The thing about a project like Newman is that it’s basically impossible to make it work perfectly. It has a difficult job, because there are so many potential sources of error. Servers may go offline, connections may fail, article formats may change and so on. It is as good as impossible to guarantee that Newman will do the right thing, because at the end of the day we are trying to analyze text, and computers are not good at doing that. Just look at spam filters – they have been improved upon for years, but everyone is still getting spam. Much less than before, of course, so the filters are definitely useful. And Newman too makes mistakes, but it does still succeed quite often.

Newman has been posting on Xtratime.org under the username Carsonne, a French female impersonator of Carson35’s it would seem. Carsonne averages about 15 posts a day since July 30, that is a little over 350 posts in all, 350+ news stories posted. While I haven’t been keeping score to present statistical numbers, I have kept a close eye on Carsonne and I would estimate that upwards of 90% of the stories posted were correctly parsed, formatted and classified. In fact, I recall about 10-15 misposts of the ones I’ve seen (which I think is most). And that is an error rate no human poster would have, Carsonne at an estimated 95% success rate is at least an order of magnitude below a human poster (ie. I would claim that a human poster would have a >99.5% success rate at copy/pasting and classifying stories – less than 2 misposts in 350).

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