Talkdo

Spurred by a twitter conversation with Jake, I've decided to try and update this blog at least once a day. We'll try for the next week, and if I'm dying of typing too much, or I just plain have nothing to say, then I'll give it up, but I may just find I have enough to say to fill a blog post every day. There goes that rhyme again. Hm... I wonder if poetry counts? I would say yes. Then again, I write quite a few poems in a week, so it could just become all poems if I'm not careful. I'll have to think on this.

I was invited today to join my professor's research project this summer. It's currently a team of 4, my professor Shilad and three students, and since two of the other students just received notification of funding from the school, he has room on his budget for another researcher, which is pretty awesome. My school doesn't have a lot of opportunities for research, much less small-team research -- most research opportunities are only during the summer and only with you and the professor, and maybe one other student.

Anyways, the project itself is called PoliWiki. The idea is that the only political wiki, or really political knowledge aggregation site at all, is Wikipedia, and due to NPOV, users can't be subjective about a topic, and pages with a lot of debate behind them, particularly political articles, are often locked as a result of slander, rapid editing, "graffiti" and so on. The idea is to give users a wiki-like format in which to create articles adhering to an MPOV style - multiple points of view. The basic idea so far (I saw a talk on it yesterday) is to frame issues, candidates and races in terms of a question, and then a collection of articles representing different viewpoints would follow.

There's a lot of things yet to be decided, but it should suffice to say that the project is quite intriguing. I should also point out that I haven't accepted the offer yet, as I'm waiting to here back from, like, 7 other programs I've applied to that won't get back to me until April. The good thing is that he's not really looking at anyone else, so I don't have to worry about other hypothetical "applicants" stealing my spot.

Notes to self: Stop trying to use Vim commands in every other text editor.bbi It doesn't work. :w Also, talk to Susan about Honors projects, as the school has no direct information on them.