10,000 baby names of Harvard

My 20th Harvard reunion book is in hand, offering a social snapshot of a certain educationally (and mostly financially) elite slice of the US population.

Here is what Harvard alums name their kids.  These are chosen by alphabetical order of surname from one segment of the book.  Most of these children are born between 2003 and the present.  They are grouped by family.

Molly, Danielle

Zachary, Zoe, Alex

Elias, Ella, Irena

Sawyer, Luke

Peyton, Aiden

Richard, Sonya

Grayson, Parker, Saya

Yoomi, Dae-il

Io, Pico, Daphne

Lucine, Mayri

Matthew, Christopher

Richard, Annalise, Ryan

Jackson

Christopher, Sarah, Zachary, Claire

Shaiann, Zaccary

Alexandra, Victoria, Arianna, Madeline

Samara

Grace, Luke, Anna

William, Cecilia, Maya

Bode, Tyler

Daniel, Catherine

Alex, Gretchen

Nathan, Spencer, Benjamin

Ezekiel, Jesse

Matthew, Lauren, Ava, Nathan

Samuel, Katherine, Peter, Sophia

Ameri, Charles

Sebastian

Andrew, Zachary, Nathan

Alexander, Gabriella

Liam

Andrew, Nadia

Caroline, Elizabeth

Paul, Andrew

Shania, Tell, Delia

Saxon, Beatrix

Benjamin

Nathan, Lukas, Jacob

Noah, Haydn, Ellyson

Freddie

Leonidas, Cyrus

Isabelle, Emma

Joseph, Theodore

Asha, Sophie, Tejas

Gabriela, Carlos, Sebastian

Brendan, Katherine

Rayne

James, Seeger, Arden

Helena, Freya

Alexandra, Matthew

George

If you saw these names, would you be able to guess roughly what part of the culture they were drawn from?  Are there ways in which the distribution is plainly different from “standard” US naming practice?

 

The world language is coming

I was writing today about Ro, a language constructed by the Rev. Edward Powell Foster in the early 20th century.  You can read his 1913 manifesto, Ru Ro, online.

It starts:

Friends — I mean the entire world — I have a message for you.
It is on a subject of interest to every one, whether President,
King, Queen, Kaiser, Czar, Mikado, Shah, prince, peasant,
subject,citizen, learned or unlearned, rich or poor, in Europe,
Asia, Africa, America or the islands of the sea. 

Who am I, you may ask, who calls upon the whole world for attention.

And continues:

Friends have offered the suggestion that I let men 
who have plenty of money and plenty of time work 
out the language problem. I am surely not standing 
in their way, nor trying to hinder them. Why do 
they not carry out the work? There are multimil- 
lionaires in the United States who can hire clerks by 
the regiment. Why do they not set men to snatch 
the oratorical crown from the brow of Demosthenes? 
Why not employ painters who can make the master- 
pieces of Raphael look like daubs? Why not engage 
operators to outwizard Edison in handling electricity? 

Why ? Because they cannot. 

Neither can they pick 
up at random stenographers or typewriters who will 
dash off to order a new language, complete in all de- 
tails, and superior to English, or German, or French, 
or Spanish, or Russian, or Italian. 

But the world language is coming. That means 
that somebody must make it.

Stable cohomology for Hurwitz spaces: Upgoer Five version

People ask how many of a kind of thing there are; the thing might be a kind of number, or something like a number. I, together with others, work out how many of those things there are by understanding the way some kinds of spaces look; these spaces are, in a way, the same as the things about which we ask, “how many,” but in another way they are different.  This allows us to use different ideas when we think about them, and answer some questions about numbers which could not be answered before.

Make your own!

(inspired by xkcd, natch.)

Graph search skepticism

Gary Marcus asks the right questions about Facebook’s new Graph Search:

Most search engines, including Google’s, mainly sort pages to see which come closest to some set of keywords (or their synonyms), but they do relatively little to integrate information across pages. If you want a list of all the books written by members of Congress in 2007, you can do a search, but you’ll end up lost. Unless someone has already compiled that information into a single page, you are likely to be directed to a series of individual pages, many with little relevance. It would be left to you to consolidate information across many, many pages; worse, you would have to start from scratch to get the same data for 2008.

But, in theory at least, Facebook Graph Search consolidates information over time and space (albeit in very limited ways). In effect, each user can now use Facebook as if it were a giant, custom-tailored database, not just a librarian that gives a list of documents that are most relevant to your query. Although the ideas behind Facebook Graph Search aren’t entirely original—Google can do similar things in limited domains, such as shopping, and Wolfram Alpha can do math (and draw graphs) based on data in its archives—it really is likely to change the way many people think about search…

Forget search engines. The real revolution will come when we have research engines, intelligent web helpers that can find out new things, not just what’s already been written. Facebook Graph Search isn’t anywhere near that good, but it’s a nice hint at greater things to come.

