"You do not talk about Fight Club."

I think I can, after a brief experiment, claim that Brad is definitely not Joe based on some postings that I captured and analyzed.

I did a search on Brad Miller within the past 30 days and captured all postings made on the first 10 threads that showed up on the search and did the same for Joe Redifer.

I ran a Perl script on the two people's collections of postings and here is what I found:

Of Brad Miller's words, 39.7 percent of his words are distinct. That means that if you take his total number of different words used and divide by the total number of words in the post (counting duplicates), you get 0.397. With Joe Redifer, the number is 32.5 percent. This means that Joe tends to use a slightly smaller set of words than Brad when he posts.

However, although Brad uses a larger set of words, Brad uses a smaller set more frequently than Joe. If you take the top ten words in Brad and Joe's set, Brad top 10 frequently used words comprise 24.4 percent of his total words while Joe's comprise 21.5 percent of his posts.

Here are Brad's top 10 frequently used words and their frequencies of occurrence:

7.21% the
2.73% to
2.53% of
2.21% a
2.14% and
1.88% in
1.69% i
1.36% was
1.36% on
1.30% as

As I said before, the above words comprsise 24.4% of Brad's posts. The numbers above may not add up to exactly 24.4 because of slight round off error.

Here is the same list for Joe Redifer:

4.15% the
2.87% to
2.52% i
2.33% a
1.94% is
1.90% and
1.67% of
1.67% that
1.40% it
1.12% they

As I said earlier, the above words comprise 21.5 percent of Joe Redifer's posts.

I think it is clearly obvious from these lists that the writing styles and use of language are significantly different. Their lists of top 10 frequently used words only have 6 words in common! Just look at the differences in how much they use "and"! One out of every 14 words from Brad is "and" while Joe only uses it one out of every 24 words. Brad uses "of" approximately 50 percent more often than Joe, while Joe uses "I" approximately 50 percent more than Brad. In fact, "to" and "a" are the only two words in their top 10s that they both use with nearly the same frequencies!

I think it is safe to say that Brad Miller and Joe Redifer are definitely NOT the same person according to this study.

More studies could be done on their writings, but after finding such differences after investigating this far, there is no need in continuing.

It was fun, though!

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Evans A Criswell
Huntsville-Decatur Movie Theatre Info Site

Anyway, I have a new math problem for you, Evans. Figure this one out:

Why can't I just stick a DVD in the player and press PLAY and the movie starts... you know, like a LaserDisc? Instead I must wade through the menu (I hate the menu, especially animated, noisy ones). The menu should not pop up unless I press MENU. I don't know if there is a Perl script advanced enough to explain this.

Jedi Fore_er (Jedi Fore'er)

Rearrange the letters. I just can't believe this.

Jedi, the reason you can't just press play when you stick a DVD in the player is the author of the disc has way too much control over the behavior of the disc. They determine how the disc reacts to user input at various points of access, which is why you can't skip FBI warnings on most discs and why you must use the menus to access functionality.

Sure, you can use the "You know you're a film-tech junkie if ..." in any way you wish. May the force be with you!

As y'all know, I wrote a public domain anagram generator, so my brain tends to take names and words and fiddle with them. I realized, out of nowhere, that "Joe Redifer" contains j, e, d, and i. My program dictionary does not have the word "Jedi" in it, so that combination did not get tried when I ran the program on Joe's name long ago. I immediately turned on the light above the bed, got a notepad, wrote "Joe Redifer", and extracted Jedi, and "Fore'er" was left. I originally thought the letters left spelled "forever" and I thought, "Oh God, I've been had! This is the best joke ever!", but that damn "v" is missing.

The writing styles of Brad Miller and Joe Redifer are very different, though. There is something incredibly mysterious going on here, though.

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Evans A Criswell
Huntsville-Decatur Movie Theatre Info Site

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However if Brad is Brad. Then Joe must be female.

The questions are:

Do you think she cut her hair for the picture?

Should we call her "Josephine"?

1. Become part of the system in order to perform the measurements.

2. Observe the system from an external viewpoint.

Measuring a system nearly always affects the system, especially in the case where the measurer is part of the system. If people know their word frequencies might be analyzed, some people will change their word usage as a result. If average speed is being measured on a highway, the presence of a policeman with a radar gun for the purpose of measuring speed, not writing tickets, will cause people to slow down. A meter placed on an electrical circuit provides a very small resistance which changes the circuit characteristics every so slightly.

In this case, Brad posted a message purposely avoiding his most commonly used words.

Measuring from an external viewpoint, which is not possible for many systems, is more likely to not change the system. For example, observing traffic flow from atop a tall building in a city. In this case, external measurement would be like a lurker doing this analysys and never posting the results, or Brad secretly analyzing these attributes and never telling anyone. OF course, if people in the forums are interested in such stats, the "external viewpoint" method doesn't serve a purpose.

It's interesting. It would be fun to capture every single post made in the past on the FIlm Handler's forum and analyze everyone, but I'd have to learn how to submit the queries from a program and parse the returned pages. For that reason, I simply cut and pasted the ones I captured by hand for Brad and Joe. I chose the Film Handler's forum because it is the most active (most poasts) and people are more likely to be writing their own words rather than posting material written by other people, like often occurs in Film-Yak. For example, if I took Bob Maar's Film-Yak posts, the results would be meaningless because of the large number of jokes posted. You have to be careful to avoid sigs as well. If every post has a quote in it, that would skew the counts and quotes from other people's postings would need to be avoided as well. This is easy to avoid by hand, but doing it from a Perl program would be more difficult.

After class last night, I was glad to be done with that homework and wanted to do something fun other than study and so I went ahead and took samples and did the word frequency counts. There are many other attributes that could be checked, such as most frequent word pairs and word triples, as well as sentence construction attributes, and things such as words most frequently used to begin or end a sentence, number of words per sentence on the average, number or words per message, average number of letters per word, and so on. Text analysis is a very interesting kdkk3993k3222
Can't modify constant item in scalar assignment at post.pl line 686, near "TCP)
"
syntax error at post.pl line 686, near ")
("
Execution of post.pl aborted due to compilation errors.

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Evans A Criswell
Huntsville-Decatur Movie Theatre Info Site

Joe- If you are referring to Evans, he is in ALABAMA (AL) not Alaska (AK)

Now, please take this with, the tone that it is given. I don't want you to cry and spoil your make-up. Look in the mirror and say to yourself. "I am women, watch me grow, I got a long long way to go," you can sing the whole song if you wish.

P.S. Brad said to stop using his photo.

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quote:

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Bobby Maar sed: "I am woman, watch me grow" or something like that

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I have corresponded with Bevan many times over e-mail, a few times on the phone, and once in real life. We do not hang out after work. We don't go over to eachother's houses and play videogames. In fact, I bet you are nothing but a stooge placed by Bevan to extract his evil revenge for my awesome Christie projector review!