Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Took screen shot, just in case, but I fear #Breitbart is well beyond the point of decency and shame that they would delete this insane tweet. #INTL4335 #Islamophobia pic.twitter.com/ipo1MhDmNI — Cas Mudde 🌪️ (@CasMudde) February 5, 2018 In early February, 2018  Breitbart News  made a splash with its inflammatory tweet suggesting  Muslims will end Super Bowl ,  which they deleted twelve hours later stating it did not meet their editorial standards. The deleted tweet had an imaginary conversation between a Muslim child and a grandparent about the Super Bowl and linked to one of articles on the  declining TV ratings of  National Football League (NFL) for the annual championship game . News articles from  The Hill , Huffington Post , Politico , Independent , etc., talked about the deleted tweet controversy in detail.  We have deleted a tweet that did not meet our editorial standards. — Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews...

It is time for the Conference Championship games. Both sets of teams have worked hard to make it this far but only two can go to the Superbowl. This week all of our Data Mining algorithms are in agreement as to who the winners should be. For the AFC Championship, Indianapolis hosts the Jets at 3:00PM EST. The Colts with Peyton Manning have arguably one of the best pass offenses in the League however their rushing game leaves a little to be desired. The Jets have one of the best defenses and their pass defense has given up less yards than just about every other team over they year. The algorithms call for the Colts to win but if I was a betting man I would wager that even with a loss that the Jets would cover the spread. For the NFC Championship, the New Orleans Saints host the Vikings at 6:40 PM EST. The Saints have had a phenomenal offense this year with some explosive plays. Their defense however has been lackluster. The defense seems to be better at forcing turnovers that actually d...

Dallas has really taken off and seems to be peaking at just the right time. The Cowboys decimated the Eagles for a second time and they almost made it look easy. While our research seems to indicate that teams with good offensive passing generally do better, the recent Dallas surge lends credence to the old saw about the run game. According to our numbers Dallas has the best run offense this year and close to the best run defense. The Dallas pass statistics are not that bad but they are overshadowed by the likes of New Orleans and the Colts. The Colts bring up an issue that I alluded to last week that I had to deal with before running this weeks algorithms. Because Indianapolis sat their starters for the past few weeks I need to decide whether or not to exclude those weeks from the calculations. If I include weeks 16 and 17 for Indy then Baltimore comes out as the predicted winner. However if I ignore those weeks then the Colts are the pick. We felt that that those two weeks are not in...

The NFL playoffs have arrived so grab some snacks and find a good spot to watch the games. We are going to have our own playoffs here by pitting the best performing algorithms from the regular season against each other to see which one does the best job predicting the playoffs and superbowl. While I was running the algorithms I contemplated how New England was going to perform without Welker and especially after reading that Brady has been playing with broken fingers on his throwing hand. How can my algorithms take things like this into account to improve the accuracy. Having the Colts sandbag the last few games of the regular season by benching their starters already throws a monkey wrench into the works. Then there was the Dallas-Philly game, Philadephia had the playoff spot already so did they really take it easy and let Dallas stomp all over them like that last week or are they in for another beating? I am sure Frank would say that Dallas really is that good. If their defense can...