A research team at Hebrew University in Israel has developed a computer program that can recognize sarcasm with about 77 percent accuracy : To create such an algorithm, the team scanned 66,000 Amazon.com product reviews, with three different human annotators tagging sentences for sarcasm. The team . . . . Continue Reading »
Pro-life is on the rise and has been for the past fifteen years. Since May 2009, the majority of Americans (47 percent to 45 percent) now identify themselves as pro-life . What’s striking, however, is that the percentage of Americans ages 18 to 29 who view abortion as “illegal in all . . . . Continue Reading »
Arlen Specter slips away , defeated yesterday in his attempt to gain the Democratic nomination for what would have been a sixth term in the Senate. We could speak here of his failures and his oddities, his political life from the Warren Commission, to the Bork and Thomas confirmation hearings, and . . . . Continue Reading »
An interesting post from Felix Salmon, in which he writes : an entire generation of Americans started working and saving and buying a house in the early 1970s—and millions of them hit the trifecta, becoming successful in their careers even as their stocks rose and the value of their . . . . Continue Reading »
Dissent reviews three recent books on the fall of communism. Nothing new, for even casual students of the history, but along the way, the reviewer describes the argument in the books by David Priestland and Archie Brown: The fall of communism, in Russia and Eastern Europe, preoccupies Priestland . . . . Continue Reading »
It’s hard not to mention Michael Kinsley’s column on “Sex Lives of Supreme Court Justices,” in which the former editor wrote: Now that the sex lives of Supreme Court justices have become grist for commentators, we are finally free to discuss a question formerly only . . . . Continue Reading »
For the six people who might still be interested, the Episcopal Church’s house of bishops has released a report on Same-Sex Relations in the Life of the Church . My former colleague Grant LeMarquand’s summary of the “conservative” position can be found here . The . . . . Continue Reading »
In January, when Beau Biden announced that he would not run for Congress, I made an offhand comment about the interestingly large number of reports on Democratic attorneys general around the nation who were not seeking higher office. Our executive editor Dave Blum reminded me of that comment . . . . Continue Reading »
For those interested in the Republican primary I mentioned in “Other Responsibilities” , the father-of-six walloped the lawyer who worried that he had too many children to be a congressman. Fox News reports that Keith Rothfus has won with 67% of the vote, with 84% of the precincts . . . . Continue Reading »
Back in December, Peter Singer and Agata Sagan wrote a piece in the Guardian arguing on behalf of robot rights. I took exception here as SHS, my headline being, “Robots Will Never be People and Should Never Have Rights.” Singer and Sagan have now taken exception to my exception in . . . . Continue Reading »
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