Daniel

Pipes

August 2, 2010

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Dear Reader:

You may be interested in an hour-long interview I did last week in Toronto for "On the Line with Christine Williams." It can be seen at http://www.ctstv.com/ontario/player.php?ctsvidID=17771&show=On%20The%20Line

Yours sincerely,

Daniel Pipes

Operation Desert Storm Plus 20

by Daniel Pipes
August 2, 2010

http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2010/08/operation-desert-storm-plus-20

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It was twenty years ago on this day, that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, initiating a crisis that lasted half a year and beginning the slow turn of events that led eventually to his own overthrow and execution, followed by the American-led occupation.

While immensely important in the history of Iraq, the real surprise lies in the transitory nature of the invasion and the war it spawned. Here's how I put it on the tenth anniversary, in an article titled "After 'Desert Storm,' Barely a Footprint Was Left in the Sand" and published in August 2000:

Nearly everyone at the time [in 2000] agreed that the Gulf War was a huge event, perhaps an epochal turning point. [George H.W.] Bush spoke about it leading to the start of a "new world order" in which coalitions would come together to prevent Iraqi-style use of force. Pundits expected that the war assured Bush four more years of the presidency just as it meant that Hussein would soon be gone, perhaps followed by the breakup of Iraq. Analysts predicted that a new, American-oriented era had begun in the Middle East, with more democracy, human rights and economic competitiveness. … In retrospect, one can only marvel at how little of this came about.

That the invasion is now quite neglected on its anniversary points further to its relatively small role in our consciousness and our lives. That in turn points to the fact that seemingly huge events sometimes are not, while the real turning points are hardly apparent at the time. (August 2, 2010)

Related Topics: History, Iraq

My Website Furthers Computer Science / Linguistics

by Daniel Pipes
August 1, 2010

http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2010/08/my-website-furthers-computer-science-linguistics

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On the grounds that "danielpipes.org is clean, consistently formatted, carefully edited and larger than WSJ," a team of three authors from Google and Stanford University have used my website to explore a possible connection between linguistic syntax and web mark-up. To put it more technically,

Spanning decades, Pipes' editorials are mostly in-domain for POS taggers and tree-bank-trained parsers; his recent (internet-era) entries are thoroughly cross-referenced, conveniently providing just the mark-up we hoped to study via uncluttered (printer-friendly) HTML.

Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Daniel Jurafsky, and Hiyan Alshawi, the authors of "Profiting from Mark-Up: Hyper-Text Annotations for Guided Parsing," show how web mark-up can be used to advance the state-of-the-art in unsupervised dependency parsing. They presented their discovery of a strong correlation with hierarchical syntactic structure last month at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Uppsala, Sweden. This finding could have broad implications for natural language processing problems, with applications extending well beyond parsing.

Comment: It's an honor to have http://www.danielpipes.org/ selected for this study, and the honor goes primarily to Grayson Levy, the person who initiated the idea for this website in 2000, brought it online at the end of that year, and has overseen it ever since. (August 1, 2010)

Related Topics: Daniel Pipes autobiographical This text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an integral whole with complete information provided about its author, date, place of publication, and original URL.

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