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Here are several coffee coupons that have RESET plus a new Eight O'Clock coupon! Steve has spotted Newman's Own on clearance at Publix lately so you will want to keep your eye out and see if you find any clearance deals yourself! -$2/2 Eight O'Clock Coffee Bags printable -$1.50/1 Green Mountain Coffee 12 oz printable […]Extreme Couponing Tip: You can usually get two prints of most internet coupons. To find them in the easiest possible way, use our preclipped links that take you right to the coupon. Then come back and click the same link to get your 2nd print. This will save you the time spent searching for the coupon.
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Eau Claire (WQOW)- There are a number of different groups working to make sure no child in the Chippewa Valley goes hungry this summer.
Starting Points, along with a handful of other community partners in Chippewa Falls, are teaming up to serve nutritious and free meals all summer long.
"There are definitely kids who come here who would be in danger of not having a nutritious meal if they didn't come here or have a meal at all," says Starting Points Executive Director Mary Clay Santineau.
Homework may end when school is finished but hunger does not. There are some children who routinely receive a free or reduced price meal at school that are in danger of going hungry during summer vacation.
"We've had a number of parents say that if it wasn't for the meals at summer lunch I wouldn't be able to feed my children every day I wouldn't be able to have the gas money to drive to work," remembers Santineau.
The summer lunch for kids program began in 1999. Outside of a well-rounded meal, kids can take part in fun activities; with a little bit of learning mixed in. Interns from area universities give short lessons on things like healthy snacks and smart beverage choices.
"The program is funded partially by a grant from the DPI and from community charities," Santineau explains.
In Eau Claire, free summer meals can also be found at Longfellow Elementary and at The Boys and Girls Club. To take part in any of these programs, all you need to bring is an appetite.
"There are more people in need one of the great things about this program is that there is no paperwork no questions asked anyone with a child can come and eat here," Santineau says.
Meals are served Monday through Friday at noon at Christ Church in Chippewa Falls. Beginning Tuesday, June 11th and continuing through Friday, August 24th kids and their parents or caregivers can eat a nutritious lunch for no charge. Christ Church is located at 624 Bay Street in Chippewa Falls.
Here is a list of locations and meal times in Eau Claire:
Longfellow Elementary School
512 Balcom Street
Breakfast will be served from 8:00 a.m. to 8:45 a.m.
Lunch will be served 11:45 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.
All meals will be served Monday through Thursday beginning June 18th and continuing through July 19th.
Boys & Girls Club of the Greater Chippewa Valley
201 East Lake Street
Breakfast will be served from 8:00 a.m. to 8:45 a.m.
Lunch will be served from 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.
A snack will be served from 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
All meals will be served Monday through Friday beginning June 13th and continuing through August 24th.
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subset: commoncrawl


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**Important Notice: This site IS NOT affiliated with Idaho State. Any messages sent through this site about recruitment to ISU from players, parents or coaches will be immediately deleted. Please submit those on the ISU site: https://secureq.scoutwareforms.net/q/isu_soft/a43f1.html
2013 Pan American Games Gold Medal Game
2013 General Tire World Cup of Softball


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Go Conquer!
The 48 months from 18 to 22 can be the craziest of your life. Memberships with 48 can make it happen!Order a free SIMto get started Activate a 48 SIMto become a member of 48
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Dr. Lin has been an obstetrician/gynecologist with DCOL since 1999. He received his medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. Dr. Lin also completed his internship and residency at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. He is board certified and a Fellow of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. He is a member of the Texas Medical Association and American Medical Association. He his wife have two children.
707 Hollybrook, 2nd Floor
Longview, TX 75605
Phone: 903-757-6042
To Schedule Appt: 903-757-2790


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Tap Sheep Christmas Edition
5,000 - 10,000 downloadsAdd this app to your lists
+ By ILOapps - simple and easy Android apps and games
Simple and fun 'Tap a sheep' Christmas game for kids, where you aim to tap as many sheep as you can and not to let lambs to disappear when they look from left & right. This is a simple arcade game, a bit of dummy as well :-)
The game is similar to famous Ant Smasher but with sheep and lambs. It is based on original Android Sheep Game which features now over 35 MILLION SHEEPS CAUGHT by the players worldwide already!! So I hope you like this simplified version and the special Christmas edition while we are now waiting for the Santa Clause to arrive and bring us many new toys and gifts.. :)
Tap Sheep / Tap Lamb game features:
- try to catch Santa Clause's lambs when they are looking from left and right
- use your device touch screen to tap a sheep
- catch joker lamb to gain extra points
- tap lambs as many times as you can for additional points
- beware of angry dog - it farts if you tap it
- special Xmas edition features: Christmas sheep and winter background images, a special Christmas song
This game is using advertisements and they are currently visible all the time due to technical constraints from ads provider (Leadbolt).
Please send all feedback and comments to email@example.com.
Happy Sheeping!
Game by ILOapps
Developer blog at www.iloapps.com
The application is provided to you AS IS. You may use the application as you wish. We assume no warranty obligations or any other liabilities due to this application. You may share and promote this application freely to your friends and family. Application is developed and owned by ILOapps. Any non-ILOapps developed assets (if any) are the property of their respective owners.
Please notice that by using and installing this application, You agree to our Terms and Conditions (aka EULA) available http://www.iloapps.com/terms.html.
This game uses a fantastic cross-platform game engine library called libGdx: http://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/
For statistical analysis and game improvement purposes, the game includes Google Analytics library. Please see our privacy policy for more information at http://www.iloapps.com/privacypolicy.html.
The application uses following permissions for game play and session management: WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE, READ_PHONE_STATE.
The application utilizes Ad network which requires following permissions: INTERNET, ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE, ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION, ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION, ACCESS_LOCATION_EXTRA_COMMANDS.
TAP SHEEP CHRISTMAS EDITION - over 35+ million sheep caught by players worldwide with sheep game saga.
Latest changes:
- Changes to comply new Google developer policy
- updated graphics engine; bug fixes
- Special Christmas edition.. yeah waiting for next Christmas.. :)
- added Finnish and initial German languages (requires some work still)
(70 stars)
Christmas sheep are cute, like the sound, the added dog is nice, but my score total was wrong every time!! Only 2 levels is ridiculous. Play for 30 seconds and it will say I got 20 sheep, impossible! Would not buy unless score fixed more levels. Thanx.
(70 stars)
Only Santa is missing.. :)
(70 stars)
dis app is great! what other apps u make? :) $$
(70 stars)
Catch a christmas sheep.. Haha ;)
(70 stars)
Xmas feelings. Nice music. Muy
(70 stars)
Funny xmas version
Simple catch game, what comes next. Funny!
(70 stars)
Simple, fun
Funny, very simple. My kids loved it


