Language Log

The OED has a "birthday words" feature:

Do you know which words entered the English language around the same time you entered the world? Use our OED birthday word generator to find out! We’ve scoured the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to find words with a first known usage for each year from 1900 to 2004. Simply select the relevant decade and click on your birth year to discover a word which entered the English language that year.

Please note that the dates given for these words refer to the current first known usage of the word. The OED team is continuously researching the histories of words (something you may be able to help with), and it’s therefore possible that we will find an earlier sense of the words during our research.

It's been available since December of last year, but I just learned about it today.

Photograph of a sign in Taiwan from Jason Cox, whose friend posted it on Facebook:

Beginning around the end of April, there was a flurry of activity surrounding this Chinglish expression: "no zuo no die".

The big news was that this Chinglishism had supposedly entered the American vocabulary, witness this article:  "Chinese buzzword 'no zuo no die' enters Urban Dictionary", and there were scores of others, most of them giving essentially the same story, namely, that "no zuo no die" had won a place in the Urban Dictionary, a rather dubious distinction.

Yesterday afternoon at an ICASSP-2014 session on music transcription. Just as in the session on Diarization that I wrote about yesterday, most of the papers reported results on published data, and several also offered links to their code. Thus Ken O'Hanlon and Mark D. Plumbley, "Polyphonic Piano Transcription using Non-negative matrix factorisation and group sparsity", which ends with this note:

6. REPRODUCIBLE RESEARCH
This research benefits from the efforts of other researchers to share their code [5] and dataset [21]. The open availability of these resources is commendable, allowing other researchers to easily and accurately compare methods. The code used in the experiments described in this paper is available at http://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/gs bnmf/.

From Anthony Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science:

Imagine the scene: An academic conference. Two cognitive scientists, casual but friendly acquaintances, are chatting in a hotel bar.'

"So, what are you working on now?"

"I've been doing some stuff with [insert one of: ecological psychology, connectionist networks, dynamical modeling, embodied cognition, situated robotics, etc.]."

"But [insert name(s) here] already showed that that approach is hopeless. The paper was published in …"

"Yeah, yeah. I've read that one. I don't buy it at all. [Reinsert name(s) here] doesn't really get it. You see …"

If you're reading this, you've probably taken part in a conversation like this. In fact, nearly everyone working in cognitive science is working on an approach that someone else has shown to be hopeless, usually by an argument that is more or less purely philosophical. This is especially true of the not quite mainstream approaches listed above, the approaches that constitute the core of radical embodied cognitive science, the view I will describe and defend in this book. But it is also true for more mainstream computational cognitive science (e.g., Miller, Galanter, and Pribram 1960). We all know about the arguments that purport to show that our research can never succeed; indeed, nearly every book written by a philosopher begins with an argument that the competing approaches are hopeless. Yet, for some reason, we persist. Somehow we're only convinced by the philosophical arguments that everyone else's approaches are hopeless.

Perhaps the most widespread of all Chinglish expressions (it has become virtually a standard throughout China) is "slip carefully", with extensions such as "carefully slip and fall down", "please slip carefully", and so forth.

TEXTS

IMAGES

This ubiquitous regret has long provided fodder for commercial exploitation—since the 1960s, speed reading courses have been marketed with promises to double or quadruple the rates at which text can be absorbed and understood. More recently, a number of speed reading apps for mobile devices have been released (e.g. Velocity, QuickReader, Acceleread), promising “superhuman” reading speeds that will “accelerate your learning potential” and help you “keep up with the web, blogs, twitter and e-mail.” (Now, if they could only invent an app for quadrupling the speed of answering e-mails, or writing Language Log posts, or thinking about what I’ve just read, that would truly increase my productivity.)

Of all these apps, the recently launched product Spritz offers the most specific pseudo-scientific hype as part of its marketing (their website offers a page soberly titled “The Science”). Since the stated rationalization for the app sounds plausible, at least to the point of managing to impress a number of smart, generally skeptical people who’ve sent me queries about it, it’s worth subjecting it to some psycholinguistic scrutiny.

I spent this morning at at ICASSP-2014 session on "Speaker Diarization". As the picture indicates, the room was not exactly handicapped accessible…

Luckily this is not a problem for me, but my experience of three torn knee ligaments a few years ago sticks with me.

Anyhow, I made it up the stairway to Room Scherma, and learned some useful and interesting things about current techniques for speaker diarization, which is the problem of determining who spoke when in an arbitrary audio or video recording.

At the site of ICASSP 2014 to register yesterday evening, this is what I saw:

Erratic in time, anyhow — maybe no more erratic than usual in terms of content.

Sent in by A.C. from NZ:

My ISP's sign-on page has a 'daily picture', accompanied by some surprising(?) trivia. (Usually the surprise is how strained is the link to the picture and how badly they twist the language — often ending up misusing language in some way or other — this one is itself an example: is it really a fact *about* snow?)

Even a simple Google search offers an Inuktitut word for hello. (Admittedly also a large number of links alleging "no word for hello".)

Sparing you the screenshot, the "Daily Fact" is "Snow: Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow but none for hello."

Arif Dirlik called my attention to a wonderful article entitled "'Speak Tibetan, Stupid': Concepts of Pure Tibetan & the Politics of Belonging" in the Lhakar Diaries.

At the heart of the article is this powerful 16-minute video entitled "Linguistic Diversity on the Tibetan Plateau":

A recent xkcd:

Morse code was first used for telegraphy in 1844. I'm not sure when the French navy started to use it, but I understand that transmission of Morse code by radio began in the 1890s, so if that last plaintive message was sent in 1997, Morse code in the French navy would have had a run of just about 100 years. LiveJournal was started in April of 1999, and of course some people still use it, but it flowered and faded in the U.S. over a period of about a decade: "In January 2009 LiveJournal laid off some employees and moved product development and design functions to Russia", according to Wikipedia.

Yesterday I attended a workshop on Social Media Data at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and it occurred to me to wonder what the social media landscape will be like ten years from now.