I love soccer, or as we Europeans call it, football. I also like network visualizations. So, how can I not love this network visualization of Ballon D’Or votes. If you don’t know what the Ballon D’Or is, check this out.
Quick explanation:
“The above visualization shows the network of votes of the Ballon d’Or 2012. Voters and voted for players make up the 524 nodes of the graph. Node size is based on indegree. The 1513 edges are based on the given votes, with each of the voters having three votes: 1st place 5 points (thickest line), 2nd place 3 points, and 3rd place 1 point (thinnest line). Node color indicates either being a captain (red), coach (violet), journalist (blue), or player who did not vote (green).”
There really seems to be two players and everybody else: Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo just dominates the whole thing.
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The Global Sociology Blog: The Visual Du Jour – GOOOOOOAAAAL
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PopAnth - Hot Buttered Humanity: Authentic cool: Global hipsters and consumer culture
South by Southwest hipsters image, courtesy of Todd Dwyer (Flickr 2009)America appears to be confronted by a sinister wave of indifference, inauthenticity, and shallow irony, but somewhat surprisingly the threat arrives wearing tight jeans and flannel shirts, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, listening to Belle and Sebastian on their iPod, shopping at open-air markets, and sporting strategically mussed-up hair. Each time their death rites are read, these “hipsters” seem to again be resurrected by critical observers decrying insincerity or foreseeing the end of Culture.The most recent volleys of disdain, parody, and moralizing over hipsters come from the unusual intersection of Francophone literary scholar Christy Wampole and the most prescient of all popular cultural mirrors, The Simpsons. These and more than a decade of observations on hipsters betray deep and consequential anxieties about consumer society and mass culture. However, they rarely reveal anthropology’s essential humility in the face of difference, respect for everyday experience, or appreciation for cultural and social complexity. It is very difficult to fathom understanding a social group or their broader sociocultural context without some fundamental respect for those people and their voices, yet that is precisely what we see missing in most hipster commentaries.Wampole’s New York Times essay How to Live without Irony laments the shallow materiality of the hipster, who “tries to negotiate the age-old problem of individuality, not with concepts, but with material things.” Her critique of hipster consumption is a familiar refrain that somewhat romantically imagines a counter-culture steeped in creativity, strategic politics, and authenticity. In 2008, for instance, Adbusters’ Douglas Haddow hyperbolically lamented, “An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning.” [Read the rest of the article]: Authentic cool: Global hipsters and consumer cultureAuthor informationPaul MullinsChair, Professor Department of Anthropology, Indiana University-Purdue University at Docent, Historical Archaeology, University of OuluProfessor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI), where he teaches archaeology, popular culture and applied anthropology. His research focuses on the relationship between racism and material consumption. Paul also writes about doughnuts in American history, trans-Atlantic material culture, and Finnish ruins. He blogs about his work on his website, Archaeology and Material Culture, and on the Society for Historical Archaeology's President's Corner.Original article: Authentic cool: Global hipsters and consumer culture©2013 PopAnth - Hot Buttered Humanity. All Rights Reserved.
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Islam, Muslims, and an Anthropologist: Think Tanks, weak research and the case of Hizb-ut-Tahrir in Australia
Think Tanks, often linked to a party in the nation’s political system, are becoming increasingly popular (particularly in the US and the UK), receive funds, and produce very easily digestible research, ready-made for the rushed politician. Think Tanks do not have to adhere … Continue reading →
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Language Log: Another perfectly cromulent word
Miranda Leitsinger, "11 killer whales free after being 'locked' in ice, mayor says", NBC News 1/10/2013:
Twenty of the Inukjuak villagers were tasked with doing much the same: they were going to remove the broken ice around the area and use chainsaws to enlargen the hole, which was getting increasingly smaller.
Adam Czarnota, who sent in the link, noted that "'Enlargen' put me in such a good mood that I got a chuckle out of 'increasingly smaller', too".
In fact, the Middle English Dictionary tells us, enlargen was a common form in the 14th and 15th centuries:
?a1425(c1400) Mandev.(1) (Tit C.16) 28/20: Egypt is a long contree but it is streyt..þei may not enlargen it toward the desert for defaute of water.
ME usage apparently also included the collocations enlargen the herte, "to make kinder or more generous", and enlargen with abundance, "provide abundantly".
The 347 comments on that NBC News article are, I note with interest, dominated by angry screeds about the NRA, Al Gore, global warming, and media bias.
