While I was in the hospital last week, I hit the five-month mark on my 365 photo project.
Monthly Archives: January 2011
Obama v Palin : A Visual Analysis
Updated. Yesterday, former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin delivered a short video statement on the tragedy in Arizona. Later in the day, President Barack Obama spoke at the memorial service in Tucson.
I’ve used Wordle to compare the two speeches.
Sarah Palin On The Tragedy In Tucson
Barack Obama On The Tragedy In Tucson
I’ve also written about the controversy surrounding Palin’s use of “blood libel” to castigate the media.
- Sarah Palin and “Blood Libel” - TheModerateVoice
- Blood Libel: How The Meme Spread – Storify
- Blood Libel: What The “Left” Said – Storify
UPDATE:
Wordle provides a visual rhetorical analysis of a text. The size of the words relates to how often they are used; I wish that color intensity was also correlated with word frequency (darker = more frequent) but I don’t think it is.
A few caveats about these Wordle images:
- Obama’s text is a LOT longer than Palin’s
- I did not add any “stop” words to the stock “a, and, the, etc” list that is in Wordle*
- I did not conflate words — which I often do (singular/plural)
I am adding a Wordle of Bobby Kennedy’s remarks on the slaying of Martin Luther King as a point of cultural (political era) comparison. Arguably, 1968 was an even more divisive time than the one we live in today.
Robert (Bobby) Kennedy On The Assassination of Martin Luther King
FCC Broadband Plan Shrivels Compared To New Hampshire
Last March, the FCC announced a national broadband plan with the goal of connecting ~85 percent of the US population to 100 Mbps high speed broadband by 2020. I just learned that New Hampshire is requiring that North Carolina-based FairPoint* (which paid $2.3 billion for Verizon’s New England land lines and internet service) is required to offer broadband service to 95 percent of its customers by 2013.
It’s true that the NH requirement contains no speed threshold. However, broadband speeds have been increasing by 50 percent a year for the past decade. Therefore, assuming that FairPoint keeps up with the technology – or even lags a little – they should be at 100 Mbps by 2010, given that the US average was 5 Mbps last March:
US Broadband: The FCC and Network Neutrality
Part 1 of a series (How US Broadband and Cellular Telecomm Got So Messed Up) on U.S. telecommunication infrastructure
Back in December, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted 3-2 along partisan lines to approve network neutrality rules, rules which had not yet been made public. The proposed rules (pdf) were released on 23 December.
The proposal features three primary points: transparency (Internet Service Providers can do whatever they want, so to speak, they just have to disclose what they are doing); no blocking (if content is legal, an ISP cannot “block” it, ditto applications, services and non-harmful devices); and no “unreasonable” discrimination against lawful traffic (which means yeah, it’s OK to discriminate against spammers … but there’s no definition of “unreasonable”).
As a concept, network neutrality is simple: just like telephone companies are required to treat competitor incoming calls like they would treat their own, ISPs should be prohibited from treating “bits” differently based on point of origin. However, as with most complex topics, the devil is in the details. And, in this case, also buried in a law written in 1934.
Study: 40% of iPad owners have Kindles, too
Despite stereotypes, almost half of iPad owners also have a Kindle at the same time, JPMorgan found in a new study. About 40 percent have Amazon’s e-reader, and another 23 percent still plan to buy one in the next year. Only 23 percent have no plans, and 14 percent didn’t know what a Kindle was.
via electronista.com
Why is the fact that about half of iPad owners also have a Kindle a big deal? Early adopters buy early. Early technology adopters buy the latest shiny piece of tech. That’s what they do! (The challenge is getting normal people interested, people who need a reason other than shiny and new to open their wallets.)
What’s intriguing to me is that a quarter of the folks who bought an iPad first say that they now plan to add a Kindle. Now that’s interesting. It suggests a growing comfort with reading books, magazines and newspapers published in digital ink. It also adds credence to the assertion that the iPad is simply too heavy to serve primarily as an e-reader.
