2004

November 6

Purple America

By now, most people have probably seen Robert Vanderbei’s map that tempers the overused red and blue electoral college view with county level detail where the proportion of the 2004 presidential vote is represented by a range of colors; some purple hue — halfway between blue and red — for a 50/50 split between Democrat and Republican.
Purple America
The newsies espouse the fallacy of equating what they call a “deeply divided” country with the “red and blue states.” While the electorate certainly is polarized, the division is represented by neither the electorally colored map nor the proportionally colored county map. A close election with regional and population density tendencies is not proof of a bimodal electorate. The same maps could occur without a “deep division.” Rather it is the strength of the polarization which is important to our sense of division; the degree to which an issue (and ultimately a set of polarizing issues) such as abortion separates voters, void of a middle ground.

posted @ 03:03 PM EST

November 9

Firefox 1.0 Released

Firefox Mozilla’s Firefox version 1.0 was released today. The success of this open source multi-platform web browser project improves the surfing experience for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux users and drives website developers to adhere to W3C standards.

posted @ 01:11 PM EST

Version 11 of GDBI

As version 11 of GDBI has been released, I’ll now be using gdbi-11-pgv.jar for the Dolben Family database modifications.

posted @ 01:19 PM EST

MathPad 2.6.4

There is a new version of MathPad, a general purpose graphing scientific calculator for the Macintosh, which has a few bug fixes and minor enhancements.

posted @ 01:36 PM EST

November 14

The Pan-Mass Challenge Donates $20 Million to the Jimmy Fund

Yesterday in Boston the Pan-Mass Challenge presented a check for $20 million to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, through its Jimmy Fund, to support treatment and research. This year’s donation amount, 97% of the funds raised by the PMC, is a notable increase over last year’s $16.2 million.

posted @ 02:30 PM EST

November 16

RSS Feeds in My Yahoo!

After a friend pointed out to me that you can add RSS feeds to My Yahoo! pages, I put an Add-to-My-Yahoo! button on this website.

posted @ 07:39 PM EST

November 20

Upgraded to PhpGedView 3.2

The Dolben Family software has been upgraded to version 3.2 of PhpGedView. The new version has a new theme, added charts, reports in PDF, and an RSS feed.

posted @ 01:03 PM EST