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Erkan in the Army now...: Buradan da paylaşalım: Yarın #pub203 sınavı. Sınav notları ve sınavlara ilgili sorulara cevaplar;)
Öğrencilerin elinden ders notları:
20 Kasım 2012 ders notları
27 Kasım 2012 ders notları
4 Aralık 2012 ders notları
11 Aralık 2012 ders notları
18 Aralık 2012 ders notları
25 Aralık 2012 ders notları
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Ethno::log: Vortrag am Amerika-Institut
Dr. Sonja John (Berlin): New Orthography to Save the Lakota Language – Help or Harm?
Datum/Uhrzeit: 16.01.2013 um 18 Uhr
Ort: Amerika Institut, Schellingstr. 3/VG, Raum 201
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Shenzhen Noted: thinking about the southern weekend event
It’s called “the Southern Weekend Incident (南周事件)” in Mandarin and refers to a standoff between the Guangdong Provincial Minister of Information, Tuo Zhen and the editorial board of the Southern … Continue reading →
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Erkan in the Army now...: Cumhur Bumudur’dan şiir: “Sadece Akşam”
Sadece Akşam
yorgun bir aceleyle
koşup gidiyor zaman
koyu bir duman çöküyor
sokakların ışıklı yalnızlığına
üzerine toplu mezarlığın
duman hep aynı duman
sadece ölüm
tükenmiş coğrafyayı
çığlığı dolduruyor yaşam kapının
kimin habercisi, kimi çağırıyor
unutturabilir mi
yıkıntılar arasından yükselen
ölüm kokularını
sadece yaşam
içimizdeki
kır çiçeklerini ezerek
akıp gidiyor zaman
bir şehir daha doğdu az önce
şehirler tuzak, şehirler veda
dizlerim titrek
buğulu bir cam kaptan
dökülerek
usulca toprağa karışıyor
sarsak sevdam
sonsuzluğa uzanan tohumları yeşertmeye
sadece sensiz
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Erkan in the Army now...: Cengiz Aktar: Barış notu/Enver Paşa/Afrika Politikası
Barış notu
Artık hep barışı kurmak üzerine kafa yorsak, yazsak. Oslo görüşmelerinin açıklanmasından sonra kamuoyunun verdiği olumlu tepkinin aynısı bugün de geçerli. Keza 2009 açılımının kapanmasından sonra, ardından Oslo’nun akamete uğraması sonrasında yeniden alevlenen karşılıklı şiddete rağmen beklenti hâlâ barış yönünde. Alenen PKK başkanı ile müzakere edilmesine rağmen. Barış cephesi genişledikçe savaş lobisi daralıyor, daraldıkça da sırıtıyor.
Türkiye alışık olmadığı, kerhen deneyip beceremediği, itişip kakışmanın kolaylığı varken zor olan barışa yeniden girişmeye hazır gibi. Bir de şu taviz kelimesinin olumsuz “tek taraflı vermek” anlamının yanında “karşılığında bir şey vermek” yani müzakereyi ifade eden diğer anlamını bilebilsek.
Askeri kırdıran Enver Paşa
Türkiye bu kışın da Sarıkamış şehitlerine yürüdü. Yürüyüş faaliyeti yanılmıyorsam 2004’te, Sarıkamış Faciası’nın doksanıncı senesi münasebetiyle devletçe başlatıldı. O yıldan bu yana anma giderek artan dozda yapılıyor. Geçen yıl Başbakan da katılmış, âdeti üzere tarihle pek alâkası olmayan hatırlatmalarda bulunmuştu.
Birkaç zamandır Sarıkamış Çanakkale ile birlikte destan mertebesine yükseltiliyor. Bunun tesadüf olduğunu söylemek zor. Her ikisi de bir bakıma “serhat” boylarında. Biri memleketin doğu ucunda, diğeri batı. Semboller tumturaklı. Bu kadar zaman görmezden gelinmiş muharebeler son on yıldır resmen “pazarlanıyor”. Yeni destanlarımız, 1915 Ermeni soykırımının yüzüncü sene-i devriyesine millî cevap niteliğinde. Nitekim Sarıkamış hezimetinin, birkaç ay sonra başlatılacak tehcirle, güvenlik endişesi babında, ilişkisi yok değil.
