Wow wow wow! See what I found from del.icio.us!!! Does this history of Transformers evoke your dreams in childhood?
Even today I can still sing along with the theme song “transformer, more than meets the eye…” Almost every child back then could sing the song and was fascinated with the endless episodes about conspiracies. Decepticons always planed to destroy some important power plants or public facilities and autobots could always stop them. Megatron’s epilogue “I will be back” were repeated from time to time.

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I will present a detailed description and critique of the research process in which I conducted a frame analysis to compare ten news stories published in New York Times.
The first step to conduct a textual analysis is to determine the topic that interests me and what analytical method I will employ to examine the materials. Looking back on the numerous events happening in the passed few weeks, I am interested in how the mass media in U.S. cope with the public crisis in such different social aspects as nature, economy, politics and national security, say, the devastation of a series of hurricanes which plow through the Caribbean and southern Atlantic. The roles of mass media in the prevention and warning of crisis (pre-disaster), confrontment with large-scale disasters (during the disaster) and measures taken to deal with problems arising from catastrophe (after-disaster) can be derived from their continuous news reports on the topic of the disasters. The attitudes of the specific social institutions, such as the federal and state government, people who directly or indirectly suffer from the disasters, and people being away from the disaster but paying intense attention to it can be reflected in the news stories. In the consideration of the limitation on the numbers of news reports to be analyzed in this exercise, I selected ten news stories which reported on the hurricane Ivan and its effects in the southeast area as my research subjects. All the articles were originally published on the section of National Desk in New York Times and retrieved from Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe database by using “Hurricane Ivan” as keywords in searching. The time range was set to “the past month” and articles were picked from the results arranged in the chronological order. Ten reports about Hurricane Ivan from Sep 11th to 20th appearing on National Desk section were finally chosen as sample.

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Rice Virtual Lab in Statistics by David M. Lane
The little handbook of statistical practice by Gerard E. Dallal
Visual statistics with multimedia by David J. Krus of Arizona State University
Statistics at square 1 by T. D. V. Swinscow; revised by M. J. Campbell, University of Southampton
Statnotes: An online textbook by G. David Garson, North Carolina State University
Concepts and applications of inferential statistics by Richard Lowry of Vassar College
StatPrimer by B. Gerstman
SticiGui by P. B. Stark of UC Berkeley
Investigating Statistics by Robert Hale of Pennsylvania State University
Statistics for journalists by Robert Niles of the LA Times.
Introductory statistics: Concepts, models, and applications by David W. Stockburger of Southwest Missouri State University
Multivariate statistics: Concepts, models, and applications by David W. Stockburger of Southwest Missouri State University
Electronic textbook by StatSoft
A new view of statistics by Will Hopkins of the University of Otago
The knowledge base: An online research methods textbook by William M. Trochim of Cornell University
Statistics 30X class notes by H. J. Newton, J. H. Carroll, N. Wang, and D. Whiting of Texas A&M.
Statistical Resources on the Web by David W. Stockburger

Even when our bus approached the Art Institute of Chicago I hadn’t succeeded recalling who Georges Seurat is. Actually it was my very first time to travel around Chicago instead of simply stop by it; I was kind of overwhelmed by this. Basically the twenty minutes spent hovering around the downtown approved my proposition that all the downtowns in big cities are quite alike.
This is actually a free program offered to university and college faculty and students [ yeah, we were just charged $5 as bus fee ]. To my surprise, there were 44 colleges taking part in the exhibition tonight and the auditorium was almost full. The one-hour-long presentation titled “Seurat and the Making of ‘La Grande Jatte’” made by a lady who never raised her tone all along was very informative. Until the most famous masterpiece of Seurat - A Sunday on La Grande Jatte - was shown on the screen did I recognize it and couldn’t help shouting inside that “hey, I know this guy!”

Surely I knew this guy and I even tried to imitate his pointillism in the class of watercolor paining, though my efforts to draw a bunch of dots on the paper in purpose of drawing a tree were finally stopped by my teacher’s remark. “Please don’t dot like that. Try another brush stroke.” My inspiration about pointllism was from a TV program I happened to watch the night before that day. I never expected that one day I would stand before the painting and appreciate it from all the angles I could think of. WOW!!!

