An introduction and guide to my series of posts “Corpora and the Second Amendment” is available here. The corpus data that is discussed can be downloaded here. That link will take you to a shared folder in Dropbox. Important: Use the "Download" button at the top right of the screen. COFEA and COEME: lawcorpus.byu.edu. This […]
Ulf Jäger has just published this impressive article: “A Unique Alxon-Hunnic Horse-and-Rider Statuette (Late Fifth Century CE) from Ancient Bactria / Modern Afghanistan in the Pritzker Family Collection, Chicago", Sino-Platonic Papers, 290 (August, 2019), 72 pages (free pdf). In this study the author offers a first attempt to describe, discuss, and interpret the bronze statuette […]
This new 2nd Cir. brief for @nytimes has a good example of how the fear of splitting infinitives can lead to awkward or ambiguous sentences. "Plausibly" modifies "allege," not "failed." (PS also change "assist it in addressing" to "help it address") https://t.co/kbRUa2LVtf pic.twitter.com/cPtnl9SSql — Ross Guberman (@legalwritingpro) August 22, 2019 Past LLOG coverage… [h/t Daniel […]
In a recent interview ("Immigration Chief: 'Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor Who Can Stand On Their Own 2 Feet'", NPR 8/13/2019), the director of the Citizenship and Immigration Service suggested an update to the poem on the Statue of Liberty: Your browser does not support the audio element. Q: Would you also agree that […]
From today's SMBC, an idea about AI that's obvious in retrospect but seems to be new:
It's common these days to lament the decline of civility caused by various forms of internet discourse. But for an eloquently uncivil condemnation of incivility, it's hard to beat the introduction ("To the Reader") of the 1598 edition of John Florio's Italian dictionary A Worlde of Wordes: I knowe not how I may again adventure […]
People have been wondering when Hong Kong's magnates would speak out on the prolonged protests in their city. Finally one has. That's Li Ka-shing, the richest of them all: "HK Billionaire Li Ka-Shing Breaks Silence Over Protests" (8/15/19 newscast on YouTube). He took out full page advertisements (both seem to be on the front page) in […]
The Hong Kong extradition bill protests, with hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes even a million or two million people (out of a total population of 7.392 million) on the streets, have been going on for more than 11 weeks, with no end in sight, even though the PRC keeps threatening to invade. One of […]
There was an interesting story yesterday on NPR's All Things Considered, "How We Hear Our Own Voice Shapes How We See Ourselves And How Others See Us". Shankar Vedantam starts with the case of a woman whose voice was altered because her larynx was accidentally damaged during an operation, leading to a change in her […]
The book for this year's Penn Reading Project is Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction. From the PRP's description: We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by […]
Cindy Boren, "The Ohio State University wants to trademark its favorite word: ‘The’", WaPo 8/14/2019: Ohio State is serious about calling itself “The” Ohio State University. The grammatical article is right there on many of the school’s seal, logos and signs. Now the university has gotten so serious about that three-letter word that it has […]