On September 19th, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson made a speech regarding the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) to allay the fears of investors:
I am convinced that this bald approach will cost American families far less than the alternative—a continuing series of financial institution failures and frozen credit markets unable to fund economic expansion.
Unfortunately, the key phrase in this passage was widely mistranscribed in the media as a “bold approach.” But now that more details of the new Troubled Asset Relief Program have being released, Secretary Paulson’s true intentions are clear.
The Treasury Department tapped James H. Lambright [above center], head of the Export-Import Bank, as the interim chief investment officer for the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program… The bailout program is being directed by Neel Kashkari [above left], who had been senior advisor to Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr [above right].
Will this new program stem the global credit crisis? Maybe. But at least we can all agree… it’s a bald move.
Bailey just asked me what the difference between 回収 (kaishū) and 収集(shūshū) is—two words that would both map to the English verb “collect.” I intuitively came up with a hypothesis to explain the distinction:
回収 may take things away from others when collecting while 収集 does not have that implication.
Things that you 回収 may have been previously distributed by the actor themself while 収集 does not have that implication.1
Not content with armchair theorizing, however, I decided to take advantage of one of the largest corpora in the world: Google.2 To test my hypothesis, I chose two “objects of collection”, one you can take away (and often is distributed first) and one you can’t take away: アンケート (ankēto “survey,” from the French inquête) and 意見 (iken “opinion”). I then took the four resulting collocations3 on Google in quotes (“•”) and recorded how many hits there were.
This second point could also be hypothesized based on the component meaning of 回, which in the verb 回る (mawa=ru) can mean “circle back.” ↩
Google is of course a huge corpus but it has very limited search and can easily be misused and misunderstood, thus making Google an unreliable (unprofessional) source for statistical data. One Google alternative for some different statistics is the n-gramdata they offer for research. ↩
”Collocation” on Wikipedia says: “Within the area of corpus linguistics, collocation is defined as a sequence of words or terms which co-occur more often than would be expected by chance.” ↩
I got hooked on The Office since I’ve been in Taiwan, which I watch at hulu.com via VPN. Checking for a new episode the other day, I found this clip from Steve Carell on Saturday Night Live this past weekend: The Japanese Office.
I’ve been a fan of the SNL Digital Shorts since Lazy Sunday, but this is absolutely something else. It’s a brilliant piece of cross-cultural parody. Many on the associated Hulu page had some questions, however, so I decided to write up a little explanation of what’s actually going on in this short, and why I love it so.[^2]
As Google adds ten more languages to its machine translation service, it seems to be on its way to becoming the most convenient universal translator of the world’s popular languages. Google’s handling of languages of course isn’t perfect, however—in particular, I’ve been complaining to friends for a while about the weaknesses of Google’s handling of queries in Chinese character (漢字/汉字) scripts. In this post, I run some tests using Google’s Language Detection service to try to better understand its handling of Chinese character queries.
Background
Chinese characters have been used all across East Asia, most notably in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese (the “CJKV”). Prescriptivist writing reforms in Communist China and Japan have simplified many characters, though. Some characters were simplified in the same way, some in different ways, and some in only one country but not the other. For more information, there’s Wikipedia or Ken Lunde’s CJKV Information Processing.
The problem
The issue comes up when you try to search for a word in Chinese characters which clearly came from one Chinese character-using language. From my experience, Google doesn’t consider which language you are a user of, based on the query, and returns many results in other Chinese character-using languages as well.[^1]
White Protestants and Catholics backed Mrs. Clinton, but Mr. Obama was strongly supported by voters who frequently attend religious services.
Seeing as backing Mrs. Clinton and supporting Mr. Obama are, in terms of votes, mutually exclusive, this sentence entails that white Protestants and Catholics (the majority of ) are not a part of “voters who frequently attend religious services”, as is demonstrated by the infelicity of the following sentence:
“Group A did A, and Group B did not do A — but Group A is part of Group B.”
Yesterday Steve Jobs introduced, among other things, iTunes movie rentals. Rent a movie and download it over broadband. You then have 30 days to start the film, and then 24 hours to finish it before it turns into a pumpkin. A lot of people are complaining about the 24 hours, including some with good reason and apparently many who have kids.
So why rental? Thus spoke Steve: “Your favorite movie… most of us watch movies once… maybe a few times.”1 Currently number eight on the top rentals is one of Paul Sally’s favorites, The Usual Suspects
. From the iTunes Store description:
There are a handful of movies that demand a second viewing—because they’re so good, or because a surprise ending gives every scene a new meaning when it’s watched a second time. The Usual Suspects is both.
