CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-22 06:37:32 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

Perhaps this kind of thing will suffice to reclaim the written word? To introduce the crazy concept of people wanting to type more than five words for the picture they ripped off Facebook or the high-resolution image of a beach from their you-beaut DSLR, freshly ruined by HDR processing. How does Google decide that one pointless cat picture, regurgitated meme or multi-megabyte mobile data eating animgif is worth promoting above another? 

I think what they do is see if there's any words. Someone typed something? Why that can't possibly be important.

2013-05-22 06:32:40 (12 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

So essentially, if you post a pic picture, you get more space in everyone's G+ stream. Now it's not news that the written word has been suffering to catch phrases in imagery but this seems to have just relegated everything other than photos into the dustbin of obscurity.

2013-05-22 04:49:03 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

I was listening to RN just now: Interview with NASA robotics dude talking about Mars rovers. Cool. So now obviously we need some Strayan robotics dude. It's a guy from Sydney University doing a study on... putting robots in paddocks and seeing how cows react to them. #facepalm  

2013-05-20 03:32:12 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

I think the best bits of Game of Thrones are actually the dialogues rather than the huge set pieces. I think my favorite bits from this season so far would be the conversation  between Jaime Lannister and Brienne in a hot tub in Harrenhal and between Stannis and Davis Seaworth in a dungeon in Dragonstone. 

It helps that they had great writing obviously but there's so many excellent performances. I've also been quite impressed with Emilia Clarke and how she's taken ownership of David Peterson's made-up languages. Of course she's totally ballsing it up, or so Peterson says, but he surrendered that battle early on. (He was mandating what the vowels were and that's quite hard to do, people just tend to use the vowels they know). Still, she delivers it with confidence and that's more important than getting it right but being uncomfortable with it.

2013-05-20 01:38:56 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Heh this #autoawesome is cool. 

2013-05-19 01:08:33 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

New Arduino Yun is quite impressive

Very impressed by this. It's basically an Arduino with an on-board linux WiFi module. You've been able to buy those modules for awhile but they're quite expensive. This whole shebang is US$69 apparently.  It's pretty much the ideal device for any internet-of-things application where you don't want to dick about with Linux all day and mess around with hardware interfacing like you do with the Pi.

Thumbs up for the name too. 云/雲 (Yún) in Chinese (meaning cloud, giving some tip as to their mooted applications  guess). I thought it was pretty interesting they actually indicate the tone mark too. If you want to say it correctly, just say Yoon with a rising intonation like you're asking a question. The Chinese u vowel is actually /y/, which is like /i/ or saying 'ee' but with the lips rounded. So whenEnglish... more »

2013-05-18 06:08:06 (16 comments, 1 reshares, 7 +1s)

This

It's not just a hostile public sphere that keeps thinkers at bay. Academics may also not want to enter public debate. And I can understand why. Firstly, they receive no rewards in terms of career advancement for writing for the public. And secondly, many may not want to engage with a knife-drawn public prone to Goldstein-style Two-Minute Twitter Hate Rituals. Academics are often timorous folk who specialise in showing the complexity of issues, not offering tweet-sized solutions. Social media doesn't democratise debate. It limits it to the resilient. Snark triumphs over insight, and commentary is reserved for those with voluminous folds of scar-tissue. Sensitive thinkers rarely fit this bill.

2013-05-18 00:03:34 (4 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

He's an atheist and he's proud

Mike Booth has been branching out from the Some Grey Bloke series of satirical cartoons. In this video Jeremiah McDonald performs Mike's writing. It's a bit of fun but what I found particularly interesting was the weblinks to this thing called Patreon. The idea is that people can become a patron of an artist/content producer. We're talking about something like a dollar for anything they produce. No one is getting rich off it (yet) but I saw that when Mike makes a video he gets about $50 out of Patreon. Beer money if nothing else. I think it's a pretty cool idea.

