Perry

Hewitt

Tag: language

Friday 5 — 2.17.2017
1. To this erstwhile language geek, the application of technology beyond a language lab (look it up, kids) is intriguing. Mondly aims to marry language learning with virtual reality to advance immersion learning.
2. In order to build a successful product, identify friction-killing tactics to engage and delight your users. These lessons from Amazon points to different kinds of friction, and actions you can take to listen, identify, and mitigate.
3. How much content do you give away on social media before asking users to pay for content? Learn from how The Economist turns social media users into subscribers.
4. Do you wonder — or worry — about your political posts on social networks like Facebook or Twitter? There are implications for you, and for your expanded social network. Here’s what you should know before you post. And there’s a strong case to be made for leaving your phone at home when you travel abroad.
5. If your company is working on its LinkedIn strategy for recruitment, it might want to double down on Facebook instead. Quartz suggests that Facebook’s new job postings don’t mean it’s chasing Linkedin — it’s headed for something far bigger.
Weekend fun: Creative juices flowing? Try A.I. Duet, which lets you play a duet with the computer. Machine learning-driven, it allows you to play some notes and then the computer responds to your melody. Also: this tweet made my Friday morning.

Consumed: Some unbelievable tuna tartare at Toro, a place I was nowhere near cool enough to be.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Sign up for a weekly email.
February 17, 2017
Friday 5 — 2.5.2016
1. It’s been almost ten years since Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy, and in that decade artificial intelligence has continued to advance. This week for the first time a Google DeepMind program defeated a professional human player in Go. Interesting take on how this advance reflects an “artificial imagination” capability, and what this breakthrough implies for business.
2. Facebook is again adjusting its news feed to show you the relevant content you are most likely to engage with. Good news for individual users, and bad news for Pages that post on autopilot — in truth, it’s an opportunity for Pages to create more content that resonates.
3. What does it take for interactive content to become viral? According to this post on Moz blog, it’s got to be clickable, playable, shareable. Read on to learn 11 tips focused on making interactive content shareable.
4. I was waiting for this: Brand New posted a review of the new Uber branding. Quick take: wordmark’s OK, and app icons are oddly disconnected. WIRED offers an inside look at the design process.
5. As the next billion internet users come online, resolving the technology challenges inherent to rendering global languages is critical. For example, some languages, like Khmer, appear only as boxes in certain browsers today. The result is that we can end up with biased data, a limited view of the information available online. Read this presentation from An Xiao Mina, a product designer and researcher currently a Nieman fellow at Harvard.
Weekend fun: With Super Bowl L imminent, it’s high season for ads. Now Instagram’s new 60-second format lets us watch Drake get edited, but you can also see Jerry Rice drive for Lyft, or watch dachshunds dressed like hot dogs all day long.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

Photo credit: ALWinDigital
February 5, 2016
Noble or lazy gas: language and perspective

Last week I was speaking to a Chinese-speaking colleague when the concept of ‘noble gas‘ came up. Initially, translation was a problem, because it turns out the Chinese phrase is ‘lazy gas’ or 惰性气体. The difference made me wonder enough to go back and check where the English phrase came from. It was translated directly from the German ‘Edelgas,’ coined by German chemist Hugo Erdmann in 1898.

Noble or lazy — it’s all a matter of perspective

February 15, 2015
Friday 5 — 11.14.2014
1. Beyond audience analytics and editorial review, what are some other ways to suss out how well your website content is performing? Here are seven website graders you can try today.
2. We’re all hoping for a silver bullet for email management, but Google Inbox isn’t it. While the Material Design approach makes the app look slick, the default bundling of conversations and multiple message management options are confusing.
3. With 14 newsletters, and merely one on the topic of cats, Buzzfeed has increased its website traffic from email by 700% year over year. Read how Buzzfeed overhauled its email strategy to become among the top traffic drivers to their site.
4. Quartz reports that while 80% of the web remains dominated by just 10 languages, another 6,990 are out there. Read how web platforms are gearing up for a truly multilingual web.
5. The early web was all about community — and then swiftly yielded to a mountain of Flash animations and brochureware. Now community management is emerging as a discipline and, increasingly, a job title.
Weekend fun: The Thanksgiving season is upon us, and Facebook has made it easier to say thanks by auto-generating videos to construct a narrative of your friendships. Creepy or clever? You be the judge.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
November 14, 2014
Friday 5 — 6.6.2014
1. LinkedIn really, really wants you to buy a premium account, and is disrupting its current paid model with a less expensive $9.99/month option. This includes new, more visual profiles, and tools to help you optimize for search. For early access, you can sign up here.
2. Despite the growth of and improvement in speech recognition software with Siri, Dragon, et al., inferring meaning from language remains a difficult problem. Natural language processing pros, take note: the U.S. Secret Service has posted a request for vendors who can help them detect sarcasm. Whatever.
3. AirBnB has a beta in-app concierge service for San Francisco only. As collaborative economy services disrupt existing models, this seems like a smart experiment to determine what people might miss about hotels.
4. Social product spotter Product Hunt got a glowing write up in TechCrunch this week. And here’s an analysis of the early Product Hunt data — product names seem to be converging around IO, iOS, Me, 2.0, One, Up, Box, Hub, and Hello.
5. Google is reportedly in talks for a $1B acquisition of Twitch, which allows gamers to stream their gameplay for others. And watching others play video games is serious business: Twitch has 45 million visitors and more than a million new videos each month. Surely, some are from newly-funded Super Evil Megacorp.
Weekend fun: John Oliver explained net neutrality clearly enough that Americans finally became outraged about a system with “all the ingredients of a mob shakedown.” And maybe his plea for vitriolic internet commenters to channel their indiscriminate rage in a useful direction took the FCC website down.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
June 6, 2014
Friday 5 — 10.11.2013
1. How do the words we use segment us by personality, gender, and age? An open vocabulary study of over 700 million Facebook posts by 75,000 volunteers provides a range of insights into attributes associated with language use. As the word cloud shows, men use profanity and talk about xbox far more than women on the social network.
2. Direct messaging, long the neglected stepchild of the Twitter user experience, are about to get a lift with experimental new feature @eventparrot. Follow the account and it will direct message you with personalized breaking news, defined as news items noticed by the people you pay attention to.
3. GigaOm posits why app-based tablet magazines are a failure, despite a few notable exceptions. Paid individual magazines titles continue to draw only a very small market. The desire to create the bespoke apps seems to stem, as one commenter put it, from an obsessive need for control of font and layout rather than a more sensible embrace of the messy, social open web.
4. Perhaps the other end of the continuum of perfection and permanence is analog and ephemeral, like the live performances of Pop Up Magazine. As many of us relentlessly record and document, a new niche emerges for a live 100-minute show, where nothing goes online or is recorded.
5. 91% of US adults own a cell phone today, and 41% of them use it to watch video. Pew’s latest report on online video shows continued growth not only in consumption, where comedy and education videos lead the pack, but an increase in adults posting video online to 31% from 14% in 2009. A full 35% of those video posters harbor hopes of their video going viral.
Weekend fun: fancy a little telekinetic rage with your coffee?

