King Abdullah of Jordan, an acknowledged fan of Star Trek, appeared as an uncredited extra in the 1996 Star Trek: Voyager episode "Investigations". Abdullah's cameo was arranged as a surprise for him by his US advisor. (via Memory Alpha)
Update, May 27, 2013: Work on $1.5bn Star Trek theme park in Jordan finally starts.
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Tracx Launches Social Analysis Platform With Impressive Client List; Earns $4.4mil
by Sam Dwyer
Between Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, digg, delicious, Wordpress, and more, monitoring your company's presence in the social media universe is no easy task. With the launch of its social media management platform and $4.4 million of venture capital funding in its pocket, New York-based startup tracx will do it for you.
Tracx's recently launched platform is "designed to provide professional users all the tools necessary to build, manage and monetize their social media presence." To do this, the company "refines masses of raw data across all social media channels, blogs, forums, news and retail sites, turning the posts and interactions into full conversations with intelligence around the participants." How much raw data? A terabyte a day, to be exact.
Tracx's massive aggregation of data helps businesses of every size better evaluate their audience, measure their bottom-line, and increase the effectiveness of their media strategies.
The potential impact of this platform has garnered attention from an impressive list of companies. At launch, the company boasts over 180 clients, including headline names like Coca Cola, LivePerson, Porter Novelli, and FleishmanHillard.
Tracx's remarkable client rolodex caught the eye of venture capital firms Revel Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners, which combined to inject $4.4 million in the company on launch. As tracx plans to use the money on growth and international expansion, it looks like 180 clients is only the beginning.
An MIT linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn't a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative."
A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."
This has been discussed on the Linguistics Stack Exchange: Is "double positive meaning negative" a common phenomenon?
Yes, for example, it's the same in Italian "sì, sì" (= yes, yes), but it's ambiguous, it depends on intonation and not on the words themselves; this means that "double positive = negative" is wrong speaking about the words, but it works through other means. Changing intonation, that "sì, sì" can be absolutely positive as well. We also use a small variation in written language to substitute the intonation. We write "seh seh" or "se se"... More or less like the English slang variation "ye ye".
In Hebrew, my native language, we have "כן, בטח" (ken, betach — "yes, sure"). With the right intonation, it flips to pure sarcasm. Same with "כן, כן" (ken, ken — "yes, yes"). Can be genuine agreement or complete dismissal.
Related, from The Lousy Linguist:
There are 3 interpretations of "yeah, right" in American English:
- Normal (factual agreement): yeah right = 'yes, that is correct'
- Sarcastic (opposite meaning): yeah right = 'no way in hell'
- Back-channel (sentiment agreement): yeah right = 'mm-hmm'
Thanks to the influence of Seinfeld and Friends throughout the 90s, Sarcastic is probably the default use these days...
The Lousy Linguist links to a 2006 paper from USC that tried to teach a computer to detect sarcastic "yeah right" in phone conversations. Their finding: when human annotators listened without context, they only agreed 52% of the time. Barely above chance. Add context, and agreement jumps to 77%. The machine did best when it ignored tone of voice entirely and focused on contextual cues like laughter and position in the conversation. How something is said matters less than what surrounds it.
At work we're trying to detect intent from text. No audio. No laughter. Just words. Sarcasm is especially confusing: "yeah, sure, I'll buy this camera tomorrow!" means one thing as a reply to Canon posting about the new EOS 600D, and something else entirely when it's a comment on an article about the $120,000 EF 1200mm f/5.6.
I wonder how long until computers actually get this right.
Penn Jillette draws a sharp line between beliefs preserved by tradition and knowledge anchored in reality and repeatable discovery:
If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.
As Richard Feynman put it decades earlier:
The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific truth.
It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well-put is half-solved.
A problem well stated is a problem half solved.
Let's assume my problem is well stated. I now have a new problem - solving the remaining half. Following the same logic, that problem is also half solved.
Lather, rinse, repeat, and voilà. Infinite progress achieved. I'm going to bed.
Unless you make the classic mistake...
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.
Jamie Zawinski (aka jwz) (via)
Which neatly breaks the infinite-halving loop... and introduces exponential suffering.
(But if you really have to, use Grant Skinner's very useful RegExr tool.)
