"Oh, the Profanity!"

The Parents Television Council is sounding the alarm on an increase in profanity on television. In a report aptly named "Habitat for Profanity," the watchdog group alleges that foul language on network TV has increased 69% from five years ago. Are they kidding, is that the real number?! Not 68% or 70%?

The PTC spent the first two weeks of the fall TV season counting dirty words in prime time. The group monitored ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, UPN, and the WB in 2005; the Big Four plus the CW in 2010. 124 hours of programming from 2005 was compared to 128 hours in 2010.

The Parents Television Council monitored 18 terms it considers indecent. According to federal law, content can be considered indecent if it describes or depicts “sexual or excretory organs or activities… [and] the broadcast must be patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium.” A full list of the terms they encountered and how often they were repeated can be found here.

PTC reports that the most popular curse word on TV was a bleeped F-word. The group found 156 instances of it, compared to just once in 2005. The word "hell" is next with 119 instances. The least used profane words were "douche" and "balls," each tied at one.

The group said the biggest increase of foul language occurred during the 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. time slots. During the 8:00 pm "family hour", instances of the f-word increased from 10 in 2005 to 111 in 2010. Use of the s-word during this hour increased from 11 instances in 2005 to 42 in 2010.

Why such a drastic increase? It has been attributed to a court ruling against profanity censures by the Federal Communications Commission. As Television Broadcast explains:

The Second Circuit ruled in July that the FCC’s penalties for fleeting expletives were “unconstitutionally vague.” The case evolved out of a 2004 FCC indecency dragnet resulting in $4.5 million in fines. Fox was cited for expletives uttered during live awards telecasts in 2002 and 2003, though a similar previous occurrence was given a pass. Fox challenged the ruling. The Supreme Court agreed that the FCC's fleeting expletive rules were vague and tossed a First Amendment challenge back to the lower court.

In response, the networks instituted tape delays to bleep fleeting expletives or cut away from indecent material during live shows. That nixes most of the PTC's complaints. However, the group is increasingly opposed to scripted programming such as Fox’s “Family Guy,” the title of CBS’s “$#*! My Dad Says,” and “Two and a Half Men.”

Personally, I'm not opposed to profanity or "offensive content," I just find this subject to be particularly interesting as an avid fan of classic film and television. Every fart, boob, and penis joke reminds me of just how far censorship on American television has come since shows first began broadcasting in the 1940s and 1950s. Back then, Lucille Ball wasn't allowed to say she was "pregnant" on "I Love Lucy," she had to use the word "expecting." The first Tweety Bird, a featherless pink baby bird, was considered to be too naked and to satisfy the censors the animator was forced to add the distinctive yellow colored feathers we know him by today. Oh my, how times have changed!

Historically, edgy shows that push the envelope like those listed above have been popular with audiences. The predecessors of today's show's owe some of their freedom to groundbreaking sitcoms such as "All in the Family," "The Jeffersons," "Three's Company," "Married... with Children," and "Roseanne." Is it a coincidence that some of the biggest sitcom hits on television right now are also some of the most "profane"?

Painting Lyrics in the Air with His Hands

I've made my feelings known about hip-hop and rap before - I'm highly selective and skeptical of newcomers. You have no idea how excited I was to find this video newscast about Signmark, the deaf man who paints lyrics in the air by waving his hands.

Though he expresses himself through an art form rooted in the spoken word, Signmark doesn't make a sound. Instead, he signs his way through songs as fellow rapper Brandon gives voice to his lyrics. Together, the artists bridge the gap between the deaf world and the hearing world.

For the curious, though Signmark can't hear the music, he can feel the beat. "You can go to a concert with earplugs and you'll feel it, you'll then notice that you feel it in your body," said Signmark. As the music plays, he signs and Brandon raps in unison. The combination is a whole new kind of performance art.

"Those two words, music and deaf, they've never gone together," signed Signmark. Maybe not, but they do now: In 2009, Signmark became the first deaf rapper ever to land a recording contract.

And the music is infectious. I found three videos of his online. My personal favorite is "Smells Like Victory" but honestly they're all good. I highly recommend taking a look and a listen!

Signmark - Smells Like Victory

Signmark - Against the Wall

Signmark - Speakerbox

Thanksgiving 2010 Haiku News

Make sure you know what
will be served for dinner at
your Thanksgiving feast.

