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Showing posts from October, 2012

2012-10-24: NFL Power Rankings Week 8

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After running the R script for the week 8 rankings, the first thing that struck my mind was the disparity in the size of the nodes between the AFC on the left side of our graph and the NFC on the right side. Two weeks ago we wrote that the NFC West has been dominant so far this year. The NFC West has the best combined record and their aggregate point differential puts others to shame.  However it is not just the West division but the entire NFC conference has dominated and out-performed the AFC conference at every turn. CBS Sports rates the NFC as head and shoulders above the AFC this year. Our ranking system is based on Google's PageRank algorithm. It is explained in some detail in past posts . A directed graph is created to represent the current years season. Each team is represented by a node in the graph. For every game played a directed edge is created from the loser pointing to the winner and it is weighted by the Margin of Victory.  In the Pagerank model

2012-10-11: NFL Power Rankings Week 6

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It is now five weeks into the 2012 season and the season is starting to come into focus. The topic of many online discussions is this years performance of the NFC West division compared to last year. The NFC West is one of the best performing divisions so far this year, which is a far cry from last year. They are certainly doing well in our ranking system. Our ranking system is based on Google's PageRank algorithm.It is explained in some detail in past posts . A directed graph is created to represent the current years season. Each team is represented by a node in the graph. For every game played a directed edge is created from the loser pointing to the winner and it is weighted by the Margin of Victory.  In the Pagerank model each link from a webpage i to webpage j causes webpage i to give some of its own Pagerank to webpage j .  This is often characterized as webpage i voting for webpage j . In our system the losing team essentially votes for the winning team with a nu

2012-10-10: Zombies in the Archives

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Image provided from  http://www.taxhelpattorney.com/ In our current research, the WS-DL group has observed leakage in archived sites. Leakage occurs when archived resources include current content. I enjoy referring to such occurrences as "zombie" resources (which is appropriate given the upcoming Halloween holiday). That is to say, these resources are expected to be archived ("dead") but still reach into the current Web. In the examples below, this reach into the live Web is caused by URIs contained in JavaScript not being rewritten to be relative to the Web archive; the page in the archive is not pulling from the past archived content but is "reaching out" (zombie-style) from the archive to the live Web.  We provide two examples with humorous juxtaposition of past and present content. Because of  JavaScript, rendering a page from the past will include advertisements from the present Web. 2008 memento of cnn.com f