polyglot conspiracy

Why did I never hear Says You! before? Listening to this show makes me feel like I’m in 1937.

Also learned just now: both whimsy and whimsey are dictionary-approved.

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (another one! - read it fast, before it goes subscription) presents the findings of a study of automatic keystroke recognition. That means that computer programs can analyze typing in the same way they analyze speech - knowing what you type just by hearing you type it.

Armed with a microphone that cost $10, Mr. Tygar’s team recorded a series of 10-minute typing sessions — each conducted on a different keyboard — without filtering out ambient noise.

The group then ran the recordings through a computer program that used the same technology underlying speech-recognition software, isolated individual keystrokes, and grouped the strokes that sounded alike.

Unlike the human ear, the software can pick up the subtle tonal differences between the strikes of two nearby keys, according to Mr. Tygar. “A keyboard is a little bit like a drum,” he says. “Depending on where you hit it, you get a slightly different tone.”

The researchers then told their computer to play cryptographer. They gave the machine a statistical rundown of the English language — teaching it, for example, that the letter combination “th” occurs far more often than “tj” — and let it use that data to deduce which keystroke sounds matched which letters.

The computer initially managed to identify correctly about 60 percent of the characters that had been typed. By running the software’s initial guesses through a spelling checker, Mr. Tygar and his team rendered the text partially readable. And by feeding the spelling-corrected data back to the computer and training the machine to fine-tune its interpretive skills, they eventually identified 96 percent of the characters they recorded.

So this is disturbing, the article says, because someone (I’m not sure whether computers or people are the target here) could discern your password just from hearing you type it, in a public place for example.

But I actually think this is really cool! Not because you can tell what words people are writing, per se, but because I’m imagining using “overhearing” sort of procedures to study people’s typing behavior in different types of CMC. Could we tell whether someone was typing an email vs. instant messaging vs. writing a paper, from analyzing not necessarily the words they’re writing but the style in which they hit their keystrokes? This might be a cool way to go about getting at register variation in CMC, or issues of speed and synchronicity.

But, yeah. You should be careful about typing in your passwords in public places.

The Tensor has an excellent post up about writing style rules at an anti-hacker training program, featured in the Chronic (er, I mean the Chronicle of Higher Education) online. The Tensor has really done all the work here; I have nothing to add that I didn’t already say in his comments. But, here’s a snippet from the article to get you intrigued:

The rules that seem most onerous to many of the students are the ones covering writing style. They include the following:

–Students cannot use colons, semicolons, exclamation marks, or question marks, nor can they separate a phrase with a dash. No sentence can begin with the words “and,” “but,” or “because.”
–Students cannot use apostrophes for any reason, not even for contractions or possessive nouns.
–Students cannot use passive voice, or words like “could,” “would,” and “should.” Instead, they must use “must” to describe a policy or requirement.
–Students cannot end a sentence with a preposition.

“The goal is to communicate, not to impress,” says Mr. Jabbour. “Simplicity improves communication.”

See, I thought maybe they’d have to do exercises in Leet.

A headline on the cover of a recent Star magazine issue reads:

OPRAH

IS SHE MAD AT BRAD, TOO?

As if there are a million other things Oprah also *is* at Brad. You can’t even *be* that many adjectives at someone. Angry and pissed (off), but that’s pretty much the same thing as mad. Amazed or surprised, maybe. Those are basically all that google comes up with for “I’m * at *”. Disappointed is questionable for me. Annoyed might work, or peeved.

I suppose Oprah could be any of these things. However, I’m positive they meant that either:

a) Oprah, along with other people, like Jen, is mad at Brad.
(Is she mad at Brad, too?)

or

b) Oprah is mad at Brad, and she is also mad at Tom.
(Is she mad at Brad, too?)

Incidentally, Tom is also totally pissed at Angelina, who’s unsurprisingly mad at Jen, too, and also Britney. Who doesn’t care, because Kevin’s babysitting tonight, so she can also secretly meet Nick for drinks later, under the guise of “going to the gym to work off my babyweight.” Chaotic!

