Language Log

So many complaints about science journalism appear here on Language Log that it is only proper that we should occasionally draw attention to a fine piece of popular science writing. One such, I think after one read-through, is Natalie Angier's "Gut instinct's surprising role in math" in The New York Times (hat tip to Barbara Scholz, who pointed me to it). It's reporting on a paper in Nature by Halberda, Feigenson, and Mazzocco, which supports the view that (in Feigenson's words) "your evolutionarily endowed sense of approximation is related to how good you are at formal math." There have been many Language Log posts on related themes, like "The cognitive technology of number" (July 11, 2008) and "The Pirahã and us" (October 6, 2007). There is intrinsic interest in what Angier reports: evidence that how good you are at subitization, the instinctive quantity-assessing ability you share with many animal species, is correlated with, and perhaps even determinative of, the extent to which you will readily develop abilities at linguistically formalized manipulation of mathematical concepts. But Angier's article also represents an instance of really good generally accessible writing about science, in a contemporary American newspaper. It can be done. Some science journalists put out good product. And not all journalism that touches on the cognitive and linguistic sciences gets grumbled about on Language Log.

Commenting on our posts about Business Week's credulous coverage of the SpinSpotter software release, Trent defended his former profession:

When we are knowledgeable in a particular field, we notice errors made by outsiders. […] Because the typical journalist at a newspaper is a generalist, and because he or she may have to write 10 column inches within 20 minutes about something unfamiliar, there are bound to be errors — some substantive, some not so. […] Demanding that a newspaper hire experts in all fields is just … unreasonable. Demanding that a journalist spend hours researching the material — well, you can get it perfectly accurate, or you can get it fast. Newspapers are in the business of being fast. Journals are in the business of being rigorous.

I've heard versions of this excuse many times over the years. And with respect, I believe that it's irrelevant to the case under discussion, and largely nonsense in general.

What is spin? According to the OED's 1993 additions,

2. g. fig. A bias or slant on information, intended to create a favourable impression when it is presented to the public …

What is SpinSpotter? According to Claire Cain Miller in the NYT ("Start-Up Attacks Media Bias, One Phrase at a Time", 9/8/2008), it's a Web tool that "scans news stories for signs of spin".

The Spinoculars find spin in three ways, said Mr. Herman. First, it uses an algorithm to seek out phrases that violate six transgressions that the company’s journalism advisory board came up with based on the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. They are personal voice, passive voice, a biased source, disregarded context, selective disclosure and lack of balance. […]

SpinSpotter’s algorithm also uses a database of common phrases that are used when spinning a story. Finally, readers can flag instances of spin. Other SpinSpotter users can see these flags, and the reported phrases will enter the spin database.

The guy being quoted is  "SpinSpotter founder and chief creative officer, Todd Herman". Other stories about SpinSpotter — and there are quite a few of them — give a similar picture.

But here's another definition, offered by me in comments on a weblog post yesterday:

This might be an unusual type of demoware …, one that is released for general use in the hope that enough people will submit their proposed spin-spots to give the company enough free training data to actually develop some of the technology that they pretended to have in the first place.

A SpinSpotter tool — a plugin for the Firefox browser — has been announced in a credulous article by Jon Fine in Business Week. It will (its inventors claim) scan the text of web pages that you view, and identify passages of untrustworthy spinspeak. Our experts at Language Log's research laboratory have run it through our secret multi-million-dollar bullshit detector, and we got a strong positive. Having written several times before on Language Log about people who publish claims about language, and mention the passive voice, when they are completely unable to tell an active clause from a passive clause, I was delighted to see one more instance. Look at this description, from Jon Fine's description of SpinSpotter, detailing the "tenets" (i.e., diagnostics) that enable SpinSpotter to spot spin:

The tenets are: reporter's voice (adjectives used by a journalist that go beyond the supporting evidence in the article); passive voice (example: a story says "bombs land" without stating which party is responsible for them); a biased source (a quoted source's partisanship is not clearly identified); disregarded context (a political rally's attendance is reported to be "massive," but would it have been so huge had the surviving members of the Beatles not played?); and lack of balance (a news story on a controversial topic gives much more credence to one side's claims).

Bombs land is of course an active clause. Passive clauses always have a participial form of the verb, in almost all cases (setting aside "concealed passives" like "This needs looking at") a past participle. The past particple of land has the form landed. So quite independently of the absurdity of an algorithm running on raw text being able to spot things as subtle as strength of supporting evidence or balance on controversial topics, the inventors of this crucially linguistic tool (or the people who wrote their press release) don't know even the most elementary things about English grammar. Caveat downloader.

This is a little lesson in how not to investigate a linguistic question and in how not to use expert opinion about that question. For a change, our target is not BBC News, but instead Wired.com. The piece, by Brian X. Chen, begins promisingly:

The validity of recent e-mails supposedly sent by Steve Jobs to Apple customers is questionable, according to an analysis by Wired.com.

We carefully examined the writing style and grammar of three recent e-mails claimed to have been sent by Jobs with three samples of his confirmed writing.

With help from Wired.com's copy editors and Patrick Farrell, head of the UC Davis linguistics department, we observed that the customer-reported e-mails contained elementary grammatical errors, which are absent from Jobs' real e-mails; the CEO has a much stronger command of the English language than recent e-mails suggest.

It appears, however, that the Wired staff started with a hypothesis, that the e-mail messages were not genuine, based on considerations that had nothing to do with the language of the messages, and then searched for linguistic features that would support this hypothesis, labeling as "grammatical errors" entirely acceptable variants in standard English.

Then, when the article finally gets around to Patrick Farrell, it turns out that what he actually said didn't agree with Wired's opinion:

"The grammar in all the e-mails is competent, native, and standard English," he said.

However, he said the evidence of just three short e-mails was too scant to come to a conclusion.

"I don't see anything obvious that would lead me to believe that the three questionable emails are fake," he said. "I think one would need more evidence. Longer emails or something."

Wretched analysis, appalling reporting.

The LPGA has announced that it is backing down from its "plans to suspend players who could not efficiently speak English at tournaments" (which I posted about here).

[Democratic California State Sen. Leland] Yee said he understood the tour's goal of boosting financial support, but disagreed with the method. "In 2008, I didn’t think an international group like the LPGA would come up with a policy like that," Yee said. "But at the end of the rainbow, the LPGA did understand the harm that they did."

This understanding is indirectly reflected in a statement from the LPGA:

"We have decided to rescind those penalty provisions," [LPGA Tour commissioner Carolyn] Bivens said in a statement. "After hearing the concerns, we believe there are other ways to achieve our shared objective of supporting and enhancing the business opportunities for every tour player."

[ Hat tip to Ben Zimmer. ]

To a recent article about metamaterials ("Chinese boffins crack invisible-shed problem", 9/3/2008), Lewis Page at The Register added this disclaimer:

WARNING: Habitual use of our science coverage may harm your baby and others around you. Such use has been linked to incidence of the King's Evil and is thought to contribute to global warming, entropy, substance abuse, terrorism, hair loss, volcanoes, orbital decay, intellectual languor and decline of moral standards in team sport.

Unfortunately, this warning is not yet required by the FCC. But if you're in the market for some entropy, intellectual languor and decline of moral standards in team sport, it'll be hard to top the past week's reports about the "monogamy gene" (AKA the "infidelity gene", the "divorce gene", etc.). A small sample of the headlines (with linked stories):

"Is monogamy genetic?"; "Baby, my genes made me do it"; "Some men carry 'commitment-phobia' gene"; "Is Lover Boy a Louse? It May Be Genetic"; "Infidelity: It's All In the The Genes"; "Would you abort George Clooney?";  "Study: For men, genetics might untie marital bonds"; "Marriage Woes? Husband's Genes May Be At Fault"; "Marriage problems? Husband's genes may be to blame"; "Study Finds Fear of Commitment May Be in a Man's Genes"; "Commitment phobes can blame genes: A man's reluctance to marry may be down to a genetic 'flaw', say researchers"; "Marital crisis? Blame it on male genes"; "'Bonding Gene' Could Help Men Stay Married"; "Divorce gene linked to relationship troubles"; "Scientists Discover the Monogamy Gene"; "Gene Variant Holds The Key To A Long And Happy Marriage"; etc., etc.

You can pretty much guess how this is going to turn out. The researchers found a small effect — the biggest result was a 5% difference in group means on a "Partner Bonding Scale", for 41 (out of 1,104) guys who were homozygotic for one of the 11 alleles examined at one of three loci. There was a lot of overlap in the distributions — the biggest effect size was about 0.38 — and most of the differences and effect sizes were much smaller. And because it was a twin study, the small group of subjects with the genetic pattern associated with the biggest difference was effectively even smaller, and may well have shared a large number of other cultural and genetic traits.