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Sequestration Round Two
12 February 2013
Congress resigns itself to the inevitability of the sequestration
Stop me if you've heard this one before. The US is facing an entirely self-created fiscal crisis which if not averted could push the country back into recession. But sure enough that's just where we find ourselves. On March 1st, unless Congress and the President can reach some alternative agreement, the dreaded budget sequestration will go into effect reducing government spending by $86.5 billion dollars over the current fiscal year and $1.2 trillion over the next ten.
The cuts were part of the 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA) which was set to take effect at the beginning of this year. However, Congress delayed its implementation by three months as part of the last minute deal to aver the fiscal cliff/austerity crisis.
The $1.2 trillion in cuts are split evenly between defense and non-defense discretionary spending and are crudely egalitarian in nature. All federal programs would be cut by an equal amount meaning that agencies couldn't pick and choose which areas of their budget to protect. This was intentional as the goal was to make the policy so unpalatable that both sides would be pressured to agree on an alternative way of addressing the deficit.
Responsible long-term debt reduction would also be back loaded so as to not suck large amounts of money out of an economy still suffering from a lack of demand. But there's no such prudence in the BCA. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that GDP would be cut in half if these policies remain in effect for the rest of the year.
In some respects this new threat is more worrisome than either the first fiscal cliff or the debt ceiling negotiations. It's not that the cuts would be more damaging. Luckily, we no longer have to worry about large-scale tax increases or defaulting on debt obligations. But what's troubling this time around is that there may not be the same incentives in place to facilitate a compromise.
An inability to reach a deal to avert the January 1st fiscal cliff would have meant the total expiration of the Bush tax cuts-something both sides agreed was unacceptable. And Republicans couldn't avoid higher taxes simply by refusing to act. As such, while it was always possible that negotiations would drag on through the early part of the year it was inevitable that some sort of agreement was going to be reached.
Similarly, thee consequences of not raising the borrowing limit would have been so catastrophic that it seemed very likely-if not certain-that Republicans would come to their senses rather than be blamed for a massive unforced error.
But this time around the calculation isn't so clear. No one thinks that that the sequestration is good policy. But Republican leadership in Congress is saying that it would be preferable to any deal featuring higher taxes. By contrast, President Obama has made clear that he will not accept any alternative agreement that dosen't feature a 1:1 ratio of new revenues to spending cuts.
It's also an issue that could cause divsions within the Republican caucus. The GOP has long been a party that emphasises a strong defence and low taxes. The coming standoff is a test as to which they see as the lesser of two evils.
The simplest and best solution would be just to mutually agree to get rid of the sequestration all together. Republicans don't have to stomach higher taxes. Democrats don't have to worry about an anti-Keynesian shock to the economy. And we could focus on the most pressing problem-getting back to full employment-instead of the deficit which is decreasing faster than at any point since WWII. Then as the economy stabilises we can work on reducing the long-term debt in a fiscally responsible way.
Of course things are never that easy in Washington. And Congress' idea that this is some unavoidable problem is like Homer being unable to get his hand out of the vending machine because he won't let go of the candy bar.
A Populist State of the Union
12 February 2013
Tuesday's State of the Union address is President Obama's first major opportunity of his second term to offer a comprehensive defence of his legislative goals. The President's mission this speech-as well as in the years ahead-should be to offer a populist message that allows Democrats to leverage public support for a progressive political agenda.
The 2012 elections were a fairly decisive rejection of the Republican Party platform. President Obama coasted to a second term and Democrats won the popular vote in both the House and Senate elections. However, Republicans maintained controlled of the House due to gerrymandering and structural advantages and the filibuster still provides the GOP with de facto veto power in the Senate. As such, the legislative gridlock that's paralysed Washington over the last two years is likely to continue into Obama's second term.
Democrats' s best response is to avoid what John Judis dubs an "insider strategy" and "instead transfer the fight for their agenda..to the electorate where they hold the advantage." This means no more vague statements about priorities and then leaving Congress alone to work out all of the legislative details as Obama did with healthcare reform. Instead, the President needs to take a more active role in shaping bills and applying pressure to the legislature. Obama did this well during his proposal on immigration reform late last month. "If Congress is unable to move forward in a timely fashion, I will send up a bill based on my proposal and insist that they vote on it right away," he explained in his speech in Las Vegas.
The President needs to reiterate this message in his State of the Union address. And he also should make a point of reaching out directly to citizens and other grassroots organisations-explaining that he needs their help in getting Congress to take action.
It's true that political science research shows that the power of the bully pulpit is greatly overstated. The president dosen't have the capacity to bend the public or members of Congress to his will with rhetoric alone. But Obama's objective isn't to change minds; it's to marshal existing public support for many of his policy propsoals.
Ninety-two per cent of Americans want universal background checks on all gun sales, a figure that includes eighty five percent of NRA households. Fifty-five per cent support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants-a number that's almost certain to grow in coming years as the Hispanic percentage of the population increases. And sixty-eight per cent favour Obama's fiscal cliff proposal to allow the federal government to negotiate prescription prices for Medicare recipients with drug companies.
Democrats faces two conflicting realities. The public is largely receptive to many of their policies and favourable demographic trends mean this isn't likely to change at any point in the near future. At the same time, the American political system-and its entrenched interest groups-make it very easy for a determined opposition to stymie the majority and block change. The challenge for Democrats is to find ways of effectively utilizing their advantage in numbers in order to bring about legislative change. I don't have all the answers of how this can be done. But it should start with President Obama's speech tomorrow.
Marco Rubio volunteers for nasty, thankless mission
11 February 2013
Ah, the State of the Union response. Where Next Big Things go to die.
Remember Bobby Jindal, Republican up-and-comer? It's tough to remember now, but back in the early days of 2009, that kid was golden. Not like he is now: a well-regarded and influential GOP governor. No, in the dark days after President Obama had first been elected, Louisiana's Jindal was considered the future of the party, the man who would lead them out of the wilderness, and a surefire contender in 2012. A charismatic and considered politician whose Indian heritage would inure the party against charges it was becoming old and white.
Then Jindal gave the State of the Union reply. His address, filled with clumsy bon mots like "Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington," was widely panned and Jindal slunk back to Louisiana. When 2012 rolled around, his name was barely in contention for the GOP nomination; when Republicans dreamed up governors who could save them from their lacklustre field, they thought of Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels, not Bobby Jindal. It's only now that Jindal has started to regain some of his lustre, and that's through a combination of extremist tax policy and the winning tactic of calling his own party the "stupid party."
It's not just Jindal. Virginia governor Bob McDonnell's 2010 response was awkwardly staged and awkwardly delivered, while Mitch Daniels in 2012 was at least talented enough to deliver an entirely forgettable response. (He has since left politics and is now president of Purdue University.) I suppose you could point to Paul Ryan as someone who made it through a SOTU reply unscathed — and even went on to become his party's vice-presidential nominee — but this seems more a function of his party's refusal to allow his celebrity to wilt than any particular talent he showed. And he was overshadowed anyway by the shenanigans of Michele Bachmann, who that year gave the deeply weird "Tea Party response."
And now Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a charismatic and considered politician whose Latino heritage, Republicans hope, will help inure their party against charges it is becoming old and white, is to give the 2013 response. For someone who is, like Jindal once was, considered a leading contender for his party's presidential nomination, this is a high-risk, low-reward task. At best, he'll deliver an entirely forgettable reply to Obama's speech, filled with Republican bromides. But there's also a decent chance he'll end up looking silly.
That's because the SOTU reply is a tough, thankless job. Coming immediately after the president has publicly flaunted all the many trappings of his office, delivered before the entirety of Congress, the response automatically looks cut-rate by contrast. Because it's delivered straight after the president has finished speaking, the speech is never more than a laundry list of party talking points. Much of the television audience has switched off anyway, leaving only wonks and partisans behind. There are few ways to look and many ways to look bad.