[PS - Slate's Keeping Tabs is the best.]

From this week’s NYT mag:

Deborah Solomon: I just read somewhere that jokes are less popular than they used to be.

Stephen Colbert: You mean like, “Two guys walk into a bar”? I think you are right. I get e-mailed jokes a lot - by friends who are not in the business. Jokes live on in e-mail. E-mail has become a museum of jokes.

(emphasis mine)

I sense a study coming on, combining my two great loves of CMC and theories of humor..

I love birthdays (ask any of my friends), and why should I treat that of online entities any different? And so it is that I wish myself a happy birthday today. It’s been about a year since I came up with a name, a year to the day since the first post, and at the time I basically had no idea what I was doing with polyglot conspiracy. All I hoped was that maybe a few people would like it (they did) and a few people, either those same people or different people, would comment once in a while (they have).

In honor, I’ll be completely self-indulgent and link to some of my favorite posts from the year. Here they are:

‘”Airquote Revolution”
spam (at) countries (dot) evil
Until cell phones can accommodate people’s bad memories, I prefer my pickups on paper
Put your comma where your semicolon is
Confessions and hugs, from screen to page
Grammar check fever (he got it bad)
1 n33t 1337 7r337 and Legalese vs. Leetspeak: a speak-off
The ringer’s a ringer
Forwardese: which you’s on first? (or, Email Deixis)

That’ll about do ‘er. Thanks to everyone so far who’s read, commented, and especially linked to this site. I’ve enjoyed it; I hope you have too.

A current post at Heaneyland! has inspired me to check my referral logs for some ca-razy search strings. I’ve meant to do this for a while, actually, and since PC has good reason to be self-reflective this weekend (said ever mysteriously), why not? Besides, it’s fun and easy, and totally fascinating to boot. So here are some of my faves.

a sentence use the word jackal
anglo-saxon period pictures of squires
master polyglot limited
is kanye on myspace
what is the meaning of those who live in glass houses shouldn t throw stones. ?
conspiracy of names that start with even letters
grammar fish and chips is
sexy lexi johnson
motocross bikini models
examples of polygot [sic]
female penguins stealing baby penguins.
what is the baddest swear word
weed lowers iq
pirate emoticon
beau coo origin of
wheel of fortune conspiracy
cleverness
marijuana cell phone
differences in the language in two hurricane katrina-related photo captions
when to use airquote
what is the differences between semicolon and comma
is typing a message has entered text
t-mobile contract conspiracy
advantage of weblish
sociolinguistic- gender vs dirty words
katrina femur
difference between linguistic and polyglot [after my own heart!]

And, finally, my personal favorite:

rupert murdoch evil

Interestingly, about half of them have “myspace” in them. Which honestly, I think I’ve only written about, like, twice. Now, thrice.

A few days ago, Geoff Pullum posted one of my favorite posts ever (so far) at Language Log:

Search The New Yorker for some word that doesn’t appear in any recent on-line article, I found recently, and you will get the following staggeringly unidiomatic message:

I’m sorry I couldn’t find that for which you were looking.

The sad truth is that this probably is not intended as a joke. It would be a rather feeble joke, but at least as a joke it would be less pathetic than it is as an attempt to write ordinary English. I think the programmer who wrote this message was being serious. He or she may even have been instructed (God help us) to write it that way.

I erupted in raucous laughter upon trying this for myself and receiving the same idiotic and unidiomatic message. But it is, deep down, not funny, as Geoff goes on to rant about John Dryden’s original prescription against ending sentences with prepositions, and the sway it’s held over English grammar instruction ever since.

But something else intrigued me: the post’s title, “New Yorker search engine stark staring mad.” Stark raving mad I’ve heard, yes, but stark staring mad? A new one on me.

