Today’s Rhymes With Orange:
Here’s a particularly silly version of autocorrect — or possibly automatic completion software — one that replaces frequent words (party, jacket) by infrequent ones (partake, jackal), indeed infrequent words that don’t fit the context (partake is a verb, while the context calls for a noun; and suit jacket is a common collocation, while suit jackal is absurd).
From Ann Burlingham on Facebook, a link to this xkcd:
Definitely a cool app, one I’d have a lot of use for. Especially since it has roughly the same effect as reading minds.
The mouseover text:
If you read all vaguebooking/vaguetweeting with the assumption that they’re saying everything they can without revealing classified military information, the internet gets way more exciting.
In my Palo Alto neighborhood, tech companies spring up (and, often, disappear) frequently. Not too long ago, Junyo appeared around the corner from my house, and now the sign on the door has been expanded to
Junyo Learning Analytics
Ah, learning analytics is a technical term, one that I hadn’t encountered before. It’s a N + N compound glossable as ‘analytics having to do with learning’. So that drives things back to analytics.
Back on the 8th, Charlie Doyle posted plaintively to ADS-L about a puzzle in alphabetization:
Yesterday my daughter-in-law called me with a question about my third-grader grandson’s homework. The assignment was to alphabetize a list of words, and the list included the four items girl/girl’s/girls/girls’. (My daughter-in-law made clear than both the academic career of my grandson and the family’s standing in the community were at stake, since the parents of the other third-graders were also depending on my answer.)
I failed. I could tell her that there exist various styles of alphabetizing, that certain traditional “rules” obtain, one of which is “Ignore apostrophes” — but the rules I am aware of don’t fully address the case at hand. I could tell her that if the Microsoft Corporation is asked to “sort” the words alphabetically, they will appear in the order in which I have listed them above, which seems reasonable — but not, as far as I can determine, “authoritative.”
Any suggestions? (I don’t recall that third grade used to be this hard!)
Two issues here: one, why is the question being asked? and two, what’s the answer?
A comment on my latest look at phrasal overlap portmanteaus (POPs) brought up still another game you can play with them. That makes three so far, not counting the WESUN puzzle in that posting, which adds anagrams to the mix.
A triple feature for (U.S.) Memorial Day weekend, from the Two Z’s of the cartoon world. First, from Zippy World, Dingburgers reacting to the decline of print and hand-written communication:
Then, from Zits World, Jeremy rockets into the electronic future, past cellphones and on to txtng:
Ashlee Vance, “For Speech-Impaired, Insurance Fights Remedy”, front page of the NYT, September 15:
SAN FRANCISCO — Kara Lynn has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., which has attacked the muscles around her mouth and throat, removing her ability to speak. A couple of years ago, she spent more than $8,000 to buy a computer, approved by Medicare, that turns typed words into speech that her family, friends and doctors can hear.
Under government insurance requirements, the maker of the PC, which ran ordinary Microsoft Windows software, had to block any nonspeech functions, like sending e-mail or browsing the Web.
Dismayed by the PC’s limitations and clunky design, Ms. Lynn turned to a $300 iPhone 3G from Apple running $150 text-to-speech software. Ms. Lynn, who is 48 and lives in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., said it worked better and let her “wear her voice” around her neck while snuggling with her 5-year-old son, Aiden, who has Down syndrome.
Instead, public and private insurers insist that, if Ms. Lynn and others like her want insurance to pay, they must spend 10 to 20 times as much for dedicated, proprietary devices that can do far less.
The logic: Insurance is supposed to cover medical devices, and smartphones or PCs can be used for nonmedical purposes, like playing video games or Web browsing.
“We would not cover the iPhones and netbooks with speech-generating software capabilities because they are useful in the absence of an illness or injury,” said Peter Ashkenaz, a spokesman for the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Private insurers tend to follow the government’s lead in matters of coverage. Two years ago, iPhones and netbooks barely existed, so it may not be surprising that the industry has yet to consider their role as medical devices.
The ways of health insurance in the U.S. are often confounding. Some companies do not cover the expense of a wig following chemotherapy, on the grounds that a wig is merely “cosmetic”, but some do (at least in part), given a doctor’s prescription for an “extra-cranial prosthesis”. (Since 1998, federal law obliges insurance companies to cover prostheses or breast reconstruction following a mastectomy, but before that some companies did not cover such devices or procedures, again on the grounds that they were not medical treatments, but merely cosmetic.)
Some years ago, when my partner’s pituitary gland basically shut down and all the hormones controlled by the pituitary had to be replaced, I ended up spending lots of time over a year or so in fighting with his insurance company over the testosterone injections prescribed for him; every claim for the shots was initially denied, on the basis that some people got prescriptions for testosterone to increase muscle mass and strength, sexual performance, and energy, which are not medical uses. The company systematically disregarded the diagnosis of hypopituitarism in his records, and every month I had to wear them down.
