Plextor's been plenty busy this week, announcing its new M3 Pro SSD and PlexEasy external DVD burner, but the company's not done unveiling new products just yet. Plextor's newest offering is another external DVD burner, the easily remembered PX-612U. Like the PlexEasy, it connects via USB and works with TVs and media streamers without needing a PC. That's possible thanks to some secret sauce called PlexTV (not to be confused with the media client), which acts as a code translator to make the PX-612U's output mimic a HDD. It'll be available the first quarter of this year, for an as-yet-unknown number of dollars.
The Daily App Deals post is a round-up of the best app discounts of the day, as well as some notable mentions for ones that are on sale.
The Best
Celsius - Weather & Temperature on your Home Screen (iTunes) Previously $1.99, now 99?. Celsius is a full-featured weather app that gives you a 10-day forecast (in Celsius) that includes cloud cover and rain fall totals. The temperature gets displayed on your home screen icon, lock screen, and notification center. Get it for 99?. (via LogicBuy)
Google has just announced that it's named Diane B. Greene, a cofounder and longtime CEO of VMware, to its Board of Directors. Greene is also on Intuit's Board of Directors, where she serves on the Audit and Risk Committee and Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee as well. Greene was formerly President and CEO of VMware from 1998 through 2008, leading it to a $625 million acquisition by EMC in early 2004, and, in 2007, an IPO on the NYSE.
We may be less happy, but our language isn'tPublic release date: 12-Jan-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Joshua Brown joshua.e.brown@uvm.edu 802-656-3039 University of Vermont
"If it bleeds, it leads," goes the cynical saying with television and newspaper editors. In other words, most news is bad news and the worst news gets the big story on the front page.
So one might expect the New York Times to contain, on average, more negative and unhappy types of words like "war," " funeral," "cancer," "murder" than positive, happy ones like "love," "peace" and "hero."
Or take Twitter. A popular image of what people tweet about may contain a lot of complaints about bad days, worse coffee, busted relationships and lousy sitcoms. Again, it might be reasonable to guess that a giant bag containing all the words from the world's tweets on average would be more negative and unhappy than positive and happy.
But new research shows just the opposite.
"English, it turns out, is strongly biased toward being positive," said Peter Dodds, an applied mathematician at the University of Vermont.
The UVM team's study "Positivity of the English Language," is presented in the Jan. 11 issue of the journal PLoS ONE.
This new study complements another study the same Vermont scientists presented in the Dec. 7 issue of PLoS ONE, "Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network."
That work attracted wide media attention showing that average global happiness, based on Twitter data, has been dropping for the past two years.
Combined, the two studies show that short-term average happiness has dropped against the backdrop of the long-term fundamental positivity of the English language.
In the new study, Dodds and his colleagues gathered billions of words from four sources: twenty years of the New York Times, the Google Books Project (with millions of titles going back to 1520), Twitter and a half-century of music lyrics.
"The big surprise is that in each of these four sources it's the same," says Dodds. "We looked at the top 5,000 words in each, in terms of frequency, and in all of those words you see a preponderance of happier words."
Or, as they write in their study, "a positivity bias is universal," both for very common words and less common ones and across sources as diverse as tweets, lyrics and British literature.
Why is this? "It's not to say that everything is fine and happy," Dodds says. "It's just that language is social."
In contrast to traditional economic theory, which suggests people are inherently and rationally selfish, a wave of new social science and neuroscience data shows something quite different: that we are a pro-social storytelling species. As language emerged and evolved over the last million years, positive words, it seems, have been more widely and deeply engrained into our communications than negative ones.
"If you want to remain in a social contract with other people, you can't be a," well, Dodds here used a word that is rather too negative to be fit to print which makes the point.
This new work adds depth to the Twitter study that the Vermont scientists published in December that attracted attention from NPR, Time magazine and other media outlets.
"After that mild downer story, we can say, 'But wait there's still happiness in the bank," Dodds notes. "On average, there's always a net happiness to language."
Both studies drew on a service from Amazon called Mechanical Turk. On this website, the UVM researchers paid a group of volunteers to rate, from one to nine, their sense of the "happiness" the emotional temperature of the 10,222 most common words gathered from the four sources. Averaging their scores, the volunteers rated, for example, "laughter" at 8.50, "food" 7.44, "truck" 5.48, "greed" 3.06 and "terrorist" 1.30.
