Two Talk the Talk episodes have come down the pike today.
One is the “Google and Bing” story about dueling search engines and why being clever sometimes looks the same as being very stupid.
The other is about the phrase “shit happens“, which can get you into a lot of trouble if not handled correctly.
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When I heard that Google had accused Microsoft of copying Google’s results for their search engine Bing, it was like 1995 all over again. Great snakes, I thought, can’t Microsoft develop anything on its own? Yes, I still hold a grudge over Microsoft’s plagiarism of the MacOS. But it appears there’s a bit more to this story.
The way Google unearthed the alleged copying was reminiscent of ‘copyright traps‘ that map-makers set. You don’t want someone copying your map, so you insert fictional towns into it. If anyone else shows the same town on their maps, you know they must have copied you.
In Google’s case, they took the unusual move of hard-coding strings of nonsense letters (e.g. “mbzrxpgjys”) so that it would find a certain web page (say, a theatre in Los Angeles.) The page wouldn’t even have the search term in it — it was totally arbitrary.
Within a few weeks, sure enough, Bing’s results started to show a few of Google’s hard-coded results. Caught red-handed!
But Microsoft, it appears, wasn’t copying; at least, not directly. Bing uses crowd-sourcing, a legitimate and very smart kind of information. If you’re using the Bing toolbar or Internet Explorer (with ‘Suggested Sites’ on), it’s watching what you do and reporting it to Microsoft. So if you search for something (on Bing or Google), it watches which suggested page you go for, and it upweights that link. So that would explain why Google engineers, after trying the links a few times, would trip Bing’s sensor, and their nonsense link would get into Bing’s results.
I’m a Microsoft hater — I won’t have MS software on my computer, and I use iWork rather than Office — but I don’t think Microsoft is doing the outright plagiarism that Google is accusing them of. They’re not copying, they’re imitating. It is creepy to have your computer watching you, though, so if you don’t like it, then don’t use the Bing toolbar, and don’t use Internet Explorer. Good advice anyway.
The English-only movement is essentially an anti-immigrant movement, but they don’t always make it as obvious as this.
An Arizona-like Immigration bill is looming in the Indiana legislature, as one state senator is looking at cracking down on illegal immigrants in Indiana. But the bill goes a little further, making English the only language used by state and local government.
“It’s going to put everyone under the same rule of law, there isn’t going to be a question anymore that people in the state of Indiana are legally able to be here and legally able to work here as well,” State Senator Mike Delph, (R) Carmel, said.
Senator Delph, is the author of Senate Bill 0590. A bill that will require police to as people to verify their legality, for example, during a traffic stop if police suspect they could be illegal.
The bill also mandates all local and state government to only use the English language.
“Any government entity at the state or local level would be required to perform all of their operations and interactions in English, including public meetings, voice activated systems with the telephone or electronic communication,” Delph said.
An English-only provision tacked onto a bill designed to stick it to immigrants. Bit of a giveaway, isn’t it.
Meanwhile, another English-only bill has passed the Indiana House, and is on its way to the Senate. What’s up with Hoosiers these days?
We’ve seen Word Lens, which translates signs automatically. Now this:
Google Translate App works as you speak
In an attempt to break down language barriers the world over, Google have developed an App which allows you to translate your words into another language as you speak.
Users simply speak into the device and the Google Translate app translates your speech and then reads the translation out loud, all in real time.
The person you are conversing with can then respond in their own language and their translated words will be spoken back to you.
But language teachers and linguists can rest easy that they’re not about to be put out of a job just yet: currently the app only supports English and Spanish.
I’d love to play with a copy. At the moment, I suspect it’d be pretty rudimentary and error-prone, but there would be updates. The task of machine translation is as yet unsolved — or should I say the set of problems that converge on MT — but we keep seeing innovations that get us closer and closer to that goal, inch by inch.
If we ever do realise the goal of instantaneous, unconstrained automatic translation, communication would of course be the most obvious beneficiary, but the other would be minority languages. It could potentially save them.
I see it as similar to the OS wars of the 90’s, which, like language, was a conflict over standards. Computer operating systems, like languages, require a population of users who can exchange information (in this case, files) with each other. But cross-platform file compatibility issues made this difficult. Operating systems also run applications that won’t run on other systems, so there’s a disincentive to adopt an OS that doesn’t have the software you need. At the time, the Mac was on the bad end of that struggle — there were fewer installed users, and some programs weren’t available for the Mac. I remember feeling very concerned that the Mac OS would die out.
Then the Mac adopted standards that were in common use anyway — text was text no matter what computer you were on, jpegs were jpegs, and Word files didn’t need to be converted. (Perhaps Mac users should be grateful for Word after all.) You couldn’t run the exact same programs, but every computer became able to do mostly the same things: Java, Perl, Flash, and so on. And if you got really desperate, there were Windows emulators. So the cost of settling on a minority OS went way down.