So I googlefought. And it gets about 15,500 hits (cf. “- raving -” getting 227,000 hits), of which Geoff’s post is the first (?!). Is it a more typically British phrase? Judging from the google results, many of which are from .co.uk domains, I think that must be it. It also sometimes appears with a comma, as in “stark, staring mad.” Such is the case in this poem, “Repression of War Experience,” by Siegfried Sassoon (excerpt from last stanza):

You’re quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home;
You’d never think there was a bloody war on! …
O yes, you would … why, you can hear the guns.
Hark! Thud, thud, thud,—quite soft … they never cease—
Those whispering guns—O Christ, I want to go out
And screech at them to stop—I’m going crazy;
I’m going stark, staring mad because of the guns.

With the Bowlingual dog translator, you can interpret utterances from your canine’s mouth, and translate your own utterances to dogspeak. From the sales page at Amazon:

Your dog has something to tell you! Dr. Doolittle’s dream of talking with dogs is finally a reality with the Bow-Lingual, the amazing new dog translator. Based on the patented Animal Emotion Analysis System (AEAS)., the Bow-Lingual uses voice print analysis combined with sophisticated behavior analysis to determine which of six emotions your dog is expressing: happy, sad, on-guard, assertive, frustrated and needy. Then the Bow-Lingual provides a translation based on the emotion, to tell you what your dog is trying to tell you. Bow-Lingual is not just a translation tools, it is also a tool to help you train and care for your dog, with built-in training tips such as chew-training and a medical reference. The Bow-Lingual also offers a Home ALone function to monitor your dog’s emotions for up to 12 hours while you are away and a body Language Interpreter to help you understand your dog’s behavior.

People: this toy is 90% discounted right now. You know it’s good. The perfect gift for your budding little linguist, 8-14 years old.

And, because you never want to take your dog to the dog park without knowing what he’s thinking, the Bowlingual now comes to your mobile phone via SMS technology.

(via AIR)

[UPDATE: Meowlingual already available; props to Translate This! in the comments.]

An article yesterday in the NYT about swearing (thanks be to Jarrett). HeiDeas has posted an interesting reflection on the validity of the article couching the discussion (which is mostly a historico-linguistic-psychological presentation of cursing) in a claim about swearing as pre-dating speech in linguistic evolution. While she’s got some real thoughts on the issue, I just straight-up don’t understand this from the article:

…the earliest writings, which date from 5,000 years ago, include their share of off-color descriptions of the human form and its ever-colorful functions. And the written record is merely a reflection of an oral tradition that Dr. Deutscher and many other psychologists and evolutionary linguists suspect dates from the rise of the human larynx, if not before.

“Larynx” equals “vocal cords,” right? We were swearing before we had vocal cords? The article needs to have explained these things in plain language, methinks. It feels like you could say that swear words came about in language to substitute for some kind of emotion or emotionally charged actions, which existed before language did and would have been some kind of survival tool. But I guess I don’t really understand how “cursing” could precede “speaking” at all. And so Heidi has a point - the article is, after all, titled, “Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore.” (Which I thought was going to be an article about people swearing in the wake of Katrina, which I’ve mentioned being intrigued by before, because I want an analysis of the media letting people curse on TV and the radio and in the newspapers. Alas…different story.) And if that’s really the claim, there needs to be more focused discussion on it.

There IS a focused infographic (go straight to it here) on swear words through the years. Drat, by gog! Don’t be a strumpet and go sfooting with such lazy no-good slangrills! They are the deuce!

What I would love to have seen in this article, in addition to the brief history of curse words, is a description about the process of words being brought down from curse word status to being just normal words or, just as often, even weaker words than they probably were before they were curse words (what is this called?! Related to “pejoration”?). That’s the kind of evolution I’m interested in. Examples listed as curse words that now are enthusiastically NOT curse words, like, words you use INSTEAD of curse words: heck, shucks, gee whillikens, gosh, punk.

Current distraction: Maledicta.