The Vermont team including Dodds, Isabel Kloumann, Chris Danforth, Kameron Harris, and Catherine Bliss then took these scores and applied them to the huge pools of words they collected. Unlike some other studies with smaller samples or that elicited strong emotional words from volunteers the new UVM study, based solely on frequency of use, found that "positive words strongly outnumber negative words overall."
This seems to lend support to the so-called Pollyanna Principle, put forth in 1969, that argues for a universal human tendency to use positive words more often, easily and in more ways than negative words.
Of course, most people would rank some words, like "the," with the same score: a neutral 5. Other words, like "pregnancy," have a wide spread, with some people ranking it high and others low. At the top of this list of words that elicited strongly divergent feelings: "profanities, alcohol and tobacco, religion, both capitalism and socialism, sex, marriage, fast foods, climate, and cultural phenomena such as the Beatles, the iPhone, and zombies," the researchers write.
"A lot of these words the neutral words or ones that have big standard deviations get washed out when we use them as a measure," Dodds notes. Instead, the trends he and his team have observed are driven by the bulk of English words tending to be happy.
If we think of words as atoms and sentences as molecules that combine to form a whole text, "we're looking at atoms," says Dodds. "A lot of news is bad," he says, and short-term happiness may rise and and fall like the cycles of the economy, "but the atoms of the story of language are, overall, on the positive side."
###
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?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
We may be less happy, but our language isn'tPublic release date: 12-Jan-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Joshua Brown joshua.e.brown@uvm.edu 802-656-3039 University of Vermont
"If it bleeds, it leads," goes the cynical saying with television and newspaper editors. In other words, most news is bad news and the worst news gets the big story on the front page.
So one might expect the New York Times to contain, on average, more negative and unhappy types of words like "war," " funeral," "cancer," "murder" than positive, happy ones like "love," "peace" and "hero."
Or take Twitter. A popular image of what people tweet about may contain a lot of complaints about bad days, worse coffee, busted relationships and lousy sitcoms. Again, it might be reasonable to guess that a giant bag containing all the words from the world's tweets on average would be more negative and unhappy than positive and happy.
But new research shows just the opposite.
"English, it turns out, is strongly biased toward being positive," said Peter Dodds, an applied mathematician at the University of Vermont.
The UVM team's study "Positivity of the English Language," is presented in the Jan. 11 issue of the journal PLoS ONE.
This new study complements another study the same Vermont scientists presented in the Dec. 7 issue of PLoS ONE, "Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network."
That work attracted wide media attention showing that average global happiness, based on Twitter data, has been dropping for the past two years.
Combined, the two studies show that short-term average happiness has dropped against the backdrop of the long-term fundamental positivity of the English language.
In the new study, Dodds and his colleagues gathered billions of words from four sources: twenty years of the New York Times, the Google Books Project (with millions of titles going back to 1520), Twitter and a half-century of music lyrics.
"The big surprise is that in each of these four sources it's the same," says Dodds. "We looked at the top 5,000 words in each, in terms of frequency, and in all of those words you see a preponderance of happier words."
Or, as they write in their study, "a positivity bias is universal," both for very common words and less common ones and across sources as diverse as tweets, lyrics and British literature.
Why is this? "It's not to say that everything is fine and happy," Dodds says. "It's just that language is social."
In contrast to traditional economic theory, which suggests people are inherently and rationally selfish, a wave of new social science and neuroscience data shows something quite different: that we are a pro-social storytelling species. As language emerged and evolved over the last million years, positive words, it seems, have been more widely and deeply engrained into our communications than negative ones.
"If you want to remain in a social contract with other people, you can't be a," well, Dodds here used a word that is rather too negative to be fit to print which makes the point.
This new work adds depth to the Twitter study that the Vermont scientists published in December that attracted attention from NPR, Time magazine and other media outlets.
"After that mild downer story, we can say, 'But wait there's still happiness in the bank," Dodds notes. "On average, there's always a net happiness to language."
