Vintage Vocabulary

If you have a love of words, be sure to read through this post on the words that first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary back in 1951. That was the year of the nerd, fast food, Vegan, and 401 others. "Nerd" and the word's creation is attributed to none other than Dr. Seuss: "The origin is uncertain, but signs point to the 1950 children’s book If I Ran the Zoo by Dr. Seuss, which uses nerd as the name of a creature, as its inspiration."

The lines have "Nerd" capitalized as a proper name: "And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Katroo / And bring back an It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo, / A Nerkle, a Nerd and a Seersucker too!"

The word "Vegan" is listed as a proper name, as well; the meaning then was "an alien from a planet orbiting the star Vega," not someone who conforms to a particular type of diet.

Online match ups

I wrote a post about the latest research on online dating in Dating Data Analyzed

Also check out the study of lies in online profiles at http://www.psypost.org/2012/02/lovelorn-liars-leave-linguistic-leads-9835?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter


For a different kind of pairing online, read about the teaming up of General Mills and Meredith to market cereal  in connection to fitness goals.

Google data for doctors and marketers

I wrote about the uses of Google flu for medical professionals in "A Dose of Google Data for Doctors & Hospitals" , Here is how marketers use the data to their advantage in promoting a thermometer to a market targeted by areas identified in the data.

The usefulness of art

"All art is quite useless" is one of Oscar Wilde's famous sayings. In looking it up, I found a letter in which he elaborates on the point. He offers an analogy: "A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers." You can Letters of Note link to see the letter as written and more of the transcript.

There has long been a debate over whether literature should simply entertain or entertain and instruct. Most of us read fiction for fun, not for information. However, The Business Case for Reading Novels contends that there is utility is what has been deemed "useless." It expands a bit on the research presented in the following paragraph:

Over the past decade, academic researchers such as Oatley and Raymond Mar from York University have gathered data indicating that fiction-reading activates neuronal pathways in the brain that measurably help the reader better understand real human emotion — improving his or her overall social skillfulness. For instance, in fMRI studies of people reading fiction, neuroscientists detect activity in the pre-frontal cortex — a part of the brain involved with setting goals — when the participants read about characters setting a new goal. It turns out that when Henry James, more than a century ago, defended the value of fiction by saying that "a novel is a direct impression of life," he was more right than he knew.

If you work in New York

If you freelance or do other self-employed work in New York, you should be aware of the updates to MCTM tax for this year. The threshold went up to $50K a year net, a substantial difference from the previous years when it was only $10K.

Section 801(a) of the Tax Law that imposes the MCTMT on self-employed individuals has been amended. For tax years beginning on or after January 1, 2012, an individual will be subject to the MCTMT only if his or her net earnings from self-employment attributable to the MCTD exceed $50,000 for the tax year. Prior to the amendment, an individual was subject to the MCTMT only if his or her net earnings from self-employment attributable to the MCTD exceeded $10,000 for the tax year. The rate of the MCTMT for self-employed individuals (.34%) has not changed. 

 from http://www.tax.ny.gov/pdf/memos/mta_mobility/m12_1mctmt.pdf