What Thanksgiving dish
could you do without? For me,
green bean casserole.

Have cooking questions?
The Turkey Talk-Line is on
standby just for you!

The pardoned turkey
won't go to Disneyland, but
George's Mount Vernon.

This festive season,
do something to help others
have Thanksgiving meals...

...But don't worry too
much over whether children
clean their plates or not.

Gluttony Pants will
keep you from busting buttons
following your meal.

Arrive alive to
dinner, depart alert and
sober - You are loved!

Friday Photography - Last Flowers of Summer

I am finally reaching the end of the photos I needed to sort through from the summer. I came across these flowers and remembered the fun and warmth in the sun. It's winter now, though, so my photo subjects are going to be changing soon. There are new fun times to be had, they're just likely going to be snow-filled! Next week: Las Vegas photos!

Bright Pink Flower

Pale Pink Flowers

White Flower

If anyone knows the names of any of these flowers, I would be most grateful if you could share them with me!

The Word: Plagiarism

The words "plagiarize" and "plagiarism" are popping up in the news lately. These words can chill a creative soul to the bone, and I am no exception. To commit plagiarism is "to plagiarize":

plagiarize: \ˈplā-jə-ˌrīz\

Date: 1716

Function: transitive verb
: to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own : use (another's production) without crediting the source

Function: intransitive verb
: to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

Plagiarism seems to be everywhere, from cooking magazines to J.K. Rowling's popular Harry Potter book series. And you wouldn't believe the people being accused of plagiarizing other people's work, such as Oprah Winfrey, "South Park" creators and satire specialists Matt Stone and Trey Parker, even the former president of the United States, George W. Bush. At all levels of publication and even higher-level academics, the world of writing is rife with word thiefs, idea pirates, and otherwise plain old copyright infringers.

Plagiarism is a huge problem, particularly on the internet. Because everything on the internet is so easily copied, pasted, and reproduced, its not hard to understand why people like Cooks Source editor Judith Griggs believe everything on the web is in the "public domain." The subject doesn't have to be an article or a memoir, no one's content is off limits to these charlatans, it can be as personal as your own past! Just ask graphic designer Clay Butler who has had his biography stolen in various forms by many tricksters, sometimes the same person more than once.

So why do people do it? Well, at the very least it is just easier to pass off someone else's work as your own than to buckle down and actually do it yourself. Another reason may be for profit, such as discount content services that promise vast quantities of "unique" text at prices that would baffle any self-respecting writer who values themselves and their work. Other people, like the Black Eyed Peas (who have been sued repeatedly for plagiarism) and even Supreme Court Associate Justice Mariano del Castillo just seem to think that they can get away with it. Poor planning, ineptitude, even writer's block are all reasons that can contribute to a person choosing to plagiarism but I think what most plagiarists have in common is one very specific characteristic: They want to impress others.

Whether its the boss, colleagues, their friends, their professor, potential employees, future clients or even random readers, I think most plagiarists steal other peoples words, ideas, and experiences because they wish they could claim them as their own. They want others to believe that they're creative, intelligent, deep. Instead of showing those qualities by accomplishing something uniquely their own, they disprove themselves by doing the opposite.

But plagiarism is a shallow crime that can be easily revealed. First of all, duplicate content and plagiarism detection software are making this crime harder to accomplish. Additionally, the stories of plagiarists who are trying to co-opt other people's experiences can be easily shot down by witnesses or even just people who have an interest in rooting out creativity theft. Finally, as in the case of plagiarized resumes and bios, when someone claims they have a specific skill and yet fails to accomplish that task in a satisfactory way, it becomes apparent that person lied about his or her qualifications.

Then what follows next?

Public shaming, endless ridicule, humble apologies, lost jobs, and expensive lawsuits. Because whether its a song, a book, a website, a blog, a photo, a logo, a graphic, or any other copyrighted item, the person or people who created it will defend their work against infringement to whatever degree they can. After all, it is their intellectual property and likely their livelihood. And as proven by the purported collapse of Cooks Source, even if the case doesn't end up in court, a verdict and punishment for plagiarism can be doled out quite swiftly through social media justice.

For anyone who would pursue this type of behavior, I would advise them to determine whether the short term gain that can be accomplished through plagiarism is outweighed by the long-term stigma and repercussions of getting caught.

Haiku News - November 15, 2010

Chocoholics may
have to pay a hefty price
for their cocoa fix.

