Archive for May, 2017

Trends in presidential pitch II

In Trends in presidential pitch (5/19/2017), I observed that the median fundamental frequency (= "pitch") of President Trump's weekly addresses has increased  steadily since January, by about 30%.  As a point of comparison, I did the same calculation for President Obama's first few months of  weekly addresses, from 1/24/2009 to 5/23/2009, in comparison to Trump's weekly addresses from 1/28/2017 to 5/19/2017:

[I've omitted Trump's three addresses from 3/3/2017, 3/25/2017, and 3/31/2017, because of the differences in recording context and production style explained in the earlier post. Because Obama seems not to have recorded any weekly addresses in February of 2009, the time span of the 13 plotted weekly addresses from the two presidencies is very nearly the same. ]

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (4)

BARF (Belt and Road Forum) 2.0

[This is a guest post by the inimitable satirist, S. Tsow]

[1.0 is this: "BARF (Belt and Road Forum)" (5/19/17)]

Xi Jinping ("Mr. Eleven" [XI]) calls his New Silk Road initiative "One Belt, One Road"  (Yidai-Yilu).  A map I have shows a land route in the north, going westward, bifurcating at Urumchi, and ending at Rotterdam and Istanbul.  OK, that's the "belt".  The "road" shows a sea route in the south that wanders all over the place and ends in the west at Venice.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (14)

BARF (Belt and Road Forum)

We are currently in the midst of a massive propaganda barrage unleashed upon the world by the People's Republic of China.  It's all about something that started out being called "Yīdài yīlù 一帶一路" ("One Belt One Road"), at least that's what it was named when I first heard about it a year or two ago.  The Chinese publicists writing about it in English may have just styled it "The Belt and Road", but everybody I know spoke of it as "One Belt One Road" — "OBOR" for short, which reminded me of Über.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (18)

Trends in presidential pitch

I've been downloading the audio for Donald Trump's Weekly Addresses from whitehouse.gov, as I did for George W. Bush and Barack Obama. And as I did for the previous presidents, I listen to the results and sometimes do simple acoustic-phonetic analyses — see e.g. "Raising his voice", 10/8/2011; "Political sound and silence", 2/8/2016. Recently I thought I noticed a significant change in Mr. Trump's pitch range, and a quick check confirmed this impression.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (3)

Use of the I-word

Trevor Noah explains the cultural constraints:

Comments (9)

"White left" — a Chinese calque in English

I had never heard of "white left" until two or three days ago when I read this article by Chenchen Zheng in openDemocracy (5/11/17):

"The curious rise of the ‘white left’ as a Chinese internet insult".

It's an intelligent, thought-provoking piece, followed by a stimulating discussion among the commenters who come from many perspectives and venture into all sorts of relevant areas (e.g., immigration, race, social constructionism, deregulation, privatization, healthcare, and so on, but even more purely philosophical questions as well).

What I find particularly interesting about the issues swirling around "white left" is that they were initially broached in the context of China, which means that both the advocates and detractors of "white left" thinking were outsiders critiquing the West, yet wondering what implications the "white left" critique of the social, political, and economic situation in the West hold for themselves.

Here's the epigraph:

Meet the Chinese netizens who combine a hatred for the ‘white left’ with a love of US president Donald Trump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (48)

Machine learning

Today's xkcd: slightly unfair, but funny:

Mouseover title: "The pile gets soaked with data and starts to get mushy over time, so it's technically recurrent."

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (7)

"Fli??ed me off"

Sent in with the comment "Who the hell says 'flicked off' instead of 'flipped off'??"

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (31)

C.S. Peirce: "My Life: written for the Class-Book"

In May of 1859, Charles Sanders Peirce was 19 years old, and graduating from Harvard College. Graduates were invited to describe their life for the "Class-Book" — and what Peirce wrote in response stands as the first entry in Volume 1 of the Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition:

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (11)

On whether prairie dogs can talk

Ferris Jabr recently published in the New York Times Magazine an interesting article about the field research of Con Slobodchikoff, professor emeritus of biology at Northern Arizona University, on prairie dog alarm calls. The article title is "Can Prairie Dogs Talk?"

It is an interesting question. People who have read my earlier posts on animal communication have been pressing me to say something about my reaction to it. In this post I will do that. I will not be able to cover all the implications and ramifications of the question, of course; for one interesting discussion that has already appeared in the blogosphere, see this piece by Edmund Blair Bolles. But I will try to be careful and scholarly, and in an unusual departure (disappointingly, perhaps, to those who relished my bitterly sarcastic remarks on cow naming behavior), I will attempt to be courteous. Nonetheless, I will provide a clear and explicit answer to Jabr's question.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments off

Harrisian transformation of the week

Comments (19)

Um…

CNN, CCN, whatever…

More evidence for the Conservation of Gemination.

Comments (19)

English names in East Asia

We have had thousands of students from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore enrolled as undergraduates and graduate students at Penn.  To name just a few at random, there are Andromeda, Tess, Sophie, Isis (but she changed it to Iset after finding out about the Islamic terrorist state), Leander, Lovesky, and so on.  I won't speculate on why they choose the names they do (and, of course, there are plenty of students named David, Peter, Henry, Susan, Nancy, Jane, and even an occasional Carlos, etc.), but the fact remains that almost every student from the Sinosphere who applies to Penn has an English name of one sort or another.  Many of them, prodded by their American teachers or friends, give up these foreign names after a while, or they use their Chinese names and English names in different circumstances.

The same is true for Korea, and it seems to an even greater degree, such that in some circles in Korea, having an English name is obligatory:

"Why Korean companies are forcing their workers to go by English names" (WP, 5/12/17)

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (62)