Querycount

Posted on 2013-01-25 by arjaybe

Querycount

Querycount

The Wordcount website, where “Elgin” was ranked as the 28,411th most-used word in British English, has a sister site called Querycount. This site also ranks the words, but instead of counting how many times they are used in the British National Corpus, Querycount monitors how the words are queried by the users of Wordcount itself.

From the website: “Each time someone searches a word on Wordcount, Querycount takes note. Every few hours, Querycount refreshes itself, rearranging its word rankings based on the number of times each word has been queried by Wordcount.” So, while Wordcount is an archive of English usage at one point late in the twentieth century, a static database, Querycount is a current picture, a dynamic, changing record of human curiosity about language.

Let’s try it out. Remember, “Elgin” ranked 28,411 in wordcount. In Querycount it comes in at 33,820, preceded by “plaice” and followed by “foiled.” A plaice is a large flatfish. “Frances” has moved up from its Wordcount spot at 9,860 to a Querycount position of 4,691. It’s preceded by “consumption” and followed by “irony.” Remember, these results are changing all the time as people query the Wordcount archive, so if you go to the website and try it yourself, don’t be surprised if you get different results. Now for this blog. “green,” previously 671 in Wordcount, is 204 now in Querycount. It’s now preceded by “please” and followed by “Jennifer.” “Comet” was 16,896 and jumps up to 6,911. It’s preceded by “fasten” and followed by “antichrist.”

The last word in Wordcount is “conquistador,” rank 86,800. In Querycount it is the 64th entry. A lot of people must be looking to see what the last word is. The second- to fifth-last words were “recrossed,” “workless,” “Carniola” and “tangency,” which now rank 3,791, 1,091, 4,832 and 3,111 respectively.

The last five words in the Querycount archive are, beginning at the end, “fart,” “crap,” “help,” “house” and “cool.” Naturally, if a word gets queried it is very likely to change its position, especially if it is near the end to begin with. For instance, querying “fart” moved it from last to 69th.

The original top ten words, such as “the” and “of,” etc, have largely been replaced by other words that people seem to find more interesting. With the exception of “the” and “a,” the top positions are held by much more colorful words, which won’t be quoted here.

rjb

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Wordcount

Posted on 2013-01-20 by arjaybe

Wordcount Home Page

Wordcount Home Page

I found a site on the Internet called “Wordcount.” It describes itself as an interactive presentation of the 86,800 most frequently used English words. It ranks the words based on usage – the more a word is used, the higher its ranking. The word usage data come from something called the British National Corpus. The BNC is a one hundred million word cross-section of current British English, both written and spoken. It contains a broad range of samples of spoken and written language from the later part of the twentieth century.

The written part of the BNC comprises 90% of the corpus. Among many other forms of text it includes extracts from newspapers, journals and periodicals for all ages, text books, fiction, and essays written at schools and universities. The oral 10% comes from radio shows and phone-ins, formal meetings and informal conversations recorded by volunteers, etc.

Wordcount presently includes the 86,800 words that are used at least twice in the BNC. In the future, the site claims that wordcount will be modified to sample any chosen text or website, and eventually the whole Internet. I doubt that because the site seems to be stuck in time.

But let’s try it out anyway. First, let’s check whether Green Comet’s leading man is on the list. He is. “Elgin” comes in at word number 28,411. It is preceded by “lichens” and followed by “joystick.” I don’t think we can read anything into that. How about Elgin’s beloved? “Frances” appears at position 9,860. It is preceded by “excuses” and followed by “dusk.” As for this blog, “green” is number 671 and “comet” follows at a distant 16,896. “Green” is preceded by “planning” and followed by “students,” while “comet” is between “stafford” and “pol.”

The last word in the Wordcount archive, coming in as the 86,800th most used word, is “conquistador.” It’s preceded by “recrossed,” “workless,” “Carniola” and “tangency.” Carniola is a mountainous region in southwestern Slovenia. For the most used words we’ll do ten of them because they’re smaller, starting with number ten, “was.” Number nine is “is.” Eight is “it.” Seven, “that.” Six, “in.” Five, “a.” Four, “to.” Three, “and.” Two, “of.” And the number one word in the archive, the most used word in British English, is “the.”

Strangely, the word “wordcount” is not in the Wordcount archive.

rjb

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Parasite Puppeteers

Posted on 2013-01-15 by arjaybe

Parasite Puppeteers

Parasite Puppeteers


The effect of a parasite can sometimes go beyond the immediate health of the host. Sure, a tapeworm can steal nutrition, making the host weaker. Wasps sometimes lay their eggs inside other living insects, where they grow while eating their host. But some parasites go even further. Some of them can actually control the behavior of their host. It has to do with the life cycle of the parasite. If it’s presently in an ant and the next stage of its life cycle is in a grazing animal, for instance, the thing to do is make the ant climb to the top of a blade of grass where it can be conveniently eaten.

Half of all humans have in their brains a parasite of the type which is known to control the behavior of other animals. If they can control other animals, can they control humans?

We shouldn’t tar all parasites with the same brush. Some of them are fairly benign, even useful, as in the case of the pig whipworm. While the human whipworm infects half a billion people and can cause some problems, the pig whipworm doesn’t survive long in people. Just long enough to do its job, which is to treat inflammatory bowel disease, where the immune system gets overactive. Treatment involves drinking a concoction of pig whipworm eggs. It works by giving the immune system something to do, something it’s accustomed to doing like dealing with parasites, so it doesn’t attack the body’s own tissues. The results so far have been very encouraging. While drinking worm eggs might seem repulsive, it’s a lot better than an inflamed bowel.

Now back to the mind control parasites. There are hairworms that make grasshoppers jump into water so the worms can continue their life cycle there. There are flukes that make fish attract the attention of predatory wading birds. The flukes need to get into the birds. And there are the grass-climbing ants mentioned before.

The parasite which infects half of us humans is called Toxoplasma gondii. A version of T. gondii lives in rats and cats. Rats which have their brains infected are less likely to be scared off by the smell of cats and are more likely to be eaten. The parasite carries on in the gut of the cat.

Can this parasite affect the behavior of humans? There seems to be a link between it and schizophrenia. And drugs used to treat the disease halt the growth of the parasite in lab dishes. In the rats above, when they got the drug they became properly alarmed by the smell of cats again. It seems as if stopping the parasite also stops the strange behavior.

It’s time to break the strings of our parasitical puppeteers.

rjb

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