I am sometimes asked whether I am working on the stats, whether I am making progress on the stats, and what I do with all of the stats.  People are also prone to hyperbole.  I am told that I sure work on a lot of stats, I am always keeping myself busy doing stats, and I am the person to go to for stats.  I suppose my real job is more mysterious than the one others imagine that I do.  I first want to explain that for everyday people, the term “stats” or “statistics” often means historical…

BERLIN stands for Behavioural Event Reconstruction Linguistic Interface for Narratives. I introduced BERLIN a few blogs ago - in my "final blog." Theoretically after one's final blog, no further blogs are forthcoming. However, I am now posting bonus blogs reflecting aspects of the same closing subject. Today, I will be elaborating on BERLIN's syntax and how its searches are facilitated. As a general rule, the objective of BERLIN is to convert human-friendly narrative into computer-friendly…

"Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.  Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another's speech."  (Genesis 11-6,7)  On the distance between expression, meaning, and action resulting from growth of populations and…

I recently noticed a proliferation of websites from organizations in my area openly offering to investigate ghosts. I thought it would be interesting to share my peculiar data-oriented slant on the subject. It is possible to approach the issue of ghosts from different perspectives. I have been taught to accept the…

There are a number of movies that I consider much more suitable for television than theatre: Alien Versus Predator; Doom; Snakes on a Plane; The Cave; The Colony. The stories of these movies play out in environmentally-limited sometimes enclosed settings. In the theatre, I considered Alien Versus Predator the worst movie I ever had to sit through in my entire life, second perhaps only to the original Tron. But at home on a 36-inch display, it has become one of my all-time favourites. On the…

Phenomenalism is sometimes described as a type of reductionism. Information about a complex object might be reduced to simple sensory details. For example, ignoring the many interesting features of the ice cream…

Last year, I wrote a blog on "mass data assignments." For readers that lack a prototype or application to handle data using mass data assignments, the topic probably seems a bit evasive. In this blog, I will be reinforcing and developing…