What automatic machine translation does is lower the cost of maintaining a minority language. Languages like English or Mandarin have an irresistible attraction for speakers of other languages because they have a huge install base. They represent economic and social opportunity. If translation between them is easy, then using the other language isn’t an irretrievable commitment.
You could argue that the ease of translation would doom minority languages because the translation might only flow one way: toward the big language. That’s not what happened in the OS wars. People liked their Macs, and the ease of conversion helped them hang on to them. People like their languages, too. They’re important markers of their identity. But not if the cost is too high. MT would bring the cost down.
Forget left and right wing, forget coriander lovers v haters. The real divide in our society is between the one spacers and the two spacers. And Slate’s restarted the war with this article: Space Invaders: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period
Two-spacers are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste. You’d expect, for instance, that anyone savvy enough to read Slate would know the proper rules of typing, but you’d be wrong; every third e-mail I get from readers includes the two-space error.
I’m a one spacer, and I’ll tell you why: Go to your bookshelf, open up any book, and look after any full stop. You’ll find one space. That’s how the pros do it.
Back in the days of typewriters, all the characters were monospaced, so an ‘m’ took up the same space as an ‘i’. A monospaced font will look like crap if there’s only one space after a full stop, so people were taught to use two. Nowadays, we have computers with well-designed typefaces, so you only need one space, as nature intended.
I can only see two reasons to use two spaces. Either you’re on a clanky old IBM Selectric, or you were taught to type by sadistic nuns who beat you if you forgot the extra space. The former can be cured with a computer, the latter with therapy.
A friend asked me what I thought about Sarah Palin’s responsibility with regard to the Arizona shooting. Here’s what I wrote back.
People have seized upon Palin as a very visible example of unacceptably over-heated rhetoric. This is not entirely unfair — Palin has done much to poison the dialogue, and there are many examples that people have unearthed. But the problem is much bigger than Palin. Advocacy of violence has been SOP for the GOP for a long time now, and there are many who have done it much more consistently than Palin. I’m thinking of Anne Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Michael Savage — at times, the most popular commentators on the Right. Check this link for many more examples of violent eliminationist rhetoric.
Does this send some people over the edge? Well, direct causation is hard to determine. I tend to view this a bit probabilistically. Let me use the example of health. In any population, there will be robust, healthy individuals, and some people on the margins. And there are always some nasty germs around in the population, and there’s a chance you might get sick from them, but you might not if you’re otherwise healthy. But if we now inject other factors into the population, it changes the odds. Say there’s an earthquake where services get knocked out. Now we’ll see the entire population moving toward poor health. Many people will remain healthy, but the probability of getting sick rises, and it’s going to send a certain percentage of least healthy individuals over the edge.
Similarly, if you have a population of individuals ranging from nice to crazy, and you change the environment so that formerly unacceptable kinds of discourse become commonplace, and in fact so common as to be barely noticeable, you are raising the chances that someone on the edge will take action (though they may not). This time someone did.
I also think our toxic discourse has the effect of hiding people with real problems: “I didn’t think anything when he said that; people on the radio say things like that all the time.” How do we know that someone wearing this shirt isn’t a potential shooter?
How about this guy?
They’re just normal guys, right? Or they could be crazies. They seem crazy to me. But if these people aren’t crazy, they’re making the real crazies that much harder to spot.
I don’t want to put limits on what people can say just because a mentally ill person might take them seriously, but I think it’s time for people to draw the line and vote with their feet and their money when media personalities engage in this kind of talk.
Finally, what I find most objectionable is the attempt of right-wing apologists to disclaim any responsibility by saying the shooter was a crazy guy. Well, yes, he was a crazy guy. Who else would do that if they weren’t? But he was also someone who used a gun for its intended purpose, acting on cues from the most significant and well-paid voices on the right. The GOP claims to stand for personal responsibility, but this incident has shown me that, once again, they don’t believe their own story. Everyone is responsible but them.
China is concerned about creeping English.
Chinese authorities have banned the use of foreign words and phrases – especially English – in Chinese newspapers, books and websites.
The ban, reported Wednesday, was issued by the General Administration of Press and Publication, the governing body for written publications. It says the increasing use of English and half-English phrases is damaging the purity of the Chinese language and disrupting the nation’s “harmonious and healthy cultural environment.”
No language is pure — all languages change over time, and every language is influenced to some extent by other languages. This is a futile attempt to stop language change, and probably to promote a standard variety of Chinese.
China’s not alone — other countries have taken action from time to time to prevent the borrowing of English words. (Which is fine — we have something of a trade surplus going at the moment.) Other countries include Iran — remember ‘elastic loaves‘?
And, of course, France, which has been trying to replace the stubborn ‘e-mail‘ with the more Frenchy ‘courriel’ for years. Doesn’t seem to be taking, though — Google gives me a lot more hits for “email” than it does for “courriel” on French pages. (Though interestingly the situation is reversed for the more formal “votre courriel” v “votre email“. Could this be a formality thing?)
