From a recent article on the Vanity Fair site by Abigail Tracy ("'There's Blood on the Hands of Members of Congress': Frustrated Democrats Debate Strategy as Mitch McConnell Holds Gun Control in His Pocket," published Aug. 6): Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who was elected weeks before the 2012 mass shooting in Newton, Connecticut, expressed […]
Thai sign over a sink in a restroom, from Alexander Bukh on Facebook:
From Nora Castle, who came across this restaurant which has just opened in Coventry, England:
China Daily News headline: "Xinjiang Uygur sees big influx of visitors", by Cheng Si (8/7/19) N.B.: "Domestic travelers accounted for 98 percent of those visiting the region, while the top three sources of overseas visitors were Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia." Never mind that it's hard to imagine why tourists would be rushing to the world's […]
A Twitter thread from Incunabula, starting here: Language development – in this case sign language – happens in real time, as the need arises. To ensure needed supplies reach them quickly, Hong Kong’s protesters have developed a unique system of hand signals, to send messages through the crowd about what equipment is required. pic.twitter.com/1G5YTGhya0 — […]
From the Facebook page of the Hong Kong poet, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, president of PEN Hong Kong, as reproduced in Andrea Lingenfelter, "At This Moment, Everyone Is a Revolution: The Poems of Tammy Ho Lai-Ming and the Hong Kong Crisis", Blog // Los Angeles Review of Books (8/4/19):
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Taylor Telford, "‘Emotion detection’ AI is a $20 billion industry. New research says it can’t do what it claims", WaPo 7/31/2019: In just a handful of years, the business of emotion detection — using artificial intelligence to identify how people are feeling — has moved beyond the stuff of science fiction to a $20 billion […]
I recently had reasons to consult a book published in 1961, "Structure of Language and its Mathematical Aspects", Proceedings of Symposia in Applied Mathematics, Volume XII, edited by Roman Jakobson. The table of contents: W. V. Quine – Logic as a source of syntactical insights Noam Chomsky – On the notion “Rule of Grammar” Hilary […]
Photograph in the Wall Street Journal, "Hong Kong Protesters Fill Streets in District With History of Violent Clashes: Police are under pressure to contain weeks of tear-gas-soaked demonstrations against mainland China’s growing influence", by John Lyons and Joyu Wang (8/3/19):
A cartoonist and her collaborator have been arrested in China for being "spiritually Japanese" (jīng Rì 精日). They have also been accused of "insulting China" (rǔ Huá 辱华). The latter term is transparent, and I've been hearing it a lot for the last couple of decades, whereas the former term is morphologically more difficult to […]
In "Contextualized Muppet Embeddings" (2/13/2019) I noted the advent of ELMo ("Embeddings from Language Models") and BERT ("Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers"), and predicted ERNiE, GRoVEr, KERMiT, … I'm happy to say that the first of these predictions has come true: "Baidu’s ERNIE 2.0 Beats BERT and XLNet on NLP Benchmarks", Synced 7/30/2019 "Baidu unveils […]
So, kurzgesagt, reads the text that runs along all four sides of this two-millennia-old iron writing instrument excavated from an archeological site in London six years ago:
"FDA approves first novel drug to treat medical burnout": TWISP, WA – The US Food and Drug Administration today approved Peaceaudi (Idongivafumab) injection for intravenous use for the treatment of medical burnout. “Medical burnout is a serious condition, which affects thousands of doctors across the country. The effects of burnout have untold consequences, and could […]