Archive for January, 2009
Word Cloud Analysis of Obama’s Inaugural Speech Compared to Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Lincoln
Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb:
Barack Obama was just sworn in as president and though he stumbled in repeating his oath, the speech that followed was delivered flawlessly and was widely praised around the web. (Several readers have told us that it wasn’t Obama that stumbled, it was Justice Roberts.)
There were quite a few concepts discussed that we suspect haven’t been a part of past inaugural speeches. What words were used most often? We ran the full text of the speech through tag cloud generator Wordle.net for one view of the event, and just for the sake of historical context we ran George W. Bush’s second inaugural speech through as well.
Update: After one reader suggested it, we’ve also added word clouds from Bill Clinton’s second inaugural speech and Reagan’s first. Second update: By reader request, we’ve added Lincoln’s first and second inaugural speeches as well.
The most common words in the Obama and Bush speeches…
Transparent Government Over the Internets? Check Out What Changed (Under the Hood) for the White House’s Website
Jason Kottke: Here’s a small and nerdy measure of the huge change in the executive branch of the US government today. Here’s the robots.txt file from whitehouse.gov yesterday:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /query.html
Disallow: /omb/search
Disallow: /omb/query.html
Disallow: /expectmore/search
Disallow: /expectmore/query.html
Disallow: /results/search
Disallow: /results/query.html
Disallow: /earmarks/search
Disallow: /earmarks/query.html
Disallow: /help
Disallow: /360pics/text
Disallow: /911/911day/text
Disallow: /911/heroes/text
And it goes on like that for almost 2400 lines! Here’s the new Obamafied robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/
That’s it! BTW, the robots.txt file tells search engines what to include and not include in their indexes.
Obama’s Cheney Dilemma: Barack Don’t Know Dick … Yet
Cheney pushed for expanded presidential powers. Now that he’s leaving, what will come of his efforts? The new president won’t have to wait long to tip his hand.
Stuart Taylor Jr. and Evan Thomas | NEWSWEEK:
Dick Cheney, who will step down as vice president on Jan. 20, has been widely portrayed as a creature of the dark side, a monstrous figure who trampled on the Constitution to wage war against all foes, real and imagined.
Barack Obama was elected partly to cleanse the temple of the Bush-Cheney stain, and in his campaign speeches he promised to reverse Cheney’s efforts to seize power for the White House in the war on terror.
It may not be so simple. At a retirement ceremony recently for a top-level intelligence official, the senior spooks in the room gave each other high-fives. They were celebrating the fact that terrorists have not attacked the United States since 9/11.
In the…
Obama ‘Is No Martin Luther King’
Glen Ford, the executive editor of Black Agenda Report, explains why he rejects ties between the US president-elect and the iconic civil rights leader. The two days touch: Dr Martin Luther King’s Birthday observance and Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration, January 19 and 20, respectively.
To many, the juxtaposition is self-evident confirmation of the intersection of the two men’s missions. Dr King’s journey, which ended with his murder in 1968, and Obama’s ascent to the presidency, are seen to merge as the dates approach to form a perfect, tragic-glorious symmetry — a 48-hour revelation.
The coincidence of the calendar makes for good copy and grand sermons, but in fact reveals a great moral and political dissonance. It is true that there could have been no Obama presidency had Dr King and the movement he sprang from not existed, but that simple fact of history does not amount to a King benediction from the…
No Final Pardons From Bush
George Bush has, on his final full day as US president, commuted the sentences of two border patrol agents but steered clear of a high-profile pardon for former vice-presidential aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Bush commuted the 11-year prison sentence of Ignacio Ramos and the 12-year sentence of Jose Alonso Compean, who had been convicted of assault and violating the civil rights of Osvaldo Aldrete Davila, a Mexican drug dealer.
Davila pressed charges against them after he was shot while attempting to smuggle 300kg of marijuana into Texas in 2005. Davila, who said he was unarmed, was shot in the buttocks as he tried to flee back across the border to Mexico.
The two agents did not report the shooting to their superiors and tried to cover up the incident but their convictions drew sharp criticism from advocates of tough US border security policies who said they were just doing their jobs.
