Waffle

A waffle is a leavened batter or dough cooked between two plates, patterned to give a characteristic size, shape and surface impression. There are many variations based on the type of waffle iron and recipe used. Waffles are eaten throughout the world, particularly in Belgium, France, Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Scandinavia, Hong Kong, and the United States, with over a dozen regional varieties in Belgium alone.

Etymology

The word "waffle" first appears in the English language in 1725: "Waffles. Take flower, cream..." It is directly derived from the Dutch wafel, which itself derives from the Middle Dutch wafele.

While the Middle Dutch wafele is first attested to at the end of the 13th century, it is preceded by the French walfre in 1185; both are considered to share the same Frankish etymological root wafla. Depending on the context of the use of wafla, it either means honeycomb or cake.

Alternate spellings throughout modern and medieval Europe include waffe, wafre, wafer, wâfel, waufre, iauffe, gaufre, goffre, gauffre, wafe, waffel, wåfe, wāfel, wafe, vaffel, and våffla.

Waffles (machine learning)

Waffles is a collection of command-line tools for performing machine learning operations developed at Brigham Young University. These tools are written in C++, and are available under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Description

The Waffles machine learning toolkit contains command-line tools for performing various operations related to machine learning, data mining, and predictive modeling. The primary focus of Waffles is to provide tools that are simple to use in scripted experiments or processes. For example, the supervised learning algorithms included in Waffles are all designed to support multi-dimensional labels, classification and regression, automatically impute missing values, and automatically apply necessary filters to transform the data to a type that the algorithm can support, such that arbitrary learning algorithms can be used with arbitrary data sets. Many other machine learning toolkits provide similar functionality, but require the user to explicitly configure data filters and transformations to make it compatible with a particular learning algorithm. The algorithms provided in Waffles also have the ability to automatically tune their own parameters (with the cost of additional computational overhead).

Political Google bombs in the 2004 U.S. Presidential election

During the 2004 U.S. presidential election, Google bombs were used to further various political agendas. Two of the first were the "miserable failure" Google bomb linked to George W. Bush's White House biography and the "waffles" Google bomb linked to John Kerry's website. Supporters and detractors of the candidates were able to manipulate search engine rankings so that searches for "miserable failure" and "waffles" returned links to the targets' sites.

In 2006, Google altered its searching algorithm to make massive link farms less effective, making search results less politically slanted.

In 2009, President Barack Obama's official White House web site also appeared on the first few results for "miserable failure" on Live Search and Yahoo, and on the first page of results for the word "failure" on Google. The cause of this is disputed, with some claiming it to be the result of a similar campaign. Others believe it to be a result of URL redirection from the old White House site (under President Bush) to the site for President Barack Obama. Because the HTTP301 redirect indicates that the old page is permanently replaced by the new one, it also inherits all links to it and therefore the ranking for the same keywords.