Language Log » What use electrolytic pickling?

The source includes some real doozies, including “Repulsive Tory” for “Repository.”

My point here is not at all to make fun of Google's speech recognition capabilities. I've long been a staunch defender of current ASR technology in general, and Google's implementation of it in particular. And in fact, the overall quality of the Kagan transcripts is very good — there are stretches where nearly all the words are correct.

Still, errors of the kind illustrated above indicate some of the… shall we say, areas for potential improvement.

There are some cases where the transcript is a plausible rendering of the pronunciation, but is not very plausible as English-language content, e.g. "the searched ford general …" in place of "the search for general …", or "like adams molecule selves and tissues" for "like atoms molecules cells and tissues". I'm surprised that the recognizer's n-gram language model, which is contemporary ASR's approximation to what makes sense, made these choices. And there are a few things that are just bizarre, where I can only imagine that some obscure bug has short-circuited Google's language model entirely:  "became evermore phadke" for "became ever more vague", or "tutsi you can write" in place of "to each new generation".

Language Log » What use electrolytic pickling?

About | Undercover Reporting

A case study in information responsibility: The site collects some the best undercover reporting alongside some of the most ethically bankrupt. It also cites some of the ensuing discussions and outcomes, which run the gamut from Pulitzer prizes to story retractions and reporter terminations.  Also see this previous post on a related topic.

This collaboration with NYU Libraries collects many decades of high-impact, sometimes controversial, mostly U.S.-generated journalism that used undercover techniques. It grows out of the research for Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception (Northwestern University Press, 2012), which argues that much of the valuable journalism since before the U.S. Civil War has emerged from investigations that employed subterfuge to expose wrong. It asserts that undercover work, though sometimes criticized as deceptive or unethical, embodies a central tenet of good reporting--to extract significant information or expose hard-to-penetrate institutions or social situations that deserve the public's attention. The site, designed as a resource for scholars, student researchers and journalists, collects some of the best investigative work going back almost two centuries.

The material has been gathered into clusters, highlighting award-winning series, exemplary proponents of the practice or recurring themes (such as prison infiltrations, shadowing migrants, work, and gender, class or ethnic impersonation and dozens more.) Included are not only examples of the most outstanding work but also the most serious lapses. There are examples of controversies over the practice, such as those generated by hidden camera investigations, and of the scholarly, legal and journalistic debates that followed. Many excellent digital collections still cover only recent decades so retrieval of much of this material has been difficult, much of it still accessible solely on microfilm.

About | Undercover Reporting

Documents at Anti-Aging Clinic Up for Sale in Doping Case - NYTimes.com

A lurid case study in the information arms race.

Major League Baseball’s investigation of an anti-aging clinic linked to performance-enhancing drugs has taken a new turn, with the commissioner’s office paying a former employee of the facility for documents related to the case. At the same time, two people briefed on the matter said, at least one player linked to the clinic has purchased documents from a former clinic employee in order to destroy them.

The unusual battle, according to the two people, also appears to involve efforts by other players tied to the clinic to buy potentially incriminating documents and keep them out of the hands of baseball’s investigators.

One of the two people said that, in part, baseball, which has no subpoena power, felt compelled to pay money for documents because its officials had been concerned that more than one player was trying to do the same.

Documents at Anti-Aging Clinic Up for Sale in Doping Case - NYTimes.com

Happiness, Beyond the Data - NYTimes.com

This one might not make the team cuts when I moderate the panel “Human Factors in Data Quality” at the 2013 MIT Chief Data Officer & Information Quality Symposium this July, but it’s worth noting the limits—and the overall skepticism about—quantitative studies on human phenomena.

Happiness studies are booming in the social sciences, and governments are moving toward quantitative measures of a nation’s overall happiness, meant to supplement traditional measures of wealth and productivity. The resulting studies have a high noise-to-signal ratio, but we can expect that work with an aura of scientific rigor on something as important as happiness is going to be taken seriously. Still, our first-person experience and reflection can catch crucial truths about happiness that escape the quantitative net.

Happiness, Beyond the Data - NYTimes.com

For Scientists, an Exploding World of Pseudo-Academia - NYTimes.com

I’ll surely be mentioning this when I moderate the panel “Human Factors in Data Quality” at the 2013 MIT Chief Data Officer & Information Quality Symposium this July.

But some researchers are now raising the alarm about what they see as the proliferation of online journals that will print seemingly anything for a fee. They warn that nonexperts doing online research will have trouble distinguishing credible research from junk. “Most people don’t know the journal universe,” Dr. Goodman said. “They will not know from a journal’s title if it is for real or not.”

For Scientists, an Exploding World of Pseudo-Academia - NYTimes.com

Big Data – Relational Opens Its Mouth – Is It Going To Consume Hadoop? | Mike Ferguson's Blog

It’s worth following the link below to read the entire post, about how Hadoop, a linchpin of many NoSQL products and attitudes, now must coexist with SQL, and some of the most Hadoop-centric vendors are moving aggressively in this direction.  Here, I’ll just call attention to what sounds like an actual repository.  The pendulum swings back.

The point about this is that if you want to comnect to a mix of NoSQL DBMSs, Hadoop and Analytical RDBMSs as well as Data Warehouses, On-Line Transaction Processing Systems and other data then you very quickly start to need the ability to know where the data is in underlying systems.  A global catalog is needed so that software knows that it needs to invoke underlying MapReduce jobs to get at Data in Hadoop HDFS, or that it accesses it directly by bypassing MapReduce via Impala for example. 

Big Data – Relational Opens Its Mouth – Is It Going To Consume Hadoop? | Mike Ferguson's Blog

Obamacare: round two : Columbia Journalism Review

An appeal for information responsibility in journalism.

The Affordable Care Act, a.k.a Obamacare, is the law of the land, and the re-election of the president ensures that its far-reaching provisions will take effect as scheduled in 2014. What does that mean for journalists? It presents an opportunity—and an obligation—to deliver the clear and thorough reporting that was missing during the debate on the Act itself.

The politicians were not helpful then. Republicans demonized Obamacare, essentially a plan hatched in conservative think tanks and road-tested by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. The Democrats hid the football, de-emphasizing the mechanics of the law in an effort to minimize the risk that the requirement to have health insurance or face penalties might not win votes.

In the end, the media covered the law’s long, slow passage like a sporting event, without much explanation of how it would shape people’s lives. Here comes another chance.

Obamacare: round two : Columbia Journalism Review