Early release
The…
Israel Accused of War Crimes
Human rights group Amnesty International has accused Israel of war crimes, saying its use of white phosphorus munitions in densely populated areas of the Gaza Strip was indiscriminate and illegal. The accusations from the London-based organisation came as the scale of the destruction caused by the Israeli assault on the Palestinian territory overwhelmed Gazans.
Amnesty is not the first group to accuse Israel of using white phosphorus. Human Rights Watch made the accusation on January 10 and the UN has also said Israel used the munition during its offensive in Gaza.
Donatella Rovera, a researcher with Amnesty, said: “Such extensive use of this weapon in Gaza’s densely populated residential neighbourhoods is inherently indiscriminate.” Its repeated use in this manner, despite evidence of its indiscriminate effects and its toll on civilians, is a war crime,” she said.
Ample evidence
The use of white phosphorus is not prohibited under international law, but the indiscriminate use of…
We Don’t Have to Like the President
Regardless of how George Bush’s legacy turns out, there’s one sure thing – history will either love him or hate him. The Presidency isn’t about loving or hating someone and hopefully we can all agree to start the new administration there.
Millions See UFO Crash in Saudi Arabia
Special report by Michael Cohen: Astonishing events are occuring around the world and not as much as a word about them is being written or said in the West. In Saudi Arabia last week what might well have be a UFO, possibly crashing into earth, was witnessed by literally millions of people in the vicinity. Multiple photos of the object have come to light.
Arabic language forums are abuzz with Saudi citizens claiming to have witnessed what is even being described by some in the normally conservative Saudi Arabian press as a possible UFO either crashing to earth or simply executing manoeuvres designed to scare humans. Others are claiming the object was an Asteroid or a Satellite. Witnesses are reported to be waiting for an explanation from local meteorological bureau’s but have received no answers yet.
ON Wednesday 7th of January after evening prayers a loud noise was heard in the sky…
Another First: Obama Acknowledges ‘Non-Believers’
Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY: On a morning of countless firsts in U.S. history, add this: Barack Obama’s inaugural speech is the first time a president has ever explicitly acknowledged not only “Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus” but non-believers as well.
“This inclusiveness is a signature moment in American inaugural history,” says David Domke, professor of communications at the University of Washington in Seattle, who has analyzed religious language in seven decades of inaugural and State of the Union addresses.
Obama’s speech was “right in the middle” of recent presidents in the number of references to God — more than Reagan, fewer than George W. Bush — according to Domke’s tally.
Even so, “You could hear beneath it all references to God-given promise, God’s calls on us, God’s grace on us, and the frequent use of ’shall’ in that King James-ian English of the Bible and early translations of Jewish prayer books,”…
Britain On The Edge Of National Bankruptcy
They don’t know what they’re doing, do they? With every step taken by the Government as it tries frantically to prop up the British banking system, this central truth becomes ever more obvious.
Yesterday marked a new low for all involved, even by the standards of this crisis. Britons woke to news of the enormity of the fresh horrors in store. Despite all the sophistry and outdated boom-era terminology from experts, I think a far greater number of people than is imagined grasp at root what is happening here.
The country stands on the precipice. We are at risk of utter humiliation, of London becoming a Reykjavik on Thames and Britain going under. Thanks to the arrogance, hubristic strutting and serial incompetence of the Government and a group of bankers, the possibility of national bankruptcy is not unrealistic.
Why Men Are Better Dieters Than Women
You wouldn’t think a diet would be a cause of marital discord. But it often is — at least when couples try to shed pounds together and, as often happens, the husband drops the weight a lot faster than the wife does. Well, guess what, guys? It’s not your steely resolve or your trips to the gym or your superior genes that are entirely behind it. It might just be your brain.
It’s hardly a secret that men and women gain weight, lose weight and think about weight entirely differently. It’s also not news that body-fat percentage alone — with females naturally carrying an extra ladling of adipose tissue — gives males a head start in the slimming game. But a new study from Brookhaven National Laboratory looked deeper into the primal ways in which we react to the very presence of food — and if you like to eat, this…
Bush Protest: Shoes Thrown At White House
President Bush was given an Iraqi-journalist-style sendoff on his last full day in office Monday, as tourists and demonstrators lobbed shoes, pumps, boots, sandals and Crocs from Pennsylvania Avenue onto the White House lawn.