Obama's victory becomes even less suprising
4 February 2013
Back in early October I argued that post-election analysis often misses the forest for the trees; focusing narrowly on campaign tactics and strategy instead of the underlying trends that are often driving the race.
We saw the same thing this time around, with pundits quick to credit the Obama campaigns GOTV efforts or Mitt Romney's incompetence for the president's impressive showing. In actuality though, there wasn't anything too shocking about the electoral results. When the economy is gradually improving the incumbent president is generally a small favourite to get a second term. And while Obama slightly outperformed the fundamentals there wasn't anything especially odd about the final result.
And now the release of the January job's report makes the president's re-election seem even more typical. The Bureau of Labor Statistics had previously estimated that the economy was adding around 150,000 jobs a month in 2012 but the new benchmark revisions have pushed this number up to around 181,000. And while the economy actually contracted slightly during the fourth quarter of last year due to a large drop in defence spending, job growth remained solid with 247,000 new jobs added in November.
We're a long way from full employment and the economic picture still isn't especially cheery. But all things considered this wasn't a bad climate for the incumbent to run in.
A defence of dysfunction
1 February 2013
A few weeks ago, during a discussion of the differences between US and Australian politics, a friend expressed frustration over the lack of party discipline in the American System. The thing is, she explained, sometimes individual politicians just have to be willing to suppress their interests for the collective good of the party or else you'll never get anything done. We get that here in Australia.
It's an understandable sentiment. It's easy to feel pessimistic when John Boehner can't exert any control over his caucus or when rural Democrats distance themselves from President Obama's positions on gun control or climate change.
However, there's a price to be paid for unanimity, and a danger in creating some monolithic conception of party ideology over and above what its members actually support.
West Virginia Senator Joe Machin may have a different view on climate change than most other Democrats. But it's a position that reflects the feelings of his constituents. And to act like there's a duty for him to abide by party norms is to ignore the concerns of the West Virginians who voted him into office.
Similarly, the rise of the Tea Party has not been a positive development in American politics, but this wasn't some unwanted change forced upon a helpless public. Voters were frustrated with Obamacare and the bleak economic climate. Conservatives were angry with a Republican establishment that they saw as unwilling to take a hard line stance on spending. The people who showed up to the polls wanted change and they got it.
And there's something healthy about the fact that an outside political movement could shift the political debate so quickly. That veteran politicians, with more money, name recognition and the support of their party leadership, could be ousted in primary challenges.
Because while progressives might be frustrated by the changes in the GOP over the last several years the process cuts both ways. Ultimately the same populist forces and electoral mechanisms that helped the Tea Party come to power also allowed a little known senator from Illinois to upset Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries. And that provides a sense of hope for those outside the current system who want to change it.
The US political system is a messy and often dysfunctional one. And there's countless changes I would want to make to improve its effectiveness. But while a government without primaries and party line votes might be more efficient at times it also sacrifices much when it comes to democratic accountability. And that's not a trade off I'd want to make.
A better way to 'rig' elections
30 January 2013
Good news for fains of fair elections and democratic legitimacy! Taegan Goddard reports that the Republican plan to allocate electoral votes by congressional district may be "losing momentum."
If applied nationally such a system would have allowed Mitt Romney to be elected president despite receiving nearly five million less votes than Obama. I'd love to hear anyone defend such an outcome as representative of the will of the people.
But even this is a charitable interpretation of what Republicans were trying to do. This wasn't a serious attempt at national reform. Rather, Republican controlled state legislatures in some blue leaning swing states were/are trying to rewrite their own rules while leaving the current system in place for the rest of the country. Siphoning away Democratic electoral votes in Pennsylvania while maintaining the winner take all system in Mississippi is a complete perversion of the electoral process.
So naturally we'd all be better off if the GOP stops trying to find ways to rewrite electoral rules and instead focuses on appealing to voters right?
Maybe not. In fact, there's a straightforward change that Republicans could push for that would make them more competitive in upcoming elections while simultaneously improving American democracy; get rid of the Electoral College.
I've never found either of the two major arguments in favour of the Electoral College convincing.
1. It keeps candidates from spending all of their time in big cities like New York and Los Angeles.
Who knows exactly how candidates would allocate their time if there was a national popular vote-although I'm fairly confident their travel schedules would be more diverse than they are now-but either way I don't like the idea of artificially increasing the influence of some areas as a means of getting Obama or Romney to pay attention to their interests. Candidates go to cities not because urbanites are special or more deserving of attention but because that's where the majority of people live. As former Chief Justice Earl Warren eloquently explained in a slightly different context; "Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests." The fundamental idea of American democracy is one person one vote; enshrine that system via a popular vote and let the candidates figure out how best to get as many of these votes as possible.
Besides, it's not like rural interests are underrepresented in the American political system. After all, Wyoming gets the same number of senators as California.
2. It localizes recounts. A national recount in a close presidential election would be a nightmare. Better that it be concentrated in one or two states rather than spread out across all fifty.
A national recount would certainly be problematic. But so would an entire presidential election coming down to a tiny number of votes in one state. And there's probably more potential for fraud and abuse in the second case then the first. Timothy Noah makes the point well:
The national difference between Gore and Bush may have been 500,000 votes in 2000 (actually 543,895), but the outcome-changing difference in Florida was a mere 537 votes (according to the official tally, anyway). There's no end to the ways you can massage a 537-vote plurality for one candidate into a 537-vote for another one. And there's a powerful motivation to do so when that narrow majority can be leveraged in a populous, winner-take-all state like Florida into an outsized share of the Electoral College.
So yes, abolishing the Electoral College would be good in and of itself. But luckily for Republicans the push for a national popular vote need not be a purely altruistic endeavour.
The GOP is currently at a structural disadvantage in the Electoral College that could hurt their chances in future elections. Nate Silver outlined the extent of the problem in a November 8th column, estimating that Republicans "may have had to win the national popular vote by three percentage points to be assured of winning the electoral college."
This point may be somewhat overstated-at the time he underestimated Obama's eventual margin of victory in the national popular vote by nearly 1.5 points-but the general argument still holds.
One can get a rough sense of a party's Electoral College advantage or lack thereof by comparing the winning candidate's margin of victory in the 'tipping point state' that gave Obama his 270th electoral vote to his overall margin of victory in the national popular vote.
In 2012 Colardo was the tipping point state for the second consectuive election with Obam winning it and its 9 electoral votes by 5.4 points. In contrast, the president only won the popular vote by 3.9 points.
In other words, it's easier for Obama (and probably other Democratic candidates) to get to 270 electoral votes than it is to win the popular vote.
This trend may become even more pronounced in the years to come. Republican candidates have been running up record margins in already solid red states while simultaneously losing ground in swing states like Colorado and Virginia. Such tradeoffs wouldn't matter as much in a national popular vote scheme but it's an especially harmful trend in an Electoral College system.
Historically conservatives have tended to favour the current system while progressives have been more sceptical. As such, a GOP committed to abolishing the Electoral College could probably find a lot of allies on the other end of the political spectrum.
It also wouldn't be as difficult as one might think. A Constitutional Amendment is always a difficult sell; but the easier option is to simply get states to assign their Electoral College votes to the winner of the national popular vote once enough other states agree to the proposal. If a group of states with 270 cumulative electoral votes signed off on this idea it would effectively create a direct election. So far eight states and the District of Columbia have done just this leaving them 138 electoral college votes short of 270.
Ths wouldn't be a long term fix for the GOP. But it would increases their chances somewhat in the next couple of election cycles. And with so much at stake every little bit helps.
