MyDebates.org, online polling, and potentially the coolest question corpus ever

MySpace and the Commission on the Presidential Debates put together a neat site, mydebates.org, which presents the candidates' positions through various mini-polls and such. It even has a cool data exploration tool for the poll results ... for example, here are two support maps, one for respondents over 65 and one for 18-24 year olds.




Anyway, the site also takes submissions of questions for tonight's debate. Apparently six million questions were submitted, and moderator Tom Brokaw will of course use only 10 or so. This begs a question, how were they selected? There's no Digg-like social filtering or anything. You could imagine automatic methods to help narrow down the pool: Topic clustering? Quality ranking on syntax and vocabulary?

Eric Fish suggested the obvious: probably someone picked 1000 randomly and sent them to Brokaw.

I'd love to see a corpus of 6 million questions on U.S. political subjects, directed at only two different people. Anyone know anyone who works at MySpace or CPD?

Time to watch the debate! (Alas, no PalinSpeak liveblog this time, of course.)

"Machine" translation/vision (Stanford AI courses online)

The Stanford Engineering school has put up videos and course materials for several programming, AI, and optimization courses online. They did get some of the ones that are taught by excellent lecturers -- e.g. introductory programming (the CS dept has craploads of money, so can afford to hire specialist lecturers, which results in very good courses), and Brad Osgood on the FFT (he's just such a good lecturer).

Main link, minor link.

I was looking through the transcript of Chris Manning's introductory lecture for CS224N, Natural Language Processing, last year. (SEE link; actual website link.) I took this same course years ago as a sophomore, and this part sounded familiar:

So if you look at the early history of NLP, NLP essentially started in the 1950s. It started just after World War II in the beginning of the Cold War. And what NLP started off as is the field of machine translation, of can you use computers to translate automatically from one language to another language? Something that’s been noticed about the field of computing actually is that you can tell the really old parts of computing because the old parts of computer science are the ones that have machine in the name.

I wonder if it's in the zeitgeist and I heard it from somewhere else? Sounds right though.

Fukuyama: Authoritarianism is still against history

The latest on the world ideologies front --

In the light of Russia's Georgia adventures, there's been lots of talk whether this represents a new rise of authoritarian Russia, which is presumably another nail in the coffin for U.S.-led liberal democratic hegemony in the world. Our "end of history" friend Francis Fukuyama just wrote an op-ed arguing that Russia and China are still not big threats to liberal democracy. There are some good points: Russia is behaving as an aggressive imperial power, but does not embrace a grand, exportable ideology with universal appeal. Similarly with China. They both still feel the need to pay lip service to democratic rituals and norms. Even Nicholas Kristof's hilarious column chronicling his experience with China's dubious protest registration system concludes that even a pale mockery of democracy is progress.

I still like Azar Gat's article which I wrote about last year, that Russia and China represent authoritarian capitalism, which will be an effective alternative to liberal democracy. Sure, it's not a war of ideologies, he argues, but now it looks like big successful nations can economically succeed without being very democratic. Furthermore, this should encourage others to not bother with democracy.