Şühedayı anmak anlaşılabilir ama tarihi yeniden yazarak değil. Sarıkamış, imparatorluğun her köşesinden müslim ve gayrimüslim askerin Enver Paşa’nın kibri, orduyu parmağında oynatan Alman subayların Kafkas stratejisi ve fahiş bir kolektif komuta hatası sonucunda, Rus ordusuyla çarpışarak değil donarak ölmesinin feci hikâyesidir. Facia gecesi bölgeden sıvışan Enver’i daha önce cephede bir Osmanlı Ermenisinin kurtardığı söylenir. On binlerle ifade edilen zayiat gurur duyulacak, hele İttihatçı melanetin simgesi Enver’i yücelterek destanlaştırılacak bir şey değil. Buram buram hamaset kokan bugünkü Sarıkamış destanının işlevi güncel, 98 sene önceki feryat ise Sarıkamış Türküsü’nün ilk dörtlüğünde: Oltu’dan girdik Sarıkamış’a; Akıl ermez yerde yatan üleşe; Askeri kırdıran Enveri Paşa; Kitlendi kapılar mekân ağladı
Afrika politikası
Başbakan “Afrika’ya baktığımızda elmasları, altınları, madenleri görmüyoruz. Biz, sadece ve sadece dost ve kardeşlerimizi görüyoruz. Artık kardeşler arasındaki hasreti, ilgisizliği, uzaklığı ebediyen dindirmeye niyetlendik ve bunun için mücadele veriyoruz” dedikten sonra esasa gelmiş: “Gabon’a gelirken 300 işadamı ile birlikte geldik. Bunların içerisinde 175 girişimcimiz var ki yıllık ciroları 65 milyar dolardır. İhracatları 12 milyar dolardır. Çalışan işçi sayıları ise 429.000 kişidir.”
Hükümetin tuhaf bir kapitalizm anlayışı var. Kardeşlik ve daha iyisi din kardeşliği, içeride ve dışarıda, kapitalizmin fenalıklarını dengeleyen bir fazilet olarak sunuluyor. Kardeşler arasındaki patron-işçi ilişkisi, “büyük abi-küçük kardeş” ya da “baba-oğul” tadında seyrediyor. Kapitalizmin en iptidaî şekli olan, 19. yüzyıl başının paternalizmi, “baba patron” evresi.
Daha önceleri, Kaddafi’den sonra Libya’ya şirket yöneticileriyle birlikte kendisinden evvel avdet eden Sarkozi’yi benzer bir üslûpla paylamıştı. Bugün petrol zengini Gabon’a, doğal zenginliği olmayan Senegal’e ve uranyum zengini Nijer’e de kardeşlik mesajıyla gitti. (Son ikisinin halkı Müslüman ama ilkininki sanılanın aksine Hıristiyan!)
Türkiye’nin Afrika’ya açılması, oralarda iş imkânları araması, uluslararası rekabete çekinmeden dâhil olması, bakir Afrika’nın eski müstemlekeci Avrupalı efendileri ile bugünkü heveskârları ABD, Brezilya, Çin, Güney Afrika ve Hindistan’la aşık atması kayda geçer. Buna kardeşlik kılıfı uydurmanın ne manası var? “Müslüman Müslümanı sömürmez” masalına kim inanır bu devirde Allahaşkına?
İstanbul’da haftanın icraatı
Belediye halkla dalga geçmeye devam. Sirkeci ile havameydanı arasındaki iki şeritli sahil yolunun bir şeridini yoğun saatlerde toplu taşımaya ayırdılar. Aksilik o ki, o tıklım tıkış yoldan geçen otobüs hattı yok! Ama sağ şeride girerseniz ayakbastı cezası var.
Bu yazı ilk olarak Taraf’ta yayınlandı. Yazarın izniyle burada da yayınlanıyor.
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tabsir.net: More of the Sham of al-Sham
Image source: alhadath.yemen
The demise of Bashar al-Assad continues its downward spiral with bodies strewn all over Syria in the process. What makes him hang on? Can he not see what just about every pundit outside of Syria and increasingly most Syrians see in blood red letters: mene mene tekel upharsin? Even vain Belzhazzar saw the gig was up in Babylon when those lines cracked his banquet hall. Or is he raving mad in the style of Nero, who plucked his lyre while Rome burned? Or is he just a chicken without a head, but who is still trying to bury his head in the sand?
He hangs on for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, because for the time being he can. Russia has not yet told him he has to go and the United States has basically given him leave to do whatever he wants to his own people except gas them. The military has not yet deserted him in sufficient numbers and they are, thanks to Russia, very well armed. Even the hint from the U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi that Assad has been in power long enough is not likely to move the last of the pre-Arab-Spring dictators (not counting kings, sultans and emirs for life) into retirement.