So how about it Republicans? Ditch an anitquated system of voting and give your presidential aspirations a boost.
Are the budget hawks finished?
30 January 2013
I wouldn't be as foolhardy to predict the demise of austerity fever in American politics so soon, but the eternally gloomy Paul Krugman seems to think otherwise:
President Obama's second Inaugural Address offered a lot for progressives to like. There was the spirited defense of gay rights; there was the equally spirited defense of the role of government, and, in particular, of the safety net provided by Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. But arguably the most encouraging thing of all was what he didn't say: He barely mentioned the budget deficit.
Mr. Obama's clearly deliberate neglect of Washington's favorite obsession was just the latest sign that the self-styled deficit hawks — better described as deficit scolds — are losing their hold over political discourse. And that's a very good thing.
"An era has ended," Krugs triumphs. Let's hope so. Krugman is (not suprisingly) right on the economics. But the politics? Well, I've rarely seen him this cheery about anything short of Arcade Fire...
Midterms matter four Court appointees
28 January 2013
The fate of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Supreme Court seat was one of the most important-albeit least discussed-issues at stake in the presidential election. Ginbsbrug, who is identified with the liberal wing of the court, is 79 and has undergone surgeries for colon and pancreatic cancer.
No one doubts her grit and determination. In June she broke two ribs but kept the injury private while serving out the rest of the term. In all likelihood though, an Obama loss in November would have given Romney the chance to appoint her successor.
Liberals no longer have to worry about this counterfactual as Ginsburg will almost certainly retire during the next four years. But we're not past the point of elections playing an important role in determining who replaces her on the Court.
Any Obama appointee would need to be confirmed by a majority of the Senate. Right now that shouldn't be a problem. Democrats control 55 seats so barring a filibuster, which has only been used once for a Supreme Court justice, Obama could get his nominee seated. But after the 2014 midterms all bets are off.
Due to retirements and their success in the 2008 Senate elections Democrats will be facing an extremely unfavourable map in 2014. Barring the retirement of Susan Collins I can't find a single Republican Senate seat which Democrats have close to a 50-50 chance of winning. In contrast, I count four Democratic seats where Republicans likely start out as favourites (Arkansas, Alaska, Louisiana and West Virginia) and roughly ten others where they have a legitimate shot of a pickup.
We'll have to wait and see how the midterm landscape shapes up, but at this stage there's a very real possibility that Republicans will reclaim control of the upper chamber in less than two years.
The type of justice Obama could get through the confirmation process could be very different then than now. There would be intense pressure on Republicans senators not to cast the decisive yay vote that would get the president's nominee confirmed. GOP senators could reject moderate liberals in the mold of Elena Kagan and instead pressure the president to appoint someone even more centrist.
We may be heading for just this sort of standoff. Ginsburg has stated that she wants to serve as long as Justice Louis Brandeis, which would slot her for retirement in 2015 at the age of 82. Ginsburg is fully entitled to step down on her own terms whenever she sees fit. But, if she is concerned about ensuring that her replacement on the Court continues to uphold her legacy, there's a strong argument that it would make sense to retire after the next term.
In any case, this issue speaks to the importance of Obama prioritizing all judicial appointments during the next two years. The president did not spend much political capitol on nominations during his first term and consequently vacancies on the district and federal courts rose 51%. If you're going to address this failure now is the time do it.
There's still legislative tactics that Republicans can use to slow down and block nominees but it's obviously much easier to get judges through the Senate when your party controls the upper chamber. Democrats have a lot they want to accomplish over the next several years, but they shouldn't let judicial nominations fall off the agenda.
Who killed the 2011 grand bargain?
25 January 2013
A week ago I wrote a piece featuring examples of the tension. between the Republican caucus and GOP leadership:
It's no secret that Boehner has had serious problems controlling his caucus in recent years. In 2011 he and Obama were close to reaching a grand bargain on debt reduction when he abruptly walked away from negotiations after it became clear that Republicans would reject the agreement. The ultimate embarrassment came this past December. Boehner, in an attempt to gain leverage in the fiscal cliff negotiations, introduced a bill raising taxes on those making over $1 million. The Speaker said he was confident his party would support the measure but it turns out he'd miscalculated and was forced to quickly pull back the bill.
It's worth sayings bit more about the 2011 failed grand bargain since I don't think my characterisation was entirely fair. According to Matt Bai of The New York Times Boehner and the Obama administration reached a preliminary agreement on debt deal that would have raised $800 billion in new revenue in exchange for about $450 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid over the next ten years and larger cuts to these programs and Social Security down the road. However, in response to liberal backlash the Obama administration went back and asked for about $400 billion in new revenue. Boehner initially seemed open to a new deal but then facing intense push back from within his own party abruptly broke off negotiations.
I don't think there was ever any real chance of this getting done-it would have been almost impossible to get Tea Party Republicans to sign off on any bill that raised taxes by any amount. But the reasons for the deal breaking down were more complex and bipartisan than I made it seem.
Moderate Filibuster Reform
25 January 2013
Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell announced Thursday that they had reached a bipartisan agreement on a modest set of filibuster reforms. The new rules will limit the length of post-cloture debate for executive branch and appellate court nominee and simplify the process for sending a bill to conference or proceeding on to the next piece of legislation. These changes aren't entirely insignificant, but it's a far cry from the much broader reforms many were calling for.
Regular readers will know the importance I attach to filibuster reform. The government simply cannot function if the minority party requires the majority to get 60 votes to pass virtually any piece of legislation. Consequently, itt's disappointing to see only minor tweaks to a major problem.
At the same time, none of this is that surprising. The Senate is an old fashioned institution filled with 100 people who think that they should be president; regardless of political preferences it's hard to get any group like that to agree on anything that might limit their own individual power and prestige.
Greg Sargent gets at the heart of the reason that the Reid-McConnell deal is so inadequate.
Norman Ornstein, an observer of Congress for decades, literally wrote the book on GOP obstructionism. So I asked him what he thought of the disappointing filibuster reform deal reached today between Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell. His reply:
"To avoid disruption right now, they opted for greater efficiency in the operation of the Senate, rather than providing a much higher hurdle for obstructionism. They are going to make it easier to move things, but they are not extracting a price for bad behavior right now."
This is exactly the problem. Today's reforms do nothing to discourage, or extract any price whatsoever for, precisely the type of unprecedented and destructive party-wide obstructionism that launched the push for reform in the first place.
The package of reforms doesn't include the "talking filibuster," and it does not include the provision that would have put the onus on the minority to come up with 41 votes to sustain the filibuster. What's more, the threshold remains 60 votes both to end debate (which was probably never going to change) and for the motion to proceed (which was supposed to change, but in the end was only tweaked). You can debate endlessly how effective the talking filibuster and the 41 vote requirement would have been in discouraging concerted obstructionism. But those were at least efforts to try to address the problem. The current reforms don't try to address it at all.
And Gregory Kroger provides a nice overview of the changes and some reasons for optimism.
I expect that this package of reforms will be criticized for what it is not. It does not lower the cloture threshold or set up a realistic process for forcing filibustering senators to hold the floor. Nonetheless, it does address some of the worst problem areas: nominations, conference committees, and redundant filibusters as the Senate debates about what to debate. What I do like about these reforms is that they focus on an under-discussed source of Senate paralysis: the time lags built into the operation of the cloture rule. It's not just the cloture rule's supermajority threshold that retards the Senate; the time required to wait for a cloture vote and the 30 hours of "debate" time after the Senate votes to limit discussion are extremely costly in a chamber with a limited budget of floor time. They force the Senate to waste its days and nights, to remain in session but empty, and allow individual senators great power over petty issues. Senator Reid will doubtless be blamed for selling out the true reformers of the Senate instead of attempting a grand confrontation with the Republicans. Reid has a persuasive if indelicate answer: there probably weren't enough Democratic votes to push through more drastic reforms, and the short-term payoffs for any major change would be limited by the Republican majority in the House.