Both studies drew on a service from Amazon called Mechanical Turk. On this website, the UVM researchers paid a group of volunteers to rate, from one to nine, their sense of the "happiness" the emotional temperature of the 10,222 most common words gathered from the four sources. Averaging their scores, the volunteers rated, for example, "laughter" at 8.50, "food" 7.44, "truck" 5.48, "greed" 3.06 and "terrorist" 1.30.
The Vermont team including Dodds, Isabel Kloumann, Chris Danforth, Kameron Harris, and Catherine Bliss then took these scores and applied them to the huge pools of words they collected. Unlike some other studies with smaller samples or that elicited strong emotional words from volunteers the new UVM study, based solely on frequency of use, found that "positive words strongly outnumber negative words overall."
This seems to lend support to the so-called Pollyanna Principle, put forth in 1969, that argues for a universal human tendency to use positive words more often, easily and in more ways than negative words.
Of course, most people would rank some words, like "the," with the same score: a neutral 5. Other words, like "pregnancy," have a wide spread, with some people ranking it high and others low. At the top of this list of words that elicited strongly divergent feelings: "profanities, alcohol and tobacco, religion, both capitalism and socialism, sex, marriage, fast foods, climate, and cultural phenomena such as the Beatles, the iPhone, and zombies," the researchers write.
"A lot of these words the neutral words or ones that have big standard deviations get washed out when we use them as a measure," Dodds notes. Instead, the trends he and his team have observed are driven by the bulk of English words tending to be happy.
If we think of words as atoms and sentences as molecules that combine to form a whole text, "we're looking at atoms," says Dodds. "A lot of news is bad," he says, and short-term happiness may rise and and fall like the cycles of the economy, "but the atoms of the story of language are, overall, on the positive side."
###
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Landing 15 unanswered shots, Muhammed Lawal nearly beat Lorenz Larkin into oblivion to pick up his ninth career win. "King Mo" was far from jubilant. In fact, he was angry following the victory. Lawal lashed out at the referee Kim Winslow for not protecting his opponent.
In the ring, Lawal screamed out a suggestion that Winslow shouldn't be reffing fights. In the postfight press conference, he brought it even stronger.
"The commission, they need to like to do something with her ... let her take a fight or something and give her a bad ref. Let her fight [Cristiane] "Cyborg" Santos and let's do a late stoppage with her," said Lawal."The tables need to be turned. Put me in there as a ref and I'll do a terrible job like her."
Winslow's decision to allow a limp Larkin to absorb 6-8 extra punches was shaky, but her explanation to Lawal was even worse.
"She said 'well, I wanted to give him every opportunity to bounce back. If it takes for him to be asleep, that's what it is,'" said Lawal. "She's never taken a punch before, so it's easy for her to say that."
Strikeforce CEO Scott Coker suggested that it been rough night overall for the Nevada State Athletic Commission appointed referees and judges.
In an earlier fight, Winslow also allowed Gian Villante to finish off Trevor Smith with two illegal shots to the back of the head. Smith spoke to Aaron Tru about the end of the fight and said Winslow "has no business in the sport." Smith said Winslow tried to make up for a poor early stoppage in his fight by allowing Larkin to take an extra beating.
The scoring in two other fights confused cageside observers. Most onlookers thought Tyron Woodley rolled to a 30-27 decision over Jordan Mein, but one judge gave it 29-28 to Mein, who spent most of the fight on his back. The same goes for James Terry's loss to Nah-Shon Burrell got the nod 29-28 on two scorecards and looked completely shocked when he was announced as the winner.
Among other things, LG is broadening the capabilities of Mobile DTV here at CES, with a social media aspect in particular striking us as particularly helpful / wacky. Tweet-TV, as it's called, brings together public comments about specific broadcasts and retransmits them for all viewers to see. We're told that viewers engaged with Tweet-TV would be able to interact with program content and submit their comments on programs. The broadcaster consolidates the real-time comments and transmits those short messages with the video and audio, enabling a transparent conversational overlay; in essence, the Mobile DTV application enables viewers to carry on an open discussion of program content or reply to questions that could be part of an "audience quiz." The program's also being used to display pertinent information on digital signage, not to mention an M-EAS project that'll use Mobile DTV to get emergency alerts to those with compatible equipment. Head on past the break for the rest of the details -- sadly, there's no real information on how soon Mobile DTV will be spreading to your neck of the woods.
