Hey guys, it’s ye boy langblr trash back at it again with another neat and nifty post on tumblr dot com.
My language learning journey has taken me to Germany, where I am currently an exchange student. Here I met another young polyglot who’s got a pretty cool idea for a new language learning app centered around finding cognates in your target language based on languages you already know. It’s called Rootify and it’ll be launching in beta soon!
I managed to hop on board the team for this thing and I wanted to do my part by spreading the word around to people like yourselves who may be interested. This seems like a great way to get a speed boost for part of your study of a new language. It’s all free too!
You can sign up for the beta here https://www.rootify.me/ and follow the official instagram and facebook for more updates
I’d also really appreciate giving this a quick reblog so more of the langblr community can see it! I think I may have been offline a bit too long to know a lot of the new members!
Germans when i ask why they drop english in the middle of our german coversation when i can clearly speak german: yeah i just consume so much english language media that i sometimes use phrases from it because they both sound cooler and honestly come to me faster than German equivalents
Americans if German phrases come faster and sound cooler to you : will you shut up about the war
Air quote gestures are weird. They’re weird because they have a really specific form and a specific use and meaning for people who use them. Most gestures that have these features are in a category of ‘emblems’, things like a thumbs up (), please sign (✌️) or fingers crossed (). All of these emblems have a meaning and use even if there’s no speech. Air quotes, in contrast, need speech to make sense. So they’re weird.
They’re so weird I’ve been thinking about them since writing an undergraduate research paper about fifteen years ago. I had always planned to build a larger corpus, collect more data and say something more definitive about these gestures, but it’s been a decade and a half and I haven’t yet, so I thought I’d drag out that old paper and share some of the observations from it.
The earliest reference of this gesture that I found for that paper appears in the July 1927 edition of Science. S. Francis Howard wrote to the magazine of how a ‘very intelligent young woman’ he knew ’[raised] both hands above her head with the first and second finger pointing upwards’ (Howard 1927, p. 38) in order to indicate that she was quoting text.
Air quotes haven’t received a lot of attention. Bäuml and Bäuml define the air quotes as a gesture of disassociation, whereby speaker who uses the gesture makes a value judgement about the credibility of the accompanying speech (Bäuml & Bäuml 1997, p. 153). Cirillo (2019) analysed a corpus of academic presentations for the use of air quotes (190 examples from 346 presentations). She found they exhibited a relatively stable form and were used to show the speaker’s stance towards the content being marked.
I looked at a mini corpus of 32 examples of air quotes from Australian television between 1993 and 2007 (ie. I watched a lot of tv and used this as a justification). Here are some observations from this data:
Air quotes have a stable form: two hands, palms outward, and somewhere between the upper chest and eye level.
There was some variation: some speakers did not so much pulse the fingers as wiggle them backwards and forwards.
2 finger air quotes are more common than 1 finger, but they also occur.
Air quotes are found with a wide variety of lexical content, including verbs, adverbs, adjectives and nouns, and longer phrases.
For noun phrases, if there was a determiner it was never included in the scope of the quote mark gesture in this corpus.
The average section of speech accompanied by quote mark gestures was only 1-3 words long, and comprises of generally no more than 4 syllables. The performance of the gesture for longer phrases would terminate before the end of the phrase it had scope over. For example the gesture was only performed with the words “I love public” in the spoken phrase “I love public broadcasting”.
Sometimes the number of pulses of air quotes followed the syllables in the speech, sometimes the number of words. Some were harder to determine, so there was no clear answer as to what people are aligning the performance of the gesture to.
In this small corpus, air quotes had four functions; reported speech, sarcasm, distancing and emphasis - or a combination of these.
It’s really nice that a lot of what I observed in this small study aligns with Cirillo‘s much larger and more detailed study.
In terms of categories, at the end of the short paper, I suggested that maybe air quotes fits with Kendon’s (1995, 2004) category of ‘pragmatic gestures’ - a category of gestures that are used alongside speech and mark the discourse level rather than the content level. For example, the ‘ring gesture’ is often used to show precision or specificity of a point being made in Western discourse Neumann (2004). Cirillo also suggests that air quotes might be a pragamtic category, but notes that their origin as a feature of writing makes them particularly unique. It’s been fun to dig up this old work, and even though I won’t get to revisit it, I’ll still continue to appreciate the weirdness of air quote gestures.
Thanks to Lou-Ann Kleppa, whose email make me go back and dig up this old paper!
