Financial Headline Generator

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Yesterday's SMBC:


The mouseover title: "This works best if you only take headlines from hack partisan websites."

The aftercomic:

Someone needs to do this for real — it would be a good homework assignment in an intro programming course.

Update — In the comments, David Marjanović and RachelP make an interesting observation about the role of "as" in such headlines. RachelP suggests that

Using 'while' rather emphasises that the actions happen during the same timeframe but there is an implication of no causal connection, I would say.

‘Because’ makes a specific claim about causality.

‘As’ sort of maybe implies there might be a causal connection, without specifically claiming one, so is ideal for a headline that wants to make a connection but maintain deniability.

I agree, though the implications of "while" may be more complex — at least in some cases, the sense seems mildly oppositional, almost "although":

"Elizabeth Warren holds fast to VP ambitions while Joe Biden urged to pick woman of color"
"Why Japan’s Jobless Rate Is Just 2.6% While the U.S.’s Has Soared"
"Texas Small Land Sales Volume Declines In 2019 While Price Per Acre Increases"
"U.S. Virus Cases Accelerate While Trump and Governors Move On"

 



14 Comments

  1. Gregory Kusnick said,

    June 21, 2020 @ 7:02 pm

    Surely the last panel should say "Florida Man sets anus aflame".

  2. cliff arroyo said,

    June 22, 2020 @ 1:10 am

    @Gregory Kusnick,
    Exactly what I was going to write!

  3. peterv said,

    June 22, 2020 @ 1:25 am

    For whatever it may be worth, Prodigy and IBM had a system that took as inputs stock market prices and news agency stories, and generated news articles, headlines and graphics as outputs. I saw it demonstrated in 1991.

  4. David Marjanović said,

    June 22, 2020 @ 2:57 am

    As seems to be a very important word.

  5. Philip Taylor said,

    June 22, 2020 @ 4:07 am

    "[I]f you only take headlines from hack partisan websites", from which sources do you take the stories to accompany the headlines ?

  6. Abbey_Road said,

    June 22, 2020 @ 4:31 am

    “Area man…” is probably more likely.

  7. RachelP said,

    June 22, 2020 @ 5:17 am

    @David Marjanović

    I think 'as' is pretty interesting as a headline convention.

    Using 'while' rather emphasises that the actions happen during the same timeframe but there is an implication of no causal connection, I would say.

    ‘Because’ makes a specific claim about causality.

    ‘As’ sort of maybe implies there might be a causal connection, without specifically claiming one, so is ideal for a headline that wants to make a connection but maintain deniability.

    Would others understand the same?

  8. Seth said,

    June 22, 2020 @ 7:07 pm

    This would be pretty easy to do via just scraping the homepage of Google News. Say taking the top "Entertainment" headline. Right now:

    "Stock market

    JUMPS

    as

    Joel Schumacher,
    Director of Batman Films and 'Lost Boys,'
    Dies at 80"

  9. Julian said,

    June 22, 2020 @ 7:57 pm

    "Media stocks nose-dive as linguists' blog mocks lazy journalism."

  10. Barbara Phillips Long said,

    June 22, 2020 @ 11:27 pm

    It might be interesting to look at the incidence of “while” and “as” in traditional print headlines as opposed to online headlines — that is, where space is restricted vs. where space is less restricted or unrestricted. My hypothesis would be that “as” is used more often in narrow or otherwise short headline spaces that are more typical of traditional print newspapers.

  11. Andrew Usher said,

    June 23, 2020 @ 7:15 am

    There are not meant to by any stories accompanying the headlines, and as this is a comic that would be over-thinking it anyway.

    The connective 'as', in addition to its shortness, has the seeming merit of being the most neutral choice available for indicating events took place at the same time without affirming or denying any connection. It implies it no more than correlation implies causation in general.

    k_over_hbarc at yahoo.com

  12. JPL said,

    June 23, 2020 @ 10:33 pm

    Thank you David Marjanovic for noticing the importance of 'as' in these headlines, and RachelP, I think you have it basically right. I offer the following musings on this situation. The headline schema would be something like [puzzling abrupt movement of stock market] as [development or end state phase of any other situation], and what is expressed by the resulting headline is a temporal correlation only. The focused event occurs within the temporal frame of the other event. But as a connotation there is the invitation to consider the second event as a reason or explanation for the first. I think the reason for this is that 'as' has as another major sense (in its categorical structure) the expression of a reason or condition for another puzzling event, as in, "Al was not in his office, as he had been hit by a car on his way to work". In the case of 'while', in the above headlines or in a sentence like, "Nero fiddled while Rome burned", only the temporal correlation is expressed without the causal implication. But if we turn it round and say, "Rome burned while Nero fiddled", we get the inkling of a causal relation of a negative sort usually described as "concessive" or "removal of constraint", which can be seen better with, "While [the responsible official] Nero fiddled, the fire was put out because [on the other hand] the fire brigade did its work". So 'as' and 'since' differ in the other logical senses included in their categories, and this seems to make a difference in the possibilities of their temporal senses; but why do these "temporal" expressions have these other logical senses relating to causality, and why do they differ in just these ways? ('as' has other important senses as well, such as "is a" in non-predicational contexts.)

  13. Arthur Baker said,

    June 24, 2020 @ 12:38 am

    In Australia we have a much-used phrase to describe someone who is hopelessly incompetent and/or oblivious to the obvious: "He wouldn't know if his arse* was on fire".

    Which raises the question, how would one know if one's arse was on fire? Perhaps, these days, simply consult the stock market report.

    * arse = ass in North America

  14. Matt said,

    June 24, 2020 @ 9:30 am

    This reminds me of Midsomer Murders Bot which spits out potential plots for Midsomer Murders (UK crime show of the Agatha Christie variety… local village, multiple deaths via macabre means, connected to some negative undercurrent in the village).

    A recent example:
    “A pornography baron is found dead clutching a book about witchcraft. Suspicion falls on Watership’s choir, worried that sinister clown sightings might threaten the local embroidery club.”

    https://mobile.twitter.com/midsomerplots?lang=en

    Matt

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