The Cupertino Effect

The Cupertino effect describes what happens when a computer automatically "corrects" your spelling into something wrong or incomprehensible.

The name originates from an early spellchecking program's habit of automatically "correcting" the word "co-operation" into "Cupertino", the name of the California city in which Apple has its headquarters.

One of my favourite Cupertinos was my first computer's habit of changing the name "Freud" into "fraud" - or, more recently, of one phone's fondness for converting "soonish" into "Zionism".

As Cupertinos suggest, onscreen language is both a collaboration and a kind of combat between user and medium and if self-expression can sometimes reduced to little more than clicking on "like", there's every bit as much pressure exerted in the opposite direction.

Neologisms
The bewildering stream of new words to describe technology and its uses makes many people angry, but there's much to celebrate.

Someone, somewhere has probably already coined you a term - from approximeetings with friends (arranging a rough time or place to meet, then sorting out details on the fly via mobile phone) to indulging in political slacktivism (infective activism carried out by clicking online petitions).

Read more on Neologisms here

Language: How we gave colours names, and it messed with our brains

Imagine that you had a rainbow-coloured piece of paper that smoothly blends from one colour to the other. This will be our map of colour space.

Now just as you would on a real map, we draw boundaries on it. This bit here is pink, that part is orange, and that’s yellow.

Here is what such a map might look like to a native English speaker.

If you think about it, there’s a real puzzle here.  

Why should different cultures draw the same boundaries?

If we speak different languages with largely independent histories, shouldn’t our ancestors have carved up the visual atlas rather differently?

This question was first addressed by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay in the late 1960s.  

They wanted to know if there are universal, guiding laws that govern how cultures arrive at their colour atlas.


Here’s what they found. Languages have differing numbers of colour words, ranging from two to about eleven. Yet after looking at 98 different languages, they saw a pattern.

It was a pretty radical idea, that there is a certain fixed order in which these colour names arise. This was a common path that languages seem to follow, a road towards increasing visual diversity and they suggested that the road looked like this:

The figure above is really telling a story. What it says is this. If a language has just two colour terms, they will be a light and a dark shade – blacks and whites.

Add a third colour, and it’s going to be red. Add another, and it will be either green or yellow – you need five colors to have both and when you get to six colours, the green splits into two, and you now have a blue.

What we’re seeing here is a deeply trodden road that most languages seem to follow, towards greater visual discernment (92 of their 98 languages seemed to follow this basic route).

Critics of Kay and Berlin said they were reading too much from too little. Some argued that their study was too small, that they surveyed too few people from each language.

They also said that study was skewed, as most the languages were from industrialized societies with written scripts. And to top it off, their methods weren’t very quantitative.

To respond to these criticisms, the authors launched what they called the World Colour Survey, a project that started collecting data in the late 1970s. This was a survey of 110 languages, all spoken by pre-industrial societies, many that have no written script.

Read more of this article here: Empirical Zeal

Good Communication Quotes

1. "The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said." - Peter Drucker
2. "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." - George Bernard Shaw
3."Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people." - William Butler Yeats
4. "We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak." - Epictetus

5. "Speak when you are angry -- and you'll make the best speech you'll ever regret." - Laurence Peters
6. "In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do." - Stephen Covey
7. "The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them." - Stephen King
8. "Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language." - Walt Disney
9. "Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after." - Anne Morrow Lindbergh
10. "The two words information and communication are often used interchangeably, but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out; communication is getting through." - Sydney Harris

11. "Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing." - Rollo May
12. "Humor is the affectionate communication of insight." - Leo Rosten
13. "Science may never come up with a better office communication system than the coffee break." - Earl Wilson
14. "Communication is everyone's panacea for everything." - Tom Peters
15. "Two monologues do not make a dialogue." - Jeff Daly
16. "Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something." - Plato
17. "Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot." - D.H. Lawrence
18. "Any problem, big or small, within a family, always seems to start with bad communication. Someone isn't listening." - Emma Thompson
19. "When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen." - Ernest Hemingway
20. "You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time." - Scott Peck
21. "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." - Mark Twain
22. "That which we are capable of feeling, we are capable of saying." - Cervantes
23. "I have an answering machine in my car. It says, 'I'm home right now. But leave a message and I'll call you when I'm out.'" - Steven Wright
24. "Give me the gift of a listening heart." - King Solomon

Language and Communications: Are Words the best Solution?

