verbs

from the TV column in the Washington Post. (at the CW press tour about "Aliens in America," a new TV show about a Pakistani exchange student in the Midwest.)

"You are dealing with people . . . from a part of the world that aren't always very tolerant, you know -- the Danish cartoon thing and everything. Do you have a technical adviser to keep you from getting Salman Rushdied?" another critic said.

We'll pause here so you can reread that question.

link.
woohoo for new verbs. It reminds me of this post.

congress

this post is really interesting. It's about how comparisons of Bush's approval rating and Congress's approval rating are misleading. It makes a lot of intuitive sense when you think about it, but I hadn't really thought about it. The basic idea is that yeah, Congress's numbers are low, but they're *always* low. In fact, apparently in the last 27 years, their approval rating has only gotten above 50% twice. This makes sense because you might like what what your personal representatives are doing doing, but that doesn't mean you'll like what the other 500-odd people you didn't vote for are doing. On the other hand, presidential approval ratings are usually above 50%. This also makes sense because everyone votes for the president and the winner will usually have at least 50% of the vote. Presumably, unless s/he really fucks up, the president is going to keep a lot of that support, and might even pick some up from the other side. So even though Congress and the President are both polling in the 30's, it's much worse for Bush. It's a lot harder to make 65% of the population hate 1 person than it is to make them hate a legislative body of hundreds who are constantly bickering with each other.

The other interesting thing I hadn't thought about was that even Congresspeople run against congress. Everyone wants to be against the "washington establishment," so of course you'll hear the president calling congress "do-nothing" or corrupt, but you're also going to hear congresspeople calling each other "do-nothing" or corrupt. Of course Congress polls low--it's giving itself bad PR!

newest jay mathews column

here.
It's an okay column. A bit contradictory in some places, maybe. (colleges should let the kids know that admissions is a crapshoot, but shouldn't mention that in the rejection letter?) anyway, it's mostly notable because I'm (pseudonymously) quoted.

And he got my gender wrong.

Whatever, though. Still very exciting!

p.s. the Gender Genie is kind of fun. I found it or something like it a couple years ago and pasted in a bunch of my academic papers. yeah, it thought I was male too.

I haven't read a lot about the algorithm, but it does seem like the differences could be due to the disparate topic choice rather than style differences when writing about the same topic. For example, using the pronoun "I" apparently makes you sound female. But I would almost never use "I" in a formal academic paper. It would be kind of neat to try the experiment again, but with a group of papers all on the same topic, maybe a class essay assigned a few years in a row to a large group of college students? If you could discern two distinct styles, it would be interesting to see which style got the higher grades.