Interesting little article in the NYTimes Magazine today about the language of nerds. Specifically, it summarizes the research of Mary Bucholtz, a linguist at UCSB who thinks high school nerds use language that is devoid of African American slang, and thus gain part of their social stigma from being “hyperwhite.” From the article,

By cultivating an identity perceived as white to the point of excess, nerds deny themselves the aura of normality that is usually one of the perks of being white. […] In declining to appropriate African-American youth culture, thereby “refusing to exercise the racial privilege upon which white youth cultures are founded,” she writes, nerds may even be viewed as “traitors to whiteness.” You might say they know that a culture based on theft is a culture not worth having. On the other hand, the code of conspicuous intellectualism in the nerd cliques Bucholtz observed may shut out “black students who chose not to openly display their abilities.” […] Even more problematic, “Nerds’ dismissal of black cultural practices often led them to discount the possibility of friendship with black students,” even if the nerds were involved in political activities like protesting against the dismantling of affirmative action in California schools.

Interesting stuff, even if the paper described dates to 2001. Whether or not it’s true, though, do you think it applies outside the microcosm of high school? Most of the adult nerds I know use lots of words and phrases from African American culture, but while it’s usually in the normal course of conversation, African American terms are also often used in jest. If some one asks a bunch of laptop-hunched, furiously coding nerds whether they are having fun, and one of them deadpans, “Yes. We are getting dumb,” is that hyperwhiteness in action?

Food miles and advantages of Locally grown food has been a popular subject on this blog. Boston Globe has a new story on how local food may not always be the most energy efficient option out there. The story is full of interesting comparisons ranging from bananas of Chile to potatoes of Idaho and how they might often have fewer food miles compared to locally grown food. Super markets have already started to put new labels on food items describing their foot prints and the labels are only going to get longer and may be eventually reduced to a bar code, which you have to scan at the nearest price scanner if you are an environmentally aware consumer. The story rightly observes that more the information you present to humans, lesser they absorb. The only person who would really enjoy shopping then might be Mr. Harold Crick. A Zener knee just around the corner and a nice opportunity for all you folks trying to meaningfully chop information into more comestible chunks.

Relicious is famous!!

Lexicographer Erin McKean (official bio) gave a gem of a talk the other day, and I was lucky enough to be in attendance (thanks for the heads-up Hannes!). I’m not a blusher, but I’m sure I turned some weird purple color when she calls relicious “awesome.”

1) I need to think of a word that means “the sudden knowledge that one has turned a different color” and 2) I am happy that Erin uses the word “awesome” as a generally positive utterance, since someone the other day shamed me for using it outside the context of something that generates awe.

I declare this a word coining post! Leave your good words in the comments!

Q Mr. President, music is one of our largest exports the country has. Currently, every country in the world — except China, Iran, North Korea, Rwanda and the United States — pay a statutory royalty to the performing artists for radio and television air play. Would your administration consider changing our laws to align it with the rest of the world?

THE PRESIDENT: Help. (Laughter.) Maybe you’ve never had a President say this — I have, like, no earthly idea what you’re talking about. (Laughter and applause.) Sounds like we’re keeping interesting company, you know? (Laughter.)

Look, I’ll give you the old classic: contact my office, will you? (Laughter.) I really don’t — I’m totally out of my lane. I like listening to country music, if that helps. (Laughter.)

RRRRRRR…. what an idiot. Full transcript’s here if you’re interested.

This kind of relates to the policy work I’m doing this summer. Check it out here. The paper I’m revising is here. Music to our ears!

…until wind power.

Via I believe in advertising

Apparently I’ve been living under a rock. ClearForest opened up a web service (since when?) for named entity extraction over natural language text. With SOAP (WSDL) and pseudo-REST APIs ( API link ), and so far, with only a 100KB limit on submitted text and generous (no?) per-day usage limitations. A human-usable testing frontend is available.

Supply it a UID, a typeID, and a content string. Results come back as tagged XML, identifying such usual entities as names and geographic locations as well as somewhat more ambiguous ones like Technology or IndustryTerm. I haven’t run any tests against ground-truth corpora (don’t have any offhand, and way too lazy to make one myself), but eyeballing the results, it appears to be reasonably decent at doing what it claims. At least on news text.

So what to do with something like this… A concept-map kind of thing for news might be interesting. See which organizations are linked to what kind of technology, people, places, etc. What would be a compelling use of named entity detection API on a (relatively) light-weight, web-based scale?

(Something that doesn’t involve putting newsbreaking locations onto Google maps - first thing anyone thinks of, I suppose, or extracting key terms out of news and going to search Technorati, an experience I don’t really care to ever repeat.)

Also, buy some land, raise your kids, and wear deodorant (it’s not expensive). Possibly nsfw, depending on where you w.

Via chuckm and The Affected Provincial’s Almanack

…and gets geo-informatic. Check out the coolest job most people will never have. Think Gob Bluth, with a helmet, a safety vest, and a healthy respect for compliance.

So one public library system in Arizona has followed through on a plan to abandon the Dewey Decimal system in favor of an ad-hoc, “Barnes & Noble” classification scheme. Apparently, user surveys of library patrons in that system reported that “most people came to browse, without a specific title in mind”, and the director remarks that “most people do not know what the numbers mean anyway.”
Continue reading ‘The classification heresy’

A while ago, in a bar, I developed this half-baked idea of creating a home for all those unfinished blogposts and half-baked ideas that were never quite good enough for Localoaf. However, I never quite got around to actually promoting the idea very well (ow, so meta!). Today, I had to think of it again, and I added another post.
The blog’s called Untitled Document, and everyone’s welcome to dump their unfinished ideas there. Maybe someone will care. Just email me for write permissions.