Back on the first of April the online superstore ThinkGeek launched a new product. Unicorn Meat. I posted it.It was an April Fools joke. We all laughed. And laughed. All of us, except the American Pork Lobby. Who didn’t like that ThinkGeek billed their new product as “the other white meat.” So they sent a twelve page cease and desist letter.
Whoops. This my friends is a PR fail.
Craig linked to this list of 8 writing tips from CS Lewis. There are eight of them…
It would be somewhat remiss of me not to comment briefly on our new PM. Congratulations to Ms Gillard for making history and all that…
By my reckoning she’s the first “ranga” PM, the first female PM, the first challenger to oust a sitting PM in their first term, the stager of the fastest bloodless coup in history and the PM with the best hairstyle (which I put down to having a hair stylist for a partner).
Surely everybody saw this coming from the moment Rudd and Gillard formed an uneasy relationship as leader and deputy. K-Rudd’s love-hate relationship with the Australian public and the ALP respectively came to an end in a pretty abrupt moment. Labor has form for ousting elected political leaders in favour of party apparatchiks. It’s not uncommon for the party to foist premiers upon the unwilling denizens of our states – and Channel 10 are about to remind us that it’s all to typical of Labor at a Federal level as well – with its docu-drama Hawke. Labor does anything to hold on to power – even sacrificing one of its own, even if its own happens to be the most popular PM ever – who ousted the PM they loathed.
Rudd’s problem was his chalk and cheese relationship with those around him – the voters, who knew him not, loved him. His party, and any members of the opposition who knew him, reserved incredible disdain for the man. In my former role I dealt with pollies and political pundits, I shared a desk briefly with the PMs infamous chief of staff (as he phoned through some interview transcripts). Of all the people I’ve met, and of everything I’ve read, the impression I get is that Rudd operated with a veneer of courtesy which covered over a multitude of flaws and sins. His outbursts of rage – now common knowledge – were apparently typical of his treatment of those in his way. David Marr’s fascinating political obituary shows where he went wrong.
He had to do everything himself. He couldn’t trust and didn’t delegate. He worked his staff ruthlessly. His temper was formidable. The office operated in a strange atmosphere of rush and delay. Everything happened at the last minute, more often than not to suit the next media hit. This didn’t change when he became PM. While he rode high in the polls it hardly mattered. His party accepted Rudd’s demands for near absolute control. Cabinet was reduced to a shadow of itself.
Part of the problem was Rudd’s old ambition to find decent solutions to the nation’s problems. Decency is personal, intuitive, hard to delegate. Marry that to a sense of indispensability that is right off the Richter scale, and you had a recipe for ruin. Once again, Rudd had enemies everywhere.
Rudd is what happens when ruthless efficiency meets the intention to do good things. His motives were pure but his methods were not.
I couldn’t figure out where Abbott was for the first 24 hours of the coup. Had he come out strongly against Labor and the murky backroom operations of the factions and the unions Gillard’s political nose may have been bloodied from the opening moments of her ascension to power, instead, Labor get a bit of a bump in the polls.
The reaction amongst my Facebook friends was interesting – most seem unhappy with the manner in which Rudd was dismissed, happy to see the back of him, and split on the question of whether Gillard’s hair colour or gender was more historic. Having had the chance to see which way most of my friends swing politically in the last few days I’m struck by what a conservative batch they are. Maybe I’ll vote ALP just to be contrarian…
What I can’t understand is Gillard’s appeal. She seems merciless. She’s the most extremely left wing PM we’ve ever had. And she sounds like a character from Kath and Kim.
The Labor PR machine was impressive. Every Labor talking head, from union bosses to exiled former Queensland Premier Peter Beattie (speaking from Wyoming), had their talking points in order. They praised her as a “strong and decisive figure,” “a born leader,” “an excellent communicator,” and the person who would get Labor’s focus back on the big issues. And each person mentioned the same issues. This was all impressively “on message.”