Anyway, I think China is going to find that while this law may hide English from view, it will do little to stop the borrowing of English words.
This has to be the coolest machine translation idea I’ve seen for a while.
Imagine taking this app on vacation in a foreign country. Can language goggles be far behind?
Notice that it doesn’t always try to twiddle the word order, even where it would be appropriate. On the other hand, it must be doing all kinds of text and character recognition under the hood. Not to mention colour and size matching. I bet later on they’ll try font matching.
Now if I can just get a copy to play with on my iPhone.
And an iPhone.
I haven’t commented on Mormon apologist Michael R. Ash’s stuff for a while, for the simple reason that when someone’s wanking, it’s rude to interrupt. But he’s been going on like that for quite a while, and I’m afraid he’s going to hurt himself. He’s been covering the Book of Mormon bit by bit, and it’s the same old tactic Mopologists have always used: rather than find evidence for religious claims, just cast about for a nearest match, and say that this shows the claim is ‘plausible’. For example, Ash thinks the Tree of Life metaphor is plausible because early people used the same metaphor. (Really? Ancient people knew about trees?) Or look around for features of ancient boats for a nearest match so you can validate Jaredite barges. Find an NHM inscription somewhere, and try to match it to ‘Nahom’. As long as it looks close enough to something out there, you can claim a match, coincidence be damned.
But lately, he’s been writing about the Tower of Babel. Ah, Babel. It was one thing that did Mormonism in for me, as I’ve recounted here. The short version: The T of B presents a special problem for Mormons. It’s a myth about why there are different languages, but Mormons can’t really play it off as a myth because the author of the Book of Mormon wrote into it a character (the Brother of Jared) who was ostensibly at the Tower at that time. If you concede that Babel’s a myth, then the Book of Mormon can’t be taken completely literally, and this makes for shaky ground for Mormons.
I’ll be addressing the problems with Babel from a linguistic perspective in a later post. For now, let’s just point out that Mike Ash concedes that the Tower story might be mythical…
it’s possible that the confounding of tongues is an aetiological myth or legend that attempts to explain the divergence of languages. Anciently, such traditions were passed from generation to generation and, in a pre-scientific era, were never questioned for historical or scientific accuracy.
…but fails to see why that is a problem for the Book of Mormon.
While some believers may prefer either a literal or mythological approach to this topic, we should be careful to understand that a mythological approach doesn’t mean that the Nephites were fictitious. Ancient histories and scriptures can contain mythical elements as well as actual history.
Let me explain: If something is a ‘myth’, then that means ‘it didn’t happen’. So if your book claims that literal people were there for that event, then it’s wrong.
Not for Ash.
We don’t have the brother of Jared’s personal journal. We have Joseph’s translation (which was dictated in King James vernacular) of Moroni’s abridgment of Mosiah’s translation of Ether’s long-after-the-fact traditions. Perhaps the tower saga was part of the Jaredite lore which Ether interpreted according to his cultural heritage and recorded on his plates.
Ancient redactors (or abridgers) — which include Moroni and Mormon — were editors who often added to or adjusted elements to fit their view of the story or to square with the conclusions they were attempting to project.
Redacted by Mormon and Moroni? Well, what did they know? They were only prophets! They weren’t as smart as Mike.
In other words, even if he’s right, and if the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be, its message is still just a fourth- or fifth-hand account through a string of biased and uncomprehending middlemen. Which is convenient for Ash, because then he has a lot of latitude to massage the text into whatever he wants. But it opens the question of why anyone should believe such a muddle to be a factual record at all. I hope Mormons are paying attention, because what Ash is showing is that you have to dismantle the Book of Mormon in order to defend it.
But this Babel blunder does not weaken the Book of Mormon’s veracity in Ash’s estimation at all. Of course not. On the contrary, it actually strengthens it.
If the Book of Mormon was written by real ancient people it should contain ancient mythological elements.
See how it works? The more mistakes, the truer it gets! Let’s see if we can take it farther: Real people make mistakes, and real people lie. If the Book of Mormon contains mistakes and lies, that just proves that it was written by real people!
Real people from the 1800s, that is.
I’ve been noticing a phenomenon I call the ‘double is’. That’s where you say “The thing is, is that…”. This phenomenon has been noted before, but it’s not clear what’s happening. The ‘double is’ resembles (superficially) other grammatical sentences in English, like “How serious the problem is is less important than how serious it feels to them.” It’s also normal to put other verbs before an is, like “The thing to do is to be honest.” Even so, the ‘double is’ is sort of hard to account for grammatically.
The thing is is that people still use it. I just heard it from US President Barack Obama on his recent Jon Stewart interview.
But then Obama does it again, this time using the past tense:
The point “was is…”? Now that’s something I hadn’t heard before.
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