Google?s Chrome Web browser was only a twinkle in Eric Schmidt?s eye just a few short years ago; now it is one of the top Web browsers in the world. With that kind of explosive growth, the browser has already surpassed Mozilla?s Firefox Web browser in popularity and now seems ready to aggressively fight to be the ultimate victor of the browser wars.?
Once Upon a Time ?
In the Internet?s Dark Ages, browsers like Netscape ruled the landscape. At the time, no one knew they were dinosaurs because they were all people had to navigate the World Wide Web. Netscape spawned from an earlier program, Mosaic, that could be thought of as the primeval soup that got the whole browser thing started.
The first battle in the browser wars began in 1995 when Internet Explorer came on the scene. It was from Microsoft and it was free and soon would come bundled with windows; so it took off like a rocket. (Back then some people complained about its sluggishness, clunky interface, compatibility problems and buggy features just as they do today.) Soon after Internet Explorer emerged, all popular browsers would soon be free. By 2002, about 90 percent of the Web browser market was commanded by Microsoft.?
Although Apple launched its Safari Web browser in 2003, the second battle in the browser wars didn?t begin until Firefox strutted onto the battle field the following year. Firefox quickly commanded the respect of the Internet community and took a solid second place in popularity surveys. Then came Google.
Google vs. Firefox
Google surprised its critics when it released its Chrome browser in 2008. Skeptics doubted that the search engine?s venture into the software business could bear much fruit; they were wrong.?In just a few years, Chrome surpassed Firefox as the second most popular browser in the industry. The search giant recently drove a stake through that browser?s heart by yanking the lucrative search deal that infused Mozilla with millions of dollars in cash.?
Google vs. Microsoft
After conquering Firefox, Google has clear intentions for going after its nemesis, Microsoft and its now-flailing Internet Explorer browser.?
According to statistics referenced by CNN,Google Chrome already is nipping at the heels of the Microsoft browser. In December, Google Chrome version 15 users edged out Internet Explorer version 8 users by one-tenth of one percent.?
When all versions of Chrome are surveyed collectively, Chrome has 27 percent of global market share, compared to Internet?s 37 percent. This startling number reveals that in just a short time, Microsoft has lost more than half of its share of the browser market.?
As analysts and pundits continue to analyze what could be the third and final round of the browser wars, many will likely conclude that Google Chrome could overtake Internet Explorer.?
Learn more about this author, Bruce Tyson. Click here to send this author comments or questions.
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Plextor's been plenty busy this week, announcing its new M3 Pro SSD and PlexEasy external DVD burner, but the company's not done unveiling new products just yet. Plextor's newest offering is another external DVD burner, the easily remembered PX-612U. Like the PlexEasy, it connects via USB and works with TVs and media streamers without needing a PC. That's possible thanks to some secret sauce called PlexTV (not to be confused with the media client), which acts as a code translator to make the PX-612U's output mimic a HDD. It'll be available the first quarter of this year, for an as-yet-unknown number of dollars.
The Daily App Deals post is a round-up of the best app discounts of the day, as well as some notable mentions for ones that are on sale.
Celsius - Weather & Temperature on your Home Screen (iTunes) Previously $1.99, now 99?. Celsius is a full-featured weather app that gives you a 10-day forecast (in Celsius) that includes cloud cover and rain fall totals. The temperature gets displayed on your home screen icon, lock screen, and notification center. Get it for 99?. (via LogicBuy)
Google has just announced that it's named Diane B. Greene, a cofounder and longtime CEO of VMware, to its Board of Directors. Greene is also on Intuit's Board of Directors, where she serves on the Audit and Risk Committee and Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee as well. Greene was formerly President and CEO of VMware from 1998 through 2008, leading it to a $625 million acquisition by EMC in early 2004, and, in 2007, an IPO on the NYSE.![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tXPcrA7__fG7HuEwoDB3wlMIFO53GwbiP62ruNkPECYeW_k7kV5o_KMv1ZDHw3a3G1v5rW1Q3dfwbuM_Kk1dYnnuJt4RiMn3cFEiRQ7N8=s0-d){kind=small}
Public release date: 12-Jan-2012
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Learn more about this author, Bruce Tyson.