A nice hint at greater things to come?  Or, like Wolfram Alpha, another case where some of the best programmers in the world, given massive amounts of resources and time, fail to bring us appreciably closer to the dream of the research engine?  In other words, a hint that maybe there are not greater things to come, at least in this direction?

I’m not part of Facebook Graph Search’s “slow rollout,” but from the coverage I’ve read it sounds like it’s good at handling canned combinations of boolean searches.  That’s no joke, but does it really represent progress towards the goal that Marcus has in mind?

Wolfram Alpha, of course, has no idea what books members of Congress wrote in 2007, but that’s not quite fair, because Wolfram Alpha isn’t supposed to know about books.  What does Wolfram Alpha know about?  Well, a query for “Missouri Senate election 2010″ gives you the results of that election, so we know it has state-level results for those elections.  But it can’t put these together to answer “How many Republican senators were elected in 2010?”   “Senators elected in 2010″, which you might think would give you a list, doesn’t – it does, though, tell you that 24 seats went to Republicans and 10 to Democrats, along with the meaningless data of the total votes cast in the US for GOP and Democratic Senate candidates.  “List of senators elected in 2010″ gives the same result.  WA obviously has access, state by state, to the names of the Republican senators who won elections in 2010; but it apparently can’t put that information together into a single list.  Given that, I think gathering their book credits is pretty far off.

Meanwhile, a Google search for “Republican senators elected in 2010″ gives you the relevant Wikipedia page, with the complete list, state-by-state results, and much more.  And searching for “books written by members of Congress” pulls up as the first result a Roll Call article about books written by members of Congress.  Hard to complain about that.

Were any of those books written in 2007?  Who knows?  More to the point — who cares?  That’s the genius of the Google approach.  You know how they tell you, if you’re confused about something in class and you want to know the answer, you should raise your hand and ask, because probably other people have the same question?  That’s the Google principle, except they take it one step further; if you need an answer, not only do other people have the same question, but one such person has already found the answer and put it on the web.  Google can’t tell you which states that entered the Union after 1875 have public universities with animals as their mascots, or which Congressional district ranks 10th by percentage of area covered by water, which is the kind of thing Wolfram Alpha is ace at; but that’s because no one has ever asked those questions, and no one ever will.

 

 

 

Is anybody still editing Basic Books?

As a Certified Math Blogger I sometimes get new popular math books in the mail.  I just got one from Basic Books, opened to a random page, and found a reference to “Euclidian geometry.”  Yes, I know this is an arguably acceptable alternative spelling.  But it’s “Euclidean” everywhere else in the book.

(The typo is on p.47, if the self-Googlers at Basic should happen to read this.)

 

 

Framing the jobs report

The Wall Street Journal‘s headline today:

TEPID JOB GROWTH FUELS WORRY:  Unemployment Rate Hits 7.8% as Economy Stays Sluggish

Doesn’t the word “hits” there kind of make you think the rate rose to 7.8%?  But no, it was 7.8% last month too, and is down from 8.5% at the end of last year.

Meanwhile, the New York Times goes with

JOB CREATION IS STILL STEADY DESPITE WORRY:  Gain of 155,000 Keeps Jobless Rate at 7.8%

which gets the constancy of the unemployment right — but “steady” alone conveys a misleadingly sunny impression.

Cheers to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which rolls it pretty straight down the lane:

JOBLESS RATE STAYS PUT:  U.S. economy adds just 155,000 jobs in its 34th month of subpar growth

It’s steady and tepid!

Althouse on Gatsby

I don’t always see eye-to-eye with my law school colleague and UW superblogger Ann Althouse (and her comments section is a wretched hive of scum and villainy) but I was pleased to see that she’s doing a series of close readings of sentences from The Great Gatsby.  The world needs more close reading.  Today’s entry:

Gatsby’s notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and so become authorities on his past, had increased all summer until he fell just short of being news.

My own favorite sentence in Gatsby is a simple one.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

With all due respect

I think I heard this phrase finally lose the last shred of its meaning this morning on NPR.  Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL):

“The Republican Party has been in many respects, with all due respect, the party of racism in this country, going back to the time of Nixon.”

Save a lot of day

Listening to AB talk you learn a lot about the development of syntax.  The other day CJ found her mitten strap, which had gotten wedged into a crevasse in her carseat.  ”CJ saved the day!” I said.  AB, who likes to repeat things, said

“CJ saved a lot of day!”

So she knows that “a lot of” is a sort of intensifier but is still learning when and where it can be inserted.

 

Work hard, play hard

A phrase that viscerally annoys me is older than I thought.  Harold Field Kellogg, Harvard ’06, writes:  ”We students worked hard and played hard in Paris, but had time to travel through most of the countries of Europe, sketching and painting.”

Google suggests that “Work hard, play hard,” is even earlier, and was said to be a favorite slogan of Theodore Roosevelt.