That weed which makes us
forgetful now may help us
remember later...

...And that drink we quaff
could be the reason we have
civilization.

There has got to be
a sacrilegious joke in
this story somewhere.

First class passengers
wanted nothing to do with
coach's pillow-fight.

He fell asleep and
drifted to sea, but friendly
porpoises saved him.

Trees cleared from the land,
the structure of an ancient
city is revealed.

The richest woman
in the world told a homeless
man she had no cash.

Thanksgiving draws near.
I know one way to deal with
aggressive turkeys.

I wish I could find
something like this. They almost
threw it in the trash!

Uncommonly Known Origins of 20 Common Words

Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. English in particular is a language that consists of many words that were adopted and adapted from other languages.

Though it may sound dull, learning how our modern-day English words came to evolve from older languages is fascinating. Recently, this post by Best College Online was brought to my attention. I liked it so much, I had to share. It explores 20 surprising origins of words that many of us use every day.

Excerpts:

Mortgage : Paying your mortgage can have a deathly effect on your bank account, so go figure that mort was taken from mori, meaning “to die” in Latin. That combined with gage, which is Latin for “pledge,” mortgage literally means “dead pledge.” The word surfaced in Old French during the 13th century, indicating that a pledge for property was dead to the borrower if the loan was repaid, or the property was dead to the borrower if the loan weren’t repaid.

Panic : Pan, the half-man and half-goat Greek God of woods and fields, was infamous for causing unbridled yet mindless fear in crowded places, inspiring the coining of panikon deima, or “panic fear.” Later, the term was adopted by the French as panique

Weird : The original English meaning of weird was “fate” or “destiny.” During the Middle English period, it was used in reference to the three fates of Greek and Roman myth. Later, Shakespeare included the three weird sisters in “Macbeth,” leading to its modern usage.

And these were the safest definitions I felt comfortable posting on my blog! You wouldn't believe from where the words fizzle, dork, or avocado originated. Read the rest of the article here.

Friday Photography - Volunteer Sunflower

Summer is done. Fall is here. The flowers and greenery have gone.

Sunflower

This was the last flower still blooming in my container garden before they all died about two weeks ago. This wasn't even technically in my potted garden, either, it actually grew under my bird feeder. It died and I've harvested the seeds to sew on purpose next year.

Haiku News - November 8, 2010

Pizza: A deep dish
style community service
I can get behind.

Like a cartoon, the
baby bounced off the awning,
into daddy's arms.

Answer honestly:
Could you solve this empty Wheel
of Fortune puzzle?

Career advice for
the college-bound? Three words: Large
animal doctor.

Lost to gambling debts,
nothing is left of Henry's
famed Nonsuch Palace.

Freedom of the road?
No thank you, I'd rather pay
fares and buy gadgets.

I really wonder
about the types of news us
geeks cover sometimes.

Economic rifts
annihilate our sense of
national union.

Apprentice psychic
octopus, Paul II, hasn't
used his powers yet.

Finally, what I've
wanted for ages: Bacon,
in drinkable form!

NELL: The Computer That Learns Like a Person

Few challenges in the computing world are bigger than understanding human language. The meanings of words and phrases relies on their context and the cumulative knowledge that humans learn over time. But researchers are now working on a machine that is trying to learn semantics just like a human does.

Utilizing a research supercomputing cluster provided by Yahoo, and supported by money from Google and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has been improving the computer system called NELL - The Never-Ending Language Learning system. Housed in a basement at the university, NELL was "taught" some basic knowledge in a variety of categories, and then turned loose on the web with specific instructions to teach itself. By analyzing immense quantities of human-created text, NELL will begin to detect the patterns that define the use of language.

Calculating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, NELL scans hundreds of millions of Web pages for text patterns that it uses to learn facts. So far, it has learned 390,000, with an approximate accuracy of 87 percent. These facts are grouped into categories, such as cities, sports teams, actors, plants, animals, and 275 others and growing. The facts for each category are things like “Minneapolis is a city” and “Daffodil is a plant.”

NELL also learns facts that are relations between members of two categories. For example, Peyton Manning is a football player (category). The Indianapolis Colts is a football team (category). By scanning text patterns, NELL can infer with a high probability that Peyton Manning plays for the Indianapolis Colts — even if it has never read that Mr. Manning plays for the Colts. “Plays for” is a relation, and there are 280 kinds of relations. The number of categories and relations has more than doubled since earlier this year, and will steadily expand.

