By Cory Doctorow at 9:53 am Tuesday, May 22
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Nicko from the Sunlight Foundation sez,
The U.S. Congress speaks at nearly a full grade level lower than it did seven years ago, according to a new Sunlight Foundation analysis. Using the CapitolWords.org website -- which features the most popular words and phrases in the Congressional Record since 1996 -- Sunlight reviewed the vocabulary and sentence structure of what members of Congress are saying.
Today's Congress speaks at about a 10.6 grade level, down from a high of 11.5 in 2005. By comparison, the U.S. Constitution is written at a 17.8 grade level, the Federalist Papers at a 17.1 grade level and the Declaration of Independence at a 15.1 grade level. The Flesch-Kincaid test was used to conduct the analysis, which equates higher-grade levels with longer words and longer sentences.
A complete database of how each member in the current Congress ranks in the analysis is available.
The analysis, written by Senior Fellow Lee Drutman in collaboration with Software Developer Dan Drinkard, is broken into three parts on the Sunlight blog:
* Summary and 'report card' infographic
* Full analysis and complete methodology
* Congressional use of top SAT vocabulary words
Top Five
*
Rep. Daniel Lungren (R-CA) -- 16.01
*
Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA) -- 14.94
*
Rep. Jim Gerlach (R-PA) -- 14.19
*
Rep. Thomas Petri (R-WI) -- 14.19
*
Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-HI) -- 14.18
Bottom Five
*
Rep. John Mulvaney (R-SC) -- 7.95
*
Rep. Rob Woodall (R-GA) -- 8.02
*
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) -- 8.04
*
Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI) -- 8.09
*
Rep. Tim Griffin (R-AR) -- 8.13
Is Congress getting dumber, or just more plainspoken?
(Thanks, Nicko!)
By Cory Doctorow at 2:49 pm Friday, May 11
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Amara, the free/open subtitling/dubbing project that used to be called Universal Subtitles, has just landed $1,000,000 in funding from the Knight Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation. Amara is run by the Participatory Culture Foundation, a charitable nonprofit that produces technologies to increase and deepen the average person's ability to participate in the online world. Amara is a technology that lets people bridge linguistic barriers in the world of video. Here's TheNextWeb's Anna Heim on the announcement:
In other words, it is a great example of what crowdsourcing can achieve. According to its parent non-profit, Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF), the platform’s users have translated over 170,000 videos since its founding in 2010, including popular videos such as President Obama’s message to Sudan and KONY 2012.
However, it could expand into other territories, such as dubbing – hence its rebranding with a broader name, which may also help it capture the sense of community it is trying to create. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why Mozilla was interested in supporting the platform, its executive director Mark Surman explains:
“Mozilla’s global translation and localization communities have always been at the heart of who we are. For the first time, Amara lets us extend our community translation work to include video,” said Mark Surman, Executive Director of Mozilla. “We are proud to support Amara as they build a crucial part of the open web.”
Knight Foundation and Mozilla invest $1m in crowdsourced video translation project Amara
(Disclosure: I am proud to volunteer on the board of directors for the Participatory Culture Foundation)
By Cory Doctorow at 10:28 am Friday, Apr 27
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Seth Schoen snapped this Vatican City ATM that displays instructions in Latin.
Latin ATM
(via Kottke)
By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 9:53 am Friday, Apr 27
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Back in 2002, psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the economics Nobel Prize for showing that human beings don't have a really good intuitive grasp of risk. Basically, the decisions we make when faced with a risky proposition depend more on how the question is framed than on what the actual outcome might be.
The classic example is to tell a subject that there's going to be a disaster. Out of 600 people, she has a chance of saving 200 if she takes x risk. If she doesn't take the risk, everybody dies. Most people will take the risk in that scenario, but if you present the same situation and frame it differently—"If you take this risk, 400 people will die"—the decisions suddenly flip in the other direction. Nothing has changed about the outcome. But everything has changed in terms of how people feel about the decision they have to make. This is the kind of thing that matters a lot to economics because it helps to explain why economic behavior in the real world isn't always as rational and self-interested as it is in theory.