References
Bäuml, B. J., & Bäuml, F. H. (1997). Dictionary of worldwide gestures (2nd ed.). Lanham: Scarecrow Press.
Cirillo, L. (2019). The pragmatics of air quotes in English academic presentations. Journal of Pragmatics,142, 1-15.
Howard, S. F. (1927). Quotations. In Science, 66 (1697), 38.
Kendon, A. (1995). Gestures as illucutionary and discourse structure markers in Southern Italian conversation. Journal of pragmatics, 23, 247-279.
Kendon, A. (2004). Gesture: Visible action as utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Neumann, R. (2004). The conventionalization of the Ring Gesture in German discourse. In C. Müller & R. Posner (Eds.), The semantics and pragmatics of everyday gestures (pp. 217-224). Weidler: Buchverlag.
Gretchen:hey we should use tumblr blaze to tell people an interesting thing about linguistics!
Lauren: but, um, we don’t do ads?
Gretchen:this is different, people are using it to promote like, photos of their pets, it’s cute!
Lauren:okay, so what should we tell them?
Gretchen:we could link to a photo of our producer…
Lauren:we’re an audio podcast, people are going to be disappointed if they start out expecting to get cat pics all the time
Gretchen:okay true. hm.
Lauren: linguistics facts wouldn’t be misleading though
Gretchen:WAIT
Gretchen: I’ve got it
Lauren:what
Gretchen: the Eeyore thing
Lauren: the Eeyore thing?
Gretchen:okay, so you know how the secondary animals in Winnie the Pooh all have really obvious names? Like, there’s a rabbit named Rabbit, an owl named Owl, a piglet named Piglet, two kangaroos called Kanga and Roo. And then there’s Eeyore
Lauren: who also has an obvious name
Gretchen: yeah, obvious to you and A. A. Milne, who both have non-rhotic accents! I was a full adult when I learned that Eeyore was just the sound a donkey makes, like it’s the British spelling of “hee-haw”
Lauren:and Australian! I have always known this
Gretchen: not for me! I still remember exactly where I was when I found out, I just spent the next five minutes saying “Eeyore” to myself in a British accent
Lauren: so, just so we’re clear, your plan is to spend $10 in the hope that a few randomly selected people scrolling through tumblr will pause and say “Eeyore” at the screen with and without the R?
which one of u was going to tell me that tea tastes different if u put it in hot water?
y- you were putting it in cold water?????
Radish. Answer the question radish.
yeah??? i thought for like. 5 years that ppl just put it in hot water 2 speed up the tea-ification process didn’t realize there was an actual reason
You dont have the patience to microwave water for 3 minutes???
[ID: Tags reading “u think i have the patience to boil water wtf ?????” /End ID]
why are you. putting it in the microwave to boil it
Do you think I have the patience to boil water on the stove
Its takes less than a minute
Bestie is ur stovetop powered by the fucking sun
How long does it take you to boil a cup of water on the stove
Like seven minutes
Just stick the mug on top of the stove on medium heat n it boils in like two minutes… less than that is u use a saucepan…
Crying you’re putting the whole mug on the stove ???? On medium heat???? Ur stove is enchanted
Every single person in this post is a fucking lunatic
Yet another post that reads like four shakespeare characters who come out in the middle of the play to talk about something completely unrelated for comic relief
(Enter RADISHN’T, MOTHMAN MISATO, BOIMG FROG and CATS'N RAINCOATS, stage left. They are having a HEATED DISCUSSION.)
RADISHN’T: Prithee, which one of you had planned to tell
Of diff'rent flavours gained by simple act
Of brewing tea with water hot, not cold?
MOTHMAN: Egad! you poured the water cold? Wherefore?!
FROG: An answer from you, Radish, I must beg.
RADISHN’T: Indeed I did, dear friends - why does this shock?
Without the guide of others I assumed
That heat was merely added for the sake
Of expediting this solution’s brewing!
Half a decade I have spent, or more,
Not questioning this worldview I had made.
In fact, I am myself a bit surprised
That you might think that I, your dearest friend,
Might have a patience of sufficient stock
To wait until a pot of water boils.
FROG: Three minutes overtaxes patience so?
The microwave will beep when it is done!
CATS'N: My friend, this answer vexes me the more!
Can it be true that thou dost boil by nuke?!
FROG: Are you in turn, my friend, so shocked to know
That I have not the patience, like our Root,
To boil upon the stove our favour’d drink?
CATS'N: It takes less than a minute!
FROG: On what plate?
Perhaps your dinner cooks atop the sun?
