timlangeman

THE PROBLEM:

Many people don't trust the Media and are suspicious that quotes may be fabricated or taken out of context.

FEEDBACK REQUESTED

I created an app called CiteIt which looks up quotes that have a cited URL and displays the surrounding context if a match is found.

The app is open source (MIT) and I'm looking for feedback on the idea and implementation.

VIEW DEMOS: * https://www.citeit.net/

WIKIPEDIA PROPOSAL: * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Timlangeman/sandbox

Do you have a docker hub repo that I could run without having to configure, maintain and build myself?

One of my main points is that you need to look beyond earnings per share to see the bigger trend.

What slide/s would you use from the JP Morgan Guide that is better than the St. Louis Fed chart I featured?

  * https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=qx3r

The Chart on Page 7 looks fantastic but it is earnings per share, not total profits before taxes.

The question I would ask is why the stock market graph looks so different than the St. Louis "Corporate profits before tax" graph?

My hypothesis is that many of these companies borrowed a lot of money in the bond market to buy back their shares and thereby juice their earnings per share.

Sorry, to clarify, their profit hasn't been growing.

Since 2014, Profit (before taxes) has been roughly $2.2 trillion every year.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=qx3r

The first point I make is that profit growth has been flat since ~2014 but the stock market has gone up quite a bit.

My question is: Why had the stock market continued to go up despite flat profits?

This looks interesting! One question:

  * I see the "-s" option allows you to specify the number of sequential requests.

  * Can you specify the number concurrent requests: ie 10 requests/sec?

1) We used to use Toggl at my employer:

https://toggl.com/

2) We switched to Clockify because it is cheaper for us. They have a "free forever" version.

https://clockify.me/

I preferred the Toggl UI. It also has a free version, but I think it was more expensive for the reporting we wanted.

THE PROBLEM I'M TRYING TO SOLVE:

Often when I read a quotation online and think to myself: "that's a great quote, but I wonder what it says 2 sentences prior or 2 sentences after". In other words, what's the context, and how do I know the quote isn't cherrypicked?

MY APP: CiteIt.net: a higher standard of citation

My web citation app enables authors to demonstrate the context of their citations. If writers link to a source URL in their blockquote "cite" tag, my program will find the original quote, grab the context surrounding it, and make a small JSON file that can then be used to supply context if the reader clicks on the arrow above or below the quote.

DEMO: (3 min video introduction)

https://www.CiteIt.net/

GOALS:

My goal is to allow journalists academics, and web authors to demonstrate the context of their citations so they can help their readers quickly learn more and to distinguish themselves from the less credible and the "fake news".

One of my additional goals is to expand into audio and video, allowing authors to cite transcripts of audio and YouTube videos easily, and then display this videos inline at the cited starting position if the reader chooses. This would allow a journalist to quote a public figure in text, but to have the video popup if a reader wished to see the full context. (See Issue #10 for a mockup of YouTube Video version.)

ABOUT MY PROJECT:

My project features a python web service and jQuery plugin frontend, packaged for WordPress authors as a (currently private) WordPress plugin and available as a straight jQuery custom function for programmers to integrate into any CMS.

All code is available on GitHub and MIT licensed: https://www.citeit.net/code/

My eventual goal is to work with the internet archive and make my project part of their system, including an auto-archive feature that would archive a copy of everything an author cites.

I've also talked with someone who has worked for the Wikimedia foundation. It looks like the best way to make this available to them is to package the code to run as a Docker image so that Wikipedia could self-host my service and use it for their quotes. (He says he can write the plugin for MediaWiki. I just need to provide the web service).

TOP ISSUES IN NEED OF HELP:

You can see the list of top issues in need of help on the volunteer page.

https://www.CiteIt.net/volunteer/

Here are a few highlights: (snip)

2) Create a standardized text version of every submitted web page, including a text version of PDF and Word Docs. https://github.com/CiteIt/citeit-webservice/issues/2

3) Verify that the quote matches the original, even if the citing quote uses [C]apitalization or .. ellipses

10) Create a streamlined process to download YouTube transcripts so that authors can easily quote them and calculate the starting position. Preliminary work: https://github.com/CiteIt/transcript-to-time-mapping

11) Develop an interface to make it easy to crowdsource the cleanup of auto-generated transcripts.

Right now, this is just a one-man project. You can email me for more info or give me a call if you're interested.

- Tim Langeman: Akron, PA (USA) https://openpolitics.com/tim (contact info)

P.S. Be sure to watch the video first: https://www.CiteIt.net/ (3 min video introduction)

The internet would not be nearly as useful as it is without Ted Nelson's hypertext concepts.

For those of you who are interested in understanding Ted Nelson's role in envisioning and evangelizing hypertext, I wrote a review of Ted Nelson's Ph.D. thesis which he wrote in Japan.

https://www.openpolitics.com/articles/ted-nelson-philosophy-...

Here are two of my favorite Freakonomics podcasts:

1) Improving Social Trust would help the economy as much as a tax cut.

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/trust-me-rebroadcast-2/

2) We underestimate our "tailwinds" and overestimate our "headwinds". This relates to many discussions, including issues of privilege:

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/life-hard-rebroadcast-2/

1) What do you think of the Neotext expanding citation system featured in the article?

2) What do you think of the Al Gore and Sarah Palin Fake News examples?

3) What do you think of the idea of modifying the browser to support contextual quotations without requiring the user to leave the source page?

4) What do you think about the idea of modifying video systems like Youtube to provide greater context to video clips?