2013-05-16 10:02:14 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 9 +1s)

Google+ has basically slapped on a pair of thick glasses, buttoned on a waistcoat, bought a bright red 'fixie' bike and declared itself too hip for mere mortals to work out what's going on.

2013-05-15 00:36:54 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

The curious path of the Laryngeal Nerve: It was God wot dun it!

I saw the news that +Larry Page is suffering from vocal cord paralysis. If you want to know more about that, you should go check his informative post where he reveals he's made a contribution towards research. Avoiding doing work on a complicated phonetics assignments, I had a quick look at the condition and quickly ran into this oddity. The laryngeal nerve in mammals doesn't go where you'd expect, or rather half of it doesn't. Rather it branches off the vagus nerve that heads to the heart and other organs, looping under the aortic arch. So apparently as a consequence, it's not uncommon for heart surgery to result in voice impairment by damaging the nerve.

How strange, I thought. Given one half of the nerve function to our voice box goes directly to the brain via the superior laryngeal nerve,ho... more »

2013-05-14 23:29:08 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

UK primary school grammar test

This is pretty funny. I'm a linguistic grad student and I worked for over a decade as a journalist and I only got 8/10. I think the ones I got wrong were the question about a colon and question about the sex of Hillary. In both cases I think they were wrong but as the BBC points out on the front of the quiz, there aren't genuine rules to this stuff anyway. 

Interestingly a friend (from the UK) pointed out some time ago that I've adopted the Australian 'less' adjective for all cases including the one where fewer would be more appropriate. I remember having a bee in my bonnet about that back in the UK (as a snooty journalist), so I take this to be a sign of being re-socialised into Australian English :)

2013-05-12 14:07:21 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

You've studied for years to be a linguist. Then you decide to do your thesis on something to do with an accent of English. Frankly, you're a lazy mofo and need a big ass slap.

2013-05-10 23:32:27 (3 comments, 2 reshares, 5 +1s)

+David Brin posted this story about the development of a a microparticle that wraps oxygen gas in a layer of lipids. The mooted application is in emergency medicine where an injection could oxygenate a patient temporarily. Sadly Techwrench's article author Damien S. Wilhelmi (An SEO tactician apparently, whatever that is) decided to invent some potential future uses which include spies staying under water for 20 minutes presumably without the aid of any breathing apparatus. Our lungs, of course, don't just provide O2 but they get rid of CO2. CO2 causes the breathing reflex so if you were diving with this stuff swimming around in your blood, you'd still feel an uncontrollable urge to breath and promptly inhale a bunch of water and die.

Obviously what we need now is a CO2 capture particle. Now that's something that there's clearly many future potential uses for (and I expecti... more »

2013-05-10 07:59:45 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 12 +1s)

Sun down beers in Melbourne.

2013-05-09 09:27:34 (9 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Indian author Pankaj Mishra reflects on the British compensation of Kenyans subject to atrocities in the Mau Mau insurgency. In particular he takes aim at everyone's favorite imperial cheerleader, Niall Ferguson. 

The British had slaughtered the Kikuyu a few years before. But for Ferguson "it was a magical time, which indelibly impressed on my consciousness the sight of the hunting cheetah, the sound of Kikuyu women singing, the smell of the first rains and the taste of ripe mango".

2013-05-09 08:25:05 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

The latest pop-linguistics bollocks: ultraconserved words and spitting cavemen

One can't expect the popular press reporting of the arcane field of linguistics to be flawless but the recent coverage of an odd paper published in the US PNAS journal* (lacking in what looks like decent refereeing) has been something to behold and quite disquieting for linguists at large. The Guardian's report of this story (links below) showed the usual comprehension failure. Stated that a Eurasian super-family of ancient language was some sort of new idea, rather than the idea that runs to the heart of the entire field of historical linguistics and subject to over 100-years of study.