text:
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WHAS11) - A 37-member violence prevention work group named by Louisville Mayor Fischer is now in place. The group's goal is to reduce violence in West Louisville.
The group includes business, civic, government, religious, and neighborhood leaders.
They will hold their first meeting June 18 at Metro Hall.
One of the first goals will be developing an inventory of all the programs that provide services to young people in West Louisville and determine what's already being done.


text:
Sign up for Yardbarker's daily Top 10 newsletter, the Morning Bark! Customize to get news on your favorite sports and teams.
Found January 27, 2013 on Pro Sports Daily:
PLAYERS: Colin Kaepernick, Jim Harbaugh, Alex Smith
TEAMS: Baltimore Ravens, San Francisco 49ers, New Orleans Saints
TEAMS: Baltimore Ravens, San Francisco 49ers, New Orleans Saints
With 6:57 showing on local clocks Sunday, the National Football Conference champion San Francisco 49ers made a nationally televised touchdown at Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans and deplaned at the west cargo ramp to begin a week of preparation for their Super Bowl XLVII battle against the Baltimore Ravens on Feb. 3. Their arrival was as casual as quarterback Colin Kaepernick's attire -- a running suit, T-shirt, knit cap with headphones and a backpack. Coach Jim Harbaugh, wearing a 49ers cap, carried his daughter and a small piece of luggage across the tarmac. They boarded buses that took them to their home for the week, the New Orleans Marriott Hotel, where they held a small, brief press conference. "This week we will try to make it like a normal week," Harbaugh said when asked how he is preparing the team. He added that he didn't think the Super Bowl was a distraction. "We are focused, we have a plan, we will practice and lead up to...
Original Story: http://www.prosportsdaily.com/article...
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Private provision of public goods in a second-best world: Cap-and-trade schemes limit green consumerism
AbstractPrivate provision of public goods can only supplement government provision if individual actions affect the level of the public good. Cap-and-trade schemes reduce the overuse of common resources such as a stable climate or fish stocks by imposing a binding cap on total use by regulated agents. Any private contributions provided by means of e.g. green consumerism or life-style choices within such a scheme only impacts on who uses the resource but leaves total use unaffected. Perfect offsetting of marginal contributions is a key design element of cap-and-trade schemes. As real world cap-and-trade policies like the EU Emission Trading System have incomplete coverage, understanding what they cover is crucial for individuals aiming to contribute. Otherwise contribution efforts backfire.
Download InfoIf you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Bibliographic InfoPaper provided by School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. in its series Working Paper series, University of East Anglia, Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science (CBESS) with number 13-01.
Date of creation: 24 Jan 2013
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:uea:wcbess:13-01
Contact details of provider:
Postal: Norwich NR4 7TI
Phone: 44 1603 591131
Fax: +44(0)1603 4562592
Web page: http://www.uea.ac.uk/eco/
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Postal: Helen Chapman, School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK
Related researchKeywords: cap-and-trade; green consumerism; emissions tax; crowding-out of private contributions; carbon labelling;
Find related papers by JEL classification:
- H23 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Externalities; Redistributive Effects; Environmental Taxes and Subsidies
- H31 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - Household
- D64 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Altruism; Philanthropy
- H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods
- Q54 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Climate; Natural Disasters
- Q58 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environmental Economics: Government Policy
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2013-02-16 (All new papers)
- NEP-ENE-2013-02-16 (Energy Economics)
- NEP-ENV-2013-02-16 (Environmental Economics)
- NEP-REG-2013-02-16 (Regulation)
- NEP-RES-2013-02-16 (Resource Economics)
ReferencesReferences listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
- Anthony Heyes & Sandeep Kapur, 2011.
"Regulating altruistic agents,"
Canadian Journal of Economics,
Canadian Economics Association, vol. 44(1), pages 227-246, February.
- Anthony Heyes & Sandeep Kapur, 2010. "Regulating Altruistic Agents," Birkbeck Working Papers in Economics and Finance, Birkbeck, Department of Economics, Mathematics & Statistics 1010, Birkbeck, Department of Economics, Mathematics & Statistics.
- Andreoni, James, 1990. "Impure Altruism and Donations to Public Goods: A Theory of Warm-Glow Giving?," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, Royal Economic Society, vol. 100(401), pages 464-77, June.
- Kotchen, Matthew J., 2005.
"Impure public goods and the comparative statics of environmentally friendly consumption,"
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management,
Elsevier, vol. 49(2), pages 281-300, March.
- Matthew J. Kotchen, 2003. "Impure Public Goods and the Comparative Statics of Environmentally Friendly Consumption," Department of Economics Working Papers 2003-06, Department of Economics, Williams College.
- Brekke, Kjell Arne & Kverndokk, Snorre & Nyborg, Karine, 2003.
"An economic model of moral motivation,"
Journal of Public Economics,
Elsevier, vol. 87(9-10), pages 1967-1983, September.
- Kjell Arne Brekke & Snorre Kverndokk & Karinen Nyborg, 2000. "An Economic Model of Moral Motivation," Discussion Papers, Research Department of Statistics Norway 290, Research Department of Statistics Norway.
- Matthew J. Kotchen, 2009.
"Voluntary Provision of Public Goods for Bads: A Theory of Environmental Offsets,"
Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society,
Royal Economic Society, vol. 119(537), pages 883-899, 04.
- Matthew J. Kotchen, 2007. "Voluntary Provision of Public Goods for Bads: A Theory of Environmental Offsets," NBER Working Papers 13643, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
- Sugden, Robert, 1984. "Reciprocity: The Supply of Public Goods through Voluntary Contributions," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, Royal Economic Society, vol. 94(376), pages 772-87, December.
- Sugden, Robert, 1985. "Consistent conjectures and voluntary contributions to public goods: why the conventional theory does not work," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 27(1), pages 117-124, June.
- Krysiak, Frank C., 2008. "Prices vs. quantities: The effects on technology choice," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(5-6), pages 1275-1287, June.
- Andreoni, James, 1989. "Giving with Impure Altruism: Applications to Charity and Ricardian Equivalence," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, University of Chicago Press, vol. 97(6), pages 1447-58, December.
- Warr, Peter G., 1983. "The private provision of a public good is independent of the distribution of income," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 13(2-3), pages 207-211.
- Warr, Peter G., 1982. "Pareto optimal redistribution and private charity," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 19(1), pages 131-138, October.
- Bergstrom, Theodore & Blume, Lawrence & Varian, Hal, 1986. "On the private provision of public goods," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 29(1), pages 25-49, February.
- Requate, Till & Unold, Wolfram, 2003. "Environmental policy incentives to adopt advanced abatement technology:: Will the true ranking please stand up?," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 47(1), pages 125-146, February.
- Montero, Juan-Pablo, 2002. "Prices versus quantities with incomplete enforcement," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 85(3), pages 435-454, September.
- Cornes, Richard & Sandler, Todd, 1994. "The comparative static properties of the impure public good model," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(3), pages 403-421, July.
- Matthew J. Kotchen, 2003.
"Green Markets and Private Provision of Public Goods,"
Department of Economics Working Papers
2003-05, Department of Economics, Williams College.
- Matthew J. Kotchen, 2006. "Green Markets and Private Provision of Public Goods," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, University of Chicago Press, vol. 114(4), pages 816-845, August.
- Andreoni, James, 1988. "Privately provided public goods in a large economy: The limits of altruism," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(1), pages 57-73, February.
- Eckel, Catherine C. & Grossman, Philip J., 2003. "Rebate versus matching: does how we subsidize charitable contributions matter?," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 87(3-4), pages 681-701, March.
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text:
Catching up on the OpenBI Facebook page the other day, I came across a promo for a "Fast and Easy BI" Web seminar co-hosted by Pentaho and Actian. Further down the release, I saw reference to the analytic database Vectorwise and was confused. I was certain Vectorwise was the latest offering from Ingres, the ageless relational database vendor. Who the heck is Actian? I had to go online to get the scoop.
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Find the perfect drink!
Browse by categories or ingredients
Read what others had to say about each recipe
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|Ingredients [ oz | cl ]
|[ My Bar ]
|1 1⁄2 oz Cuban Rum
|[ Add ]
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Method: On the Rocks
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Volume: 6.0 oz
Alcohol units: 1.8 standard drink
Alcohol by volume (ABV): 10%
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Rum and ginger is a marriage made in heaven!
Often described as Bermuda's National Drink.
A great taste of of the Caribbean created by Dale DeGroff.
Post a comment about this drink:
Added by David on 2010-10-30 17:01:36
Last updated on 2010-12-23 20:03:27
Status: Approved


