Facebook's "Diversity" Study: Fact or Fiction?

Facebook has just published the results of their own research about the diversity of their users. The introduction to a summary overview of the study states:

In order to make Facebook as open and connected as possible for everyone, one of our goals is to understand how different populations of users join and use the service. With that objective in mind, the Facebook Data team recently sought to answer the question, "How diverse are the ethnic backgrounds of the people using Facebook?"

While I applaud their efforts to determine how well they represent the population at large, I question certain of the Facebook Data team's techniques. The primary method of identifying users as a given ethnicity or race for the study

Visual Metaphors

In a Twitter post, Sean Zdenek asks "Which rhetorical figures can be redeployed visually?" He gives a great example of visual chiasmus, a rhetorical form that uses repetition of themes (also sometimes words) or structures in an inverted order. The name derives from the Greek word for the letter "x."

The most prevalent form of visual rhetorical figures may be the metaphor. Metaphors, in the simplest sense, simply refer to one thing as another.

CFP: CEA 2010, ATTW Sessions

ATTW Sessions at College English Association 2010: Voices
March 25–27, 2010, San Antonio, Texas

Call for Papers

ATTW 2010 Call for Papers

ATTW conference Proposals Deadline extended to 10/19/2009!
ATTW 2010 13th Annual Conference
Synergies: The Intersections of Research and Teaching
March 17, 2010
Louisville, KY

Honoring The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation - September 22, 2009

Although not officially signed into law until January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln formally announced on September 22, 1862 his intent to free all persons held as slaves in the Conferderate States. This announcement generally is referred to as the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

A little-known fact is that the Emancipation Proclamation actually did not free all slaves, but only those in states in which "the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States." Be that as it may, the anniversary of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation seems to me to be a good time to reacquaint ourselves with the text of that document, a document that forever changed the face of our Nation.

God bless America. God bless Abraham Lincoln. God bless those who suffer and strive for freedom everywhere.

The transcript of the text herein is from the National Archives. http://is.gd/3AdIs or http://www.archives.gov

Writer Humor & New Post on IATX

The Past, the Present, and the Future walk into a bar. Bartender looks at them & says, "Why so tense?" (via @willsansbury on Twitter)

Rather than repeat my IA post, here is a link to it: http://iatx.blogspot.com

Happy reading!

How Many Have You Read?

Everyone loves lists.

In the USA, we expediency-loving Americans like "top ten" lists. In England, they take a somewhat longer view.


In 2003 the BBC surveyed their audiences to compile a list of the top 200 "best-loved" novels in that nation. The BBC refers to this as "The Big Read."

Interestingly, the BBC lists The Big Read books on their website as the top 200, top 100, and top 21. Why 21, I wonder? In any case, 200 is too many to fool with for this expedient American and 21 too few.

There is a meme circulating on Facebook currently that supposedly lists the BBC "top 100" and also posits that the "average person" has read only six of the books on the list. However, the only BBC list appears to be the 2003 one. The list circulating on Facebook differs from this one. In any case, it's an interesting exercise.

How many of the books in the BBC's Top 100 Best-Loved Novels (2003 list) have you read? Take the Poll, at left, to record your results.

To whet your appetite for the larger list, here are the top 21. Go to the BBC site for Top 100 and Top 200 novels.

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

Remember, the question is not whether this is a good or reasonable "top" list - only how many you have read.

India Rising: The New Empire

CNBC video of the burgeoning growth in India 4/28/2009

My Twitter Peeps

I created a Word Cloud of the bios of the people who are following me on Twitter. Interestingly, "husband" shows up as a frequently-occurring word. More expectedly, these words pop up frequently: media, writer, technical, business, communication, marketing, social, blogger, author, speaker, professor, development, and, of course, twitter.

Curious? Use twittersheep.com to create your own.

Small Differences

I am researching an historical neighborhood that was once an enclave for merchants and other Jewish immigrants to a burgeoning Dallas. The Jews experienced residential restrictions at the time the neighborhood was built, from 1910-1935. They built their essentially segregated neighborhoods to be close to downtown, their Elm Street shops, and their temple and school.

Dallas already had a sizable black population at that time. Most lived in the Freedman's area just north of downtown and -- directly across the Houston & Texas Central tracks -- in near east Dallas. As the Central tracks gave way to Central Expressway, much of Freedman's town (including the cemetery) was uprooted. This area is now the toney Uptown area of Dallas. As soldiers, including black servicemen, returned from WWII, and people migrated from rural to urban areas, the already significant shortage of housing available to black residents in Dallas was exacerbated by this influx of returning veterans and increasing urbanization of the area.

Both de facto and formal residential segregation measures continued to prevent migration of blacks to the established, upper-middle class and upper-class white areas of North and East Dallas. South Dallas is where most of the in-migrating blacks moved, including the typically Jewish areas. Additionally, upperwardly-mobile blacks began to migrate from the tougher black area north of downtown to the middle-class Jewish neighborhoods just south and east of downtown.

In 1949, the first black family moved onto Atlanta Street. As others moved in, the white families moved out. By 1952, South Dallas was about 90% black. The former upscale Jewish enclave of the Park Row - South Boulevard area experienced the same residential upheaval. My study will look at the stories of some of the people who lived in the Craftsman, Prairie-style, Historical Revival bungalows and mansions along the two streets of this neighborhood during those exciting years of upward mobility and home ownership within the context of an ongoing struggle for civil rights. This is the story of ethnic segregation, integration, and racial resegration.

While searching for something quite unrelated, I came across this sweet video. Perhaps we can all take a lesson from these odd-fellows in the animal kingdom. Enjoy.

Indian English

As a result of my external disk crashing, and taking with it much of my research notes, I've been taking a little break from my research on offshoring to India and other countries. Plus, a more-pressing priority has come up. I must finalize a paper for presentation at an IEEE conference. The research behind the paper actually stems from my offshoring research and work in India and with Indians. But its focus is more on the language: Indian English, or English as it is spoken and written in India.

My interest in Indian English primarily is in the form it takes in technical documents and written and verbal workplace communications. Whether Indian English is a dialect, a patois, or some other form, I cannot say. Nor do all linguists agree on this point. What is certain, is that English as it is spoken and written in India is different than the standard English of either America or Britain, and this difference extends to technical English as well.

In doing some research and preparing material for my presentation, I came across this YouTube video made by an Indian man. He provides us with a humorous look at Indian expressiveness. I particularly enjoy the finger wag. Hmm. I wonder if I can craft a dissertation around Russell Peters? (Watch Peter's "Outsourced Terrorist" for a good laugh.) Enjoy!