“Harvard, Google Map Cultural Trends, Seek God and Sigmund Freud - BusinessWeek” plus 1 more

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Harvard, Google Map Cultural Trends, Seek God and Sigmund Freud - BusinessWeek Posted: 16 Dec 2010 11:39 AM PST December 16, 2010, 2:40 PM EST By Esmé E. Deprez Dec. 16 (Bloomberg) -- The word "God" peaked in usage in the world's books about 1830. "Women" overtook "men" in print after 1985. Sigmund Freud has gotten more ink in the past 60 years than Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein. Researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, teamed up with Google Inc. to survey 5.2 million digitized books -- about 4 percent of all the volumes published in any language -- to analyze language patterns and quantify cultural trends from 1800 to 2000. The four-year project is described today in the journal Science. The Harvard researchers dub their discipline "culturomics" -- evoking genomics, in which scientists use billions of bits of quantitative data to study genes. Google, which has digitized 12 percent of the 130 million books published worldwide, unveiled today an online tool that enables users to track the frequency of words and phrases. Goggle, the Mountain View, California-based creator of the most-used Internet-search engine, gave funding and staff to the project. "This data is a new tool for the humanities, just one part of the puzzle that humanists can use to address questions about human society," Jean-Baptiste Michel, the study's coauthor and a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, said in a telephone interview. The researchers used the data to explore the growth of the English lexicon, society's collective memory, the evolution of grammar, fame, and the effects of censorship. 'Easy Access' "This tool gives us really easy access to the way that words or concepts have been used over time," said Erez Lieberman Aiden, a co-author, who is a member of Harvard's Society of Fellows, scholars who free to work without formal requirements. "This has always been notoriously difficult to achieve because you have to quantify how words were and are used now. Even if you're extremely learned it's just not possible to read everything that's been written." About 72 percent of the database's text is in English, followed by French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Russian, and Hebrew. It's the largest data release in the history of humanities and is available for download, Michel said. While the database's books date from the 1500s, users attempting scientific analyses should restrict their use to volumes published from 1800 to 2000, Michel said. There was a scarcity of material before 1800, and Google altered the criteria for the post-2000 books that were digitized, skewing the sample, he said. Men vs. Women Studying word frequency, the researchers found that "men" was present in books almost nine times as often as "women" during the first half of the 19th century. The gap narrowed until 1985, when both words were used evenly, and by 1994 "women" appeared about 4.3 times for every 10,000 words, while "men" lagged behind at 3.3, according to the data. There are other words to express the ideas behind "women" and "men," Michel said. Studying the frequency of any specific word is just one way to determine cultural trends, he said. "You're also hearing from different authors in 2000 than you are in 1800," Aiden said. "So it's a combination of not only what's being written changing, but also what voices are being heard." Members of the clergy produced a greater percentage of what was written in the early 1800s than later, Aiden said. That may help explain why "God" peaked around 1830, when it represented 12.5 of every 10,000 words, he said. By 2000, its prevalence had dropped to 2.6 times. "'God' is not dead, but needs a new publicist," the authors wrote. Freud's Triumph Year by year before 1950, the fame of Darwin, the 19th- century evolutionary biologist, was greater on average than that of the psychoanalyst Freud, the physicist Einstein or 17th- century astronomer Galileo Galilei. Freud then took the lead. The research team, which included staff members from the publishers of "Encyclopaedia Britannica" and "The American Heritage Dictionary," concluded that the English language absorbs about 8,500 new words each year. From 1950 to 2000, the lexicon grew more than 70 percent. Dictionaries don't account for the extent of this growth and fail to include an estimated 52 percent of the language, the authors wrote. By restricting searches to certain languages, users can detect the effects of censorship, the researchers wrote. The prevalence of the Jewish artist Marc Chagall differs when comparing literature in English with that in German -- a result of Nazi censorship, according to the researchers. "As with fossils of ancient creatures, the challenge of culturomics lies in the correct interpretation of this new evidence," the authors wrote. "Many more fossils, with shapes no less intriguing, beckon." --Editors: Robin D. Schatz, Jeffrey Tannenbaum To contact the reporter on this story: Esmé E. Deprez in New York atedeprez@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Kaufman at jkaufman17@bloomberg.net This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php Five Filters featured site: So, Why is Wikileaks a Good Thing Again?.