text:
Dead beat mothers, of all these nigger babies born out of wedlock, thus are now being supported by Caucasian tax dollars.
Both Pookie and Ray-Ray have "baby momma's".
by omega greek March 06, 2009
The mother of one's child. The connotation is that mother and father do not and never did have any relationship beyond being sex partners. Contrast: ex-wife, ex-girlfriend.
by Dorothy November 21, 2004
Some one who takes the money that she is supposed to use to take care of the kid and spends on a rental car for the summer, buys hair, gets nails done and pretends to be a baller with her child support to impress all her friends who all thinks she is a loser for losing such a good man. Normally attempting to make some poor man life hell because she was to sorry to keep him.
"uppity baby momma"
by Pissed of baby daddy June 14, 2009
Mark just found out that he got his ex knocked up in 7th grade and now hes a junior in high school and now he got two kids that he just learned about and a bitch for a baby momma
by LilAlexis March 06, 2006
The mother of your children out of wedlock.
She ma baby mama.
I love ma baby momma.
I love ma baby momma.
by Yasirt November 20, 2007


text:
I've been lucky enough to have spent the past two months gainfully unemployed, and inspired enough to explore the wonderful world of Google'esque type search and data extraction problems. The optimistic software engineer inside of me estimated two months to grok and build software and algorithms those PhD students at Cambridge spend years contemplating. Needless to say after two months I've concluded that PhD's are probably worth a cent, and that it's no coincidence they're being hired by the fistful at Google and Microsoft.
I chose to spend my two month 'sabbatical' on three major themes:
The problem domain I chose to experiment with is simple: crawl commerce websites and extract products and prices in an unsupervised manner. Or put another way, screen scrape sites like eBay, Harvey Norman (an Australian retailer) etc. with zero hard-coded knowledge of the HTML structure, and extract out their product and price catalogue with very minimal handholding. Yes, I want to build Google Product search, without relying on merchant sites providing a products XML feed. And once I have the products and prices, I also want to build the search part too.
For this post I'll start by focusing on the parsing, data-extraction and filtering. I'll hopefully find the time to write up the other parts soon, so subscribe and sit-tight for the remainder.
The goal of this post is simple: document my experiments, approaches and conclusions to the HTML data extraction problem space. But, before we kick off, my disclaimer: I'm not a PhD in this field; I'm simply a hacker hacking on stuff that lights me up. For claims of scientific merit, please stand on the shoulders of true giants.
Data extraction (or web scraping) from HTML pages is typically done through a manual, supervised process. These manual workhorses to extract data elements we care about are tightly coupled to the structure of HTML through mechanisms like string comparison and Regular expressions. Let's look at an example to make this point clear. The following is a webpage screenshot extract from a local Australian e-commerce seller:
I've simplified the underlying HTML structure of the above example to focus on the rendering of the thing that we care about later on: products and prices:
 ...

Desktop Computers

...

  Acer eMachine EZ1600 All-in-One 18.5" Desktop

 A$449

 ...
The structure of this HTML is typical (important parts bolded above): a
 container (
 ...
 and so on) that will contain the product and price grouping; an  HTML tag that has the product description (Acer eMachine EZ1600 All-in-One...), and a HTML tag to display the price (
A$449
). This div container format is repeated for the columns (<div class="fp_img1"... "fp_img2" ... "fp_img3"), and then again for more rows if needed.
Programmatic extraction of product and pricing text from this example would be typically achieved by either:
These approaches (and similar variants) have two core problems: 1) code is tightly coupled to the HTML structure, and/or the HTML markup and thus is fragile under situations where the content is dynamic or the website structure/layout are changed or versioned in the future, and 2) it doesn't easily account for subtle structure/markup variants that are found throughout most e-commerce sites.
We need a better way to abstract and reflect on HTML, all while dealing with its malformations and variations. We need a better way to programmatically extract data, one that can deal with versioning and variants. And we need the approaches to scale well. Scale in terms of the amount of sites we can parse (and their various idiosyncrasies), and scale well in terms of computation (scale out). Product and price data extraction from e-commerce sites seems like a meaningful way to explore this problem space.
Programmatic string manipulation, regular expressions and so on are commonly used tools because one thing is typical about websites: they're born from templates. Meaning someone has created a template page, and then most pages on that respective website are derived from the template. And taking this one step further, even the pages themselves usually have repeating sections that are based on templates – anyone familiar with ASP.NET repeaters will testify to that. Using regular expressions makes some sense in these template scenarios: they're simply mechanical harvesters of templates derivatives, based on template deconstruction by a programmer (or put in language geek speak: they're early bound, statically linked to the HTML). If this is generally true, why not build a harvester Reflection library instead? This way, you build a tool once, and it can generate data extraction logic for any site, and any page. And while we're here, we should push forward one step further and dynamically build the extraction logic every time a crawl/parse occurs so that site dynamism over time can be ignored. Sort of like a Reflection for HTML, where everything is discovered and extracted late-bound with no static dependencies.
This approach hopefully alleviates the versioning problem, deals with the scale problem (we can point the generator at any domain, and away it goes), and we can add smarts to the to overcome the template variant problem (slight variations from page to page within the same domain).
So, what's needed for a data extraction generator to work? It needs to identify the things it cares about, find out where those things exist in the HTML structure, generate the code or algorithm to extract them out, test that it meets the bar, then rinse and repeat for all pages in all sites.
To explore this generator concept further, we'll switch now to focusing on our particular domain problem: extracting out products and prices from HTML. We'll start with identification of the product and price features. If we knew the text for every single product on the planet, we could achieve product extraction from a webpage simply by string comparing all of its text against all of the world's products. This isn't computationally possible of course, but the process of identifying "some" of the products in a webpage against a smaller product corpus definitely is.
And the link between product text in HTML and websites being derivatives of templates gets us to the crux of figuring out how to automate extraction: if we can find some products in the HTML, and test to see if they all live in the same structural area of HTML, we can assume the rest of the unmatched strings in that area contains products too. But, before we get to an example of this (it'll make sense soon, I promise), we first need to define what "structural area of HTML" really means.
Dealing with HTML programmatically is terrible, so it's best abstracted to something easier to deal with. We typically abstract it away to a graph like structure (the DOM [Document Object Model] is a common choice), and then we can address it structurally using an API like XPath. This raises the level of abstraction from string manipulation and regular expressions, to a structure that makes sense (XML) an expressive language that navigates, manipulates and reflects over a directed graph (XPath). XPath is well understood, plenty of APIs for it, and has a unique feature which we'll need to heavily rely on: its graph addressing system has a spectrum ranging from very specific, to very general. A quick example of addressing to bootstrap our understanding: To find the first  node in two nested divs we can call XPath with a query that looks something like "/html[1]/body[1]/div[1]/div[1]/a[1]". Notice the [1]'s? That's saying "I specifically want the first node in the graph" and so on. We can also be more general: to extract all  nodes that live in the same nested
 structure, we can say this: "/html/body/div/div/a". Dropping the [n] indexing says "address all nodes with that name in the graph". Nodes can even be address via attribute tags: "/div[@class='foo']/a, which gets all  nodes that live within a
 container that has a class attribute "foo". And so on - very specific, to very general.
Okay, now that we know how to address areas of the HTML graph, let's get back to figuring out how to find products in that graph. Remember that we want to find a string match from a subset of products inside the HTML. Let's walk through it: we start with a corpus of products
Asus eMachine EZ1600 All-in-one 18.5" Desktop Inspiron One Desktop S260905AU DELL Inspiron 545MT S560603AU DELL Inspiron 545MT S560603AU with Monitor ...
And a website page that has products that may match some of the products in the corpus:
(The HTML for this example):
 ...