Pointillism is a style of painting in which non- primary colors are generated, not by the mixing of pigments in the palette nor by using pigments directly, but by the visual mixing of points of primary colors, placed in close proximity to each other.

Nothing can explain the spirit of the technique better than examining the painting with your own eyes. Despite the physical distance between you and A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, there is another way you can experience as well. Enjoy!

I just finished my COMM 203 Quantative Research Method. Quite overwhelmed by terminologies, I found this list and felt kind of released now.
It’s from Erich Friedman’s website who is working as Associate Professor of Mathematics and ex-Chair of the Math and Computer Science Department at Stetson University. He has a collection of some fascinating TOP-TEN lists.
The following one is from the Math Humor section.
Top Ten Reasons to Become a Statistician
10. Deviation is considered normal.
9. We feel complete and sufficient.
8. We are mean lovers.
7. Statisticians do it discretely and continuously.
6. We are right 95% of the time.
5. We can safely comment on someone’s posterior distribution.
4. We may not be normal but we are transformable.
3. We never have to say we are certain.
2. We are honestly significantly different.
1. No one wants our jobs.

Last week I had noticed that Google News had a few more international editions other than those existing versions. The newly added editions were in Korean and Japanese. Since both languages of the two countries are based on the encoding of UTF-8, it smelled like Google News was getting its feet on the East Asia where double-byte characters are dominant. Surprisingly, today I found three Chinese versions [ China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan ] were launched at the same time.
Let’s put the one China policy issue aside for a while [ it is always the topic that touches the nerve ]. I am personally more interested in the subtle distinctions among the three version sites except for the apparent interface differences — traditional and Simplified Chinese. These questions are, but not limited to, what news sources Google News counts on, how does Google deal with the censorship system in China, and how would Google conciliate the ideological conflicts backed the three sites.
To answer the first question, I refer to what Google states in the FAQs about Google News:

The headlines on the Google News homepage are selected entirely by a computer algorithm, based on many factors including how often and on what sites a story appears elsewhere on the web. This is very much in the tradition of Google’s web search, which relies heavily on the collective judgment of web publishers to determine which sites offer the most valuable and relevant information. Google News relies in a similar fashion on the editorial judgment of online news organizations to determine which stories are most deserving of inclusion and prominence on the Google News page.

I don’t know if China government will block the Chinese Google News or if there has been some agreements between China and Google to ensure the access to the site would be availalbe. According to what I have observed, all of the headlines now on the front page are from those so-called mainstream media in China, such as Xinhua, Workers’ Daily, the Beijing News…etc. By means of selecting the “appropriate” sources, Google News China might have avoided the risks of annoying the China government in deliberately because they can fully count on the gatekeepers in those media and get itself free of responsibilities. I think this can also answer my second question.
I am still making some observations for the third question. Hopefully I can find the answer shortly.

While the sources of the news vary in perspective and editorial approach, their selection for inclusion is done without regard to political viewpoint or ideology. While this may lead to some occasionally unusual and contradictory groupings, it is exactly this variety that makes Google News a valuable source of information on the important issues of the day.

Updated:
My friend back in China told me that whenever he attempted to browser the Taiwan version, he would be disconnected from Google News for a little while. Seems the Great Firewall is working now.

This morning I received an email from Kathy, the budget coordinator in my college. Interestingly, the email contained a link to White House Site. It’s a picture taken on Bush’s trip to Milwaukee last Friday.
Very interesting.

I’ve got another 6 Gmail invitations again. Having spreaded it among my friends, now I have no idea whom to send them. If you are interested, just leave a note and I’ll send you one.
You don’t need to swap something with me to get it. It’s all free and I just want to give it to those who are in need.
Update:
Say… I’m sorry that I’ve given out all my Gmail invites and haven’t got new ones for a long time. Anyway, I’ll send out all I have as long as I get some in the order you guys ask for it. Sorry about that.