When talking to several people, do you address them as “you guys”? “Y’all”? Just “you”? And is the carbonated soft drink “soda” or “pop?” Maps based on survey responses to questions like this were published in the Harvard Dialect Survey in 2003. Josh Katz took the data and produced extended visualizations and, last month, aContinue reading “Dialects”
Monthly Archives: January 2014
Needle in a Haystack
What’s the probability that the NSA examined the metadata for your phone number in 2013? According to John Inglis, Deputy Director at the NSA, it’s about 0.00001, or 1 in 100,000. A surprisingly small number, given what we’ve all been reading in the media about NSA’s massive data collection effort. Of course, that’s an unconditionalContinue reading “Needle in a Haystack”