This paper presents a system for automatically identifying salient time periods in history and grouping together similar time periods using historical news corpus data. We apply our techniques to the New York Times Annotated Corpus and present the results in a simple graphical user interface. Results show that the system reliably identifies time periods that users consider historically signific...

At a recent Paris conference on child soldiering, the keynote speaker, French foreign minister Philippe Douste-Blazy, warned that the use of child soldiers is “a time bomb that threatens stability and growth in Africa and beyond.” They are “lost children,” he argued, “lost for peace and lost for the development of their countries.” (BBC, 2007) This lost generation metaphor has become a commonpl...

Aggregations of the Sciaenid, Black Jewfish (Protonibea diacanthus), off Muttee Head in far northern Cape York Peninsula (CYP), have been exploited by Indigenous subsistence fishers for over fifty years. The apparent recent increase in effort targeting P. diacanthus in CYP’s Northern Peninsula Area (NPA), has prompted concerns for the Injinoo Aboriginal Community, which has custodial responsibi...

The weekend before the start of the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians, I contributed an op-ed to the New York Times about the history of the Fields Medal. The article treated two topics that are familiar to many mathematicians, if not necessarily to the general public. I suggested that a previously unrecognized connection between these two stories, discovered in the course of my res...

The literary world has been delirious with excitement since the announcement in February that a second novel by Harper Lee had been “found” and was to be published. To Kill a Mockingbird [3] was Harper Lee’s first (and until now only) novel published in 1960, winner of the 1961 Pulitzer Prize, and certainly one of the most beloved novels in American history. Having recently read Go Set a Watchm...

This article examines the relative value of open innovation principles for digital media, exemplified by the emergence of Open Application Programming Interfaces (Open APIs) at four news organizations: The New York Times, The Guardian, USA Today and NPR. The use of Open APIs represents a shift toward an open innovation paradigm that may help address twin challenges facing the news industry: the...

Exercise 1 (2.1). An article in the New York Times (February 17, 1999) about the PSA blood test for detecting prostate cancer stated that, of men who had this disease, the test fails to detect prostate cancer in 1 in 4 (so called false-negative results), and of men who did not have it, as many as two-thirds receive false-positive results. Let C(C̄) denote the event of having (not having) prostat...

Technological advances over the past century have dramatically lowered the cost of transmitting information over large distances, allowing high quality national media such as the New York Times to enter local markets. However, consumers attracted to outside media may consume less local information and, as a result, disengage from local affairs. In the late 1990’s, the New York Times implemented...

This work addresses information needs that have a temporal dimension conveyed by a temporal expression in the user’s query. Temporal expressions such as “in the 1990s” are frequent, easily extractable, but not leveraged by existing retrieval models. One challenge when dealing with them is their inherent uncertainty. It is often unclear which exact time interval a temporal expression refers to. ...

Extending a baseline study of three print newspapers—the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Portland Oregonian since 1894—the third of three studies of electronic editions shows a return to new-long-journalism content. Stories in 2001 ran longer, explained more, and relied on groups and officials, but included more current, past, and local references. In 2005 web editions experimented with se...