Simpler may be better

Original post:  Nov 4, 2015

In a fastidious quest for optimal mechanisms to substantiate your intellectual influence, some suppose it proper to larder their prose with flowery and elaborate phrases plucked out of a thesaurus. According to this article in Fast Company, they may be wasting their time.

It might sound counterintuitive, but using four-syllable textbook words to demonstrate your smarts will actually make you appear less capable.

"So often, our intuitions about what will impress others are wrong," says Daniel M. Oppenheimer, professor of psychology at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. He led a series of studies on how the use of language can make one appear more or less intelligent.

In one study, the researchers took essays from online college admissions essays and replaced words using an algorithm to replace shorter words with longer words and asked participants to evaluate the quality of the author. Surprisingly, participants rated the authors as less capable and less confident. Concerned that the replacement strategy used made the essays worse, the researchers took sociology dissertation abstracts, which tend to be dense in long words, and replaced the longer words with shorter words. Participants judged the authors as more capable and intelligent if they were reading shorter words.

He goes on to explain:

The reason for this phenomenon, Oppenheimer explains, is that the ease of processing information is strongly associated with positive qualities such as confidence, intelligence, and capability. "To the extent that you use long words, you make it more disfluent to read your prose, people will judge you disfavorably," says Oppenheimer.

The secret is to be clear and concise in your communications. When your co-workers require less strain to understand you, they are more likely to value what you are saying!

Here is the link to the full article:  The Secret To Sounding Smart? Using Simple Language

Have you talked to your computer lately?

Original post:  Sep 3, 2015

Many new smartphones come equipped with a digital assistant. My wife is constantly talking to Siri. I don't have an Android, but I believe there is something similar with Cortana. I am sure there are others on the horizon. Each new improvement makes it easier for us to locate information that once required laborious searches through labyrinths of card catalogs and dusty shelves.

This article in Wired talks about how computers might actually be changing the way we describe the world about us: 

How Computers Are Changing the Way We Explain the World | WIRED

The example they give is in language translation. The first attempts at programming computers to perform this complex task involved a simple substitution. They would replace nouns with nouns and verbs with verbs (and so on). In the 1980's, a team working on an early version of IBM's Watson (the famous computer that defeated humans at Jeopardy!) came up with a new approach. They decided to use a statistical model:

They did this in a clever way. They got hold of a copy of the transcripts of the Canadian parliament from a collection known as Hansard. By Canadian law, Hansard is available in both English and French. They then used a computer to compare corresponding English and French text and spot relationships.

For instance, the computer might notice that sentences containing the French word bonjour tend to contain the English wordhello in about the same position in the sentence. The computer didn’t know anything about either word—it started without a conventional grammar or dictionary. But it didn’t need those. Instead, it could use pure brute force to spot the correspondence between bonjour and hello.

By making such comparisons, the program built up a statistical model of how French and English sentences correspond. That model matched words and phrases in French to words and phrases in English. More precisely, the computer used Hansard to estimate the probability that an English word or phrase will be in a sentence, given that a particular French word or phrase is in the corresponding translation. It also used Hansard to estimate probabilities for the way words and phrases are shuffled around within translated sentences.

Using this statistical model, the computer could take a new French sentence—one it had never seen before—and figure out the most likely corresponding English sentence. And that would be the program’s translation.

Their model proved successful. Google Translate uses this very method to perform its magic!

Language is not the only area where computers are pioneering:

Related stories are playing out across science, not just in linguistics. In mathematics, for example, it is becoming more and more common for problems to be settled using computer-generated proofs. An early example occurred in 1976, when Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken proved the four-color theorem, the conjecture that every map can be colored using four colors in such a way that no two adjacent regions have the same color. Their computer proof was greeted with controversy. It was too long for a human being to check, much less understand in detail. Some mathematicians objected that the theorem couldn’t be considered truly proved until there was a proof that human beings could understand.

As computers grow more and more powerful, it will be fascinating to watch how they literally begin to change the way we experience the world around us. I am sure that healthcare will be no different than the world at large!

Something you probably say everyday

Original post:  Apr 7, 2015

Language can sometimes spread like wildfire. There are certain phrases and catchwords that seem to catch the imagination in just the right way and explode onto the scene. Many of them will fade over time. Some will become mainstays in human communication.

I heard a radio broadcast that talked about one such word. It may have started in the Boston area. It's actually one of the few words that can actually be understood nearly universally. It seems people on every continent can use and understand exactly what it means (even if they don't speak your language)!

