January 30th, 2009 | Tags:
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AlphaDictionary.com has a resident word columnist, Dr Robert Beard, and he’s written a list of The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English. Fact.
There are lots of these lists, of course – I’m just singling this one out because it’s in front of me – and it seems amazingly common for people to harbour a ‘favourite word’ (and just as common to badger lexicographers for theirs). Looking through this one, you notice some startling things which are best expressed, not in words, but in numbers.
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January 29th, 2009 | Tags:
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The UK’s Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, is advising that children under 15 should not ever be given alcohol by their parents. He is quoted:
It is advice to parents. It’s their choice at the end of the day within the family setting.
This has, rightly, elicited a lot of supportive comments from alcohol addiction groups and public health professionals, such as this one from Alcohol Concern:
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January 27th, 2009 | Tags:
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Following up on the post about Wikipedia and Britannica, there’s been a lot of talk about the proposal to introduce flagged revisions on Wikipedia. This would mean that edits, at least on some entries, would have to be checked and signed off by a reviewer.
This would reduce deliberate misinformation attacks on entries on current events, such as the recent attempt by someone to convince the world that Ted Kennedy died on Obama’s inauguration day. But it would also destroy the quality that makes Wikipedia uniquely useful for following those events. Not that fact that it’s written by members of the public, specifically, but the fact that it’s fast.
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January 26th, 2009 | Tags:
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This piece from the Independent, about the mooted introduction of parkour lessons in secondary schools, is a textbook example of why you should be careful when using social research data to inform policy. The report says:
According to figures from the Metropolitan Police, when sports projects were run in the borough of Westminster during the 2005 Easter holidays, youth crime dropped by 39 per cent. The following year, the most recent for which figures are available, when parkour was added to the projects, youth crime fell by 69 per cent.
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January 24th, 2009 | Tags:
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I’m going to try and get in before the crowd on this one, because the backlash will be inevitable.
The Encyclopedia Britannica is going to allow some user-generated content onto its site. However (according to the BBC News story), unlike Wikipedia, it will be maintaining very tight controls on what is allowed on. From what I can tell, only contributions that get an initial nod from the editors will be allowed onto the site, and even then it will carry a ‘Britannica Checked’ mark, to distinguish it from the main text.
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January 23rd, 2009 | Tags:
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The Economist has an interesting piece which reports on a forthcoming paper suggesting that monetary incentives for charitable giving have a confounding effect on image-based incentives. In other words, it’s fairly well established that people are more generous when they think other people are watching, but when other people are watching and someone offers you some money every time you give to a good cause, you’re likely to give less (because it makes you look bad).
This is interesting from the point of view of behavioural economics, but does it have any real-world application? The Economist piece ends:
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January 22nd, 2009 | Tags:
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This happened over Christmas, but it’s been a while since I got my claws into a good language topic, and it’s worth saying some things about.
A few weeks back, there was one of those eruptions of rage which, for some reason, are periodically launched at the editors and publishers of dictionaries. This time, the target was that most innocuous of tomes, the Oxford Junior Dictionary.
Why? Well, a new edition came out, and a few keen-eyed readers noticed that, while a lot of new headwords had been added, many of them science- and technology-related, a good few had been ditched: several ecclesiastical terms (including bishop, pew and sin), some natural history terms (acorn, sycamore, starling among them), and various terms involving the monarchy and aristocracy (including monarch, no less). A full list is breathlessly cited by the Telegraph.
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January 22nd, 2009 | Tags:
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The government has a new white paper on social mobility. It’s largely fairly sensible and well researched, but the recommendation that’s caused the biggest splash is for a commission, to be led by Alan Milburn, to tackle perceived barriers preventing children from poor families getting a fair crack of the whip at entering top professions: law, medicine, that sort of thing. Predictably, the Guardian loves it, and the Telegraph hates it.
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