Your grandmother probably used one of many algorithms used for fast multiplication. For example, the algorithm that I described in the post is called Booth’s Algorithm. I did not know at the time I wrote the post, I did not know it had a name or even if it existed. I just used it naturally because it made sense. Your grandmother probably did the same.

Regarding the female demographic, I believe most women feel traditionally left out when it comes to male dominated politics which my be an issue.

I notice race was not a factor.

The majority of questions were based on national political news, with a couple international questions. Some people are more knowledgeable and/or only care when it comes to local politics and news. That is to say what directly effects them.

One last thing I would like to add is in regards to news sources.
Where do we get our news? I would have like to have seen that question. This answers all sorts of questions; coverage, quality, audience, demographic, political agenda, etc.

Documenting an API is hard. It’s hard because the internal details of how an entry point in the API works can not always be put to text in a terse and simple form. There is this constant flux between whether an description of what an entry point does is too large, and thus will be unread, or whether it’s too short and thus won’t actually explain what is going on internally. This is especially the case with API calls that do a lot of stuff internally.

To be more concrete about that I have an example. Lately I’ve been doing development with Rhino. Rhino includes a great method to take a java class and make it into a host object one can instantiate in javascript. This method, ScriptableObject.defineClass has the following documentation: http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/apidocs/org/mozilla/javascript/ScriptableObject.html#defineClass(org.mozilla.javascript.Scriptable,%20java.lang.Class)

A lot of important details are missing from this (rather long) description of what defineClass does, like what exactly mapInheritence actually does (scroll down for the other forms for even more documentation), or whether the Java constructor is called if a jsConstructor is implemented, or what kind of arguments jsConstructor can take (and especially the special case where you can get access to the constructor function if you provide a jsConstructor with the correct arguments), or the fact that an entirely new object is created, and so the class you are calling defineClass on need not subclass ScriptableObject (or implement the Scriptable interface). These are just a few of the issues in the documentation here.

So obviously the answer is to read the code! Except not. Looking at the source for ScriptableObject.defineClass will indeed answer some of the above questions, but not all of them, since many of the questions about how stuff gets called are actually only available by digging into the compiler, or the interpreter, or …

This long winded post, which probably should have just been a blog post on my own blog is just trying to get at the point that while you certainly have the right idea (I don’t need no stinking UML diagrams), there is more to it then just making lean documentation. Some really nice to read documentation that gets at only some of what’s possible isn’t that useful if it doesn’t deal with what you need to know.