The Syria of 2013 is not that conquered by Umar ibn al-Khattab, not that of Ayyubid Saladin, nor that run over by the Mongols, nor that ruled briefly at the end of World War I by Faisal of Arabia (patron of Lawrence of Arabia and vice versa), nor that which joined the ill-fated United Arab Republic initiated by Gamal Abd al-Nasser in the 1960s. But there are indeed historically-stretched fault lines. (more…)
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Erkan in the Army now...: YÖK vs. Redhack. Haberler derlemesine devam…
‘YÖK’ün görevi gazetecileri tehdit etmek değil iddialara cevap vermektir’
from Medyatava.com
Çağdaş Gazeteciler Derneği, RedHack tarafından ele geçirilen “gizli” belgeleri yayınlayan basın kuruluşlarını tehdit eden YÖK’ü kınadı.
Hacklenen belgelere ilişkin bir üniversite açıklaması daha
from Medyatava.com
© MEDYATAVARedHack’in YÖK’ün bilgisayarlarını hackledikten sonra yayınlamay başladığı belgelere ilikin bir açıklama da Marmara Üniversitesi’nden geldi.
Redhack Hacettepe Üniversitesi yolsuzluğunu açıkladı: Coca-Cola’dan 250 bin TL!
soL Haber Portalı
Üniversite öğrencilerine “hepinizi fişledik” diyen Hacettepe Üniversitesi eski Genel Sekreteri Prof. Dr. Turhan Menteş, Redhack’in açıkladığı belgelere ne yanıt verecek merak konusu…Redhack’in üniversite yolsuzluklarına ilişkin açıkladığı belgelere
Redhack’ten Marmara ve Çukurova belgesi
Akşam
RedHack 12. dosya olarak Çukurova Üniversitesi ile ilgili 70 sayfalık doküman sundu. Soruşturma konusu olan iddialara göre 60 yataklı ÇÜ Tıp Fakültesi Yoğun Bakım Ünitesi’nde yüklenici firma şartnameye aykırı olarak eksik, hasarlı, bozuk, markasız veya
Redhack yolsuzlukları açıklıyor: Marmara Üniversitesi’nde 17 milyon TL’lik vurgun!
soL Haber Portalı
Bugün ilk olarak Marmara Üniversitesi’ne ait bir yolsuzluk belgesi yayınlayan Redhack, Marmara Üniversitesi Tıp Fakültesi’nde bazı öğretim üyelerine toplamda 17 milyon TL fazla ödeme yapıldığını duyurdu. Açıklanan belgeye göre Maliye Bakanlığı’nın
Üniversitede skandal
HABERTURK
‘Redhack’ isimli hacker grubu, YÖK’ün internet sitesini hack’leyip, ‘gizli’ damgası olan birçok belgeyi Twitter’dan yayınladı. İddialar arasında Fırat Üniversitesi’nde öğrenci harçlarıyla eski rektöre promosyon olarak Audi 8 marka lüks otomobil
Rektöre sabıka şoku
from Hürriyet ANASAYFARedHack, YÖK internet sitesinden ele geçirdiği belgeleri yayınlamaya devam ediyor.
E-attack reveals fraud, rift in university system
from Hurriyet Daily News
Turkish hacker group RedHack has released over 60,000 documents it captured in its latest attack.
YÖK’ten basına “gizlilik” tehdidi
from Medyatava.com
YÖK, RedHack tarafından ele geçirilen “Gizli” belgeleri yayınlayan basın kuruluşlarına ilgili TCK maddelerini hatırlatarak, hukuki sürecin başlatıldığını duyurdu.
YÖK’ten siber saldırıya suç duyurusu
from Hürriyet ANASAYFA
Yükseköğretim Kurulu’nun (YÖK), elektronik belge yönetim sisteminin siber saldırıya uğraması, veri tabanında yer alan ve gizlilik taşıyan bazı bilgi ve belgelere hukuk dışı yollarla ulaşılarak paylaşılmasına ilişkin suç duyurusunda bulunduğu bildirildi.
Educators Demand Limitations on University Presidents’ Competencies
from Bianet :: English
“Recent leakage case once more proves the necessity of democratization and transparency of university administrations,” Tahsin Yeşildere said, commenting on the cables leaked by RedHack on Tuesday.
