Andre Molnar

Words on the Radar Screen

I've gone ahead and started building my word radar screen based on data found at 10x10.

I have developed the back end of the application which grabs data evey hour and updates my database with some information about the words. I have come up with a way to store each hour's data in a file as well which will ultimately be used to create the front end of the application. So version 0.1 of the application is nearly complete.

The next step will be to build a prototype for the front end - first in basic html/php and then in flash. With each new release I will update some features and improve in areas that I see lacking.

After gathering a month's worth of data (since the launch of the 10x10 site), I've discovered the following:

Only @1500 words have ever been on the top 100 list
There have been over 700 different top 100 lists.

So far the top 10 most frequent words are:

Word	Total # of times on the list
president	665
security	661
officials	652
un	642
minister	638
iraq	637
killed	635
iraqi	624
prime	614
military	611

The word 'president' has been on the list for the past 355 consecutive hours

I will post my thoughts on what I think this all means - but for now I thought I would share some preliminary factoids.

I look forward to sharing the first beta version of the radar tool with the world soon. Stay tuned.

andre
p.s. Zen learning rest stops on this journey -> re-familiarizing myself with trig. -> hex math -> colour theory -> flash 7 ->markov chains again.

Posted by andre at December 2, 2004 01:19 AM