A life in words
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Hubris
When I saw that the various things I was working on and talking about with people brought a Tennyson poem, Doctrine and Covenants 45, a book about pre-Columbian civilizations, and my own poetic musings together in one place, I was filled with intellectual vanity. At his request, I started telling my professor my thoughts about…
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Visualizing Texts as Networks
For a recent project in my text mining class we were required to explore ways of visualizing textual data. This is a tricky problem due to the nature of text, mainly because it is both categorical and sparse. Visualizing numerical data is, relatively speaking, a piece of cake, because real numbers can all be related…
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If You’re A Member of Congress, Vote ‘No’ on Health Care Reform!
To quote one of my favorite economists, Gary Becker: Despite the long debate, many provisions of both the House and Senate bills remain highly controversial. These include, among many others, the way the uninsured would get coverage, the de-emphasis on health savings accounts, the postponement until 2018 of the elimination of the tax advantages from…