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More on trends in the Google ngrams corpus

In "Lexico-cultural decay?", 10/9/2018, I called into question Jonathan Merritt's evidence for the view that "most of the central terms in the Christian vocabulary are rapidly declining". Merritt cites Kesebir & Kesebir 2012, who argue on the basis of Google ngram-viewer data that Study 1 showed a decline in the use of general moral terms […]

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Humanities research with the Google Books corpus

In Science today, there's yesterday, there was an article called "Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books" [subscription required] by at least twelve authors (eleven individuals, plus "the Google Books team"), which reports on some exercises in quantitative research performed on what is by far the largest corpus ever assembled for humanities and […]

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Climategate, Tiger, and Google hit counts: dropping the other shoe

They're getting to be routine, Mark's virtuoso skewerings of those who Google widely but not well — in the post below, taking on James Delingpole's effort to demonstrate that the Climategate story is undercovered by the MSM by showing that the number of Google hits for the phrase is disproportionate to the news stories about […]

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UCLA linguist vastly overestimates prevalence of sarcasm

A casual inspection of the 59 (true) Google hits on "Oooo, you look", suggests that Dr. Willis Jensen, a recent presenter in the brownbag lunch series at Language Log Plaza, vastly overestimated the correlation between utterance initial "Oooo" and sarcasm: the true rate is less than 50%. However, he is correct to identify "Oooo" as a common […]

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Name change

Richard Smith, a 41-year-old care worker in Carlisle, England, did not think his name did justice to the exciting person that he actually was, so he changed his name by deed poll. The new name he chose was Stormhammer Deathclaw Firebrand.

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Knowledge and skills contributed by enslaved Africans

The recent controversy about Florida's new State Academic Standards for Social Studies leaves something out, in my opinion. The point of contention is the assertion (p.6) that "Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit". Critics have taken this as an inappropriate pitch for the benefits […]

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Ask LLOG: "take the vaccine" vs. "get the vaccine"

A few days ago, G.W. sent a question about this tweet: Remember—Biden tried to fire essentially every worker who didn't take the COVID vaccine. That's the real Joe Biden. VOTE! — Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) November 1, 2022 G.W.'s question: I noticed was that he writes "take the vaccine," rather than "get the vaccine." To me, […]

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Against physics

Or rather: Against the simplistic interpretation of physics-based abstractions as equal to more complex properties of the physical universe. And narrowing the focus further, it's a big mistake to analyze signals in terms of such abstractions, while pretending that we're analyzing the processes creating those signals, or our perceptions of those signals and processes.  This […]

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Gender polarization or accommodation in conversational pitch

It's been a while since my last Breakfast Experiment™, but a conversation yesterday spurred me to run a simple data-analysis script with interesting results, presented below. The script and the results are simple, but the issues are complicated — consider yourself warned.

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"Linguistician"?

Helen Barrett, "‘Ça plane pour moi’ was a burst of Belgian punk with a dark twin", Financial Times 6/1/2020 [emphasis added]: Meanwhile, the perennially lucrative “Ça plane pour moi” may not be all that it seems. Bertrand mimed it in TV studios, but whose is the bratty voice on the record? It is a question […]

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The only rex

From a Chinese fish market:

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Knowing when you don't know

It's often observed that current AI systems will generalize confidently to areas far away from anything in their training, where the right answer should be "huh?" This is true even when other available algorithms, often simple ones, could easily diagnose the lack of fit to expectations. We've seen many amusing examples, which we've filed in […]

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The impact of phonetic inputting on Chinese languages

The vast majority of people, both inside and outside of China, input characters on cell phones, computers, and other electronic devices via Hanyu Pinyin or other phonetic script.  Naturally, this has had a huge impact on the relationship between users of the Chinese script and their command of the characters, since they are no longer […]

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