According to this story from WGBH, in the 1830s, Boston newspapers decided that they really liked abbreviations. With our texting culture (LOL), we may be familiar with the desire to communicate swiftly and efficiently. All of this abbreviation then came to its most famous achievement:

Amidst this abbreviation fad, on March 23, 1839, came a humorous article on the second page of the Boston Morning Post where writer and editor Charles Gordon Greene abbreviated the phrase “all correct” with two letters - OK.

"And of course readers were expected to join in the humorous notion or acknowledgement that OK is an abbreviation for all correct that is not correct, since 'all' does not begin with 'O' and 'correct' does not begin with 'K.'"

It was a little bit of wordplay that would take the world by storm.

"It happened because of newspapers," Metcalf said. "And one of the things that newspapers would do, they picked up things from other newspapers and that spread throughout the country quickly enough thanks to the newspaper exchange."

The term also got a surge in exposure during the 1940 Presidential election, when Martin Van Buren — also known as Old Kinderhook — running for the presidency, incorporated it in his campaign slogan: "Old Kinderhook is OK."

It seems that presidential election helped the story go national. While there were other potential origin stories, none of them seem as compelling.

As the 20th century dawned, the word continued to surge — and morph. People began spelling it “okay” to make it more word-like, created superlatives like A-OK, and variations like Okey Dokey, mmmkay, or the text-friendly, “K.” Today OK is regularly cited by linguists and writers as the world’s single most recognized word.

"If you’re talking with somebody and you don’t know that persons language, if that person knows 'OK,' which is rather likely, you can usually get a whole message across with nothing but 'OK' and various inflections of your voice and gestures," Metcalf said.

Metcalf is so enamored with this little expression that could, that he’s dubbed it America’s greatest word – in part, because he believes those two simple letters are an elegant expression of who we are.

"If something is OK for Americans then it’s working," he said. "You’ve succeeded with it. You can of course refine it, but it's good enough. OK allows you to say something positive for something that is less than perfect. I’m not a philosopher, but I argue that’s the American philosophy in two letters."

OK. Seems to work for me!

Here is the link to the full story:  How Boston Created 'The American Philosophy In 2 Letters' — OK? | WGBH News

What I meant to say....

Original post:  Nov 11, 2013

Language can be extraordinarily powerful. Words and labels hold hidden meanings that can trigger powerful, emotional reactions. In some cases, once a name has been given to something, it can be nearly impossible to take it back.

This Bloomberg article discusses one example of this phenomenon. A decision made early on in the use of coronary stents later took on all kinds of unintended consequences. The American College of Cardiology (ACC) set up the initial guidelines.

The first stenting guidelines appeared two years after the Courage study spawned arguments about whether stents are ever appropriate for stable patients. The ACC wanted to get ahead of the debate before insurers or the government imposed their own standards, according to Manesh Patel, an interventional cardiologist at Duke University Medical Center who chairs the writing group for the guidelines, officially called the “Appropriate Use Criteria for Coronary Revascularization.”

“We could participate in change, or have change thrust upon us,” said Patel in an interview. The guidelines represented “a first step down the road of self-regulation,” he said.

By using the term appropriate, it appeared to leave stent placements outside of those use cases as "inappropriate." As healthcare costs continue to escalate, that loaded term is now being challenged by regulators and insurers.

“The term ‘inappropriate’ caused such a visceral response,” said Hendel, a cardiologist at the University of Miami. “A lot of regulators and payers were saying, ‘If it’s inappropriate, why should we pay for it, and why should it be done at all?’”

The cardiology group replaced the “Inappropriate” label with “Rarely Appropriate.” Another category -- cases in which there’s medical doubt -- will switch from “Uncertain” to “May be Appropriate.”

The changes reflect the controversy that has enveloped coronary stents, which are threaded through the circulatory system on catheters to prop open blocked arteries. With 700,000 procedures in the U.S. annually -- at an estimated cost of $14 billion -- appropriate use of the devices has become one of the hottest issues in cardiology. Eight studies have found stents are no better than drug-based therapy in preventing heart attacks and death in patients with stable heart disease.

According to Sanjay Kaul, a researcher at Cedars-Sinai, inappropriate uses of stents are estimated at $2.4 billion annually.

Here is the link to the full article:  http://www.bloomberg.com/infographics/2013-10-29/when-coronary-stents-are-inappropriate.html