In short: The paper's authors take public data on a wide array of languages and proposed cognates (that is, words of common origin) of hypothesized proto languages, and then subject this to a bunch of... more »

2013-05-09 06:21:37 (20 comments, 12 reshares, 8 +1s)

This is Water: To be aware

Bloke I've never heard of gave a speech at an American university graduation.  It seemed it took years before anyone noticed but now, as we all know, it never happened unless there's a YouTube version. As it turns out the result is a powerful combination.

Over the last few years I've tried to get across similar ideas (about what adult life is really like) to far younger class mates in my university. Well, I did for the first couple of years and then realised the futility. This makes a broader point that education should help people be more aware, rather than knowing about facts. It's a message of anti-individualism which perhaps sorely needs telling in the West and in America in particular.

2013-05-09 02:03:57 (8 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Looks like I bust more than just the glass on my Galaxy Nexus. It won't charge the battery. I'd just suck it up ordinarily but my research is based on using a mobile phone app to capture endangered languages and this was my main tool! Christ...

2013-05-07 12:33:34 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Overheard in Melbourne

Two schoolgirls, one asks:
"How come it's always women that get locked up in crazy people's basements?"
The other one thinks about it and says:
"Men would escape."

2013-05-07 12:14:20 (4 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

Microsoft's updated Windows 8: Do they get it?

Microsoft make me laugh. The Verge asked some MS drone about the 'feedback' around the lack of a start bar in W8. 

"We have heard that, we definitely have heard that and taken that into account. We've really also tried to understand what people are really asking for when they're asking for that."

It's not very hard is it? They wanted the fucking start bar. This is what's wrong with these tools. They're so determined to get some other answer, they're second guessing what you actually want when you ask for something.

2013-05-04 23:33:50 (7 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

*Niall Ferguson outdoes himself: Keynes didn't care about the future because he was gay.

Intellectually bankrupt and morally questionable academic Niall Ferguson is well known for espousing to one and all his views on economics. Namely anti-Keynesian, right-wing economics, which is usually simplified to the point of absurdity and riddled with fundamental inaccuracies. 

At a recent talk, when asked about Keynes, Ferguson put forth that Keynes' ideas were wilfully ignorant of the future because he was gay and had no children. A statement so outrageous that it's hardly surprising he issued an apology. Sadly I expect this has contributed further to the media's view of his value in economics commentary if only for the 'colour'.

2013-05-04 11:36:32 (16 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

So, you know in every American film/TV show about high-school ever... they feature hallways of these lockers. I've never really thought about it before but,  why? My high-school never had them. I mean, we just put our books in our bags and took what we needed that day to school. 

Maybe they keep their guns in there?

2013-05-02 03:17:28 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Goddamn it! I dropped my galaxy nexus from less than a meter in height but it smashed the glass regardless. Pretty unlucky, they take some punishment but this was onto the stoney concrete of the steps to my house and it landed face down.

Bollocks! I'm going to have to live with it too. I suppose I'll have to stop laughing at all the girls with smashed iPhones...

2013-05-01 23:37:16 (6 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

US five-year old kills sister with a gun made for children

"In this part of the country, it's not uncommon for a five-year-old to have a gun"

I really don't know what to say to that. I'm sure some pro-gun apologist will be willing to explain to me how this is an example of American greatness.

2013-05-01 09:50:50 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

Windows 8 Store: Just as much of a control freak as Apple

While browsing through the apps on my W8 tablet I saw that my review for Vintage Synth, Moog-like a touch-screen synthesizer, has been removed apparently due to a terms of service violation.

"At last a decent virtual touchscreen synth! Great sounds, little lag. The buttons and pitch bend can be a bit tricky but it's still a quality app for the money."

It was a five-star rating. So what do we think was against the 'terms of service'? Saying 'at last', implying that the #windows8 Store is a graveyard of decent apps perhaps? (because it fucking is) Providing a slight caveat, pointing out something wasn't perfect. Daring to mention money? Who knows!

