Once upon a time, the girl child, in performing an act of kindness and mercy for a baby crab, drenched herself, and alas, her phone, in a briny estuary. The phone made a few pathetic meeping noises from her pocket, and then spoke no more.
Various attempts were made to revive the poor beast, but it was done for, so a new phone was in order. While the nice lad at the Sprint store did heroics to pull the contact list off it, he pointed out that we might want to add in the equipment protection plan so that if something like this were to happen again, a replacement phone could be had without splashing out the primo price. Supposedly as long as it wasn't abuse, it would cover "everything": phones being dropped, bits falling off, whatever. Falling in an estuary? Sure thing. Given the girl child's track record on wearing out phones after about a year, it seemed like seven bucks a month well spent.
Time passed, and several phones, and another phone started losing its mind and hanging. Covered? No, that's software, not covered, but hey, it's OK because you're due for an upgrade.
Shortly thereafter the upgraded phone fell in some soup, and died. Covered? No, water damage not covered. No? When we *got* this plan precisely because of water damage. Nope. So nice young man was either a lying snake or an ignorant worm. Great. Fine, clone the info back to the phone that keeps losing its mind, and we'll wait out the year until upgrade time. Live and learn.
Then the trackball fell off. Covered? No. That's OK, she learned the keyboard shortcuts, waiting out the six months until upgrade.
Then the power charger socket broke so it couldn't be charged.
She talked to the nice Sprint people on line. Two of them, in fact, both of whom assured her that since I was a Sprint Premier customer and she was on my plan, she could use one of my upgrades, no problem, and they'd even put a note in the account so that she got the mail-in rebate as well. Just go to the store and they'll handle it. How helpful. She printed these conversations out.
What do you think happened when we went to the store?
Is the charge socket breaking covered? No. Of course not. Apparently, rather than "everything" being covered by the monthly tax, nothing is covered. Talk about your bait and switch, AKA lie, lie, lie.
Sprint is, of course, the master of bait and switch. They advertise their wonderful 4G network, and charge me a monthly premium because my phone is a "4G phone", but where oh where is this alleged 4G network? Anywhere I have ever been? Nope. Glad to see Visalia and Fresno are covered, though. And Sprint advertises that the phone can act as a networking hotspot, but do they tell you that it can only do that if you pony up an additional thirty a month to enable it? Naaah. That would be actual honest dealing, something Sprint is constitutionally incapable of.
OK, so can we do the upgrade thing the online guys spoke of? Let's just check....oh, sorry, no, because my line isn't due for an upgrade for another year it can't happen. So what about those on-line helpers? Apparently they were also either lying snakes or ignorant worms. But what we could do is add another line and then you'd get the discount on the phone.
OK, so if I pay to activate a line, and the extra ten bucks a month for at least the next two years (or pay $150 to cancel that line) as well as paying for a line that I don't even have a phone connected to, then, you'll actually deign to replace a broken phone that we have poured many many months of seven bucks a month of replacement plan money into, is that it? I'll get $150 rebate on a phone for the low-low cost of $240, or the even lower low cost of $160?
But you can't, heaven forfend, apply an upgrade to an account of over a decade's standing 35 days (yes, 35 lousy days) early? Or do what two of your online account reps independently said we could do? No, apparently not.
We declined that particular kind offer. We put the girl child's number onto my old phone. We cancelled the rip-off equipment non-protection plan. In 35 days, she'll get her telephonic life back.
Since we didn't actually buy a phone, we are going to even get the customer service "how do you rate us" call. So here it is, Sprint: on a scale of 1 to 10, your customer service today rates a 0. Thanks a lot. For nothing.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Italy vs Serbia
It looks like yet another international football match has been marred by fan violence: the qualifier between Italy and Serbia was abandoned after seven minutes and a kick-off delayed for half-an-hour. The scenes from Genoa are not pretty, with Serbian yahoos making their nationalistic salutes, doing their best to tear up stadium barriers, and tossing incendiaries onto the pitch. It is particularly loathsome in that the pricing for the game was set to encourage families to bring their children, and many children were indeed in attendance. The disregard for human life is appalling.
The likely outcome for this is Serbia being banned from the competition at least and, so reports say, Italy awarded a 3-0 victory. The EU mavens may well be rethinking the implications of insisting on freedom-of-travel for Serbians as a condition of joining, and maybe rethinking getting Serbia to join at all. This is likely a large part of the point of the "fans" actions. They will go back home with their heads high, nursing their unfounded sense of Serbia being unfairly put upon by the rest of the world. Good riddance.
I'm all in favour of punishing the Serbian FA for the actions of their so-called fans. Still, where it the Italian responsibility here? Why should Italy be rewarded for poor crowd control? What struck me is that the scenes in the video clips I saw did not seem substantially different from what we see from the ultras in any important match involving Italian teams. The Italian FA and police have apparently long accepted fans bringing flares and fireworks into stadiums, and waving and tossing them, and have decided to solve the problem by not solving it at all: by wrapping fans in perspex cages and hoping they don't end up with a Heysel or Ibrox or Villa Park on their hands. That looks to me like an appalling disregard for human life also. Do we really have to wait for the next disaster before they act? Really? Shame on them, too.
Monday, January 4, 2010
Glottochronology
A couple of papers on glottochronology recently came across my desk: Measures of lexical distance between languages and Lexical evolution rates by automated stability measure by Filippo Petroni and Maurizio Serva.
Rather than rely on human judgements of which terms are cognates, they compute normalized Levenshtein distances between pairs of words from the Swadesh list and then use another automated procedure to compute the correlations to compute phylogenetic trees. The resulting trees are comparable to those produced in the traditional way, and the papers include some analysis of the stability of the technique and such. It is interesting in that since it is a purely mechanical operation, one can grind through a lot of languages given nothing more than some basic vocabulary lists. The word lists and resulting trees are on-line for the interested. (Note: the time axis in the trees runs, annoyingly, from 0 to 5000 plus some unspecified amount of trailing years, so mapping the branch points to approximate dates requires some amount of mental arithmetic.)
There is something deeply appealing to me about applying mathematical approaches to linguistics in this way, but some note of caution is warranted as well. The drawing of phylogenetic trees (as the name should indicate) is borrowed from the use of matching techniques on DNA sequences to construct (true) phylogenetic tress. The application in genetics is more straight-forward, however, in that snakes don't invade dog-land and replace half their genes. In addition, while DNA sequences capture the essence of inherited traits in living creatures, there is a lot more to a language than 200 core words. Plus, while all living things appear to apply exactly the same rules in interpreting DNA sequences, languages have a lot of different takes on how they use phonemes to generate meaning: it isn't clear that Levenshtein difference is a great measure to use in comparing languages that use vowel variations for inflections (think: strong verbs) against those that use endings (think: weak verbs) when applied to some default form. In sum: there are a lot more features to language than words, we can't be sure that the comparison rules are consistent, and language contact and borrowing plays a role that it doesn't (outside the microbial world) in genetics.
This is not to say this is a useless enterprise, not by any means, and certainly the practitioners in this field are well aware of these issues. Indeed, the mathematical approach provides some hope of including additional language features and untangling some of the mess. The details of the comparisons can give clues to some of the impacts of contact.
Speaking of contact, Santa left me the John McWhorter's "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue", in which McWhorter applies his work on creoles to the history of English and rails against the focus on words, pointing out that the grammar of English (and Proto-Germanic) shows some very interesting things about the history of English as a language formed in language contact, and not just by borrowing a lot of words. In particular, he points to a couple of odd-ball features of English grammar (the meaningless do, and the use of progressive for present tense) as coming from Welsh. He argues that the supposed Celtic genocide never happened (and cites some recent genetic data to back him up). Later on, the Danelaw led, not just to the adoption of some words, but by the streamlining of the grammar. Fascinating stuff. The argument looks weakest in trying to explain why written English changes at such odds with the supposed timing of the changes on the ground.
Where things turn truly speculative is when he points to some slender evidence for Semitic (Phoenician?) influence on Proto-Germanic: the loss of inflectional endings, the consonant shift, and the introduction of a lot of words that lack cognates in the rest of Indo-European. Tantalizing, for sure, but surely speculative.
Bringing us back to the top, having a fuller set of features to compare languages should be able to show us these things. Does Proto-Germanic show affinity for Phoenician? How much?
Rather than rely on human judgements of which terms are cognates, they compute normalized Levenshtein distances between pairs of words from the Swadesh list and then use another automated procedure to compute the correlations to compute phylogenetic trees. The resulting trees are comparable to those produced in the traditional way, and the papers include some analysis of the stability of the technique and such. It is interesting in that since it is a purely mechanical operation, one can grind through a lot of languages given nothing more than some basic vocabulary lists. The word lists and resulting trees are on-line for the interested. (Note: the time axis in the trees runs, annoyingly, from 0 to 5000 plus some unspecified amount of trailing years, so mapping the branch points to approximate dates requires some amount of mental arithmetic.)
There is something deeply appealing to me about applying mathematical approaches to linguistics in this way, but some note of caution is warranted as well. The drawing of phylogenetic trees (as the name should indicate) is borrowed from the use of matching techniques on DNA sequences to construct (true) phylogenetic tress. The application in genetics is more straight-forward, however, in that snakes don't invade dog-land and replace half their genes. In addition, while DNA sequences capture the essence of inherited traits in living creatures, there is a lot more to a language than 200 core words. Plus, while all living things appear to apply exactly the same rules in interpreting DNA sequences, languages have a lot of different takes on how they use phonemes to generate meaning: it isn't clear that Levenshtein difference is a great measure to use in comparing languages that use vowel variations for inflections (think: strong verbs) against those that use endings (think: weak verbs) when applied to some default form. In sum: there are a lot more features to language than words, we can't be sure that the comparison rules are consistent, and language contact and borrowing plays a role that it doesn't (outside the microbial world) in genetics.
This is not to say this is a useless enterprise, not by any means, and certainly the practitioners in this field are well aware of these issues. Indeed, the mathematical approach provides some hope of including additional language features and untangling some of the mess. The details of the comparisons can give clues to some of the impacts of contact.
Speaking of contact, Santa left me the John McWhorter's "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue", in which McWhorter applies his work on creoles to the history of English and rails against the focus on words, pointing out that the grammar of English (and Proto-Germanic) shows some very interesting things about the history of English as a language formed in language contact, and not just by borrowing a lot of words. In particular, he points to a couple of odd-ball features of English grammar (the meaningless do, and the use of progressive for present tense) as coming from Welsh. He argues that the supposed Celtic genocide never happened (and cites some recent genetic data to back him up). Later on, the Danelaw led, not just to the adoption of some words, but by the streamlining of the grammar. Fascinating stuff. The argument looks weakest in trying to explain why written English changes at such odds with the supposed timing of the changes on the ground.
Where things turn truly speculative is when he points to some slender evidence for Semitic (Phoenician?) influence on Proto-Germanic: the loss of inflectional endings, the consonant shift, and the introduction of a lot of words that lack cognates in the rest of Indo-European. Tantalizing, for sure, but surely speculative.
Bringing us back to the top, having a fuller set of features to compare languages should be able to show us these things. Does Proto-Germanic show affinity for Phoenician? How much?
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