  Acer eMachine EZ1600 All-in-One 18.5" Desktop
By doing a simple string comparison throughout the HTML text nodes of the page to my product corpus, we find a few nodes with corpus matches:
Asus eMachine EZ1600 All-in-one 18.5" Desktop Inspiron One Desktop S260905AU DELL Inspiron 545MT S560603AU
We can then address those nodes using an XPath expression:
/html[1]/body[1]/div[1]/div[6]/div[1]/div[1]/a[1] /html[1]/body[1]/div[1]/div[6]/div[2]/div[1]/a[1] /html[1]/body[1]/div[1]/div[6]/div[3]/div[1]/a[1] /html[1]/body[1]/div[1]/div[6]/div[4]/div[1]/a[1]
And if we look closely, we find them to be structurally pretty similar, bar the indexed addressing of the third
 node. By removing that indexed addressing, we're able to obtain all products that we know about with one generalised XPath:
The side effect of generalising this XPath: we get all the other products in the same structural area of the graph too. Products we don't know about from our corpus. Running that generalised XPath expression on our HTML example will give us this:
Asus eMachine EZ1600 All-in-one 18.5" Desktop Inspiron One Desktop S260905AU DELL Inspiron 545MT S560603AU DELL Inspiron 545MT S560603AU HP Pavillion P6120a Desktop Compaq Prasario CQ1200AN CPU
A list of all products from that page, including ones not included in the corpus. And that forms the basic idea of automated product text extraction: identify product node candidates, find their common generalised XPath address, apply that to all nodes in the graph, then extract. Of course we're missing a bunch of detail here like "what's the likelihood of our product corpus matching something on a website" (the answer is not that great, but there's a cute solution), and what about price extraction? Oh, and what if I don't have a product corpus? Yep, we're going to have to go deep on this, so let's keep going.
This section will go a little deeper on the details. We'll take a look at the following:
The first obvious problem we need to solve is the text node to product corpus matching. Thousands of variations on how products can be listed (grammar combinations, extra description text etc.) kills any hope of getting away with basic string matching. Thankfully we have two workhorses of language and string comparison processing: 1) tokenisation and stemming (e.g. suffix stripping etc.) and 2) "compare and rank's" tireless algorithm tf-idf (term frequency inverse document frequency). For a given corpus, we can stem, tokenise and calculate the tf-idf scores for all words, place them in individual vectors, and then compare those against each text node in the graph. Once we've done that, we'll have a ranked list of similarity scores for text nodes compared to the corpus. Now, we're going to get a lot of noise here – a page may contain all sorts of text nodes that relate in some way to the corpus, but aren't relevant product matches. A quick look at our "Desktop Computers" example above shows us a casing point:
"Dick Smith is where you'll find the latest and greatest in Desktop Computers, Acer, HP, Compaq..."
If our corpus had a wide range of computers and electronics from Acer, HP and Compaq, this text node will get ranked -- low, sure, but ranked nevertheless. So how do we disambiguate between true products, and text nodes like the one above (and other common nodes like categories, drop down lists etc)? We apply the text node corpus ranking system to more pages on the website (making sure we have the biggest list of ranked potentials possible), then start performing XPath generalisation on the ranked text nodes. We do this so that we can look for generalised XPath's that produce a high sum of well ranked text nodes. Let's take a quick look at an example of this process:
Example Product Corpus:
Computer Memory Microsoft Acer Compaq ... Acer eMachine EZ1600 Inspiron Desktop S260905AU Inspiron 545MT S560603AU RAM DDR2 800Mhz DIMM DDR2 800Mhz SODIMM DDR3 1333Mhz DIMM ...
Page 1:
The red boxes represent graph nodes that had a corpus match hit (remember, this means they've undergone a string tokenisation and then a subsequent tf-idf vector comparison against the corpus to give us a score). You'll notice the numbers (1 through 4): this represents a generalised XPath expression that we've found. So the three red-boxed computer products found in grouping 4 represent a generalised XPath and so on.
And now Page 2:
Page 2 ends up being very similar. So after generalisation, grouping, and figuring out the tf-idf scores of each, we end up with a data structure that looks something like this:
Grouping 1: /html[1]/body[1]/div[1]/div[5]/div[1]/div[1]/p[1]/a[1]
Desktop Computers, 0.19390 Computer Memory, 0.23320
Grouping 2: /htm1[1]/body[1]/div[1]/div[5]/div[1]/div[1]/h1[1]
Grouping 3: /html[1]/body[1]/div[1]/div[5]/div[1]/div[1]/p[2]
Dick Smith is where you'll find the latest ..., 0.09334 Increase your Computer Memory with extra ..., 0.03203
Grouping 4: /html[1]/body[1]/div[1]/div[6]/div/div[1]/a[1]
Acer eMachine EZ1600 All-in-One 18.5" Desktop, 0.672399 Inspiron One Desktop S260905AU, 0.890233 Dell Inspiron 545MT S560603AU, 0.840503 DSE 2GB DDR2 800Mhz DIMM RAM, 0.650430 DSE 2GB DDR2 800Mhz SODIMM RAM, 0.64050 DSE 1GB DDR2 800Mhz DIMM RAM, 0.62283
From the data-structure we can see grouping 4 has the most node candidates, and the highest ranked tf-idf scores. We can rank the groupings by doing a simple sum, or an average, or push forward on even cuter statistical analysis. For now, a sum and sort will do:
Grouping 4: 3.47639 Grouping 3: 0.12537 Grouping 1: 0.4271 Grouping 2: 0.4271
From here, we can be certain that the generalised XPath grouping number 4 is the most likely XPath expression that will yield us a list of products given the corpus and dataset. And the last part of that statement is pretty key – given a corpus and dataset – meaning the richer the corpus and the richer the dataset, the more accuracy we're going to get.
Now we're not yet accounting for template derivation across the site. Ecommerce site owners tend to like to strike prices and products out randomly, add new prices, and add notations and all sorts of crazy stuff. Inevitably this leads to subtle HTML mark-up variations that we need to account for. These types of mark-up changes either get nicely collected in the XPath generalisation process, or yield new XPath groupings. We'd need to account for that variation, but in the interest of saving time and words, we'll leave process for another day.
Because there's no corpus for price information, we can't apply the same corpus matching theory to price data extraction. But we do have a list of products we're looking to find prices for, which means we have our first algorithmic input: the number of prices we can expect to find on a page.
The basic pseudocode for finding prices is fairly simple: for a given product, find its graph node, and then start walking "around" the graph looking for anything that resembles a number. Take that number and its markup (any periods '.', or dollar signs $, or currency markup "AUD, USD" etc) and add it to the "potential prices" list until some local maximum is found.
The fundamental premises of this algorithm rely on prices being nearby products in the graph, and that the text markup surrounding the number will offer a signal of price strength.
So let's get to it and apply our pseudocode. We use two measures to derive a list of prices for a given product node: 1) the probability that a text-node is a price based on its markup, and 2) the graph distance between the price node and the product node. Let's look at an example:

Inspiron One Desktop S260905AU

Review this product

A$899

SAVE $100.00

The "Inspiron One Desktop" product node has a number of nodes around it, two of which will show up in our graph walk when looking for numbers:

A$899

SAVE $100.00

Now we need to determine the probability of each price being the correct price. We can do something simple: parse out the number into a float, determine the floats string length, subtract that length from the total string length of the node and we have the "potential price" string distance, relative to the total node text. This will downgrade nodes we may find with lots of textual markup (like product numbers, serial numbers, "SAVE", or "RRP" and so on) relative to other nodes without such markup. We can even add influencing signals like "does the price text have a period '.' or a dollar sign '$', if so, increase the probability" which further boosts nodes with pricing markup.
Once we've dealt with probability, we add another hint: the graph distance from the product node. In this case, the
 tag has a distance of 2, and the
 tag a distance of 3, a simple count seems to be all that's needed. At the end, we'll have a ranked list of price nodes attached to a product node based on a combination of probability and distance.
Once we've done all that, we can do all sorts of analysis with those attached price lists, like making sure we have enough prices for products (an indicator that we may have the wrong product XPath query), or generalising the price nodes to see if they're all situated in the same graph structure (an indicator that we've got the correct price). From here we can even deal with another common problem: two prices for each product, an "RRP" price, and a "Sale" price. Simply walk the list of products, look for this pattern of two prices with similar probabilities and distances, and sort by the lowest price based on some maximum price difference bar.
This kind of algorithm, where we're ranking, sorting and using results to influence past algorithmic runs is sometimes called "hill climbing". Hill climbing is a search optimization technique, where we have a criteria we wish to search for which is based on local input, and we repeat the algorithm again and again refreshing inputs until we've satisfied the criteria. In this case we have a pipeline of stuff we're trying to do: find the right product node XPath generalisation, find the right price node, and account for variations in those two. And that pipeline has self-feedback mechanisms: can't find enough prices for a given list of potential product nodes, then maybe we have the wrong product XPath generalisation etc. This pipeline and its feedback loop is perfect for hill-climbing. Simply keep climbing until we find a local maximum of the best products and prices for the pipeline. (Great F# and C# example of hill climbing here)
And of course, we often get a bit of incorrect noise, so let's move on to dealing with that by filtering outliers.
We're not going to be perfect when trying to yield products and prices out of a pipeline which relies on sort and rank. So we have to expect some amount of failure, and in my experience with this experiment, it typically happens at the price node level. We find a dodgy price somewhere from some weird markup or template variation. Now, we can approach stripping out these dodgy prices (and thus, their associated products) in a few ways. One obvious one is finding the price nodes with differing probabilities and distances from the common, and culling. But unfortunately this doesn't account for the template variation problem very well (and in some cases, price node distances can vary wildly across a list of products on the same page). So, a better technique that's used widely in the machine learning space is clustering. Cluster results around some common parameter, then cull anything that looks out of place.
I used the K-means clustering algorithm for this, as it's simple and parallelisable. We can take the price nodes probability and distance, make that combination the observation, and hit run. Price nodes with probabilities and distances that are "not like the others" are simply clustered away in to a "bad cluster" and dropped. I used a K value of 3, and then culled clusters that were small (relative to the other two), and/or had a centroid distance that seemed far from the others. This worked pretty well, I've only seen a couple of cases where I culled and shouldn't have. Again, this clustering and culling process could be refined, and plugged in to a pipeline where another hill-climbing reinforcement algorithm could be added, but for now it works well enough. (F# example found here)
We've spent nearly 4000 words taking a 10,000 foot view of automated data extraction from HTML. Hopefully the key ideas of "abstraction is good" "search and rank hill-climbing" and "filtering" were described well enough to spark further interest in this problem domain. After a few months of day and night hacking I feel like I have a lot to say about this area - particularly for those that live on the .NET platform, eat functional programming techniques for breakfast, and are interested in the cloud computing space (I tried scaling all the software I built out using Microsoft's Azure, another very interesting experiment).
Soon I hope to go even deeper and show the link between these kinds of algorithms and their efficient implementation in the F# language. I'd hardly call myself an aficionado of the machine learning data extraction space, but I strongly believe that with the rise of the cloud and the explosion of data, all programmers are going to need at least some understanding of this stuff in their toolbox.
Stay tuned.
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13th Annual New Jersey Home + Garden Show
March 8, 2013 @ 2:00 pm - March 10, 2013 @ 5:00 pm
From the front door to the backyard (and the roof!), the NJ Home + Garden Show has you covered when it comes to home improvement planning, budgeting, and hiring. The Atlantic City Convention Center comes alive with indoor and outdoor remodeling professionals of all kinds, ensuring you'll find everything you need to get going on your next project in one place. Even Roger Hazard of A&E's "Sell This House" will be there (Saturday and Sunday).
Have you considered home solar panels for your next project? Not only do they add value to your home – they can reduce the amount you pay for electricity for 20 years or more! Stop by and see us at booth #520 to learn more.
Admission is $8.50 for adults and $5 for seniors 65+.
Kids under 17 are free.
13th Annual New Jersey Home + Garden Show Hours
|Friday, March 8
|2pm – 7pm
|Saturday, March 9
|10am – 7pm
|Sunday, March 10
|11am – 5pm


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B-52 READY FOR TAKEOFF? Bollig Here To Stay
Frank Nova | Sep 20, 2013 | Comments 1
One of the unexpected incidents in last night's exhibition game against Pittsburgh was the game-tying goal in the third period by Chicago Blackhawks' forward Brandon Bollig.
Bollig has been better known in his professional career for using his hands more for dishing out knuckle sandwiches and Hertz donuts than goals and assists.
But at this point, Bollig deserves a closer look.
He has a reputation as one of the hardest working players on the Blackhawks – no mean feat, considering he's in the workout room with the likes of known gymrats Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane, Duncan Keith and Patrick Sharp.
His hard work has become paying dividends – his skating has improved a great deal, and he's shown more confidence with the puck.
Now, let me temper all of this. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that Brandon Bollig will ever be Al Secord. His skating, while improved, won't make anyone put down money on a race between him and Duncan Keith. No stick company will hire him to dangle for a video. But if you look back to the 2010 Stanley Cup winning edition of the Blackhawks, he can certainly fill the physical 4th line role that was filled that year by Ben Eager to good effect. And without any data to back it up, I'm just going to go ahead and say he's smarter than Eager, because I'm pretty sure the sandwich I'm having for lunch is smarter than Ben Eager.
Bollig can be a very valuable asset if he's able to fill this role. As a player on a one-way contract, he's getting paid whether he's on the ice or in the press box. If he can be in the lineup on a regular basis, that gives Hawks' GM Stan Bowman and coach Joel Quenneville more flexibility with players like Jeremy Morin, Ben Smith, Jimmy Hayes, Brandon Pirri and Drew LeBlanc – players who are on two-way deals and can be shuttled back to Rockford without having to clear waivers. This flexibility can come in very handy as the trade deadline nears and Bowman needs to look to address needs that may arise between here and there.
As a 4th liner, Bollig's basic responsibility will be to not hurt the team. He'll be an energy guy who, along with fellow likely 4th liners Marcus Kruger and Ben Smith, will be looked to for two or three shifts a period at even strength. Kruger emerged last season as an elite penalty killing forward, and Smith will probably have an opportunity on the kill as well, as the departures of Dave Bolland and Michael Frolik will mean the younger forwards will get a chance to step in. Bollig won't get much special teams time – you'll only see that in blowouts. But he also will be looked to to drop the mitts, something Kruger can't do, and Smith would draw different dance partners than Bollig will.
So on a team that's as loaded with stars and superstars as the Blackhawks are, role players like Bollig are the ones who bear the most watching during the preseason and the early going of the regular season.
Filed Under: Chicago Blackhawks • Featured • NHL
About the Author: Spent my formative years breathing in the rarified air of the second balcony at Chicago Stadium. Refined my flair for colorful euphemisms in the blue seats at Madison Square Garden. Now a curmudgeon in the 300 level in the United Center. My musings can also be found at Hockeenight.com...and yes, I muse.