There's a new study out in the journal Psychological Science that might add another layer of complexity to Kahneman's research. If you're thinking and talking in your native language, you're likely to respond to a risky situation pretty much exactly as in the classic example. But, these researchers found that if you're thinking and talking about the situation in a second language, things change. At Wired, Brandon Keim explains:
The first experiment involved 121 American students who learned Japanese as a second language. Some were presented in English with a hypothetical choice: To fight a disease that would kill 600,000 people, doctors could either develop a medicine that saved 200,000 lives, or a medicine with a 33.3 percent chance of saving 600,000 lives and a 66.6 percent chance of saving no lives at all.
Nearly 80 percent of the students chose the safe option. When the problem was framed in terms of losing rather than saving lives, the safe-option number dropped to 47 percent. When considering the same situation in Japanese, however, the safe-option number hovered around 40 percent, regardless of how choices were framed. The role of instinct appeared reduced.
That's interesting. The researchers tried this basic thing with several different groups of people—mostly native English speakers—and used several different risk scenarios, some involving loss of life, others involving loss of a job, and others involving decisions about betting money on a coin toss. They saw the same results in all the tests: People thinking in their second language weren't as swayed by the emotional impact of framing devices.
One study doesn't prove this is universally true. Even if it is true, nobody knows yet exactly why. But Keim says that the researchers think the difference lies in emotional distance. If you have to pause and really put some brain power into thinking about grammar and vocabulary, you can't just jump straight into the knee-jerk reaction.
Read the rest of Keim's write-up on the study at Wired.com
Via Marilyn Terrell
By Cory Doctorow at 7:57 am Tuesday, Apr 24
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TheWorldGeography has a list of six places whose names are a single character: seven villages in Norway called Å and another in Sweden called Å, a river in Oregon called D and another in Scotland called E, Denmark's Ø hills, and a village in France called Y. Why not?
Å is a village in the municipality of Moskenes, in Lofoten, Norway. This village is traditionally a fishing village, specialising in stockfish, but now also features tourism. The town contains the Lofoten Stockfish Museum and the Norwegian Fishing Village Museum. The place is sometimes referred to as Å i Lofoten ("i" means "in") to distinguish it from other places named Å (seven villages in Norway have the name Å). In Scandinavian languages, "Å" means "river".
6 Geographical Terms With Shortest Names in the World
(Thanks, Bosko!)
(Image: File:Å i Lofoten.jpg , Matthew Mayer/Wikimedia Commons)
By Cory Doctorow at 4:20 pm Monday, Apr 23
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The PayPal Product Name Generator automates PayPal's nasty habit of giving stupid product names to the companies they acquire. I got "PayPal Website Advanced Checkout Online," "PayPal Online Pro Advanced," "PayPal Payflow Payments Express," and "PayPal Payments Link Checkout."
PayPal Product Name Generator
A nice piece of frightening securityspeak to conjure with:
forever-day bugs, which are known bugs that the vendor has no intention of patching. These are often found in control systems, and are the sort of thing that Stuxnet exploited to attack the Iranian nuclear program. These controllers are also found on other kinds of industrial lines and, of course, in aircraft. "Forever day is a play on 'zero day,' a phrase used to classify vulnerabilities that come under attack before the responsible manufacturer has issued a patch. Also called iDays, or 'infinite days' by some researchers..." [Ars Technica]
— Cory
By Cory Doctorow at 8:04 am Tuesday, Apr 10
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Panos Ipeirotis, who writes the aptly named "A Computer Scientist in a Business School" blog, describes how he made national news by unraveling a multimillion-dollar "clickfraud" enterprise that used hidden frames, pornographic traffic brokerages, clever misdirection and obfuscation techniques, traffic laundering, skimmed traffic, and other techniques from the shadier side of the Internet's ad-supported ecosystem to extract anywhere from $400K to $5M to date. The monetary losers were pornographic sites, but a number of high-profile "legit" sites were implicated, unwittingly used as "laundries" for the traffic. The scheme itself is awfully baroque, and Ipeirotis does an admirable job of laying it out, while introducing all these marvelously weird terms describing the modern practices of Internet grifters.