Hacklenen belgeler için bir üniversite açıklaması daha
from Medyatava.com
© MEDYATAVARedHack’in YÖK’ün bilgisayarlarını hackledikten sonra yayınlamaya başladığı belgelere ilişkin bir açıklama da Marmara Üniversitesi’nden geldi
Redhack Samsun 19 Mayıs Üniversitesi’ndeki ‘et’ yolsuzluğunu açıkladı: 891 bin …
soL Haber Portalı
Üniversitenin Sağlık, Kültür ve Spor Daire Başkanlığı’nın 2007 yılında gerçekleşen et ve tavuk ürünlerine ait mal alımları ödemelerinde tam 891 bin TL’lik büyük yolsuzluk olduğu ortaya çıktı. OMÜ Beslenme Koordinatörlüğü görevinde bulunan Prof. Dr
RedHack schlägt zu: Türkische Hacker-Gruppe deckt Korruption bei …
Deutsch Türkische Nachrichten
Die Cyberaktivisten von RedHack haben es mal wieder geschafft. Diesmal wurde das elektronische Datensystem der obersten Hochschulbehörde, YÖK angegriffen. Gestoßen istRedHack auf Dokumente, die eine weitgehende Korruption an türkischen Unis
Red Hack vs. YÖK
Milliyet
Red Hack’in patlattığı belgeleri hepiniz görmüşsünüzdür diye umuyorum değerli dostlarım. 60 bine yakın döküman ele geçirmişler ve belgeleri kontrol ettiğiniz zaman durumun aslında ne kadar kötü olduğunu ve biz öğrencilerin ardından ne pis oyunlar
Redhack’ler YÖK’e nasıl sızdı?
Bugün
Kızıl Hacker’lar RedHack’lar, kurumun internet şebekesinin ‘açık ağ’ haline getirilmesi sonucu ana server’a kolayca girmiş. ODTÜ’de polisle öğrenciler arasında yaşanan olayları protesto etmek için YÖK’ün internet sitesini hack’leyen Kızıl Hacker’ların
YÖK Redhack belgelerini haber yapan gazetecileri tehdit etti
soL Haber Portalı
Redhack’in YÖK’ün sitesini hacklemesinin ardından yayınladığı yolsuzluk belgeleri büyük paniğe neden oldu. YÖK, belgeleri haber yapan gazetecilere konuya ilişkin cezai işlem yapılabileceğini duyurdu. Redhack’in ortaya çıkardığı yolsuzluk belgeleri YÖK
RedHack Hilmioğlu’nu akladı
Gerçek Gündem
Sözcü – ODTÜ’de yaşanan olayların ardından YÖK’ün sitesini ‘hack’leyerek gizli belgelere ulaşan hacker grubu RedHack, Ergenekon tutuklusu Prof. Dr. Fatih Hilmioğlu hakkında belge yayımladı. RedHack’in yayımladığı belgelerde Prof. Dr. Hilmioğlu’na
RedHack açık ağdan sızmış
Timeturk
RedHack grubu daha önce çeşitli kurumlara yaptığı saldırılarda benzer taktik ve yöntemler kullanmıştı. Hacker’lara ait IP adresleri ya kamu kurumlarına ya da ilgisiz kişilere kayıtlı çıkmıştı. Siber tatbikata katılmamış! 2. Ulusal Siber Güvenlik
RedHack YÖK’ü hackledi
CNN Türk
RedHack, yılbaşı gecesi YÖK’ün resmi sitesine bağlı internet eğitim sayfası olan ide.yok.gov.tr’ye saldırı düzenlemiş ve kendi afişlerini yayınlamıştı. RedHack’in YÖK’e saldırısı kısa sürede Türkiye’de trend topic oldu. RedHack’in yayınladığı ve YÖK’e
RedHack şimdi de Hacettepe’yi vurdu
Milliyet
Muhalif hacker grubu RedHack, YÖK’e düzenlediği siber saldırının ardından, üniversitelerde yaşanan yolsuzluklarla ilgili birçok “gizli” belgeyi twitter üzerinden yayımlamaya devam ediyor.RedHack, dün de Hacettepe Üniversitesi’ne ait “gizli” belgeleri
Bakan Yıldırım’dan Redhack açıklaması: Yolsuzluğa değil, hack’e önlem alacağız
soL Haber Portalı
Ulaştırma, Denizcilik ve Haberleşme Bakanı Binali Yıldırım, Redhack’in YÖK’ün sitesine yaptığı saldırıyı değerlendirdiği konuşmasında, adeta “yolsuzluğa değil, hack’e önlem alacağız” dedi. 2. Ulusal Siber Güvenlik Tatbikatı’nın açılış toplantısının
İstanbul Üniversitesi’nden “RedHack” açıklaması
CNN Türk
… gizlisini saklısını bırakmadı! Video Galerisi. RedHack’in YÖK’ün web sitesini hack’ledikten sonra yayınladığı belgelerde adı geçen İstanbul Üniversitesi, belgelerle ilgili yapılan haberlerde yer alan bilgilerin doğru olmadığını ve yanıltıcı .
