I’m a regular watcher of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, so in February I was looking forward to his take on “AI“ and the large language models and image generators that many people have been getting excited about lately. I was not disappointed: Oliver heaped a lot of much-deserved criticism on these technologies, particularly for the ways they replicate prejudice and are overhyped by their developers.

It’s well known that some languages have multiple national standards, to the point where you can take courses in either Brazilian or European Portuguese, for example. Most language instruction services seem to choose one variety per language: when I studied Portuguese at the University of Paris X-Nanterre it was the European variety, but the online service Duolingo only offers the Brazilian one.

I started writing this post back in August, and I hurried it a little because of a Limping Chicken article guest written by researchers at the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre at University College London. I’ve known the DCAL folks for years, and they graciously acknowledged some of my previous writings on this issue.

Since I first encountered The Parisian Stage , I’ve been impressed by the completeness of Beaumont Wicks’s life’s work: from 1950 through 1979 he compiled a list of every play performed in the theaters of Paris between 1800 and 1899. I’ve used it as the basis for my Digital Parisian Stage corpus, currently a one percent sample of the first volume (Wicks 1950), available in full text on GitHub.

When Timm, Laura, Elber and I first ran the @everytreenyc Twitter bot almost a year ago, we knew that it wasn’t actually sampling from a list that included every street tree in New York City. The Parks Department’s 2015 Tree Census was a huge undertaking, and was not complete by the time they organized the Trees Count! Data Jam last June. There were large chunks of the city missing, particularly in Southern and Eastern Queens.

At the beginning of June I participated in the Trees Count Data Jam, experimenting with the results of the census of New York City street trees begun by the Parks Department in 2015. I had seen a beta version of the map tool created by the Parks Department’s data team that included images of the trees pulled from the Google Street View database. Those images reminded me of others I had seen in the @everylotnyc twitter feed.

It’s that time again! A bunch of really eager computer scientists have a prototype that will translate sign language to speech! They’ve got a really cool video that you just gotta see ! They win an award! (from a panel that includes no signers or linguists). Technology news sites go wild!

This showed up today in the comments that Akismet flagged for spam: {Photo|Picture|Photograph|Image|Photography|Snapshot|Shot|Pic|Photographic|Graphic|Pics} {credit|credit score|credit rating|credit history|credit ratings|consumer credit|credit ranking|credit standing|consumer credit rating|credit scores|credit worthiness}: {AP|Elp} | {FILE|Document|Record|Report|Data file|Submit|Computer file|Data|Register|Archive|Database}