Month: October 2013

97% of languages will die

95-97% of languages will die in the digital realm. as depressing as that is, i suspect it will be even higher, as the benefits of speaking a common language are just too great.

Of the 7000 languages spoken today, some 2500 are generally considered endangered. This consensus figure vastly underestimates the danger of digital language death, in that less than 5% of all languages can still ascend to the digital realm. We present evidence of a massive die-off caused by the digital divide.

Europe wants to spy too

A main outcome of all these revelations will be that the amateurish spying services in europe will be built up:

It also seems to be difficult for German intelligence agencies to actually track the activities of the NSA. The Americans’ technical capabilities are in many ways superior to what exists in Germany. At the BFV domestic intelligence agency, not even every employee has a computer with an Internet connection. But now, the German agencies want to beef up their capabilities. There are already more than 100 employees at the BFV responsible for counterintelligence, but officials are hoping to see this double.

all the calls by eurocrats to not use american sites make a lot more sense now.

Edward Snowden papers unmask close technical cooperation and loose alliance between British, German, French, Spanish and Swedish spy agencies

i have been amused how naive / hypocritical people have been around the world in assuming that their own governments aren’t spying on them. the funniest are the german politicians that sprout nonsense like the “right to be forgotten” while being fully aware of their own extensive spying.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the BfV, received the coveted software program XKeyscore from the NSA – and promised data from Germany in return

2013-12-05: as expected, other countries are working hard to close the gap with the NSA.

Yesterday the 2014-2019 defense bill passed first reading in the French National Assembly. It marks a strong shift towards total online surveillance. If passed, the bill will not only allow live monitoring of everyone’s personal and private data but also do so without judicial oversight, as the surveillance will be enabled through administrative request. The bill also turns permanent measures that were only temporary.

Can english be fixed?

English is a major component of the world abstract infrastructure, but it is broken. Suggest and auto correct could fix it over time. The major fix would be to map spelling and pronunciation more closely to lower friction in learning and communication.

Some people might say, “Why argue with success?” English has become the language of choice for science, politics, and international trade. Maybe we should leave it alone? However, this is the kind of complacent attitude that usually precedes a defeat.

2018-08-14:

English is a marvelously and maddeningly inconsistent language. The words “rough”, “though”, “thought”, and “through” all contain “ough” but pronounced in a different way. In this video, Aaron Alon gradually normalizes the vowel sounds in his speech down to 1 sound per letter. The end result sounds a little like Werner Herzog doing an impression of someone from Wales doing an impression of an Italian who doesn’t speak English that well. Which makes sense because that’s pretty much how the language came together in the first place!

2018-12-05:

amongst the modern languages, English has the worst orthography, the worst mapping between spelling and sounds of any of the existing languages. And it’s a tragedy because English is becoming the universal second language.If there were a way to do in English what they’ve done in other languages, which is to clean up the orthography, that could make a huge difference in the variation associated with whether or not people can learn to read English.

Great gov IT raises GDP

There’s a new digital divide in this country, and instead of it being between the rich and the poor, it’s between the government and the people that it represents. The pace of technology increases exponentially, and with too much friction on how the government buys things, that gap will continue to exponentially widen.

This is a bad thing because people’s expectations of service directly correlate to the amount of technology available to them. Today, my parents are vacationing in Croatia, and just 5 years ago, I wouldn’t have expected to get any word from them until they return in a few weeks. Today, I get messages from them on a regular basis throughout their trip. My expectations have changed.

And with government it’s the same thing. 10 years ago, when I started on the Dean campaign, there were no meet ups, there were no video conferences, there were no SMS campaigns, there was no iPhone, twitter, myspace or Facebook. Friendster was just getting off the ground.

But today our expectations have changed. And government needs to shift in order to accommodate those expectations, at a cost that’s within the same order of magnitude that we pay.

So please pass this along, if you care about the effectiveness of the services your government delivers to you, or if you care about small, efficient government, this should be an issue for you.

A country will only be as competitive as their gov it Infrastructure. World class it would save 100s of billions a year and would likely show up in GDP growth too.