What I do know is this. Microsoft can go and fuck themselves. I'll not bother to review anything else nor, if I can... more »

2013-04-30 12:14:16 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Saturn hurricane is 57 trillion times larger than your refrigerator

Normally it's Americans that do this stuff. It's x many times as big as Texas but here's the the BBC. So it has to be 12 times bigger than the UK. It's totally impossible to talk about anything that's big unless it's related to shit in your backyard. My question for you, dear readers, is why stop there? Why not offer visitors a personalised experience. They should be able to select from a drop down box their favorite thing, which obviously would be something right next door. It's 42 quadrillion times bigger than the neighbour's ass and that shit was biiiiig, know what I'm sayin'?

Think of the options you could have. Select your city, the bay, the bridge or that irritatingly expensive but quite long toll-road bypass near where you live. Hell, select where you went to... more »

2013-04-30 07:37:05 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

New electronic component on Mat's shitlist : the DS18B20 thermometer. Time to figure out how to use thermocouples I guess.

2013-04-26 23:17:48 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

In certain circles, I'm known as the kind of man that has a drawer full of ill-advised smartwatch purchases.

I don't know - I just have the feeling that my wrist item is an underutilised inventory slot that is failing to feed my desire for ever more data. My wrist could be doing more, dammit.

So it's no real surprise that I find myself, almost one year after backing the Kickstarter project, with a shiny new Pebble watch. The question is, does the future fate of the Pebble lie proudly on wrist, or in the dankest recesses of my drawer of shame?

Against all expectations, I find myself curiously enamoured with the Pebble. It doesn't really do much - it tells the time and date (something that the Sony Smartwatch managed about 25% of the time), it flashes up notifications from my phone and it lets me control the music my phone plays. It looks pretty good, it's... more »

2013-04-23 01:56:06 (13 comments, 3 reshares, 5 +1s)

Twitter language map of Melbourne

This is absolutely fascinating. Mapping outfit ESRI have knocked up this visualisation of the languages that feature on Twitter within the Melbourne region. The surprise is that Malay is the most spoken non-English language while languages like Greek and Chinese (which are the most prevalent languages other than English according to the 2011 census) don't get a look-in. Those languages are quite interesting examples. My intuition suggests that there are difference reasons for them now showing up: Greek speakers being overwhelmingly bilingual and Chinese speakers tending to use other services such as Weibo.

This is also highly suggestive to me that we see a snowball effect. Once enough members of a particular community get on Twitter then it becomes an attractive destination for speakers of those languages. The surprising hotspots for... more »

2013-04-21 01:26:15 (21 comments, 1 reshares, 12 +1s)

Thoughts on America: Through the viewing-glass of Boston

Since the Boston thing has cooled off a little now... I thought the whole thing was quite interesting on a few levels. Some of these thoughts aren't new but anyway... The first thing, a few days the marathon bombing, a fertilizer factory blew up and levelled a good slice of town. I was struck by the scale of the media response to the two events. In the whole marathon bombing I think a couple of people died, versus 14 in the Texan blast. What we saw was a staggering mobilisation of law enforcement, rolling coverage, second by second updates ripped from police scanners... and when it was all over, a suspect captured, celebrating in the street. People chanting USA, USA, USA! I think I can speak for anyone outside of the US in saying that this sounds ... unusual.

I'm not trying to be critical of this, I'm just... more »

2013-04-17 10:23:32 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

The finest job advert of all time?

2013-04-12 11:43:47 (1 comments, 5 reshares, 9 +1s)

HI guys, I come from Taiwan. Me and my friend of authors were total strangers that met on Google+ and later formed a tight circle that simply like writing stories.

We started to write collaborated short stories using Google Docs and within one year, it turned out to be enough for a novel. So we self-published it privately and designed the cover representing our gratitude to G+. We love this platform and hope it never gets axed like Google Reader. 