Millions of dirty secrets, 60000 documents
Hurriyet Daily News
Hacking cases around the world are on the rise. Everyday we hear of a new local or national government website being hacked. Last month alone, California, Syria, Israel and Turkish authorities were hacked. RedHack group hacked the online data sharing
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Language Log: Overestimating, underestimating, whatever
This post hits a trifecta of LLOG themes: the troublesome interaction of multiple negations with scalar predicates that we call "misnegation"; the flexible phrasal or conceptual templates we call "snowclones"; and the multiplication of careless variant quotations.
It started when a friend, in conversation, said something like "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. [pause] Or overestimating. Whatever."
To start with, I took a look around for other over-under confusions with respect to this quotation. The bulk of the versions use "underestimating the intelligence", but there are plenty of overestimations as well. From a N.Y. Daily News column:
For years the people who run boxing have ridden two axioms by P.T. Barnum all the way to the bank. The first being there's a sucker born every minute. And the second is that no one ever went broke overestimating the intelligence of the American people.
From a sports story in The Scotsman:
As H L Mencken, with reference to his fellow Americans, once memorably observed: "Nobody ever went broke by overestimating the intelligence of the public."
A Guardian correction:
In a story about drugs in sport - Exposure risks new batch of cheats, page 33, Sport, October 24 - we wrote: "As the consummate American huckster PT Barnum once said: Nobody ever went broke overestimating the intelligence of the American public." What HL Mencken said was "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."
Other replications vary in many other dimensions:
Nobody ever lost money by overestimating the taste of the American public.
No one ever went broke overestimating the intelligence of the American people.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
No one ever went broke by underestimating the taste of the American public.
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
No one ever went broke underestimating the public intelligence.
No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American middle class.
There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
And third, no one in Hollywood ever lost money by overestimating the intelligence of the American public.
I guess what P.T. Barnum said still holds true "no one ever lost money overestimating the intelligence of the American public".
So then I wondered what the original quotation really was, and where it first appeared. I didn't succeed in nailing down the answer to either of those questions, but here are some clues:
Vincent Fitzpatrick, 'H.L. Mencken', in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 137: American Magazine Journalists, 1900-1960, 1994, gives the quotation in this form:
No one in the world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the plain people.
John Leland, Hip: The History, 2005, gives it this way:
No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the plain people.
Roger Lathbury, American Modernism (1910-1945), 2006, gives this form:
No one in the world, so far as I know . . . has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
Whatever the original really was, many people have produced creative variants. Among the many things that nobody (or no one) ever went broke (or lost money) by underestimating are these:
the insecurities of gay consumers
the gullibility of Facebook users
the need of Americans for the Effortless Solution
the vapidity of the American newsmedia
the anxiety women feel about getting married
the desperation of composers
the Bush administration's capacity for doing the wrong thing
Tony Romo's ability to absolutely puke away winnable games
the intolerance levels of the Daily Mail readership
the motivation of The American Freshman
students' calculational skills
the Christmas single market
the spine of congressional democrats
And among the many things that nobody ever went broke by overestimating:
the neurotic stupidity of Floridians
the foolishness of any given group of people
the laziness of the American public
the gullibility of the American public
the racism of Today's GOP
the self-absorption of the Democratic Party
the vulgarity of the American people
how bad people could be
the heartfelt panic that the average woman feels about her body
Americans' ability to value fantasy over reality
the treason of the democrat party
the desperate unhappiness of the American public
the political knowledge of the people
the appetite of Texans for red meat
Note that in both directions, the majority of these are things that on balance one would rather have less of. (I've put in red the quantities that seem clearly to be negatively evaluated.)
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Language Log: Hagel "refused to stop efforts to end terrorist attacks"
Earlier today, "Patriot Voices" (Rick Santorum's PAC) sent out an email containing the following paragraph:
I strongly oppose President Obama's nomination of former Senator Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense because his confirmation would send a dangerous signal to Iran and other radical Islamic elements which would make our country and our allies less secure. Not only did Senator Hagel tip off the Iranians that he would not use strength to prevent them from obtaining nuclear weapons, he disrespects our strongest ally in the middle east, Israel. Time after time, Sen. Hagel has sought to distance the United States from Israel and refused to stop efforts to end terrorist attacks on Israel. [emphasis added]
This is my nomination for misnegation of the month.
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Media and Social Change: Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (review)
By Daniel Little via Project MUSE (and Savage Minds) Journal of Social History, Volume 41, Number 1, Fall 2007 pp. 181-182 | 10.1353/jsh.2007.0140 Logics of History is a fascinating and insightful book on historical thinking by an innovative historian. William Sewell has made important contributions to French social history. This book marks a return to … Read more
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The Global Sociology Blog: Book Review – Existence
Us science-fiction fans have been waiting for a long time for a new full-fledged novel by David Brin since Kiln People. It is finally here: Existence. I think Existence is on a par with the Uplift trilogy or Earth. It does indeed read like a more elaborate version of Earth. I remember re-reading Sundiver a few years ago and thinking how great it still is.
Existence is a big book. And by that, I don’t just mean that it’s long (although it is, clocking in at 553 pages on my Kindle) but that it aims at big ideas about… wait for it… existence. At the same time, it is an entertaining sci-fi work on the “first contact” theme starting when astronaut / space garbage cleaner Gerald Livingstone grabs a crystal out of orbit and brings it back to Earth, and it turns out that the crystal contains alien avatars and they are sending a message, “Join Us”. Somewhere in China, an impoverished salvage collector makes a similar discovery in an underwater abandoned mansion, except the alien in his crystal is calling the other liars.
But that is only one story line in a book that weaves many threads (and ends up with a lot of loose ends as a result). Brin has created a futuristic world that has obviously suffered massive environmental and social catastrophes (Awfulday, the Autism plague). Global warming has drowned big chunks of the world.
Not everything has been lost, the Mesh (the Internet) connects everybody. Most people have implants that constantly plug them in with AIs, information from the web, smart mobs, and varieties of overlays. Different social movements have emerged, the so-called God-makers (the technology makers and pushers), the Renunciation movement who wants to slow things down and rejects some technology advancements, various religious movements. It sometimes felt like Brin was more interested in the whole gadgetry than his characters or his “world”.
Overall, the world seems to be stratified according to a hierarchy of estates. The First estate is that a global caste of super-wealthy oligarchs who rule behind the scenes but are depicted as benevolent yet possessing a quite clear sense of entitlement. But Brin leaves this stratification system quite incomplete. Most of the characters are privileged people (except for the Chinese salvage collector). Even though it is mentioned in the book at some point that starvation has disappeared, this Chinese example shows that not to be true. And as global as the novel is, Africa is remarkably absent.
Somewhere, in there, one also finds the roots of Uplift, although that storyline is abruptly brought up, then abandoned, and does not do much for the whole book except give the Brin faithful the Origin story of Uplift. Abrupt changes of direction and loose ends left hanging abound in Existence. One such brutal change in direction is when the alien storyline really gets interesting, then, the book fastforwards decades out of nowhere… and then does it again until the end. I guess this last one is supposed to bring all the plotlines together but does not really and the book ends with no ending. Those last 30 pages were a bit of a slug for me.
Oh yeah, and there is a cloned Neanderthal child in there as well.
The cast of character is vast is it is not hard to keep track but one never knows if any of them will make another appearance once a chapter is over. And a lot of them don’t. Hence the loose ends impression. To add to the confusion, supposed “excerpts” from books, manifestos, etc. are interspersed between chapters.
Up until the abrupt fast-forward, I was really enjoying the book although never knowing whether a character would reappear or had been dropped was annoying. After the fast-forward, I confessed to losing interest and I really had to drag myself across the finish line.
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Open Anthropology Cooperative Blog Posts: Ethnographic Data Mining
From the online Journal of Social Structure
ABSTRACT: Advances in text analysis, particularly the ability to extract network based information from texts, is enabling researches to conduct detailed socio-cultural ethnographies rapidly by retrieving characteristic descriptions from texts and fusing the results from varied sources. We describe this process and illustrate it in the context of conflict in the Sudan. We show how network information can be extracted from vast quantities of unstructured texts-based information using computer assisted processes. This is illustrated by an examination of changes in the political networks in Sudan as extracted from the Sudan Tribune. We find that this approach enables rapid high level assessment of a socio-cultural environment, generates results that are viewed as accurate by subject matter experts, and match actual historical events. The relative value of this socio-cultural analysis approach is discussed.
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CONNECTED in CAIRO: Revolutionary Art in the Streets–and in the Galleries
Nancy Demerdash has a new article out on the role(s) of art in the “Arab Spring”. Her article “Consuming Revolution: Ethics, Art and Ambivalence in the Arab Spring” in New Middle Eastern Studies (NMES), the innovative new e-journal run by scholars and graduate students at The British Society for Middle Eastern Studies . The article is [...]
