Hackszine.com: Language Archives

Archive: Language

February 1, 2008

Meta-model: tools for clarifying communication

Hackszine reader nathaN writes:

i have mind performance hacks here on my lap, and i found hack 56. you included transformational grammar, surface/deep structure, you have to be aware of this other book on my desk, next to my lap. The book describes a method of using transformational grammar to analyze statements and gather incredible amounts of information, the technique is called the Meta Model, i had to write this post after i found #56 in your book. it's out of print, i think, but it's not too hard to find used if you make a few calls. it cost ME $35, but its probably online as well, torrents or whatever =(
its the single most useful "hack" i've ever found, ive been using it for about an year and it gives me more options than i know how to take advantage of.

The Structure of Magic I, by Richard Bandler and John Grinder
Introduction by Virginia Satir and Gregory Bateson.
Science and Behavior Books, Inc
copyright 1975

Unfortunately, the Google Books entry for The Structure of Magic I wasn't a full scanned version. There is, however, a wealth of information about the Meta-model and other Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) tools on Wikipedia:

The meta-model in neuro-linguistic programming (or meta-model of therapy) is a heuristic set of questions designed to specify information, challenge and expand the limits to a person's model of the world. It responds to the distortions, generalizations, and deletions in the speaker's language.

In the process of communicating, the mind is forced to translate a person's experiences and their internal understanding of the world into words, making language a highly optimized and compressed representation of a complex internal mental state. This translation occurs a second time, as the listener parses language and interprets that communication based on their own mental world model and past experiences.

The meta-model provides tools for quickly parsing the structure of a communication, determining implied meaning, and locating potential points of misunderstanding. When you can recognize the linguistic translation artifacts that are common patterns in the communication process, you can respond to them. On the receiving end, this helps you better understand the experiences that underlie the speaker's language. On the sending end, it helps you to better communicate without misunderstanding. Internally, it helps you to analyze and debug your own model of the world.

Meta-model (Neuro-linguistic Programming) - Link
Mind Performance Hacks @ the Maker Store - Link

May 24, 2007

reCAPTCHA: distributed book digitization while fighting spam

Thanks to spammers, we now are forced waste a substantial portion of time every day, typing in obfuscated wiggly letters to prove we are human. reCATPCHA is a slick idea for using the CAPTCHA system for doing something productive (...besides distinguising between homo sapien and homo computatralis).

With reCAPTCHA, the user is given two words, one known by the system and one from a book that previously failed character recognition. When the user enters both words, the sytem verifies the known word, proving human-ness, and submits the second word to a central database, which helps digitze books from the Internet Archive. With 60 million CAPTCHAs being solved every day, this could be a huge assist for portions of text that can't be handled by optical character regognition techniques. [via] Link

Related:
Negative CAPTCHA

April 25, 2007

Unofficial Google Translate API

The Unofficial Google Translate API is a combination javascript library and php service that allows you to do AJAX-style language translation. The PHP script serves as proxy to Google's Translate utility, passing data to and from Google on behalf of the javascript code.

Unofficial Google Translate API -Link.
Inspired by Philipp Lenssen's Google Translate API "Announcement From 2009" -Link.

October 25, 2006

Syntax Hacks

[Ed note: this was originally posted on the O'Reilly Network on May 16, 2005.]

For a few weeks now, I’ve been noodling around the idea of some kind of Eats, Shoots & Leaves meets Chicago Manual of Style cum writing style guide and technical publishing primer, all wrapped up into a collection of tips and tools under the banner of the Hacks series. I even mocked up my dream cover for the book I’d tentatively titled Syntax Hacks: Tips & Tools for Better Writing and Editing.

Though such a book ended up striking me as overly ambitious and more than a little bit daunting, and thus remained in the purgatorial state of an idea that exists in name only (I really liked the title, though I found myself forcing content into it that would really better suited by the more boring but more accurate title of Writing Hacks), it took a walk by my local comic book store to realize exactly how small time my idea actually was.

The cover of the May issue of The Believer (a magazine I’ve raved about elsewhere) caught my eye with a story on “DIY Semantics” by Annalee Newitz. The story inside, actually titled “The Conlangers’ Art” (excerpt available here) is given this description in the magazine’s TOC: “Over eight hundred Klingons and other inventors of language are overhauling the DNA of consciousness.” Now this is the description of a Syntax Hacks worth getting excited about (or humbled by, if you’ve been trying to fit more banal, pedantic content under the same rubric). Read full story