Tag: linguistics

Climate change refugees.

Carteret Islands|First climate refugees move to new home

Imagine that you live on the Carteret Islands, seven tiny coral atolls in the Pacific that have been described as the home of the world’s first climate change refugees.

[…]

‘‘We have a feeling of anxiety, a feeling of uncertainty because we know that we will be losing our homes. It is our identity. It is our whole culture at stake,’’ she said in Melbourne yesterday.

rossetti@Wakatipu:~/door$ sqlite3 door_wordlist.db "SELECT articles.date, articles.link, articles.title FROM articles LEFT JOIN ratings_1 ON articles.id = ratings_1.id where articles.content LIKE '%refugee%' AND articles.content LIKE '%climate change%' ORDER BY ratings_1.q3 DESC LIMIT 10;"

2009-03-28 16:00:00|http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10564124&ref=rss|Brits flee to Godzone
2007-10-03 09:16:00||Heffernan plays down climate refugee comments
2009-07-27 04:02:00|http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/07/27/2637587.htm|75 million to flee climate change: report
2009-02-13 11:29:00|http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/02/13/2491415.htm|Bougainville works to relocate ‘climate refugees’
2009-05-12 22:00:00|http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/05/13/2568746.htm|’Coral triangle’ a global emergency
2009-06-03 03:34:00|http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/06/03/2588165.htm|Indonesia’s rent-an-island answer to climate change
2007-12-19 03:00:20|http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailymail/worldnews/~3/202175143/worldnews.html|The world’s first climate change refugees to leave island due to rising sea levels
2007-09-30 17:00:06||The heat is on national security, Australia told
2007-04-04 00:00:00||The 450 million refugees we don’t want to talk about
2008-10-18 23:20:00|http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/10/19/2395035.htm|Zoos becoming ‘refugee camps for animals’

Top 20 verbs.

sqlite> select count,phrase from phrases where pos = ‘V’ order by count desc limit 20;
count|phrase
19340|said/VBD
18704|says/VBZ
14604|is/VBZ
8383|was/VBD
6424|say/VBP
5495|writes/VBZ
5306|are/VBP
4992|be/VB
2672|were/VBD
2672|killing/VBG
2578|died/VBD
2476|has/VBZ
2034|accused/VBN
1928|including/VBG
1925|killed/VBN
1793|had/VBD
1734|’s/VBZ
1729|according/VBG
1610|saying/VBG
1563|found/VBD

Collins dictionary asks public to rescue outdated words – Telegraph

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Fusby - short, stout or squat

Skirr - a whirring or grating sound as made by the wings of birds in flight

Vilipend - treat or regard with contempt

Oppugnant - combative, antagonistic or contrary

Embrangle - confuse or entangle

Astergent – cleansing or scouring

Agrestic – rural, rustic, unpolished, uncouth

Apodeictic – unquestionably true by virtue of demonstration

Caducity – perishableness, senility

Calignosity – dimness, darkness

Compossible – possible in coexistence with something else

Exuviate – to shed (a skin or similar outer covering)

Fatidical – prophetic

Griseous -streaked or mixed with grey

Malison – a curse

Manseutude -gentleness or kindness

Muliebrity – the condition of being a woman

Niddering – cowardly

Nitid -bright, glistening

Olid – foul-smelling

Periapt – combative, antagonistic or contrary

Recrement – waste matter, refuse dross

Roborant – tending to fortify or increase strength

Vaticinate – to foretell, prophesy

Eco-anxiety

10 articles from the last month containing the phrase `climate change’ with the highest `fear’ rating.

rossetti@Wakatipu:~/door$ sqlite3 door_wordlist.db "SELECT ratings_1.q3, articles.title FROM articles LEFT JOIN ratings_1 ON articles.id = ratings_1.id where articles.date_utc > date(2008-5-7) AND articles.content LIKE '%climate change%' ORDER BY ratings_1.q3 DESC LIMIT 10;"

0.685783020643|Blogwatch: the La Nina situation
0.488184223473|White House thaws over polar bear
0.47334045077|Your Views:  What MPs drive
0.467275269602|More than a billion trees planted this year: UN
0.459957990744|Water plan speech not criticism, says Treasury boss
0.455275970518|Millions of 'climate change migrants' will overwhelm Europe, says report
0.453333437261|Norway to show US global warming affect on Arctic islands
0.45237335196|'Out of ideas' - PM fails to catch Labor
0.445142297835|NZ forests falling
0.443097177169|River report points to dam trouble

And results for the word `weather’

0.546797083867|Climate change set to erode house values
0.483457646351|Photos:  First snow brings chaos to London, across Europe
0.476200389826|Wild weather chaos in New South Wales
0.469760177924|Flood emergency eases in Hunter Valley
0.433045967141|Premier confident of power availability
0.424738123771|Black ice in south, gale warning for north
0.423129126153|Two dead in European mudslides, floods: reports
0.4219486054|Pasha report blames poor seamanship
0.414978076786|Bad weather: more ships issue distress calls
0.413745027142|Rare Snowstorm

‘Daemon’ by Leinad Zeraus (2006).

pp107

No. They don’t. We believe the components are triggered not by each other, but by reading news stories. For example, one component just issued this press release…” he passed a printed page, “…only after the siege story hit the wire services. The release is digitally signed, Sobol wants us to know it was his. We already tracked down the origin of the press release; it was emailed from a poorly secured computer in a St.Louis accounting firm. The program destroyed itself after it ran, but we were able to recover it from a tape backup. It was a simple HTML reader searching hundreds of web sites for headlines about the estate siege.

pp183

Ross raised his eybows at that. “That’s to prevent him from inadvertently triggering a new Daemon event?”

“Precisely. There’s no doubt it’s reading the news. So you’d be advised to stay out of the headlines.”

[wikipedia]
[website]
[WSJ]

Daniel Suarez, aka Leinad Zeraus, in Wall Street Journal March 2009

Over-centralization and excessive interconnectivity in the pursuit of hyper-efficiency increases the fragility of the system.