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Shenzhen Noted: on strike in longgang
According to molihua dot org, 4,000 workers at the Zhongda Printing Factory went on strike on January 10, 2013 to protest the factory’s decision to discount all years of service. … Continue reading →
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C L O S E R: Het Kabinet Rutte 2 – Het Blanke Bordes
Closer Blog: Dit blog gaat over een vorm van racisme: white privilege die het gevolg is van voordelen die blanke mensen genieten ten opzichte van zwarte mensen in gelijksoortige sociale, politieke en economische omstandigheden. Read more: Het Kabinet Rutte 2 – Het Blanke Bordes
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Language Log: Speech and silence
I recently became interested in patterns of speech and silence. People divide their discourse into phrases for many reasons: syntax, meaning, rhetoric; thinking about what to say next; running out of breath. But for current purposes, we're ignoring the content of what's said, and we're also ignoring the process of saying it. We're even ignoring the language being spoken. All we're looking at is the partition of the stream of talk into speech segments and silence segments.
Why?
Well, suppose the following things were true:
Accurate automatic speech/silence partition of audio recordings is possible.
The distributions of the resulting segment durations, and of sequences of these segment durations, are lawful and are well characterized by simple models with few parameters.
Factors such as fluency, speaking style, physiological state, etc., affect the rhythms of speech and silence in ways that affect these parameters.
As a result, automatically-determined parameter estimates can be used to quantify useful estimates of these factors — at least under controlled conditions, and perhaps in combination with other sorts of measures.
In fact, I believe that all four of those things are indeed true. This morning, I'll provide some evidence bearing on points (1) and (2). [If you're not interested in speech production or speech technology, and tolerant of modest doses of exploratory data analysis, you might want to turn to some of our other fine posts…]
"Speech activity detection" is by no means a new idea, but as in other areas of speech technology, the performance of speech activity detectors (SADs) has gradually improved. Neville Ryant has recently built a series of speech activity detectors that work very well indeed — his most recent effort is a significant advance on the state of the art, in terms of noise immunity and robustness across recording conditions. (In due course, he'll describe it in a conference publication and release an implementation as open-source software.)
But for clean speech, more conventional approaches work quite well. For this morning's little experiment, I've used a system that Neville built a few months ago, which has been widely used for internal tasks at the Linguistic Data Consortium. This system starts with a set of detectors for broad phonetic classes, based on a conventional set of acoustic features calculated 100 times a second, and then uses a "hidden markov model" to produce the final partition into speech and nonspeech (here = silence) regions. It was trained on a published corpus of English conversational speech for which hand segmentation is available.
I've configured it for minimum (speech and nonspeech) segment durations of 100 msec, and applied it to a variety of collections of recorded speech, with excellent results. Here's a few seconds from the start of one such collection:
This happens to come from the start of the dedication and introduction to the Librivox reading of Amor de Perdição (1862) by Camilo Castelo Branco, which I've been looking at as part of an effort to learn something about the phonetics and phonology of Portuguese. If you want to know what it sounds like, a phrase-by-phrase presentation of the Dedicatória is here.
Today, we only care about the durations of the speech and silence segments in the Introduction and the first 12 chapters (all that's now available) — a total of about 3.25 hours of audio, comprising 5614 speech segments and (because I left out the leading and trailing silences in each recording) 5601 silence segments.
Here's a histogram of the durations of the speech segments:
And a histogram of the durations of the silence segments:
How should we characterize these distributions? For distributions of durations, the obvious place to start is the gamma distribution, characterized by a shape parameter k and a scale parameter θ:
Given a sample of numbers that might have come from a gamma distribution, we can estimate the shape parameter and scale parameters, and plot the resulting approximation to the empirical distribution. Here's how it works (quite well) for the speech segments in this case:
And for the silence segments:
To the extent that there are problems with fit, it's because we're actually looking at a mixture of different cases. Given a minimum segment duration of 0.1 seconds, some of the silent segments are actually within-phrase stop gaps and so forth, while the others are silent pauses between phrases — and similarly, some of the speech segments are cut up by such boundaries. We can see the signature of this in a histogram of silence-segment durations at a finer time scale:
The default settings for the SAD that I used require a minimum duration of 300 msec for nonspeech segments and 500 msec for speech segments — this gives good results when the goal is to divide the input into convenient breath-group-like phrases, e.g. for subsequent transcription. I set the thresholds lower because I wanted to see the shorter-duration end of the distributions as well.
For this data, the approximate dividing-point between the within-phrase and between-phrase silences is about 180 msec — but a better approach would be to divide silent-segment candidates into two categories, based on a richer set of properties than mere duration.
Anyhow, I believe that I've supported the plausibility of points (1) and (2) above — leaving for another day the distribution of segment sequences, as well as the issues raised in points (3) and (4).
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