I’ve just started reading Mark Driscoll’s The Radical Reformission.
It’s an interesting read. Mark is at once insightful, blunt, and engaging. Here’s a sample that illustrates all three:
“My problem was that I thought sin was something you do, not understanding that sin is something you are, like being French Canadian.” (p12)
Nice.
As yet I haven’t read much. It’ll be interesting to see how it pans out over the course of the book.
Andy Brice has performed a little experiment on software download sites, by creating anĀ ‘application’ that was nothing more than a text file renamed to a .exe. It didn’t run, it didn’t do anything, and was named such that anyone checking it would notice that it was a gag.
But it won loads of ‘awards’ from these download sites for being quality software.
The short story is this: most download sites are junk.
In his opinion, given some quality feedback (and rejection of his program), the sites to go to are:
Speaking of summer projects, I’ve been thinking of useful programs that I would like to have, and can’t find anywhere. My technical side has been itching a little, so I want to scratch it a little by diving into some mac programming.I’ve posted recently about a good vocab tester, but I can’t find anything that will test grammar paradigms. For those of you who don’t learn other languages in your spare time, a paradigm is a table which lays out how a verb is used in different contexts, e.g.
He is
You are
I am
There isn’t very much variation in English, but the verb ‘to be’ (is/are/am) demonstrates it about as well as is possible.
In Greek and Hebrew (and a bunch of languages other than English, such as French or German) there is considerable variation in the way verbs look when they are attached to certain subjects. If the subject (the person ‘doing’ the verb) is masculine or feminine, 3rd person/2nd person/1st person, singular or plural - all of these effect how you construct the verb. This is a pain to learn, but is really nifty in the text, as it can define clearly what a given verb relates to, thus in certain cases resolving ambiguity.
It does, however, give a lot of different forms to learn for the language student. Furthermore, I haven’t found anything that effectively tests these forms.
So I thought I’d make one.
I’ve hacked together some preliminary ideas, as you can see in some screenshots. I’m aiming at this stage to implement an editor (so that you can import paradigm tables, change them, etc), a viewer so you can learn them initially, a test mode which will allow you to check your knowledge against the database, and finally a ‘parsing’ mode which requires you to identify a particular form.
I’ve got together a basic editor (which is not very easy to use at this stage), and a viewer. It’s basic, and not terribly attractive, but it’s a start. As I said, it’s probably another project for summer.
If you would find such a program useful, let me know in the comments, and let me know what you would put in it if you could.
There’s a couple of computer science/data visualisation geeks who have come up with a really nifty way of graphically representing verbal similarities between a group of essays.
Basically, the gist of the process is that the essays are scanned, and word frequencies are calculated. The most frequently occurring words are then represented by larger and larger circles, so each essay is placed in context of the group, and relations between them can be seen at a glance. If you then drill down into each essay, the bar-code looking ring breaks down the structure of the essay into paragraphs, footnotes, etc.
Beautiful, useful, nerdy: awesome.
It strikes me that this, if implemented well, could be a really useful tool for preliminary research. When researching an essay, you feed a bunch of (hopefully) related articles into it, and you get a birds-eye-view of how they relate to each other, and a simple idea of the major themes of each article. Now it’s not too sophisticated - the major theme is decided by word count - but it’s a start at least. I imagine you could do some further links by examining the references of each article: if two articles both reference another work, they may be tied more closely.
There’s another possibility. One of our college lecturers took us through an outline of Romans, one of the books of the New Testament. A significant part of his analysis came down to verbal parallels between different parts of the letter; that is, certain parts ’sounded’ very similar to others in terms of the greek terms used. Perhaps a tool like this could be useful in getting a preliminary idea of any verbal parallels between different sections of text, which might throw up some useful ideas for further consideration.
Fascinating. I might wait a little and see if they come out with any useful software based on their algorithm… if not, I think I now have a summer project.
