Content covering the intersection between technology and culture.
Posted by on Feb 22nd, 2006 | 1 comment

Document Icons

Document Icons
Amber Frid-Jimenez, Philip DeCamp and Deb Roy over at the MIT Media Laboratory have whipped up this project they call Document Icons. Essentially it generates radial histograms of document collections which highlight salient themes. This allows users to visually scan icons representative of large datasets and quickly find the most relevant ...
Posted by on Feb 16th, 2006 | 0 comments

The Sun has set on the English language

Beyonce is mortified to find that Bootylicious has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. I don’t think you’re ready for this language. In case you were wondering; Beyonce defines bootylicious as beautiful, bountiful and bounce-able though Oxford simply defines it as “informal sexualy...
Posted by on Nov 1st, 2005 | 5 comments

When language inbreeds

If you tend to use the word ‘literally’ then one would imagine that you know what it means and how it is properly to be used. You’re probably wrong though. Somehow the word has ‘evolved’ to mean the opposite of what it once meant. Language is dying. When does what was once a word stop being a word? Perhaps a word is no longer a word once it becomes its own antonym.
Posted by on Oct 31st, 2005 | 2 comments

The Secret of Impressive Writing

Daniel M. Oppenheimer has written about problems with using long words needlessly in the 2005 journal of applied cognitive psychology. Through his series of five experiments he found that students who wrote in an accessible tone without gratuitous embellishments or pretentious academic buzzwords walked away seeming more intelligent than those who inflated their prose with linguistic fodder at an attempt to seem more...
Posted by on Sep 6th, 2005 | 0 comments

When the Customer is Wrong

The times, they are a changing. Some companies don’t like to correct your mistakes for you without lecturing you first, even if its something as silly as nomenclature. Some companies want to whine about how people don’t refer to their products in a way that pleases them or in a way that doesn’t jive with their carefully constructed brand identity. Some companies even insist on all-caps. Some girls...
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