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
October 11, 2013
Try it: Google define

Language is always changing, but the arrival of consumer technology over the past 25 years has meant a sharp uptick in our new day-to-day jargon. Terms like modem, pager, or smartphone enter and exit the common usage with remarkable frequency.

FlowingData this week pointed out how Google’s “define: <word>” feature now displays word etymology via flowchart and graphs word usage over time. Three words graphed over time tell a story of technology adoption and attrition:

You can clearly see where telegraphy emerged in the mid 1800s, and how the flat line begins around the time the last telegram is sent in 2006. Telegram remains in the language as a common noun and as a relatively popular name for newspapers, but the arc aligns with the technology in use.

Next, let’s track fax technology, which clings on doggedly in the finance, law, and healthcare sectors. A sharp rise in the 1990s, but not the subsequent flatline many might assume.

Finally, have a look at tweet:

The word tweet meaning “the chirp of a small or young bird” has been around since at least 1800. You see a minor spike in the 1920s, when Jazz Age musicians produce and record “When my sugar comes down the street, all the little birdies go tweet tweet tweet.” But the real hockey stick spike starts in 2006 when Twitter enters the scene.

As a language geek I love how we can track and quantify language usage in more simple, visual ways. Analyses like souped-up concordances can not only track macro usage trends, but perhaps even diagnose dementia in individual authors. As visualization tools become more common and accessible, we’ll have more ways to analyze and add context to our understanding of the language we use.

September 3, 2013
The politics of spelling

knaidels or kneydels or dumplings

What you call things clearly matters: global warming or climate change? High fructose corn syrup or corn sugar? Terrorist or freedom fighter? The knaidel/kneydl debate after the Scripps spelling bee is a reminder of the origins and implications of agreed, canonical spelling. Dara Horn writes an illuminating NYT Op-Ed about spelling as a political statement in Jewish Identity, Spelled in Yiddish.

Spelling in the early Soviet Union was even more perverse. There, government control over Yiddish schools and presses led to the invention and enforcement of a literally anti-Semitic Yiddish orthography by spelling the language’s many Semitic-origin words phonetically instead of in Hebrew. (Imagine spelling “naïve” as “nigh-eve” in order to look less French.) It was an attempt to erase Jewish culture’s biblical roots, letter by letter.

History is commonly understood to be written by the victors, but it’s interesting to think about the cultural and historial roots underlying in the way we spell.

Photo credit: infowidget

June 6, 2013
Why social content is extra memorable

Turns out that people can remember social content better than a CNN headline, a sentence randomly selected from a book, or even than a human face. Psychology researchers published a fascinating paper back in January that showed through a series of experiments that Facebook posts — chosen with a range of emotions and writing styles — are extraordinarily memorable. But why?

A few reasons: the text is designed to be complete (unlike a sentence from a book); gossipy/entertainment content is inherently more memorable than straight news; and casually generated language, however “vacuous, narcissistic, or vapid” is apparently more memorable. This last reason is intriguing — the idea that copy created off the top of one’s head is somehow more “mind-ready” for the recipient to absorb and retain. No wonder no one can ever remember a corporate mission statement.

April 9, 2013
What words reveal about online community

Research by Bryden, Funk, and Jansen looks at word usage in Twitter, and finds that communities can be characterized by their word choice. Even better, the words used by an individual can accurately predict the community that user belongs to.

We all speak in our own workplace jargon and the acronym-laden tech community, myself included, is more guilty of this than most. This study reminds us that words are about more than information transfer—they also serve as tribal identification. The words we choose to use on a public social network are a way of signaling the community we belong to as much as the suit or T-shirt and jeans we choose to wear to work each day.

March 19, 2013