Twitter may soon join Facebook and Google in cracking down on ads for cryptocurrency-related products. Sky sources have claimed the social network will institute worldwide ban against ads for initial coin offerings, cryptocurrency wallets and token sales within the next two weeks. It might also ban ads for cryptocurrency exchanges with "some limited exceptions," according to the apparent leak.The company told Engadget it had no comment at the moment.
A dialect is a particular form of language limited to a specific region or social group. Linguists are fascinated by dialects because they reveal social classes, patterns of immigration and how groups have influenced each other in the past.
But studying dialects is hard work. Traditionally, linguists do this by interviewing a relatively small number of people, typically a few hundred, and asking them to fill out questionnaires. Researchers then use the results to create linguistic atlases but these are naturally limited by the choice of the locations and individuals who have been studied.
Today, Bruno Gonçalves at the University of Toulon in France and David Sánchez at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems on the island of Majorca, Spain, say they have found a new way to study dialects on a global scale using messages posted on Twitter. The results reveal a major surprise about the way dialects are distributed around the world and provide a fascinating snapshot of how they are evolving under various new pressures, such as global communication mechanisms like Twitter.
Gonçalves and Sánchez begin by sampling all of the tweets written in Spanish over two years and that also contain geolocation information. That gave them a database of 50 million geolocated tweets, with most from Spain, Spanish America, and the United States.
They then searched these tweets for word variations that are indicative of specific dialects. For example, the word for car in Spanish can be auto, automóvil, carro, coche, concho, or movi, with each being more common in different dialects. Different words for bra include ajustador, ajustadores, brasiel, brassiere, corpiño, portaseno, sostén, soutien, sutién, sujetador, and tallador while variations on computer include computador, computadora, microcomputador, microcomputadora, ordenador, PC, and so on.
They then plotted where in the world these different words were being used, producing a map of their distribution. This map clearly shows how different words are commonly used in certain parts of the world.
However, they also looked at the environments in which the words were used, whether in large cities or in rural locations. And that revealed a major surprise.
If you have a Twitter account, the chances are that you have fewer than 50 followers and that you follow fewer than 50 people yourself. You probably know many of these people well but there may also be a few on your list who you’ve never met.
So here’s an interesting question: how do you know these Twitter users are real people and not automated accounts, known as bots, that are feeding you links and messages designed to sway your opinions?
You might say that bots are not very sophisticated and so easy to spot. And that Twitter monitors the Twittersphere looking for, and removing, any automated accounts that it finds. Consequently, it is unlikely that you are unknowingly following any automated accounts, malicious or not.
If you hold that opinion, it’s one that you might want to revise following the work of Carlos Freitas at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil and a few pals, who have studied how easy it is for socialbots to infiltrate Twitter.
Comments by a top telecom official suggesting that Russia might soon block access to Twitter were swiftly condemned Friday — even by other government officials — providing a rare window into differences of opinion inside the Kremlin over how best to censor voices of dissent.
In an interview with a local newspaper, Maxim Ksenzov, deputy head of the government’s telecommunications watchdog, Roskomnadzor, called Twitter a “political” tool that undermines the state’s authority. “We can block Twitter or Facebook tomorrow for several minutes,” Ksenzov said. “We do not see any risks in that.”
Oh, the things you hear on Amtrak's Acela service! Screaming kids, complaints about Wi-Fi and — oh yeah — a former director of the National Security Agency and the CIA seemingly spilling secrets to reporters.
We learn this from the Twitter feed of Tom Matzzie, former Washington director of MoveOn.org Political Action, who sat near retired Gen. Michael Hayden. Matzzie's tweets suggest that Hayden took calls from reporters digging into the ongoing NSA spy scandal and asking about President Barack Obama's BlackBerry and CIA secret prisons overseas.
Hayden apparently insisted on being quoted anonymously.
"FAIL," as they say.
Here is Matzzie's story, as tweeted from Amtrak Acela 2170, which left Washington at 3 p.m.:
