刚才困得差点昏死在键盘上。玩了一下这个提神。
love vs. sex
god vs. evolution vs. gene
men vs. women
truth vs. beauty vs. kindness vs. evil
- Re: Google Books Ngram Viewerposted on 12/21/2010
politics vs. arts vs. economics vs. science
politics vs. arts vs. economics vs. science vs. human
power vs. art vs. money
- Re: Google Books Ngram Viewerposted on 12/21/2010
Plato vs. Descartes vs. Newton vs. Darwin vs. Einstein - Re: Google Books Ngram Viewerposted on 12/21/2010
Well, that is comforting! - Re: Google Books Ngram Viewerposted on 12/21/2010
Susan wrote:
Well, that is comforting
How about this: make a living vs. dreaming vs. dream. Dreams are like the sky; dreaming is flying; to make a living you stay on the ground.
It seems the best way to live your dream is to dream while you are making a living. :)
- Re: Google Books Ngram Viewerposted on 12/21/2010
谢小麦提供的人间指南,好像找到答案了:
- Re: Google Books Ngram Viewerposted on 12/21/2010
can someone please explain the chart? totally clueless. - Re: Google Books Ngram Viewerposted on 12/21/2010
moab wrote:
can someone please explain the chart? totally clueless.
最近两百年,人类文明进入最高级阶段,吃喝拉撒所占比重,基本维持不变;pray的比重剧降,相应看涨的是play;
各式各样的玩法中,阅读/写作/聊天/发呆的比重在略有下降的前提下,基本维持现状,但用来love的时间剧降;
问题很严重,到底什么占用了love的market share? 初步判断,是music, sex, game and kill:) - Re: Google Books Ngram Viewerposted on 12/22/2010
小麦的心电图? - posted on 12/23/2010
小麦 wrote:
love vs. sex
god vs. evolution vs. gene
The first two charts say: we're getting closer and closer to our animal form, which is where we came from.
men vs. women
The third chart says: we're more and more like human, oh, right, only if you're a woman.
Hmm, I wonder what it says when you put all these three together. :)
truth vs. beauty vs. kindness vs. evil
The fourth chart says the same as the first two, as animals don't care about knowledge and don't have values as we human do (or pretend to). - Re: Google Books Ngram Viewerposted on 12/23/2010
thanks for the elaboration. I still don't (quite) get it. :) - posted on 12/23/2010
哎,图老爷,“心电图”说的好,不过不是我的,"culturomics".
老瓦:如果画一下love vs. marriage,marriage是和吃喝拉撒一样的stable,充分显示它作为social institution的优越性,当然也意味着很boring. 相比之下,love有个tumultuous history也就不奇怪了。
浮生:你的男性动物进化论让我想起来一篇论文,讲男孩子,男猴子,和小轮子的。文章:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18452921
摘要:
“We compared the interactions of 34 rhesus monkeys, living within a 135 monkey troop, with human wheeled toys and plush toys. Male monkeys, like boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys, while female monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in preferences. Thus, the magnitude of preference for wheeled over plush toys differed significantly between males and females. The similarities to human findings demonstrate that such preferences can develop without explicit gendered socialization. We offer the hypothesis that toy preferences reflect hormonally influenced behavioral and cognitive biases which are sculpted by social processes into the sex differences seen in monkeys and humans.”
- posted on 12/23/2010
moab wrote:
thanks for the elaboration. I still don't (quite) get it. :)
这篇新闻有解释:
http://www.aolnews.com/2010/12/17/pants-up-trousers-down-on-googles-ngram-viewer/
'Pants' Up, 'Trousers' Down on Google's Ngram ViewerDec 17, 2010 – 2:33 PM
(Dec. 17) -- Never one to be caught resting on its laurels, Google has released a massive, searchable database that will give linguists and historians a new tool for quantitatively understanding how language and culture have changed over time. It also makes for a good time-waster on languishing Fridays before the holidays.
The Books Ngram Viewer, which Google created with the Encyclopedia Britannica and scientists from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, takes 500 billion words from 5.2 million digitized books and allows you to track their usage over time. The result is a database that shows when certain phrases, people, ideas and trends faded in and out of fashion.
For example, if you wanted to see when certain words became outmoded in the English language, you might compare them to their more popular versions today. Below, a comparison of "trousers" and "pants" shows pants falling out of favor around 1830 as trousers took off. But, after trousers reached their apex in the 1940s, pants rebounded, and eventually reclaimed their rightful place at the top of the English lexicon around 1980:
Or, for a more controversial comparison, try looking at "dog" and "cat" and you will see that the former has appeared far more frequently since 1800 than the latter in books published in English in the United States:
The Harvard team has named the new analysis "culturomics," as a means of expressing the idea that culture can be studied quantitatively. They have come to some interesting conclusions already, that people become famous at a much earlier age today than before, for instance, but that they also fall from notoriety much faster too. Their study was published in the journal Science today.
"They've come up with something that is going to make an enormous difference in our understanding of history and literature," Robert Darnton, cultural historian and director of the Harvard University Library, told The Wall Street Journal.
Erez Lieberman Aiden, one of the lead researchers at Harvard, told Scientific American that they do not see the Ngram Viewer as an answer factory. Instead, many of the findings in the database will elicit a multitude of questions.
The current Ngram database took about four years to assemble, and the team intends to add more books, magazines, newspapers and blogs -- and also non-text-based work such as art -- in the future。 - posted on 12/23/2010
经济学家这期的报道:
http://www.economist.com/node/17730198
Culturomics
Dec 16th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION
WHEN Google began scanning books and allowing them to be searched online in 2004, publishers fretted that their literary treasure would be ransacked by internet pirates. Readers, meanwhile, revelled in the prospect of instant access to innumerable publications, some of them unavailable by other means. But Google Books is also responsible for another, quieter revolution: in the humanities.
For centuries, researchers interested in tracking cultural and linguistic trends were resigned to the laborious process of perusing volumes one by one. A single person, or indeed a team of people, can read only so many books. Large-scale number-crunching seemed an impossible task. Now, though, Jean-Baptiste Michel, of Harvard University, and his colleagues have used Google Books to do just that. They report their first results in this week’s Science.
So far Google has managed to digitise 15m of the estimated 130m titles printed since Johannes Gutenberg perfected the press in the 15th century. Dr Michel’s team whittled this down to just over 5m volumes for which reasonably accurate bibliographic data, in particular the date and place of publication, are available. They chose to focus mainly on English texts between 1800 and 2000, but also included some French, Spanish, German, Russian, Chinese and Hebrew ones.
That yielded a corpus of over 500 billion 1-grams, as Dr Michel calls a string of characters uninterrupted by a space. These include words, acronyms, numbers and dates, as well as typos (“becasue”) or misspellings (“abberation”). He also looked at combinations of 1-grams, from 2-grams (“The Economist”) to 5-grams (“the United States of America”). To minimise the risk of including random concatenations of words, rare spellings or mistakes, any word or expression had to appear in the corpus at least 40 times to merit inclusion in the final, chronologically ordered set.
At this point, the number-crunching could begin in earnest. Dr Michel first used his data to estimate the total number of words in the English language. To do this, he and his team took a random sample from the corpus, checked what proportion were non-words and extrapolated that to the whole lot. He puts the figure at a smidgen above 1m.
On their reckoning, even the most authoritative lexical repository, the “Oxford English Dictionary”, underrepresents this total by a factor of two. Also, after hardly budging in the first half of the 20th century, the English vocabulary expanded at a rate of 8,500 words a year in the second half, leading to a 70% increase in its size since 1950 (see chart).
Amusingly, Dr Michel found that some words added to the “American Heritage Dictionary” in 2000, like “gypseous” or “amplidyne”, had been in widespread use a century earlier. What is more, by the time they did make it into the dictionary, they were becoming obsolete.
The researchers did not confine themselves to poking fun at lexicographers, though. They also looked at a range of cultural trends, such as how long it takes innovations to impinge on the popular consciousness (which is happening ever more quickly), the age at which celebrities become famous (which is dropping, albeit at the expense of ultimately shorter spells in the limelight), as well as many other more or less frivolous trends.
Clearly, books do not exhaust the whole of human culture. In recent decades their relative importance has waned. Nor are the books Google has already chosen to scan necessarily a representative sample of literature across the ages. This means that any findings based on them ought to be treated with caution.
Still, Dr Michel and his team hope that their approach will spur a more rigorous, quantitative approach to the study of human culture. In fact, their paper doubles as a manifesto for a new discipline. They dub it “culturomics”, making them the first clutch of culturomists. More are sure to follow—whether or not this particular, clunking neologism survives.
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