At this point, we now know how this person makes money. Clearly, there is click-fraud: the scammer is employing click-fraud services to click on the pay-per-click ads "displayed" in his parked domains. If some of the ads are also pay-per-impression, he may also get paid for these invisible impressions that happen within the 0x0 iframe.
Why the parked domains though? Why not doing the same directly within the porn site? The answer is simple: Traffic laundering.
What do I mean by "traffic laundering"? First, the ad networks are unlikely to place many ads within a porn site. On the other hand, they have ad-placement services for parked domains. Second, the publishers that get the traffic from the parked domains see in the referral URLs some legitimately-sounding domain names, not a porn site. Even if they go and check the site, they will only see an empty site full of ads. Nothing too suspicious. Hats off to the scammer. Clever scheme.
You think we are done? No. There is one more piece in the puzzle. How does the scammer attract visitors to the porn site?
The other interesting part: The porn website does not really contain porn! There are a few images but most of the links are to other porn website that actually host the video. In other words, the scammer does not even pay the cost of hosting porn!
Uncovering an advertising fraud scheme. Or "the Internet is for porn" (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
By Cory Doctorow at 10:50 am Friday, Apr 6
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You had me at hello: How phrasing affects memorability, a clever study of "memorable phrases" from movies and advertisements from Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Justin Cheng, Jon Kleinberg, Lillian Lee at Cornell attempts to uncover why certain phrases become part of our collective history.
The results are interesting. The phrases themselves turn out to be significantly distinctive, meaning they're made up of combinations of words that are unlikely to appear in the corpus. By contrast, memorable phrases tend to use very ordinary grammatical structures that are highly likely to turn up in the corpus.
They also found that memorable phrases tend to use pronouns (other than you), the indefinite article a rather than the definite article the, and verbs in the past rather than present tense. These are all features that tend to make phrases general rather than specific.
So memorable phrases contain generic pearls of wisdom expressed with unusual combinations of words in ordinary sentences.
The Secret Science of Memorable Quotes
By Cory Doctorow at 1:54 pm Monday, Apr 2
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YodaFan has recut Yoda's scenes from the Star Wars movies to correct his grammar. I've always summarized Yoda's speech patterns with this: "Bad grammar have I you think? When 900 years old you are, talk like your zayde you will, too!"
Speaking Correct Order of Words Yoda Is (via IO9)
By Cory Doctorow at 12:23 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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On Project Gutenberg, the 1811 edition of Francis Grose's "Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue," a compleat look at all the dirty cussin' of the early 1800s. It was produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team, who clearly have admirably filthy minds. Some of my favorites:
ACCOUNTS. To cast up one's accounts; to vomit.
ADMIRAL OF THE NARROW SEAS. One who from drunkenness
vomits into the lap of the person sitting opposite to
him. SEA PHRASE.
AMBASSADOR OF MOROCCO. A Shoemaker. (See Mrs.
Clarke's Examination.)
APE LEADER. An old maid; their punishment after
death, for neglecting increase and multiply, will be, it is
said, leading apes in hell.
APPLE DUMPLIN SHOP. A woman's bosom.
APPLE-PYE BED. A bed made apple-pye fashion, like what is called a turnover apple-pye, where the sheets are so doubled as to prevent any one from getting at his length between them: a common trick played by frolicsome country lasses on their sweethearts, male relations, or visitors.
ATHANASIAN WENCH, or QUICUNQUE VULT. A forward girl, ready to oblige every man that shall ask her.
BAG OF NAILS. He squints like a bag of nails; i. e. his eyes are directed as many ways as the points of a bag of nails. The old BAG OF NAILS at Pimlico; originally the BACCHANALS.
BAYARD OF TEN TOES. To ride bayard of ten toes, is to
walk on foot. Bayard was a horse famous in old romances,
BLANKET HORNPIPE. The amorous congress.
BODY OF DIVINITY BOUND IN BLACK CALF. A parson.
BORN UNDER A THREEPENNY HALFPENNY PLANET, NEVER TO BE WORTH A GROAT.
Said of any person remarkably unsuccessful in his attempts or
profession.
