Major video fail

My blog on the video that spurred a storm of negative reviews, the trending hashtag #sciencegirlthing and a viral status that the EU Commission would have been happier without is posted here.  There is additional information, like the fact that the video cost 102,000 Euros to produce, and more links in the comments.

Punctuation, pronouns, and pet peeves

 From This Embarrasses You and I*Grammar Gaffes Invade the Office in an Age of Informal Email, Texting and Twitter"
"People get passionate about grammar," says Mr. Appleman, author of a book on business writing. They sure do, which is why this Wall Street Journal piece has garnered around 600 comments in just a few days. People chime in with their views on the LinkedIn groups I shared it on, as well
. 

Some of us mess up by accident when typos creep in or due to ignorance of the rules of grammar. One of the things that makes me cringe is seeing constructions like "whomsoever wrote this." In a way it's worse than using "who" where "whom" is warranted because the latter is accepted by some as a less formal, conversational style. The person who inserts the m where it is not needed, on the other hand, is trying to appear well-educated enough to know of the word "whom" while showing ignorance of the fact that it is not to be used as a subject pronoun. 

But the most common irritant is the misuse of apostrophes -- sprinkled over the letter s when just he plural form is needed and not the possessive -- or left in "it's" when the writer clearly means the possessive form rather than the contraction of "it is." 

If the school can't get to the museum

you can now bring the museum to the school with the Google Art Project.  Even if the school does have access to some art museums, the project gives them an expanded view with examples of art from around the globe, but no works by Picasso  -- see more on that in the comments.

Analytics and the job search

My latest post on analytics , How Analytics Can Help You Find That Dream Job, looks at a job site that uses algorithms to come up with compatible matches between employer and employee.

Technology and education blogs

I wrote about Coursera's innovation in the online education and the possibilities of automated readers for writing assessment

Farmers milk analytics for optimum breeding

They've been doing it since the middle of the last century, but now they have the high tech advantage for greater precision. Read about it here: Got Milk? Then You've Got the Product of Analytics

A couple of literary devices

A question of literary devices was raised by kid prepping for the English Regents. Looking for a comprehensive list, I found http://literary-devices.com. I like the contrasting terms: polysyndeton and asyndeton. The former is the term for adding in conjunction even where they usually would be absent, like "Tom and Dick and Harry," if you want to stress each one separately rather than presenting them as a collective unit. Asyndeton refers to dropping the conjunction for greater impact as in the expression, "Reduce, reuse, recycle." That could also account for the memorable quality of "We came, we saw, we conquered."  

Beautiful marketing

"The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw." Havelock Ellis's statement fits Dove's "real beauty" marketing campaign, which you can read about in my latest CMOsite post.

Do you picture a robot as your audience?

Writing for Robot Readers: assessing automated assessment. My latest post for Internet Evolution at http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=1402&doc_id=243299&piddl_msgid=633439#msg_633439

A possible solution for the perennial parking problem.

 See my latest post for All Analytics on the combination of analytics and pricing put into effect to ease congestion caused by people in search of an available parking spot.

Just me and my keyboard

Do you consider writing a solitary activity, one that exemplifies the writer as an artist figure who stands alone, outside society? Or do you see it as the product of more than your mind alone? These are some of the questions that arise in my post: http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2012/04/working-alone.html

Hopefully

I am old enough to remember being taught not to confuse "hopeful" with "I hope" or "we hope." I was also taught to draw a distinction between "healthy," which is what we hope to be, and "healthful," which was the correct term to describe the foods and activities that would contribute to our health. Ever hear anyone describe a low-fat diet as "healthful" today? No, people call it "healthy," and talk about eating "healthy" all the time. People also rarely use the term "hopefully" to mean "with hope," as they are usually using as a short form of "may it be so.

" A Washington Post article on the AP's official stamp of approval on the adjective "hopefully" functioning as "“It is hoped, we hope,” as it had to succumb to popular usage gave rise to an article in The Atlantic tthat argues that no regrets are necessary. Key quotes from the WP: "After all, 'English was created by barbarians, by a rabble of angry peasants,' McIntyre says. 'Because if it wasn’t, we would still be speaking Anglo-Saxon.' Or worse, French."
 Key quote from the Atlantic: "What this means is that in language and in clothing, there is no single standard any more, except at publications that rely steadfastly on a style guide and have the resources and skilled copy editors to enforce it. Often the issue is not the garment or the word, but how the wearer or user carries it off.

"This is the argument of those who take the attitude of anything goes, so long as meaning is effectively conveyed, against language purists who believe in preserving forms and Latin structures -- the type of people who are offended by split infinitives. I fall out somewhere in between the two extremes of these positions.

Measuring data

What women want according to analytics. My latest post at AllAnalytics.
 Though jeans that fit properly do not make the top 10 list, apparently they are enough of a concern to warrant high tech scanning for measurements of the body to correlate with that of the garment.  That's what my latest CMOsite post is about.

The ABCs of school retention analytics

The high school dropout rate in the US is about 25% nationwide. What can be done to improve that figure? Some people believe the answer lies in analytics. It all depends on ABC, my latest post up at AllAnalytics.

Marketing weather data and retro appeal

When it rains, it pours. Well, weather is one of the topics that I addressed. But as the expression goes, what I mean is that I had two blogs published on the same day, even though they were written many weeks apart. One is on long term weather predictions applied to business decision.

The other is on the use of retro design for modern places and products and set up as a slideshow for the numerous pictures to illustrate them. Nostalgia sells, as we see with the attention brands garner on their Facebook timelines that showcase their origins with the stores, ads, and logos of the last century.