04.03.07
Posted in sports, web, wikipedia at 9:04 pm by danvk
A few weeks ago, I looked at the Wikipedia edits to the 2006 NCAA Tournament article. Here’s the edits chart for this year’s tourney, as promised.
For comparison, here’s the chart for last year:
The overall features are quite similar: the important dates stand out clearly in each chart. The total edit volume in 2007 is about double what it was in 2006, which is consistent with Wikipedia’s rapid growth. The edits were more front-loaded in 2007. Selection Sunday was far and away the busiest day, and the edits decreased steadily into the later rounds. This may indicate that fans contributed content relating to their favorite teams, and then stopped once that team was eliminated.
Shortly before last year’s tournament, I wrote a program to create a basic article for every NCAA tournament, from 1939-2005. The articles had a list of teams, locations, and a bracket. The idea was that, once the tournament got underway, other contributors would spruce the articles up a bit with some individualized content. Here’s a plot of the cumulative edits to the 1939-2005 tourney articles.
There are clear spikes during March Madness each season. Cumulative, there have been 1,493 edits to these articles by users other than myself, an average of 22/article. This is a bit skewed by the more recent tourneys, though. The median number of non-Dan edits is 10/article, which still isn’t bad. Wikipedia has its own flavor of the “release early and often” mantra from open source software. It’s not important that the article be perfect the first time around. It’s more important to just put something out there so that others can improve upon it.
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Posted in tv at 12:09 am by danvk
What was New York thinking? Why’s she got to go with the boring ninja turtle? She and Mr. Chance were perfect for each other. You could tell she regretted it the second she let Chance go. And she was surprised that he was mad? Come on New York! I was “really feelin’” her and Chance.
I was happy to find out this past weekend that lots of my Rice friends were watching I Love New York as well. It really was a fun show. But I’ll bet it’s just the beginning. Here’s hoping for the greatest spinoff ever… Second Chance for Love!
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03.28.07
Posted in news at 1:29 am by danvk
I watched PBS Frontline’s Burden of Innocence tonight and bade farewell to whatever confidence I had in our legal system. The show follows several men as they’re released from long prison sentences by DNA evidence. They rarely adjust, and often wind up back in prison. It’s exceptionally difficult to get monetary compensation for wrongful imprisonment in most states and, what amazed me most, it’s impossible to get your name off the list of convicted felons. This makes getting a job next to impossible, which leads no the rest of their problems.
Clicking around, I found the sad case of Gary Dotson. Shortly after having sex with her boyfriend, Cathleen Crowell, a teenage girl, made up a rape accusation as a cover in case she got pregnant. She didn’t get pregnant, but the rape charge somehow found a life of its own. Gary Dotson was later charged and put in jail based largely on her false testimony. Fast-forward eight years and Cathleen (shock!) has a guilty conscience. She publicly renounces her story. But for various political reasons, the charges still stick. It isn’t until more competent lawyers and DNA evidence come into the mix that he’s finally exonerated. As a final sick twist, it turns out that she based her rape story on a scene in a trashy romance novel, Sweet Savage Love. I highly recommend reading the story I linked to above.
I had no idea how easily misleading statistics and logic could be used in a court of law. The most terrifying thing about all of this is that a perfect storm of politics, media and science were necessary for Gary Dotson’s release. How many thousands of other people haven’t had their perfect storm?
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03.22.07
Posted in sports, tv, web, wikipedia at 11:26 pm by danvk
I’ve been enjoying March Madness the past few weeks, even though my team got knocked out in the first round.
Internet video really is coming into its own. This year, for the first time, you can watch the games online with March Madness on Demand. As with the NewsHour Online Video Archive, there are still some kinks to work out. Biggest gripe: it only works in Internet Explorer 6 on Windows. No love for Mac users like myself. What’s worse is that you don’t even get a message telling you that IE6 is required if you load it in Firefox. It just mysteriously doesn’t work. Hopefully this tool will be better next year. The main thing is that it exists at all.
Oh, and if a game is being broadcast on CBS in your area, you’ll get a message saying it’s been blacked out. Yeesh.
The Wikipedia article on the 2007 tourney has been fun to watch. In the last ten days, it’s received over a thousand edits. Wikipedia edit counts aren’t a bad way to track current events. Here’s what the edit history for last year’s tourney looks like:
The major events stand out in stark relief. One caveat: if an article gets protected by an administrator in response to vandalism, it throws a wrench into the fluidity of edits. I’ll post a similar chart for this year’s tourney after it’s over.
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03.20.07
Posted in news, politics at 9:22 pm by danvk
I was struck by this story by Holly J, a woman who attended the recent anti-war protest in Washington. It’s mostly about the anti-anti-war protesters, who frighten her on her way to the protest. Then she unexpectedly comes face-to-face with one, and finds some perspective on the whole issue.
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