Possibly my favourite part of the post-coup coverage was Crikey’s collection of photoshopped versions of Julia Gillard (henceforth J-Gill) in the situations she said were more likely than her challenging K-Rudd.
Speech to text recognition software is one of personal computing’s final frontiers. The dream of sitting in a room and talking to your computer (and having it understand, compute, and respond accordingly) is, apparently, unlikely to ever become an actual reality. The problems are manifold – the biggest problems being that words are aurally ambiguous and we instinctively translate them based on context and expression, and that certain words have an array of meanings.
Here are a couple of snippets from this fascinating article, that ends up being more about language than voice recognition (you might also notice a couple of things I’ve posted recently in that article).
In 2001 recognition accuracy topped out at 80%, far short of HAL-like levels of comprehension. Adding data or computing power made no difference. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University checked again in 2006 and found the situation unchanged. With human discrimination as high as 98%, the unclosed gap left little basis for conversation. But sticking to a few topics, like numbers, helped. Saying “one” into the phone works about as well as pressing a button, approaching 100% accuracy. But loosen the vocabulary constraint and recognition begins to drift, turning to vertigo in the wide-open vastness of linguistic space…
Many spoken words sound the same. Saying “recognize speech” makes a sound that can be indistinguishable from “wreck a nice beach.” Other laughers include “wreck an eyes peach” and “recondite speech.” But with a little knowledge of word meaning and grammar, it seems like a computer ought to be able to puzzle it out. Ironically, however, much of the progress in speech recognition came from a conscious rejection of the deeper dimensions of language. As an IBM researcher famously put it: “Every time I fire a linguist my system improves.” But pink-slipping all the linguistics PhDs only gets you 80% accuracy, at best…
Researchers have also tried to endow computers with knowledge of word meanings. Words are defined by other words, to state the seemingly obvious. And definitions, of course, live in a dictionary. In the early 1990s, Microsoft Research developed a system called MindNet which “read” the dictionary and traced out a network from each word out to every mention of it in the definitions of other words.
Words have multiple definitions until they are used in a sentence which narrows the possibilities. MindNet deduced the intended definition of a word by combing through the networks of the other words in the sentence, looking for overlap. Consider the sentence, “The driver struck the ball.” To figure out the intended meaning of “driver,” MindNet followed the network to the definition for “golf” which includes the word “ball.” So driver means a kind of golf club. Or does it? Maybe the sentence means a car crashed into a group of people at a party.
To guess meanings more accurately, MindNet expanded the data on which it based its statistics much as speech recognizers did. The program ingested encyclopedias and other online texts, carefully assigning probabilistic weights based on what it learned. But that wasn’t enough. MindNet’s goal of “resolving semantic ambiguities in text,” remains unattained. The project, the first undertaken by Microsoft Research after it was founded in 1991, was shelved in 2005.
Gladwell is a phenomenon. His books sell like hotcakes. He’s a compelling storyteller and he uses this ability to stitch together anecdotes and essays in a cohesive way. His books are famous for pushing one big idea using several supporting examples presented in an amusing and engaging way.
Here are eight tips for writing like Gladwell. In sum:
1. “Your book is actually going to be a collection of essays drawn together by a loose thread” – You should start writing a bunch of essays about loosely connectected topics.
2. “Each of your essays is going to revolve around a single idea” – Conveniently, these idea then become a chapter.
3. “Illustrate the idea with stories about real people” – Everybody likes a story about real people (this works with media releases too).
4. “Get a professor” – find an expert who is willing to put their names to conjecture and unproven theories, present them as fact.
5. “Best to have some sad stories to illustrate your points well” – You need to balance out all the success stories with stories of people who have failed because they haven’t embraced Gladwell’s concept.
6. “Give things names and remember Douglas Adams’ rule of capital letters” – basically give the concepts you’ve come up with names, catchy names, expressed best by the power of proper nouns.
7. “Don’t fret too much about accuracy, concentrate on telling a good story” – some of Gladwell’s work has been shown to be either based on conjecture or old wives’ tales.
