As you might expect, they mostly have to do with the pandemic. Here are the top ten from Zhang Ru and Xie Anran, Sixth Tone, "The Chinese Online Slang That Took Over the Internet in 2022" (12/20/22): 1. tiān xuǎn dǎgōng rén 天选打工人 The chosen laborers Derived from the Chinese term da gong ren — […]
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As I observed in "Alexa down, ChatGPT up?" (12/8/2022), there's reason to fear that LLMs ("Large Language Models") like ChatGPT will force major changes in writing education, by offered a cheap and easy way to generate essay assignments. A small sample of the extensive published discussion: Stephen Marche, "The College Essay is Dead", The Atlantic 12/6/2022 Daniel […]
Two recent developments seem to point in opposite directions. On one hand, there are R&D cutbacks as voice assistants are seen as failures. On the other hand, there's widespread enthusiasm for the impressive capabilities of ChatGPT, including suggestions that it will take over internet search (Ben Cost, "Rise of the bots: ‘Scary’ AI ChatGPT could […]
From RfP: I’m one of those writers who will do just about anything to avoid using the same word—or, worse yet, the same phrase—within a short run of text. So imagine my horror this morning when, after hastily responding to a comment on your post about “Parse depth in essays vs. novels”, I noticed the […]
Jon Jackson, "Writer Behind Trump's Rally Music Wants to Distance Himself From QAnon", Newsweek 9/20/2022: Former President Donald Trump on Saturday appeared at an Ohio rally for J.D. Vance, a Republican nominee for Senate. Afterward, Trump received much attention for what many people have claimed was a QAnon element to his appearance. When Trump took […]
Update 9/21/2022 — See "'Mirrors' composer rejects Richard Feelgood and Donald Trump" for confirmation by the original composer of the plagiarism documented below. Alan Feuer and Maggie Haberman, "Trump Rally Plays Music Resembling QAnon Song, and Crowds React", NYT 9/18/2022: Former President Donald J. Trump appeared to more fully embrace QAnon on Saturday, playing a […]
Intriguing t-shirt that is making the rounds these days: (source)
As seen on Weibo: Shanghai residents go to their balconies to sing & protest lack of supplies. A drone appears: “Please comply w covid restrictions. Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing.” https://t.co/0ZTc8fznaV pic.twitter.com/pAnEGOlBIh — Alice Su 蘇奕安 (@aliceysu) April 6, 2022
Guillaume Cabanac, Cyril Labbé & Alexander Magazinov, "'Bosom peril' is not 'breast cancer': How weird computer-generated phrases help researchers find scientific publishing fraud", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1/13/2022: In 2020, despite the COVID pandemic, scientists authored 6 million peer-reviewed publications, a 10 percent increase compared to 2019. At first glance this big number seems […]
If you want to get an idea of what preoccupies Chinese people, one good way is to take a gander at current lingo. SupChina provides a convenient compilation from two authoritative sources. In the past, I've been disappointed by many Chinese words of the year lists because they seemed to have been blatantly chosen by […]
Article by Holly Else in Nature (8/5/21): "‘Tortured phrases’ give away fabricated research papers Analysis reveals that strange turns of phrase may indicate foul play in science" Here are the beginning and a few other selected portions of the article: In April 2021, a series of strange phrases in journal articles piqued the interest of […]
In his addresses to the Liǎnghuì 兩會 (Two Sessions), annual plenary meetings of the national People's Congress and the national committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference that have just concluded in Beijing (March 4-11), Xi Jinping repeatedly stressed “guó zhī dà zhě 国之大者”. The grammar is clearly literary, with the first character a […]