I just noticed something on the latest Tekzilla Daily: Patrick Norton, host of Tekzilla and former host of the Screen Savers says “there’s a lots to learn here” (1:28) and then later “the site you’re having troubles with” (1:39). While “having troubles with…” is fine, I believe “having trouble with…” is much more common. As for “a lots to learn,” however, that’s definitely out. Is it hyperarticulation? I don’t know.
Wikipedia notes: “Norton grew up in the Midwest, but considers the Jersey Shore his home… He currently lives in San Francisco, California.” So, is this a Jersey Shore or California thing? I have no idea.
As I continue to work on and debug Yet Another Related Posts Plugin and WP-Smartdate, I’ve come across an issue where plugin activation fails, but I get no useful error message.
When I try to activate the plugin, I am redirected to a url of the type /plugins.php?error=true&plugin=...&_error_nonce=.... This redirect just gives me the plugins control panel with my plugin still disactivated, and with no useful error message.1 This apparently is an issue with the Plugin Protection mechanism introduced in WP 2.2. A quick fix (hack) is available on the WP forums.
Here’s hoping this helps some people scratching their heads, and that this behavior is reconsidered/fixed in future releases.
Apparently some people get a message like “Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.” ↩
Don’t want to be their guinea pig? Omniture lets you opt out.
Oh wait, really? You can? That’s great! This opt-out link gives you a cookie called omniture_optout on .2o7.net with a 1 value. But wait, it’s a cookie? That means…
…it is necessary to install a cookie on your browser. This cookie identifies that you have opted-out. If you delete the opt-out cookie, or if you change computers or Web browsers, you will need to opt-out again.
That’s right. Cookies are stored in your browser. So if you opt-out in Safari or FF, will you be opted-out in a CS3 app? Um, no. Or in the iTunes MiniStore? No.
In the case of the MiniStore, you can just turn it off. But in the CS3 case (and for any other apps that build such communications in) things are trickier. As a commenter suggests on the ValleyWag, it looks like Little Snitch is the best way of clearly opting-out of communications like this. Unless, of course, you want to switch to Vista.
It’s important to give props to our man John Gruber. The ZDNet article jumps on the John Nack train of “you can’t call this disgraceful without looking into it!” But you clearly can see something is suspicious about a 192.168.112.2o7 url, which was the main impetus for Gruber’s harsh claims. John Nack hath since repented. ↩
I still have yet to find a fix to the dvipng discoloration mystery I ran into back at The Academic Approach, even with the latest MacTeX version, so I’m going to repost the problem here.
I’ve recently run into what I believe is a rare bug in dvipng: here’s the setup. (To play along, you can get my test files: http://mitcho.com/discolor.zip .) I am using MacTeX… in fact, it’s today’s release.
The LaTeX source file (discolored.tex) loads just two packages: color and graphicx. The body does two things: an \includegraphics with a local PNG file (with the bb option to specify the BoundingBox explicitly) and a \textcolor command introducing some green text, using the green defined there.
pdflatex produces the expected result: the figure and the green text.
But when you run the following commands…
latex discolored.tex
dvipng -D 200 discolored.dvi
you get a PNG (discolored1.png) which shows the text in a brownish color… the green is gone!!
There are two quick ways to fix this that I’ve found: one is to not include the image… if you comment the \includegraphics command out, the color comes out fine. The second is to not specify a -D (output resolution) parameter in the dvipng… this also gives you the expected output. However, in my current project, neither of these are available options…
I am frankly not very familiar with the inner workings of dvipng… does anyone have any thoughts? Can this bug be reproduced?
A great example of Taiwanese customer service: I recently bought a hot drink at a 7-11. After paying at the register, the cashier put a hot beverage sleeve on it for me. Very kind.
But then later I looked a the sleeve. It has some non-verbal instructions on one side…
and, just in case that didn’t work for you, there’s an image of the end goal as well:
Recall that the cashier put the sleeve on for me. That’s just crazy.
The funny thing about all of these is that we don’t speak commas. It’s used to graphically represent pauses in speech, but are often used according to certain artificial rules which, when used systematically, aim to help the reader parse the sentence or help disambiguate between different readings.1
I’m surprised Language Log hasn’t picked up this new piece yet. UPDATE: Yup, they got to it. Great coverage, as always.
We use pauses in spoken language to do this too, but not necessarily in the same places that we place commas in “good” written language. ↩
since I’ve been in Taiwan, which I watch at 
. From the iTunes Store description:
