A new take on Purchasing Power Parity (PPP – no pun intended)

At times, it’s good to spend on something you used to love.

Here’s a freecycle ad that I found to be quite poetic. All newlines were inserted later and were not part of the original post. The link at the end leads to the original posts but will only work if you are a member. Offered. pink drinking glass. Broken. A bit weird maybe It’s a drinking glass pink coloured about a half pint. It has broken and a slice has cracked off of it. ...

A paper on “Positivity of the English Language” caught the attention of the main stream media recently. It claimed that English words exhibit a “clear positive bias”. The authors (which happen to be Mathematicians) based this conclusion on their analysis of data from tweets, books, news articles and song lyrics in English. The results showed that people used more positive words than negative ones. In spite of the fact that frequency based analysis is not exactly new in Computational Linguistics and the spread of this article in the media might be a good example for understanding why some news items receive more attention than others, the experiment is interesting nevertheless and finding out if other languages behave the same might be more intriguing. ...

Today, I got a copy of the policy guidelines against sexual harassment in institutions of higher learning in my inbox which has been published by the Govt. of Pakistan Higher Education Commission. It contains a “listing of sexual harassment” along with “actual reported cases”. The last item in the list is Forcing students to publish their research work in Supervisors name. While the most obvious implication of this statement is that plagiarism (by the supervisor) is sexual harassment, I think there is a hidden message there as well. ...