8. “Don’t worry about the new, new thing” – some of Gladwell’s ideas are from papers or events more than ten years ago.
You’ve no doubt heard the theory that if you gave a monkey a typewriter and infinite time he would eventually compose, in order, the complete works of Shakespeare. This may take him a very, very long time, but it possibly, if this other theory is correct, would not require infinite time.
The number of possible sentences in the English language is apparently finite. Indeed, the Macquarie University has calculated that there are 10570 possible sentences in English. They used these suppositions:
Now, they even acknowledge that some of their assumptions are unrealistic and false – but using these assumptions they’ve given us a pretty reasonable guess at the number of permutations available in English. I guess you could go a step further and introduce “texts” to the equation – if each text is assumed to be 100,000 sentences long, or something unreasonably high, we’re still in the realm of calculable numbers.
Then we could figure out how fast a monkey produces a sentence, and get an upper limit for how long a monkey would take to produce every possible combination of words within those parameters to figure out the maximum amount of time required for a monkey to produce the works of Shakespeare. Simple.
The Macquarie University used the calculations above to demonstrate that English is an open language – full of unique sentences that have never been written before. My aim when I write, is to produce as many unique sentences as possible. To claim my place in the lexicon of life. I am pretty sure that at the point of writing, those two sentences are unique and have not been read by imaginary dinosaurs before. This process of trying to achieve the maximum number of unique sentences may lead me to introducing an odd adjective, and a MacGuffin, in every tremendously Jurassic sentence. Then I could rewrite the same sentence over and over again in order to claim maximum mileage from the one creative work (ie the writing of a unique sentence).
Lets try.
Producing unique sentences in an open language is relatively easy. Here’s what the Macquarie researcher had to say:
Grammatical rules would greatly reduce this number of sentences, as would the requirement that all sentences be meaningful, but the resulting number of possibilities would still be extremely large (more than could ever be spoken in the entire history of human languages let alone during the much shorter life span of an individual language). So for all practical, non-mathematical, purposes we can say that the English language, or any other living language (1), is an open system. It’s actually quite easy to come up with a unique, never before produced, sentence. To do so, for example, combine an unlikely (or impossible, or meaningless) event with a particular named person on a particular date. For example: “On 31st October 1999, whilst writing a lecture on animal communication, Robert had a colourless green idea.” (2) Once this sentence has been written or spoken, subsequent productions of this same sentence are not unique, but unique sentences may potentially be generated from it by making slight changes to it (eg. change “green” to “red”).
Got any unique sentences? Care to claim your place in history?
And perhaps a mathematically minded commenter might like to resolve this infinite monkey conundrum for me – if I have an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters will one monkey come up with the works of Shakespeare on his first go?
Hey everybody, look over here, a new Oatmeal cartoon. This one is on irony. Here’s the number one use of irony:
Their conclusion is that you shouldn’t debate irony – just like you shouldn’t be a grammar pedant – because chances are you understood what they meant and you’re just trying to look cool, informed, and right. And nobody really likes it when you do that.
Have you ever had a burning desire to understand typography better but not been sure where to start – this A to Z of font design has you sorted. It has pictures, and links to handy articles from Typedia.
Aperture: Opening at the end of an open counter.
Arm: A horizontal stroke not connected on one or both ends.
Ascender: An upward vertical stroke found on lowercase letters that extends above the typeface’s x-height.
So, you like reading cool stuff on the Internet? Well it turns out most of it still comes from traditional media – so says this infographic from Good, a blog.
The New York Times has banned its journalists from using the word “tweet” or any derivatives in their stories (possibly with the exception of describing the noise made by birds). Awesome. Instead they must use “wrote on Twitter” or “said on Twitter”… here’s an excerpt from the memo (via The Awl).
“Except for special effect, we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon. And “tweet” — as a noun or a verb, referring to messages on Twitter — is all three. Yet it has appeared 18 times in articles in the past month, in a range of sections.
Of course, new technology terms sprout and spread faster than ever. And we don’t want to seem paleolithic. But we favor established usage and ordinary words over the latest jargon or buzzwords.
One test is to ask yourself whether people outside of a target group regularly employ the terms in question. Many people use Twitter, but many don’t; my guess is that few in the latter group routinely refer to “tweets” or “tweeting.” Someday, “tweet” may be as common as “e-mail.” Or another service may elbow Twitter aside next year, and “tweet” may fade into oblivion. (Of course, it doesn’t help that the word itself seems so inherently silly.)”
Also on the subject of reading, and also from Andy Unedited, comes this insight into book cover design, from the horse’s mouth so to speak…
Every genre of book has a code—a visual set of criteria that readers instinctively expect to find represented on the cover. We expect brightly colored illustrations for children’s books. We expect large-block type (probably embossed) on the covers of political thrillers. We expect restrained sophistication on academic books. And we all know what the cover code is for a biography—a prominent head-and-shoulders photograph or painting of the person who is its subject.
I noticed this the other day when a couple of the books I was reading on Roman history (for an essay) from different publishers had essentially the same cover. Maroon blocks, serif font in cream (Timesish), and a the use of some first century art (or artistic representation) as a hero image… I don’t know what genre that is specific to…
I can’t remember what the second one was… but it wasn’t this one…
Or this one (though I did use this one)…
IVP publisher Andy Le Peau says the key to cracking the market is twofold:
1. Keeping the aforementioned “code”
2. Positioning.
Here’s what he says about positioning:
“But if a cover looks like every other book of its type, won’t it get lost? That’s where positioning comes in. The book also has to clearly offer something different, something that sets it apart from all the other books in its category.
The trick is to make a cover different but within the confines of the code. That’s what great design does. It’s like writing. Great authors know when to break the rules to make their piece even more powerful, to make it stand out. But they don’t break the rules so much that the book falls completely out of its category.”
Speaking of book covers – here’s a time lapse of one being put together.
TEDtalks are inspirational. Revolutionary. Amazing. And now you can create your own TEDTalk thanks to this bloke who conducted a careful analysis of the transcripts of every available TED Talk and counted up the most common words. Coffee was one of the results. These words are connected by the top ten four word phrases, and the final pieces of the puzzle are computer generated. I did have one combination of keyword options that started “It’s not nose picking” – I can’t get it back.
Here’s my speech.
When you look at the student’s, they rely on coffee that is quite nuanced in the same way that our neurons are. Efficient trimming causes the brain to recognize the exact way it’s supposed to think et cetera, et cetera. It is like French products becoming a very ecological choice. You don’t have to like it, but it is a choice that I often discuss in my seminars. When you look at the student’s, they rely on coffee which makes you both happy and excited. How many of you would prefer that to tea? I think it’s just like when the middle of it all, you could see the situation running the same way that a downward spiral would. It makes you yearn for coffee making you jittery et cetera, et cetera. So I thought maybe a mirror does not always reveal pleasant surprises. How many of you would rather consider coffee sponsored for by the administration of the United States. Who wouldn’t agree that happiness can only be achieved by connecting with the world.
Via The Oatmeal… where else. But what he’s missing is what the stuff before the @ says about you. Which is probably more telling. If you thought sk8erboi45 was cool (like the 44 people before you), or anything similarly asinine, then you were wrong. If I were the type of person who hired people I’d look no further than the email address on most resumes before dismissing 85% of the candidates.
Commenting Rules
Commenting rules on blogs are generally pretty passe.
Mine can be summed up as:
There are times when I wonder how Christians should be governing their behaviour online. Justin Taylor had some good guidelines. He took the high road and used the Bible.
Those are great if your commenters are Christians… I like these ones (via Gordo) from Triablog (they expand on each point in this list on the post).
These are the first five, of ten.
*He sometimes gets the last word.
June 5, 2010