The Idiot's Guide to Saving the Euro - YAHOO! Posted: 16 Dec 2010 02:17 PM PST WASHINGTON, DC – Since 1999, Europeans have been using euros to purchase Europe-y things, like cigarettes, bread, and soccer shoes. It is the legal tender in 16 of the 27 European Union member-states. Together these 16 countries comprise monetary union called eurozone, currently the world's second largest economy. But all is not well in eurozone. The global financial crisis left poorer nations like Ireland and Greece teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Germany and France provided the bulk of the combined 195 billion-euro rescue package for the two countries, much to the displeasure of German chancellor Angela Merkel, who warned fellow EU leaders back in October that Germany could drop the euro if private investors and less prosperous eurozone nations didn't start sharing the buyout burden. As EU prime ministers meet in Brussels this week to discuss the debt crisis and negotiate terms on bailouts going forward, a primer from commentators on how things got so dire and what needs to be done for the euro to survive. No Exit Strategy  Nicholas Hastings of The Wall Street Journal's The Source blog says the failure of EU leaders to agree upon "a longer-term rescue plan to prevent a sovereign default" has put the entire currency at risk. Particularly alarming to currency traders, observes Hastings, is that the EU leaders meeting in Brussels have already punted on issuing "euro-zone-wide bonds" and "increasing the rescue funds that the EU is setting aside for further bailouts." Choking off access to a depleted rescue fund amidst a still-active debt crisis perplexes both Hastings and some of Wall Street's top credit agencies. Hastings notes that Moody's is poised to downgrade its rating on Spanish debt and "[Belgium] had its credit-rating outlook cut to negative from stable by Standard & Poor's as the country's inability to put together a government since July hardly bodes well for fiscal discipline." The Eurozone Problem and How to Fix It  Anthony Mirhaydari of MSN Money says a lack of unity--both fiscal and cultural--is to blame for eurozone's recent struggles. The lack of a "fiscal union to back the common currency" is the "fundamental flaw in the eurozone's design," while it's hard to have an "optimal currency area" without a "common language, ... or even common social values." Here's what has to happen: The only way to restore competiveness is to engineer falling prices, or deflation, via a deep and protracted recession. ... The key will be to remedy the inherent flaws in the original mechanisms behind the euro. Namely, the Germans must compromise ... The strong would support the weak, just as strong states like Texas have supported hard-hit states like Nevada and Florida during the U.S. recession. ... In exchange, weaker countries like Ireland and Greece must accept more stringent regulatory oversight of their banking systems and fiscal budgets. This will represent the forfeiture of some sovereign independence, but compromises must be made. At What Cost?  Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have expressed a desire to "harmonize taxes and labor regulations throughout the euro zone" in an attempt to better integrate the various economies, an action The Wall Street Journal's Marian Tupy believes is a mistake. Tupy says former Soviet countries will struggle to meet the new standards. "When East and West Germany reunified in 1990," he notes, "one of their first moves was to overhaul East Germany's labor regulations so that they matched those of the West." Yet this "proved disastrous for the much less productive East German economy, which had had no time to adjust to the exigencies of the free market," and suffered from persistent unemployment as a result. Pursuing a similar policy currently across the continent, Tupy argues, would only make it harder for less prosperous nations to pull their weight, and do "long-term damage to [a poorer country's] economic growth." The wealth advantage enjoyed by Germany and France, meanwhile, would only increase. Bonds, Bonds, Bonds  Writing in The New York Times, former European Bank for Reconstruction president Jacques Atalli and Greek minister of state Haris Pamboukis make the case that while the euro is safe for now, something must be done to prevent a domino effect of eurozone countries defaulting one after another. "The worst-case scenario" is that "most threatened countries will attempt to avoid a catastrophe by adopting austerity programs. However, these will prove to be insufficient to restore investor confidence and ineffective in repelling attacks by speculators, which drive up their borrowing rates. The default dominoes will begin to fall," and the financial system underwriting the debt with them. Atalli and Pamboukis propose "backstopping" the European Central Bank with a "European fiscal authority with several indispensable instruments: the ability to issue European treasury bonds and raise federal taxes, and the capacity for decisive action at the European level." A European Treasury, with financial backing from the European Union, is the only way for eurozone countries to "build our way out of this systemic crisis instead of urgently plugging gaps." This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php Five Filters featured site: So, Why is Wikileaks a Good Thing Again?.

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