More Procrastination

Stimulus

A news bulletin about a prototype device surprised me today, describing the device as a "handheld cell counter the size of a Rubik’s Cube," then as "a simple, solid-white cube measuring 2x2x3 inches". (my emphasis).
It is dismaying to observe that cube may be following literally in the path to uselessness, if a cube no longer has to be cubic. That is, as every schooled person ought to know, a "regular polyhedron having six identical square faces."

Response

What should have been said is a block, or a cuboid, or--my preference--a square cylinder.

• A block, I think most would agree, is rectangular but not necessarily square on any side. It may be a bit oblong, like a brick. It may be, as Wiktionary notes, "approximately cuboid." But what is cuboid? 
• A cuboid is a rectangular parallelepiped, of which the cube is the special case where the rectangular faces are congruent squares.  The cuboid generalizes the cube by allowing the edges to lengthen or shorten as long as the opposing faces remain parallel to each other. The cube might be flattened and stretched to become brick-like: a little longer than twice the width, and wider than it is high (240 × 115 × 71 mm, e.g.). Or, it might extend a two inch cube to a 2x2x3 inch cuboid.
• Whereas a cylinder may usually be circular (and right) in non-mathematical usage, it may be any "surface created by projecting a closed two-dimensional curve along an axis intersecting the plane of the curve." (source: Wiktionary). A dowel is a cylinder and, yes, one can buy square dowels (ask your search engine).

Conclusion

If the three-dimensional rectangle has edges of more than one length, i.e. one cannot say it is a some length cube but must say it is a width by depth by height something, it is not a cube.

References

A 'game-changer' for HIV/AIDS -- UC Berkeley College of Engineering

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Tags: :

Labels: ambiguity, devolution, endarkenment, journalism, language

A pretty catchy headline -- Ninety flatulent cows start fire at dairy farm in Germany -- ill reflects what happened: an electric spark set off accumulated inflammable gases. It is well known that ruminants of the sort produce methane as their cud evolves. The setting suggests a venue where such natural carburation is expected and normal: a dairy farm. Was the density of cows suddenly increased, the ventilation reduced, the composition of the cud changed? Not said. Was the "static electric charge" as expected and as normal as the presence of methane? Not said, but one can doubt: it seems unlikely that the cows suddenly began producing dangerous levels of methane in a sparking environment.
This is a story I'd love to find amusing, but the framing bothers me. Much as blaming the "dangerous crude" for exploding after careless train accidents, blaming gases produced by a human-regulated process (a dairy farm, in this case) for an explosion triggered by human recklessness seems a bad habit to encourage.

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Tags: :

Labels: animism, blame-shifting, journalism, risk

A piece of writing brought to my attention recently (The Hidden Technology that Makes Twitter Huge) led me to wonder, how does one say "noyer le poisson" in American? "Noyer le poisson" is an expression in French commonly used figuratively; literally translated it is "to drown the fish" (or "drowning the fish"). The figurative use means "to avoid a taboo topic or difficult subject, concealing it under a mound of details." "Beat around the bush" is probably a good approximation, but "snow job" might be better.

The Snow Job

The piece in question is hardly unique in attempting to snow readers, but much of the detail used to snow the reader is actually wrong and misleading, while a real technological innovation of Twitter's is not mentioned at all.  The reader is provided a supposed "look under the hood" at Twitter, the better to marvel at its genius. The originality is possibly overstated, the execution performance is understated, and look under the hood leaves the reader less well informed!

The omitted technology may not matter too much to shareholders as, valuable as it may be, it cannot explain much of Twitter's market value. Twitter uses Scala effectively: "Scala is one of the main application programming languages used at Twitter. Much of our infrastructure is written in Scala and we have several large libraries supporting our use....Our use of Scala is mainly for creating high volume services that form distributed systems...".

The Genius and Genesis of Twitter

There are lots and lots of prior practices and ideas that may have contributed to the Twitter service, including e-mail listserv (for broadcasting messages to subscribers using mail protocol) and pagers (and bippers).  SMS/text messages sent from mobile phones may have a role as a model.  But the real inspiration was people's status messages on IM! From Twitter on Scala (April 2009):

Twitter started as a hack project at a company called ODEO, which was focused on podcasting. As ODEO was having some troubles in its latter days as a company, they started experimenting, to keep engineers involved by letting them play around with ideas they had on the side. One of the engineers, Jack Dorsey, had been really interested in status. He was looking at his AIM buddy list, and seeing that all of these guys were saying, “I’m walking the dog,” “I’m working on this,” “I’m going to that.” He wondered if there was some way to make it easier for people to share that status. So he and a couple other engineers started prototyping what became Twitter on Ruby on Rails, which was the stack that ODEO was built on. And Twitter continues today to be primarily a Rails application, with a bunch of Ruby daemons doing asynchronous processing on the backend.

So, using Twitter might be likened to connecting to a buddy list where nobody ever sent messages, just status updates, and the status updates were logged for later perusal. Or an alphapager system wherein anyone can broadcast short messages to everyone listening on their channel. Or simply, as one of the developers put it, a transport-independent micro-blogging system. But who will be willing to pay for that, and how much?

