Language Log

This is (meant to be) funny rather than accurate:

[Via Joe.My.God.]

In reading about the decision at London's Middlesex University to delete its department of philosophy, I came across this video clip, "WBL gives companies the edge", presented by Professor Edward J Esche, Dean of the School of Arts & Education:

What's the word this came from?

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.

Over the weekend, one of the guests on the NPR show "Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen" was the Malaysian singer-songwriter Zee Avi, who has managed to convert YouTube buzz into an indie recording contract and a well-received debut album. Most of her lyrics are in English, but one of her songs, which she performed on the show, code-mixes Malay and English. As she explains, the song "Kantoi" (meaning "Busted") is in "a hybrid of Malay and English called Manglish." I talked about Manglish a few years ago in the post, "Malaysia cracks down on 'salad language,'" where I discussed measures taken by the Malaysian government to ban Malay-English mixtures. I wonder how government officials feel now that Manglish is getting international exposure, thanks to a diminutive, ukulele-strumming songstress.

One of the things that I acquired over the holiday was a Talking Obama Figure ("Hear His Historic and Inspirational Words") from Gemmy Industries Corp. of Coppell, TX, "the worlds largest provider of all your favorite seasonal decor, animation entertainment and lighting products". This is one of a large number of other Gemmy talking toys, from the "Animated Talking Head Skeleton" and the "Gemmy Talking Dancing Hamster 97 Kurt Busch", to the "Dora the Explorer Talking Christmas Doll in Santa Outfit" and the "Animated Talking Bouncing Van of Love", and  Gemmy's monster hit from 2000-2001, "Big Mouth Billy Bass".

As you press of the red button on its pedestal, the Talking Obama Figure cycles through nine passages from president Obama's speeches. What struck me first about this collection of inspirational oratory was that it's performed by somebody else.

The second talk in a workshop on "Natural Algorithms", to be held at Princeton on Nov. 2-3, is Jorge Cortés, "Distributed wombling by robotic sensor networks". But you don't need to be able to attend the workshop in order to learn about this fascinating topic, since the author has recently published a version of the same material. The abstract:

This paper proposes a distributed coordination algorithm for robotic sensor networks to detect boundaries that separate areas of abrupt change of spatial phenomena. We consider an aggregate objective function, termed wombliness, that measures the change of the spatial field along the closed polygonal curve defined by the location of the sensors in the environment. We encode the network task as the optimization of the wombliness and characterize the smoothness properties of the objective function. In general, the complexity of the spatial phenomena makes the gradient flow cause self-intersections in the polygonal curve described by the network. Therefore, we design a distributed coordination algorithm that allows for network splitting and merging while guaranteeing the monotonic evolution of wombliness.

… in Sotomayor, blogged about by Mr. Verb, Language Hat, and Motivated Grammar.