But most of the media coverage presented this as another triumph of contemporary genetic Calvinism: the fate of our relationships is written at birth in the book of our genes.

According to Matthew Moore in the Daily Telegraph:

Google searches turn up 3,810 results for "clbuttic", 5,120 for "consbreastution", and 1,450 for "Buttociated Press".

Well, Language Log readers who had already read about the athletic feats of Olympic star Tyson Homosexual will immediately recognize the clbuttic symptoms, and will know what has gone on here. Surely, I was moved to think (but see the update below), surely someone who is being paid for writing filtering software should be able to distinguish instances of ass preceded and followed by other letters from instances flanked by non-letters such as spaces or punctuation. Not to get too nerdy about it, but for those acquainted with Unix editors like vi or sed, shouldn't a programmer know the difference between the s/ass/butt/g command (wrong) and the perhaps slightly more reasonable s/\([^a-z]\)ass\([^a-z]\)/\1butt\2/g instruction? This much was within the competence of even rank beginners by the sixth week of the linguistically-based freshman course on Unix that I used to teach at UC Santa Cruz.

Yet Moore mentions sites on which you can see discussions of embbutties dealing with pbuttport holders and even unconsbreastutional laws pbutted by a Congress butterting powers to buttbuttinate foreign leaders.

Ray Nagin has some company. Late last week, as Mayor Nagin was warning of a potential mandatory evacuation of New Orleans ahead of Hurricane Gustav, he said: "I think most people will adheed [æd'hid] to that." (Audio and discussion here.) Tonight on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann interviewed Gary Miller, National Disaster Relief Operations Director for the American Red Cross, about the current situation with Gustav. Miller said:

And by people adheeding [əd'hidɪŋ] the warning and paying attention to the officials and leaving town and getting to safe areas, this makes all the difference in the world.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city in preparation for Hurricane Gustav. He had warned that such a move might be necessary on Thursday night, at a press conference with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. A clip of Nagin speaking at the press conference was played in a segment on NPR's "Morning Edition" on Friday. I've isolated some of the audio here:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This is, this is serious business, and
we would not be calling for a mandatory evacuation
unless we thought there was a serious threat
and I think most people will adheed [æd'hid] to that.

Though he clearly said [æd'hid], NPR transcribed it rather differently in its online article:

"This is serious business. We would not be calling for a mandatory evacuation unless we thought there was a serious threat," Nagin said. "And I think most people will pay heed to that."

I think it's turning into a trend — journalists are becoming linguists. Really bad linguists, but any sort of interest in the analysis of language and communication ought to be a good thing for the field, right? Unfortunately, in this case, it's a bad thing for the nation.

A couple of days ago ("Does CBS News mean it?", 8/27/2008), the CBS News Morning Show enlisted an ex-FBI gesture analyst to support the now-standard narrative about Clinton ego and Democratic disunity. There was one small problem: his analysis was based on vague but checkable assertions, which 20 minutes of investigation sufficed to call into question.

This morning, I'll subject another journo-linguistic analysis — of the same speech by Hillary Clinton — to a few minutes of empirical and logical scrutiny.

This just in (well, a couple of days ago): the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) "has warned its members that they must become conversant in English by 2009 or face suspension". According to the NYT article, this policy is "believed to be the only such policy in a major sport". Three other North America-based major sports organizations (Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, and the National Basketball Association) have no such policy: "Given the diverse nature of our sport, we don't require that players speak English," says MLB; "This is not something we have contemplated," says the NBA.

Many of the comments on the article are crying foul, claiming discrimination, xenophobia, racism, ethnocentrism, whathaveyou. The common denominator of all of these evils, ignorance, is almost certainly at play in the decision to adopt this policy as opposed to other ways to get what the LPGA claims to be aiming for with the policy: more sponsorship opportunities. Unlike larger, better-established sports organizations like MLB, the NHL, and the NBA, the LPGA "is a group of individual players from diverse backgrounds whose success as an organization depends on its ability to attract sponsorships from companies looking to use the tour for corporate entertainment and advertisement." The geniuses at the LPGA appear to think that the money will flow a lot better if only their excellent South Korean players can answer post-game interview questions in English.

According to CBS News ("Did Hillary Mean It?", 8/27/2008):

In her speech to the Democratic convention Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton urged fellow Democrats to vote for Barack Obama, and she did it in no uncertain terms — verbally.

But did her body language match her words?

Body language expert and former FBI agent Joe Navarro says he doesn't think so.