TO BOX THE JESUIT, AND GET COCK ROACHES. A sea term for masturbation; a crime, it is said, much practised by the reverend fathers of that society.
BUTTOCK AND TONGUE. A scolding wife.
CHOAKING PYE, or COLD PYE, A punishment inflicted on any person sleeping in company: it consists in wrapping up cotton in a case or tube of paper, setting it on fire, and directing the smoke up the nostrils of the sleeper. See HOWELL'S COTGRAVE.
CHRISTMAS COMPLIMENTS. A cough, kibed heels, and a snotty nose.
COFFEE HOUSE. A necessary house. To make a coffee-house of a woman's ****; to go in and out and spend nothing.
COLD PIG. To give cold pig is a punishment inflicted on sluggards who lie too long in bed: it consists in pulling off all the bed clothes from them, and throwing cold water upon them.
CORPORAL. To mount a corporal and four; to be guilty of onanism: the thumb is the corporal, the four fingers the privates.
And that's just up to C.
(see also: The Internet was made for cussin')
Project Gutenberg's 1811 Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue, by Francis Grose
(via Kottke)
Yesterday, the Canadian Conservative government introduced a "minor" change to its sweeping domestic spying bill. Instead of being called the "Lawful Access Act" it is now called the "
Protecting Children From Internet Predators Act." (
Thanks, Robbo!)
— Cory
By Cory Doctorow at 10:16 am Monday, Jan 30
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Patrick Farley is one of the greatest and most maddeningly irregular webcomics artists working today. We've been covering his work for a decade, and a new Farley is always cause for celebration. His latest, "The First Word," is no exception -- a fine, odd, beautifully realized story about the invention of language, one that tries to invent a new user interface and visual language for live, animated comics that is, by and large, very successful.
The First Word | nsfw | an electric sheep comic
(Thanks, Jetse!)
By Xeni Jardin at 7:45 am Thursday, Dec 1
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REUTERS/Jessica Rinaldi
Brian Stelter has a piece in the New York Times today about language and the Occupy Movement.
I was among those interviewed for the article.
Within weeks of the first encampment in Zuccotti Park in New York, politicians seized on the phrase. Democrats in Congress began to invoke the “99 percent” to press for passage of President Obama’s jobs act — but also to pursue action on mine safety, Internet access rules and voter identification laws, among others. Republicans pushed back, accusing protesters and their supporters of class warfare; Newt Gingrich this week called the “concept of the 99 and the one” both divisive and “un-American.”
Perhaps most important for the movement, there was a sevenfold increase in Google searches for the term “99 percent” between September and October and a spike in news stories about income inequality throughout the fall, heaping attention on the issues raised by activists.
“The ‘99 percent,’ and the ‘one percent,’ too, are part of our vocabulary now,” said Judith Stein, a professor of history at the City University of New York.
Read the rest.
By Cory Doctorow at 3:25 pm Wednesday, Nov 30
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Facebook has an established pattern: they obliterate privacy defaults in their system, wipe out their users' stated privacy preferences, and then, after a hue and cry, Mark Zuckerberg emerges and apologizes, and the system is reset to a level that is slightly less private than before. At All Things D, Liz Gannes runs through a retrospective of Zuck's last 25 (!) apologies, and finds a common thread.
Zuckerberg almost always tells users that change is hard, often referring back to the early days of Facebook when it had barely any of the features people know and love today. He says sharing and a more open and connected world are good, and often he says he appreciates all the feedback.
Most of all, Zuckerberg seems to take pride in offering an explicit, earnest apology, but doesn’t actually admit he was wrong, just that he’s sorry for how things were rolled out or perceived...
“Sometimes we move too fast” seemed more of a brushoff than a real apology. “It’s a comment on the execution of a policy, not on the policy itself,” John Paczkowski wrote.
That brings us to the present day, where we have what turns out to be a textbook Zuckerberg apology acknowledging the FTC privacy settlement. This time, Zuckerberg tries to argue that Facebook has done more good than harm on privacy throughout its existence.
The Apologies of Zuckerberg: A Retrospective
(via JWZ)
, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.