The learned facts are continuously added to NELL’s growing database, which the researchers call a “knowledge base.” A large pool of facts, like that conveniently provided by the internet, will help refine NELL’s learning algorithms so that it finds facts on the Web more accurately and more efficiently over time. Basically, just like humans, the more it knows, the easier it is to learn more in the future.

Though NELL is learning mostly by itself with astonishing accuracy, sometimes the NELL gets its facts wrong. Every two weeks, researchers scan the categories for inaccuracies. Sometimes they do have to step in and correct a misunderstanding.

When Dr. Mitchell scanned the “baked goods” category recently, he noticed a clear pattern. NELL was at first quite accurate, easily identifying all kinds of pies, breads, cakes and cookies as baked goods. But things went awry after NELL’s noun-phrase classifier decided “Internet cookies” was a baked good. (Its database related to baked goods or the Internet apparently lacked the knowledge to correct the mistake.)

NELL had read the sentence “I deleted my Internet cookies.” So when it read “I deleted my files,” it decided “files” was probably a baked good, too. “It started this whole avalanche of mistakes,” Dr. Mitchell said. He corrected the Internet cookies error and restarted NELL’s bakery education. 

While that might seem like a hitch in the plan, it actually humanizes NELL even more. Humans don't learn completely on their own, either. When we are young, adults help us learn and as adults, we all learn from each other. NELL, however, needs considerably less attention and guidance than a human student.

NELL is one project in a widening field of research and investment aimed at enabling computers to better understand the meaning of language. Computers that understand language promise a big payoff someday. The potential applications range from smarter internet searches to virtual personal assistants that can reply to questions in specific disciplines or activities like health, education, travel and shopping.

Election Day 2010: Go Vote Already!

Mid-term elections are here! The polls are still open, get out and vote already! True to Words is a politically neutral entity (even if I'm not), but the act of voting is non-partisan. So I'm posting today to remind you to VOTE and take a friend or two with you while you're at it.

Though about 50 to 60% of all voting age citizens turn up at the polls every four years for the presidential elections, only about 30 to 40% participate in mid-term or local elections. Conversely, I'd say 100% of our population complains about their representation (completely making that up, but it sounds good - and fairly accurate). Yet, if you didn't cast your vote, you didn't make your voice heard, and it’s hard to blame your representative. After all, they're just doing what they were asked by the people who elected them. And that especially wasn't you if you didn't vote at all.

Instead of allowing your choice to be made for you by others without adding your 2 cents, go out and vote for the person or persons who best represent your interests. Yes, it can be inconvenient and yes, it takes time and yes, you might have to stand in line and, YES, even after all of your effort, there is always the distinct possibility that your candidate will lose. But win or lose, your vote counted for something. Yes, it did.

"But I'm just one person! My vote won't make a difference."

That's what lots of people say. When looking at the big numbers of vote totals, it can seem like your vote would be lost in the throng. So I'll use small, easy numbers to show just how valuable your vote is. Simple is better anyway, 'cause Dammit, Jim, I'm a wordsmith, not a mathematician!

In comparison to the millions of people that live in a state like, say, Minnesota, how small of a number is 225? Pretty small, that’s smaller than the high school class with which I graduated. That's a big wedding guest list or a really small town.

225 votes sent Senator Al Franken to Washington and sent Norm Coleman packing in the 2008 elections. That's 225 people who might have thought their vote wouldn't make a big difference either, but they made the trip. In the end, their candidate won.

How about 537? A little less than twice as many people. But 537 votes made the electoral difference in Florida to send George W. Bush to the White House instead of Al Gore. 537 people who went to the polls, despite the fact that it was raining (I've been watching CNN). It's beautiful outside, you don't have that excuse!

These are just the federal-level races that in recent years made national headlines. In local district, county, and city/town elections, where population pools are the smallest and where government has the greatest direct impact on individuals, the margins of victory and defeat can be even smaller. Especially in these cases, voting every four years instead of every two really is unacceptable. If more people chose to participate in the mid-term elections, we would have a far more accurately representative government overall – from the local level all the way to the top.

Need one more reason to vote? When January comes and it is time again to complain about the new things our senators and representatives are doing to piss us off, don't discredit how immensely satisfying it is to say "Hey, I didn't vote for him/her, I voted for the smart one!"