…and maybe of all time, at least in quantitative terms. In the New York Times Magazine, 4/10/2016:

An article on March 20 about wave piloting in the Marshall Islands misstated the number of possible paths that could be navigated without instruments among the 34 islands and atolls of the Marshall Islands. It is 561, not a trillion trillion.

A trillion trillion is presumably 10²⁴, and 561 is 5.61 x 10², so the original number was off by a factor of about 1.78 x 10²², which is more than a thousand times greater than the estimated number of grains of sand in all the beaches and deserts of planet earth.

ICYMI, the median presidential candidate TV ad:

Here's some quick follow-up to "Data journalism and film dialogue" — Peter Weinberger sent a link to Thomas Lumley's blog post, "Movie stars broken down by age and sex", StatsChat 4/9/2016, and commented "I've always thought of that as their fate, but no, it's some graphs".

Hannah Anderson and Matt Daniels, "Film Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age", A Polygraph Joint 2016:

Lately, Hollywood has been taking so much shit for rampant sexism and racism. The prevailing theme: white men dominate movie roles.

But it’s all rhetoric and no data, which gets us nowhere in terms of having an informed discussion. How many movies are actually about men? What changes by genre, era, or box-office revenue? What circumstances generate more diversity?

To begin answering these questions, we Googled our way to 8,000 screenplays and matched each character’s lines to an actor. From there, we compiled the number of lines for male and female characters across roughly 2,000 films, arguably the largest undertaking of script analysis, ever.

The following photographs come from an article on citizen protests in Lanzhou and Beijing openly demanding governmental transparency on public officials' personal assets (I am no longer able to access the article online).

Posted on imgur:

My posts have been thin recently, mostly because over the past ten days or so I've been involved in the preparation and submission of five conference papers, on top of my usual commitments to teaching and meetings and visitors. Nobody's fault but mine, of course. Anyhow, this gives me some raw material that I'll try to present in a way that's comprehensible and interesting to non-specialists.

One of the papers, with Neville Ryant as first author, was an attempt to take advantage of a large collection of audiobook recordings to explore some dimensions of speaking style. The paper is still under review, so I'll wait to post a copy until its fate is decided — but there are some interesting ideas and suggestive results that I can share. And to motivate you to read the somewhat wonkish explanation that follows, I'll start off with a picture:

Google Translate renders "Tanulok Magyarul" as "I'm learning English":

Name of a restaurant in Xinyi District, Taipei, Taiwan:

shāngxīn suānlà fěn 傷心酸辣粉

In English, the restaurant calls itself "Sad Super Hot Noodles".

I recently got a "Call for Papers" from an international organization whose next annual meeting will be held in Indonesia, and it's clear that part of the production of the flier was in the hands of an Indonesian person, because the affiliations of members of various listed committees included these:

Bielefeld University, Jerman
I2R, Singapura
LIMSI-CNRS, Perancis
Trinity College Dublin, Irlandia
Wonkwang University, Korea Selatan
Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Jepang

I have a great deal of respect for the organization in question, and I would doubtless do much worse if required to create a flier in Indonesian. And clearly much if not all of this is the standard Indonesian spelling of the country names in question. But still…

Update — I should add that this is related to the complicated discussions about Burma/Myanmar, Bombay/Mumbai, Milan/Milano, and so forth.

Apparently I wasn't the only one to be taken aback by the Antonin Scalia School of Law — see Jacob Gershman, "George Mason Tinkers With Name of Scalia Law School to Avoid Awkward Acronym", WSJ 4/5/2016:

Days after George Mason University’s law school announced that it was renaming itself after Justice Antonin Scalia, the school is slightly adjusting what it’s calling itself — thanks to unforeseen and unfortunate wordplay.

The name, officially, remains “The Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University” in honor of the late justice who died in February. But on its website and marketing materials, the name now reads: “The Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University”.

That’s no accident.

The first five words of the “School of Law” version form an acronym that has a phonetic resemblance to a vulgarity, a source of amusement for some bloggers and tweeters and a source of non-amusement for George Mason’s administration, which agreed to rename itself after Justice Scalia at the request of an anonymous donor who pledged $20 million.

A tentative but not finalized decision was made to nip the name-needling in the bud and rearrange the words, a person familiar with the school’s internal discussions told Law Blog. A school spokesman declined to comment.

In a comment to "Character amnesia and kanji attachment " (2/24/16), I wrote:

For the last 40 years and more, I have informally tracked kanji usage in Japanese books, newspapers, journals, magazines, signs, notices, labels, directions, messages, reports, business cards (meishi), packaging, etc., etc. and the conclusion I reach is that the proportion of kanji used now is much less than it was four-five decades ago. Conversely, the proportion of katakana, hiragana, rōmaji, and English has increased dramatically.

Has anyone done studies of this phenomenon in a more formal, rigorous way? And I would suggest extending the investigation back a hundred years or more.

This title on a Reuters story on Yahoo gave me a double-take:

Ex-Heisman winner Troy Smith arrested on DUI and drug charge

There is no suggestion that the Heisman trophy award was ever rescinded. I think in my dialect, once a Heisman trophy winner, always a Heisman trophy winner. I've never heard anyone called an ex-Nobel Prize winner. Am I missing something, or is this really unusual usage? I think even O.J. Simpson is still a Heisman trophy winner.

But I can imagine that the line between where I clearly use ex- and where I don't might not be sharp. Ex-president, ex-spouse are clear. (Hmm, there's also 'former' in competition — that's what I would use for 'department head', not ex-.) I find myself sometimes starting to say "Some of our former Ph.D's (never ex-!!)", but then I usually stop and remove 'former'. Aha, they're our former students, but not our former graduates – they're our graduates forever.

But back to the Heisman trophy. Even if you only hold possession of the trophy for a year, actually or symbolically, you're still a trophy winner forever, aren't you?