Message and Content Containers

The BusinessWeek piece notes that a Twitter message has lots of meta-data or header information associated. This is true, but equally true of e-mail. The piece itself, saved as html, is over 200k bytes of stuff, very little of which is the text.
It is also questionable how reliable some of the information provided by senders is, particularly when their anonymity is of the essence. On a message sent via a VPN rather than a geo-tracking device (like a smartphone) the sender's whereabouts are not known any better than those of a mail sender. Some of the fields are optional, as well, and potentially of little analytical value. Among the "special" fields in Twitter messages, a study made by an intern at PARC in 2011 found that Only 66% Use Twitter Profile Location Field as Intended:

34% of Twitter users do not provide a valid geographic location on their Twitter user profiles. Instead, some of these users co-opt the field to make jokes, express their love for a particular celebrity or to shout back at Twitter that their location is "NON YA BUSINESS!" Others, meanwhile, provide no location information at all.

n00b-speak

The factual errors concern the "snow" used to get the reader enthralled: API use and JSON. The use of technical terms was confusing, dazzling; it was not all wrong, really, but may have outstripped the author's understanding.
The first case is the explanation of JSON and its use. JSON is a set of syntax rules for representing labelled data, as is XML, and there are others. It happens that JSON uses a syntax very much like that used in ECMAScript, which (ECMAScript) served as its model. To call it "a simplified version of JavaScript" is not correct; leaving out all the control commands (loops and logic and such) is more than simplification, one does not have a programmable language left.

Similarly, and in the next sentence, "API essentially means “speaks (and reads) JSON.”" is not generally true. API essentially means "accepts requests from application programs and responds as best it can." It is an interface program, which may "speak" XML, html or something else instead of JSON. The flickr.com api, for instance, accepts requests using REST, XML-RPC or SOAP (but not JSON) and replies using REST, XML-RPC, SOAP, JSON, or PHP.

Another instance of confused reference to an API is in "For all the possibilities of APIs, there are also limits." A query result returned by a call to an API has flags set with warning messages, restricting publication; how is that in conflict with "all the possibilities of APIs"? It is not, "API" was worked in gratuitously.

Finally, and this may not bother all readers, stylistically writing of short text messages as if they were animals is inappropriate. "a tweet thrives," "once born, they're alone and must find their own way," is nonsense.

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Note on the French figure of speech: Ref. (Figuré) Ne pas aborder un thème tabou ou un sujet difficile, le dissimuler sous un monceau de détails. from Wiktionary entry

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Tags: :

Labels: criticism, debugging, ECMAScript, journalism, technology, translation, Twitter

A recent list of news headlines might not seem ambiguous at first glance.  We probably all read it according to what we wish to find.
Coroners, I do believe, must investigate hundred of hospital deaths in the course of their careers.  In fiction, whistle-blowers and other heroes take--or have thrust upon them--investigative initiatives.  Surely the Brazilian nurse, or doctor, or both were such heroic investigators.  Or were they?

Would "suspected of 300 hospital deaths" have been too hard to think of? Or must we suppose that it would have been "investigated more than" in the opposite case. 

Explanation

The meaning of "over" in this case could be in association with either

1. "investigated": was or would be investigated over something, meaning (to be) investigated because of something.
2. "300": over 300 something is investigated (did investigate) more than 300 something.

The ambiguity arises because the rationale for investigating is stated using a number, and "investigated" could be either a past active form (as "did investigate") or a present participle (as "is being investigated"). There are many ways to avoid this ambiguity. For one, a simple change from "300" to "hundreds of" (or "scads of") would suffice, since "over hundreds of" does not make sense, making it clear what was meant is "investigated over." Another possibility is to remove "over" by writing "suspected of" instead of "investigated over," as suggested above.

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Tags: :

Labels: ambiguity, journalism, semantics

Reading Charles Bremner's column Rebirth for quirky old French bike this morning (in Times Online, owned by Murdoch's News Corporation, I realize), a phrase caught my attention:

The e-Solex is made in China but it is stylish.

I'm not making it up, have a look for yourself! Might one hear that even on Fox? No, I don't know why he would write something which seems bigoted, boorish or both, so I won't answer the question in the title of this post.

Mr. Bremner, if you happen to read this, let me suggest an article from the Wall Street Journal (also owned by News Corporation, but it wasn't quite, then) from a little over a year ago:

The Forbidden City of Terry Gou
His complex in China turns out iPhones and PCs, powering the biggest exporter you've never heard of

The activities in Shenzen are not exactly unknown, are they? One doesn't have to be an expert in globalization and trade to have learned of them, they are mentioned in so many places these past few years that it is hard not to know. Among the possibilities, may I suggest the excellent blog of James Fallows? Earlier this year, he noted MacBook Air #5: the Air comes home [to China] which has a link to his full-length article, researched and edited (I'd guess), published in the Atlantic: China Makes, The World Takes .

Then, last but not least, try browsing MadeInChina.com

Oh, and you might consider getting an editor (or at least a critical proof-reader).

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Tags: Identificateurs Technorati : Bremner : journalism : China : blogging : News Corporation : Times Online

Labels: blogging, Bremner, China, journalism, News Corporation, Times Online

How much more does one read after:

High quality empirical evidence from the shows that mass media influences voters but it is not clear that the media imparts a bias.

Too bad. "Does the mass-media have political influence?" sounds interesting.

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Tags: Economics : propaganda : syntax errors

Labels: EU, journalism, language, politics, propaganda

Labels: journalism, propaganda, superstition, WSJ