Why did language evolve? While the answer might seem obvious, as a way for individuals to exchange information, linguists and other students of communication have debated this question for years.

Many prominent linguists, including MIT’s Noam Chomsky, have argued that language is, in fact, poorly designed for communication. Such a use, they say, is merely a byproduct of a system that probably evolved for other reasons, perhaps for structuring our own private thoughts.

To provide evidence, these linguists point to the existence of ambiguity: In a system optimized for conveying information between a speaker and a listener, they argue, each word would have just one meaning, eliminating any chance of confusion or misunderstanding.

Now, a group of MIT cognitive scientists has turned this idea on its head. In a new theory, they claim that ambiguity actually makes language more efficient, by allowing for the reuse of short, efficient sounds that listeners can easily disambiguate with the help of context.

“Various people have said that ambiguity is a problem for communication,” says Ted Gibson, an MIT professor of cognitive science and senior author of a paper describing the research to appear in the journal Cognition. “But once we understand that context disambiguates, then ambiguity is not a problem, it’s something you can take advantage of, because you can reuse easy [words] in different contexts over and over again.”

Lead author of the paper is Steven Piantadosi PhD ’11; Harry Tily, a postdoc in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, is another co-author.

What do you ‘mean’?
For a somewhat ironic example of ambiguity, consider the word “mean.” It can mean, of course, to indicate or signify, but it can also refer to an intention or purpose (“I meant to go to the store”); something offensive or nasty; or the mathematical average of a set of numbers.

Adding an ‘s’ introduces even more potential definitions: an instrument or method (“a means to an end”), or financial resources (“to live within one’s means”).

But virtually no speaker of English gets confused when he or she hears the word “mean.” That’s because the different senses of the word occur in such different contexts as to allow listeners to infer its meaning nearly automatically.

Given the disambiguating power of context, the researchers hypothesized that languages might harness ambiguity to reuse words, most likely, the easiest words for language processing systems.

Building on observation and previous studies, they posited that words with fewer syllables, high frequency and the simplest pronunciations should have the most meanings.

Siri: Apple Selling the Concept of Natural Language Computing?

One of the main iPhone 4S features touted by Apple during yesterday's announcement was the phone's built-in Siri feature.

Siri is a virtual personal assistant with additional dictation features that lets you accomplish various tasks simply by speaking to your phone.

If it sounds like a familiar concept, it is. Similar apps have existed for a while on other platforms and, until yesterday, even Siri itself was an app in Apple's App Store that worked on previous iPhone models.

The iPhone 4S version of Siri, however, has deep access to much of the iPhone 4S' core functionality and built-in apps, while the previously-available Siri app could only access a handful of third-party services.

While Siri's ability to work with natural language is impressive—see the demo video above or click here to watch Apple's keynote and skip ahead to the 71:30 mark, it'll be really interesting to see how many people actually use the iPhone 4S' voice command features regularly.

Being able to say, "What's the weather like today?" and having the phone open the weather app is cool, but seems like a marginal time saver compared to opening the app yourself.

But the slightly more complex actions like telling it to remind you to call your wife when you leave work, which will create a reminder for you and then leverage the phone's location features to sense when you physically leave your office before reminding you—are what will get people most excited about it.

The most important factors that'll ultimately determine Siri's success are whether Apple's able to truly make it an it-just-works experience, something Apple's pretty good at, in case you hadn't heard and, perhaps more importantly, getting as many people using the feature as possible.

While it'll just be available on the iPhone 4S at first, don't be surprised to see it creep into Apple's other product lines like iPads, iPods and computers.

In fact, it appears that while Apple's positioning Siri as an exclusive selling point for the iPhone 4S, there's really nothing keeping it from working on other Apple devices right away.

The iPad 2 and Mac computers have enough horsepower to run Siri, but I'll be interested to see if Apple also opens up Siri for use on the original iPhone 4 and even the iPod Touch in the future.

We may someday see that Siri becomes just an integrated feature of the iOS software running on all of Apple's portable devices.

If and when that happens, it'll then be a question of how ingrained the use of Siri becomes with Apple device owners.

If you see people barking orders at their iPhones, iPads and MacBooks in public instead of tapping away at their screens and keyboards, you'll know that the promise of natural language computing has taken another big leap forward.

Stephen fry animated about Language

Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography - Language from Matthew Rogers on Vimeo.

How language changes the way we see the world

Do English, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understanding, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak different languages?

These questions touch on all the major controversies in the study of mind, with important implications for politics, law and religion. Yet very little empirical work had been done on these questions until recently.

The idea that language might shape thought was for a long time considered untestable at best and more often simply crazy and wrong. Now, a flurry of new cognitive science research is showing that in fact, language does profoundly influence how we see the world.

The question of whether languages shape the way we think goes back centuries; Charlemagne proclaimed that "to have a second language is to have a second soul." But the idea went out of favor with scientists when Noam Chomsky's theories of language gained popularity in the 1960s and '70s.

Dr. Chomsky proposed that there is a universal grammar for all human languages—essentially, that languages don't really differ from one another in significant ways. And because languages didn't differ from one another, the theory went, it made no sense to ask whether linguistic differences led to differences in thinking.

The search for linguistic universals yielded interesting data on languages, but after decades of work, not a single proposed universal has withstood scrutiny.

Instead, as linguists probed deeper into the world's languages (7,000 or so, only a fraction of them analyzed), innumerable unpredictable differences emerged.

Of course, just because people talk differently doesn't necessarily mean they think differently. In the past decade, cognitive scientists have begun to measure not just how people talk, but also how they think, asking whether our understanding of even such fundamental domains of experience as space, time and causality could be constructed by language.

Russian speakers, who have more words for light and dark blues, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue.

Some indigenous tribes say north, south, east and west, rather than left and right, and as a consequence have great spatial orientation.

The Piraha, whose language eschews number words in favour of terms like few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities.

In one study, Spanish and Japanese speakers couldn't remember the agents of accidental events as adeptly as English speakers could. Why?

In Spanish and Japanese, the agent of causality is dropped: "The vase
broke itself," rather than "John broke the vase."

To read the full article got to this link The Wall Street Journal

Are Twitterverse or Homo Economicus? Check it out now!

Editors at Britain's Collins English Dictionary have added these and 264 other entries to the 30th Anniversary Edition, published Sept. 3.

To qualify for inclusion in the esteemed lexicon, a word had to have, over the past two years, six quality citations in Collins' digital corpus, a computerized database that scans 2.5 billion words across a number of print and online resources.

The rise of social-networking sites led to the addition of Twitter (the noun) and twitter (the verb), while the kind of dashed-off writing that appears in posts on that site has given new permanence to words such as hmm, heh, and mwah (the sound of an exaggerated kiss) that were previously considered mere sounds.

"Had Twitter and Facebook not become so popular, there's no doubt these terms would not have been included," says Duncan Black, editor of the dictionary. "They're part of the language of microblogging."

He also credits Twitter for the resurgence of terms like heigh-ho and hey-ho — exclamations of happiness, disappointment or surprise — that had fallen into disuse. Words popular in e-mail shorthand and text-messaging such as OMG (oh my god) and WTF (what the f___) also made the cut.

Beyond digital culture, environmental concerns have helped color the dictionary green. Craggers (members of carbon reduction action groups) now have terms to describe their colleagues in the environmental movement.

They probably know more than one ecotarian (a person who only eats food that has been produced in an environmentally friendly manner) and plenty of carborexics (those obsessed with reducing their carbon footprint).

Lastly, the ongoing global financial crisis has moved once highly niche words into the mainstream. People that bandy about complex terms like quantitative easing (increasing the supply of money in order to stimulate economic activity) can now check that they are actually using them correctly.

The recession's effect on our behavior has impacted language too. Holidaymakers trying to rein in spending have popularized the term staycation (taking a holiday without going abroad). Glamping (glamorous camping) is less popular at the moment, for obvious reasons.

Expand your vocabulary with these other additions to the dictionary:

• Avid fart: a flashy and intrusive visual-effects editing style (in film)
• Beer o'clock: the time of day when it is acceptable or customary to start drinking alcohol
• boomburb: a large suburb experiencing rapid population growth
• cage fighting: a form of extreme fighting taking place in an enclosed space
• frugalista: a person who tries to stay fashionably dressed on a budget
• gak: slang for cocaine#
• goon bag: the plastic bladder inside a box of (usually cheap) wine
• homo economicus: a theoretical human being who rationally calculates the costs and benefits of every action before making a decision, used as the basis for a number of economic theories and models
• Ponzimonium: financial turmoil in the wake of uncovering Ponzi schemes
• space junk: objects such as artificial satellites and material discarded from space stations that remain in space after use
• supernanny: an expert who advises parents on how to deal with badly behaved children
• Twitterverse: the social-networking site Twitter and its users