Big shout out to the talented developers behind G+, and we really want to give you a copy of our book, titled “G+, Circle of Chickens”. (In Chinese the letter “G” sounds the same as "Chicken".)

Although it’s all in Chinese, I think you guys at Google wouldn't mind. Please contact me in anyway so I can send you a copy! It would really mean a lot to us.

G+ brought us together and brought ourstories to... more »

2013-04-12 10:35:16 (8 comments, 1 reshares, 8 +1s)

American beer: It's not all terrible

Interesting article from the BBC covering a trend in the beer world that's well known to enthusiasts worldwide. Namely the US transforming from a horrific wasteland of flavour-free mega swill into an innovator that's having a great effect on beer worldwide. That's not apparent from this article is that the process wasn't smooth. American microbreweries for years had no idea what they were doing. They flouted style rules, they failed to comprehend the centuries of good brewing practice, but in the end many of them came through.

The American Pale Ale, for example, is a wonderful new style that deserves to sit up there with anything Europe has to offer. What's more impressive, really, is the US home brewing scene. Australia used to lead the world in this regard but in the space of little more than a decade, home brewing... more »

2013-04-15 02:56:51 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Oh the irony!

2013-04-09 10:33:49 (20 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

And you thought there was no hope for the youth of today

The University of Melbourne Student Union has passed a motion to celebrate the death of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. The motion described the former PM’s legacy as “horrific” and said her “neoliberal policies that destroyed the lives of millions”.

Doesn't that just warm your heart.

2013-04-08 00:05:04 (12 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Sino-Australian relations: The horizonal bias of distance

As I've said a few times before, I've always found claims of Australia's proximity to China as curious. It's almost as if the fact we're at other ends of the planet, neither even close to the equator, is no where near as important as how far you have to turn the globe. Our eyesight is biased in the horizontal on an evolutionary basis and many other representations of distance and mapping have been biased along what we expect to see rather than reality.

Politically, though, ask yourself this. Does Australia really have a special geophysical relationship with China? As a case in point, Moscow is around 50km closer to Beijing than Darwin and that's not anywhere useful in terms of Australian geography. Russia also shares a border, has a train service, has an economic base three times the size of... more »

2013-04-07 00:18:10 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Father of interactional sociolinguistics dies aged 91

John Gumperz was a hugely influential figure, not just in linguistics but also in the emerging field of intercultural communication in business studies. His famous study in the 1970s continues to be used to introduce the notion of cultural variation in communication strategy. He reported on Pakistani women serving in the Heathrow airport cafeteria who were embroiled in worsening relations with the native English-speaker staff. The example cited is on intonation contour differences where English raises intonation to indicate a question and leaves it level to make a statement. So when the ladies offered gravy with with a level intonation, it was taken as an obvious statement with a note of disrespect. 

2013-04-04 23:00:55 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Islamophobia

There's something about talking about religion that absolutely guarantees that the most extreme form of assholes come out of the woodwork. There are many spectacular examples, the following is but one:

"Why should another person on another continent care about the well-being of individuals in outdated societies? I don't see how it makes sense to siphon money and resources to countries that will never succeed. The niche only exists because people like you allow it to exist." - Otect

2013-04-02 05:03:18 (7 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

The Evil One hits the Top End

Well now this is unexpected. The Dark Lord himself saw fit to drop in on the parochial tabloid of Darwin, the NT News. He's quoted as saying that he reckons private enterprise is good for developing the north if "infrastructure" was put in. Which I think is a way of saying that if the government actually develops the north, private enterprise (him) will be happy to rock up and make money by flogging them right-wing hate.

2013-04-02 04:37:57 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 9 +1s)

Did... did Richard Dawkins just say... "[Scientific Method] works, bitches"?

