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Thursday, 15 May 2003
If this isn't nice... ::
After writing about it last night, I forwarded the text of the Vonnegut lecture at the Mark Twain House to a few friends. I then remembered seeing a Vonnegut commencement speech on the wall of my friend/coworker B’s office (just a couple days ago), so I set out to find it on the web. No surprise: it’s here. The interesting twist is that Vonnegut did not write it ("It was quite witty, but not my wittiness.”); it’s one of the more spectacular Internet hoaxes. ...
SpamBayes and Mail's Junk filter ::
Via Jon Udell, Bayesian Nets, Latent Semantics, Despamming and other speculations: a fascinating (well, at least for programmers and mathematicians ;-) comparison of how Bayesian nets differ from latent semantic analysis. While I don’t believe Apple has said anything about how Mail’s junk filter works, it does seem to use some form of latent semantic analysis. I’ve noticed that it doesn’t catch spam which doesn’t contain many recognizable words (e.g. base64-encoded and all-HTML messages). I do seem to have trained SpamBayes enough for it to be catching such spams, however. The combination of Mail with only a minimally-trained SpamBayes seems to be catching almost all of my spam now, and no false positives yet...