The Hapax Legomenon of Steve Jobs

I've been running an experiment over the past few days which does the following:

1. crawl news feeds (in this case, the feeds from the Economist)
2. maintain a unigram count (i.e. a record of all words seen in these articles to date and how many times they are seen)
3. present the articles in a stream that highlights words that are being observed for the first time.

The first article for such a process will have many words underlined, but as time goes on these new unique words become more interesting.

The Economist published an article on the sad news of Steve Jobs' death and I think that the hitherto unseen words highlighted in this article represent an interesting summary of his life. In particular: gadget, elegantly, experimenting, mouse, zillions, egomania, reshaped and ding.

Here's the summary of the article from the hapax system:

...conjure up a magical or incredible new electronic gadget in front of an awed crowd were...a master showman . All computers do is fetch and shuffle numbers he once explained but...He spent his life packaging that magic into elegantly designed easy to use products . He...those days of green on black displays when floppy discs were still floppy the notion that...wayward youth . Mr Jobs caught the computing bug while growing up in Silicon Valley ....in the late 1960s he cold called his idol Bill Hewlett and talked his way into...college travelling to India becoming a Buddhist and experimenting with psychedelic drugs that Mr Jobs returned to California...found Apple in his parents garage on April Fools Day 1976 . A lot of people...to connect and they end up with very linear solutions . Bill Gates he suggested would...dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger . Dropping out of his college course and attending calligraphy classes instead had for example given Mr Jobs an apparently useless love of typography . But support for a variety of fonts was to prove a key feature of the Macintosh the pioneering mouse driven graphical computer that Apple launched in 1984 . With its windows icons and menus it was sold as the computer for...s initial success Mr Jobs expected to sell zillions of his new machines . But the Mac was not the mass market success Mr...it . He co founded a new firm Pixar which specialised in computer graphics and NeXT...And the rest is history Apple launched the iMac the iPod the iPhone and the iPad and briefly...string of hugely successful animated movies . In retrospect Mr Jobs was a man ahead of...but it was vintage Steve Jobs . His interdisciplinary approach was backed up by an obsessive attention to detail . A carpenter making a fine chest of drawers will not use plywood on the back even though nobody will...would be silent putting user needs above engineering convenience . He called an Apple engineer one...His on stage persona as a Zen like mystic notwithstanding Mr Jobs was an autocratic manager with a fierce temper . But his egomania was largely justified . He eschewed market researchers and focus groups preferring to trust his own instincts when evaluating potential new products . A lot of...to them he said . His judgment proved uncannily accurate by the end of his career.... But in the end he changed reality channelling the magic of computing into products that reshaped music telecoms and media . The man...his youth that he wanted to put a ding in the universe did just that .

I'm hoping to share the system soon, just a few more bugs...

Comments

[Datakvark]

Interesting, but wouldn't tf-idf be a better choice for creating such a word summary?