2013-04-02 04:27:13 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Victor Mair at Language Log always posts fantastic posts about Chinese. This last one had me chuckle. Instructions from a packet of noodles:

將550CC的水放入鍋中，待水開後，放入麵鬼及湯粉，過4分鐘後，覺拌即可適用。
Jiāng 550CC de shuǐ fàng rù guō zhōng, dài shuǐ kāi hòu, fàng rù miàn guǐ jí tāng fěn,guò 4 fēnzhōng hòu, jué bàn jí kě shìyòng.
"Pour 550 CC of water into pot and wait till it boils, then add the noodle devils and soup flavoring.  After 4 minutes, sense/feel-stir; can be eaten at once."

It does indeed appear to say noodle devils. Also the 覺拌 doesn't seem to make sense. This is what tipped me off before I'd read the whole thing. I realised it was supposed to be 攪拌 jiǎobàn, to stir but the radical is wrong. I went off and looked it up because my reading of traditional isn'tat the same level as simplified.

Turns out what this should have said was 面塊, for a block of n... more »

2013-03-31 23:36:44 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

I was umming and ahhing about porting the mobiles in this house from Telstra to Kogan (who use the Telstra network). Then I got a Telstra bill shock, the missus managed to run up a $100 bill making not very many calls at all... and I've apparently used 90% of my stingy data allowance despite paying a fortune. Choice made! Cheerio Telstra!

2013-03-31 00:13:34 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

Killer browser application: TrollScreen add-on for Firefox

Incredible new #firefox add-on analyses the content on web pages and gives you an idea about how seriously you should take it. Americans, you need this.

2013-03-28 00:21:15 (9 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Aussie retailers hit new clue-free heights

Pay $5 to enter just to 'browse'. Yes, that'll work.

2013-03-27 07:34:53 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Apple plans Melbourne GPO building store?

It does look like their kind of gaff and they're known to be searching for Melbourne real estate. Also the Australian market in Apple gear is going great guns, they can certainly afford it.

2013-03-26 11:03:46 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Erm, Kiwis marketing soft drink in Oz as 'soda'. Please tell me I'm not the only one that thinks this is odd.

2013-03-26 10:40:06 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Linguistics community = do my linguistic homework.

Which is curious really. Do people (actually) engaged in the field use online forums? In my experience there's academic anxiety towards online. Can't quite grasp it myself. Related to projection of profession identity?

2013-03-19 09:47:34 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

I have seen some truly awful software in my time. Some truly horrific software. However I can't quite recall having experienced unabashed software horror as today during a workshop using some phonetic experimentation software. What apparently passes for the best-in-class.

Christ. There needs to be a revolution in linguistics software. Tossing out of all this diabolical programmer-driven-UI shite. A reimplementation using web technologies with a focus on productive workflow.

But, as my instructor said, who's gonna write it? I wonder how many people asked the same question and decided it wasn't going to be them.

2013-03-19 02:37:45 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 4 +1s)

Chinese researchers optimise learning of Chinese characters based on a network approach of meaning and pronunciation.

This article starts off with bollocks:

"what most dismays native speakers of alphabetic languages is that Chinese characters offer so few clues. With virtually no Spanish, I can figure out in the right context that baño means bath, but that word in Chinese (洗澡) seems to offer no clues about pronunciation, let alone meaning."

Before noting precisely the sorts of things that do offer clues to the Chinese learner, such as pronunciation and meaning. The example here shows both phonetic clues and meaning in the water radicals. Frankly every learner of Chinese ends up internalising this huge network of relationships to help one organise language competency. It's good to see this turned to good use in the teaching of Chinese in China, although mygut ... more »

2013-03-15 07:21:07 (17 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

Memes, right. I don't deny there's some crackers. Fads that become a veritable internet movement centred on something trivial. For a moment it's like we're all part of the same tribe. 

What I understand less is recycling a meme that consists of a picture of a sad-looking cat, slapping some topical text on it and thinking this serves any purpose other than to show an astounding level of unoriginality.

Then again, perhaps I'm a grumpy human.