Language Log

Like other regular readers of Andrew Sullivan's web log, I was not surprised that he was happy about Sarah Palin's decision not to run for U.S. president in 2012. However, one aspect of his commentary ("Rejoice!", 10/5/2011) did surprise me. The puzzle is in the second sentence:

Our Three Year National Nightmare Is Over!

Palin talks to Mark Levin here (her voice is the deeper one).

Mark Levin is a radio talk show host, and Sullivan's link goes to a page on Levin's web site that includes not only the text of Palin's statement, but also accesses an mp3 file of a 15-minute segment of his show. My interest here, of course, is not in the politics but in the phonetics. Is it really true that Sarah Palin's voice is deeper (i.e. lower in pitch) than Mark Levin's?

FDR had his weekly "Fireside chats", and in 1982 Ronald Reagan began the modern tradition of weekly presidential addresses, which U.S. presidents since then have maintained. I don't think that very many people actually listen to these things — no one that I've asked has ever admitted to regular consumption. But I've been collecting them since 2004, and listening to most of them, and a few days ago I noticed something.

A cool demo video from the MAGE pHTS project:

MAGE/pHTS, a real-time speech synthesis library from NUMEDIART on Vimeo.

When the Google Ngram Viewer came out, I tempered my enthusiastic praise with a complaint ("More on 'culturomics'", 12/17/2010):

The Science paper says that "Culturomics is the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture".  But  as long as the historical text corpus itself remains behind a veil at Google Books, then "culturomics" will be restricted to a very small corner of that definition, unless and until the scholarly community can reproduce an open version of the underlying collection of historical texts.

I'm happy to say that the (non-Google part of) the Culturomics crew at the Harvard Cultural Observatory have taken a significant step in that direction, building on the work of the Open Library. You can check out what they've done with an alpha version of an online search interface at http://bookworm.culturomics.org/. But in my opinion, the online search interface, alpha or not, is the least important part of what's going on here.

Now that I've got morning internet access again, and the semester is more or less underway, it's time for another Breakfast Experiment™.

In "Markov's Heart of Darkness" (7/18/2011) and "Finch linguistics" (7/13/2011) , we learned that Joseph Conrad's paragraphs are more markovian — at least in terms of their distribution of lengths — than zebra finch song bouts are. So I wondered about length distributions in some other sources — pause groups in conversational speech, and lines in Walt Whitman's poetry.

Less than 50 years ago, this is what the future of data visualization looked like — H. Beam Piper, "Naudsonce", Analog 1962:

She had been using a visibilizing analyzer; in it, a sound was broken by a set of filters into frequency-groups, translated into light from dull red to violet paling into pure white. It photographed the light-pattern on high-speed film, automatically developed it, and then made a print-copy and projected the film in slow motion on a screen. When she pressed a button, a recorded voice said, "Fwoonk." An instant later, a pattern of vertical lines in various colors and lengths was projected on the screen.

This is in a future world with anti-gravity and faster-than-light travel.

Nick Collins, "Earth is home to 8.7 million species", The Telegraph 8/23/2011:

Previous guesses had put the total number of different species at anywhere between three million and 100 million, but a new calculation based on the way in which life forms are classified puts the estimate at the lower end of that scale.

The list of known species currently stands at about 1.2 million, but experts said that advances in technology meant that the remainder could be found and classified within the next century.

The study was undertaken by researchers from the Census of Marine Life, a ten-year project involving 2,700 scientists from more than 80 countries aimed at assessing the diversity of life in our seas and oceans which concluded in October 2010.

The best part of Monday's post on the Facebook authorship-authentication controversy ("High-stakes forensic linguistics", 7/25/2011) was the contribution in the comments by  Ron Butters, Larry Solan, and Carole Chaski.  It's interesting to compare the situation they describe — and the frustration that they express about it — with the history of technologies for answering questions about the source of bits of speech rather than bits of text.

I gave a talk a few weeks ago at the Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie in Paris, founded in 1897 by L'abbé P.-J. Rousselot. Antonia Colazo-Simon took this picture of l'abbé and me:

Over the past few months, there have been several developments in the legal battle between Paul Ceglia and Mark Zuckerberg over Ceglia's claim to part ownership of Facebook. As Ben Zimmer explains ("Decoding Your E-Mail Personality", NYT Sunday Review, 7/23/2011):

Mr. Ceglia says that a work-for-hire contract he arranged with Mr. Zuckerberg, then an 18-year-old Harvard freshman, entitles him to half of the Facebook fortune. He has backed up his claim with e-mails purported to be from Mr. Zuckerberg, but Facebook’s lawyers argue that the e-mail exchanges are fabrications. […]

The law firm representing Mr. Zuckerberg called upon Gerald McMenamin, emeritus professor of linguistics at California State University, Fresno, to study the alleged Zuckerberg e-mails. (Normally, other data like message headers and server logs could be used to pin down the e-mails’ provenance, but Mr. Ceglia claims to have saved the messages in Microsoft Word files.) Mr. McMenamin determined, in a report filed with the court last month, that “it is probable that Mr. Zuckerberg is not the author of the questioned writings.” Using “forensic stylistics,” he reached his conclusion through a cross-textual comparison of 11 different “style markers,” including variant forms of punctuation, spelling and grammar.

Or at least some automatically-derived Google thesaurus does:

For some searches including the term "Freud", a significant fraction of the hits (including the second one in the screenshot above) do not contain "Freud" (or derivatives like "Freudian") at all. At the same time, instances of "Darwin" in the displayed snippets are put into bold typeface, as if they were instances of one of the search terms.

At the Revolutions blog, David Smith posts a nice little discussion about growth in jobs where people are making sense of data; he used job search site indeed.com to look at trends in job postings. Apparently postings involving "statistician" are not seeing a lot of growth, but "data scientists" have really started to catch on during the last year or so. (Hat tip to Joe Reisinger for tweeting this. He comments that data scientist is a "truly terrible name, but it's undeniably a different skill set: way too many statisticians can't code".)

It seems that the length of Joseph Conrad's paragraphs — unlike the length of zebra finch song bouts — is well approximated by a two-state markov process.