark among my top five favourite movies. The rest of the trilogy couldn’t quite recapture the first movie’s magic, but I’m still psyched for the fourth one. And glad that Sean Connery won’t be reprising his gimmicky role from The Last Crusade. Cate Blanchett will make for a more than adequate replacement.
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