Before launching the operation live, the shoe-chuckers took target practice in Dupont Circle on a 20-foot-tall blow up doll of the outgoing president, decked out in the flight suit he wore aboard the “Mission Accomplished” aircraft carrier.
Chinese Government Office Declare Dazzling Craft a UFO
Report by Audrey Chan: A remarkable UFO was seen and filmed in China by an entire squadron of fire-fighters in Liu Pan Shui City in the province of Guizhou through a camera with a 700X zoom capability. One of the fire-fighters, Wang Jia Wei, noticed an odd looking, brightly flashing star moving in a south easterly direction and went inside the fire-fighters barracks to get a camera.
Luckily for Wang he was able to find a Panasonic camera used by his comrades to record damage caused by fires that allowed him to zoom in on the mysterious object seven hundred times. At that point Wang could see that the object was in fact two rotating spinning top shaped crafts or halves of a whole craft joined at a their bases. They were flashing a multitude of colours: Purple, red, blue, orange, white and gold.
Wang then called his eight fellow fire-fighters out…
Pop Artist Nathan Janes Urges Public to ‘Free Tibet’ with New Painting ‘Tragedy and Hope’
The painting, “Tragedy and Hope,” marks the bloody history of Tibet as it culture and people have been eradicated by the Chinese since 1950 but it also marks the artist and other activists’ hope that people will continue to cry out until justice is brought to the Tibetan people.
Janes says that he “realizes many people accept the world as it is presented to them and continuing struggles such as that of the Tibetan people are not often presented to the American public through mass media outlets.”
He hopes that through his painting he will spread awareness about the tragic situation in Tibet to those who view his art and encourage people to learn about world events in other ways besides the mass media.
Pop Artist Nathan Janes urges public to “Free Tibet” with new painting “Tragedy and Hope”
The painting, “Tragedy and Hope,” marks the bloody history of Tibet as it culture and people have been eradicated by the Chinese since 1950 but it also marks the artist and other activists’ hope that people will continue to cry out until justice is brought to the Tibetan people. Janes says that he “realizes many people accept the world as it is presented to them and continuing struggles such as that of the Tibetan people are not often presented to the American public through mass media outlets.” He hopes that through his painting he will spread awareness about the tragic situation in Tibet to those who view his art and encourage people to learn about world events in other ways besides the mass media.
Anthony Cipriano: 9/11 First Plane Witness
Anthony Cipriano was working at Madison Square Garden on the morning of September 11th 2001. He witnessed the first plane fly over his head and hit tower 1. several weeks later he worked clean up near ground zero. He recalls his thoughts about the steam that was rising from the pile in mid October and the need for a new investigation into 9/11.
A National ‘Secretary of the Arts’ — Sign the Petition
Quincy Jones has started a petition to ask President Obama to appoint a Secretary of the Arts. While many other countries have had Ministers of Art or Culture for centuries, The United States has never created such a position. We in the arts need this and the country needs the arts — now more than ever. Please take a moment to sign this important petition and then pass it on to your friends and colleagues.
To: President Barack Obama
Congratulations and thank you for all you do.
Your good friend Quincy Jones said: “…next conversation I have with President Obama is to beg for a Secretary of Arts.”
[November 14th 2008 WNYC interview by John Schaefer on "Soundcheck."]
We the undersigned support Quincy Jones’ plea. Thank you.
Sincerely,
The Undersigned
MSG Makes You Fat
Research has shown that a flavor enhancer found in many popular foods known as monosodium glutamate (MSG) causes weight gain and obesity in lab animals by damaging the appetite regulation center in the area of the brain known as the hypothalamus, causing leptin resistence. Leptin is the hormone that controls how much a person feels like eating. The fullness, gratification and satisfaction that come from having eaten is completely lost when MSG is consumed, leading to an urge to eat that never stops. A recent cross-sectional study in China supports the conclusion that what was seen in the animal studies also applies to people.
