If I ever do get to write a PhD, I will have to make sure to run it through this detector (as well covered in the New Scientist). Seriously though, this sounds like a great way to show off the computational linguistics (or more specifically data/text mining) experiments. Hopefully such projects will make the field more visible and more interesting to others. On the project itself, I wonder how it would deal with papers produced by people for whom English is not their first language.

Roger Shuy describes the original goals of American Association of Applied Linguistics and progress (or in his opinion) retreat from those goals that happened over the last 30 years. I started to write a comment on it, but realised that it needs fine-tuning. So, I will skip my thinking for now, apart from saying that he has a very valid point. Ether way, the article is worth a read.

I am an idealist inside. But I keep that well hidden. 🙂 So, when I look at something that needs to be done, I search for the low hanging fruit. Grand ambitions are fine, but if they are not backed up by the near term useful solutions, everything will stagnate and die. With Esperanto, the core idea is so great and compelling that many people seem to have difficulties to turn their eyes to identifying more immediate opportunities.

Guy Kawasaki writes about the art of customer service. While all of the points are applicable, he did not take the one about integrating customer service into the mainstream far enough. He talks that customer service people receiving accolades as much as sales, engineering and marketing. That’s great. But what about actively helping them to do their jobs better. Sales have fancy tools to track customers’ pipelines, marketing get party budgets, engineers get multiple-monitors and fancy tech toys.

There is a great commercial service out there for those interested in learning English. It is called theLinguist and is run by the polyglot Steve Kaufmann (with 9 languages and more on the way, he more than deserves the label). Steve’s approach is very unconventional, but I think in a good way. It is run as a central website, it provides a lot of reading and listening material, it tracks the words/phrases you are learning and it provides tutor services that will look over what you write and suggest better (more standard) ways of saying the same thing.