Last Wednesday, March 26th, on Document Freedom Day, OASIS submitted Open Document Format 1.2 standard to the ISO/IEC JTC1 Secretariat for transposition to an International Standard under the Publicly Available Specification (PAS) procedure. If you recall, the PAS procedure is what we used back in 2005 when ODF 1.0 was submitted to ISO and was […]
The Words Democrats and Republicans Use
It came to me after listening to the State of the Union Address: Can we tell whether a speech was from a Democrat or a Republican President, purely based on metrics related to the words used? It makes sense that we could. After all, we can analyze emails and detect spam that way. Automatic text […]
First Move Advantage in Chess
The Elo Rating System Competitive chess players, at the amateur club level all the way through the top grandmasters, receive ratings based on their performance in games. The ratings formula in use since 1960 is based on a model first proposed by the Hungarian-American physicist Arpad Elo. It uses a logistic equation to estimate the […]
The New Technology Consumers
There were those who complained about the labor conditions of those who picked grapes and sewed t-shirts. About pesticides on apples and growth hormones in milk. About generically modified corn and soy. About how governments conduct foreign policy, how they treat prisoners of war, how they collect intelligence, how they make treaties and how they […]
Apache OpenOffice 2013 Mailing List Review
I did a quick study of the 2013 mailing list traffic for the Apache OpenOffice project. I looked at all project mailing lists, including native language lists. I omitted the purely transactional mailing lists, the ones that merely echo code check-ins and bug reports. Altogether 14 mailing lists were included in this study. In 2013 […]