CATS'N: How long can take your stove to fill the task
Of boiling but a single cup alone?
FROG: In minutes?
CATS'N: Yes!
FROG: I counted seven, once.
CATS'N: Perhaps you ought to have your timepiece checked!
If on a middle heat you place the cup
You soon will have the scalding drink you crave.
Two minutes, in a mug upon the plate
Or even less, if you should have a pot.
FROG: You cause me tears - is this how thou dost live?
You place upon the iron stove a mug?
A mug, ceramic, filled with water cold?
How do these flames, though medium in height,
Not shatter like a glass this fragile thing?
Surely, then, your kitchen is bewitched
With magicks far beyond the mortal ken!
(The FOUR realise they have wandered into the THRONE ROOM. The ROYAL COURT watches with fascination.)
KING: Ev'ry single person in this group must be a fucking lunatic, it seems.
I’m sorry but the THOUGHT that has been put into this, I actually CAN’T—
The fact that nearly every line is so metrically considered- near perfect iambic pentameter witb the occasional trochee for emphasis, but usually retaining a strong sense of rhythm nonetheless. And then the king comes in at the end, so wound in his disbelief that his response is reduced to prose.
And the even better thing about this is how easy it would have been to structure the king’s line into iambic pentameter: it is effectively already said as such because of the way wizardlyghost has phrased it, yet they haven’t!! They did not break the line, rendering what, by all typically of both Shakespearean canon and other periods context should be the character with the most command and authority in the whole play. If there was ever a more effective way to convey a genuine “what the fuck??”, I know of it not.
But it gets better!! Shakespeare regularly uses meter in order to represent class divide; the nobility usually speak in iambic pentameter, save for a few particularly chosen moments (e.g. Lady Macbeth’s descent into madness, Othello’s realisation of Desdemona’s “betrayal”) or just lines where Shakespeare needs to suggest high emotion or when a character is lost in thought. Supernatural characters like the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Witches in Macbeth usually speak in trochaic tetrameter, an inversion of iambic pentameter. Lower class characters, particularly those used for comic relief (usually under the influence of alcohol), speak with no structure at all: their language is plain prose. Therefore, if this is a conversation between these types of characters, as the prompt from silvergirachi suggests, why the hell are the characters speaking so eloquently???
Now, this is Tumblr. It is subsequently logical to assume that this may have merely been a humorous recreation (and a very good one at that) of the Shakespearean style in a way that is widely recognisable to an audience that may or may not have read a great deal of Shakespeare, which is understandable. However, logic is boring so I’m going to probe further into this to the point where future historians will look to this as an example of overanalysing.
The inherent eloquence of the characters here suggests an unusual subversion of the roles typically assumed in Shakespearean comedy. This could be interpreted along two major avenues: firstly, that the rhetoric displayed by the speakers is fundamentally representative of how truth can be expected even from the most seemingly pointless or ludicrous discussions. Furthermore, it could suggest that it matters not how well constructed your speeches are: if you talk bullshit, it’s going to sound that way despite your attempts to hide it.
This is similar but not identical to the second avenue of interpretation: there is the implication that the noblemen in the play are in fact the comic relief characters, therefore implying that the “common people” of the play are the ones whose influence, though not expressed in such a highly spoken manner, makes a lot more sense than whatever the hell this is. If this was a real Shakespeare play, I would call it a subtle exploration into the innate corruption of the rich and powerful. Well done, op.
Now, I doubt any of this is actually grounded analysis in any way, shape or form, but if someone else can take this to the extremes of writing a Shakespearean scene, why can I not analyse it as such? And where else to do so than Tumblr?
im in tears i didnt think anyone would put this much analysis into this‚ thank you so much
i also like that everyone else gets a version of their handle and then tumblr user pidoop is promoted to king
I see the original post going around every so often and it saddens me a little that it’s never accompanied by this thread explaining why it’s completely understandable how a child would arrive at these spellings in accordance with english phonetics
i also want to point out that even in the composition of the image, the kid is very precisely mimicking the way these pictures would have been presented to them,in kids’ books and posters. this kid not only knew what the shapes’ words should sound like and what letters matched which sounds, they knew that the shapes should be arranged in rows with the name written precisely underneath. this is a kid who paid close attention to how things should go, and it’s very cool to see.
This month I’m beginning 2022 as the first Futurist in Residence at the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building.
It’s weird to think of myself as a futurist. I write a lot about the algorithms we’re calling artificial intelligence (AI), but rather than deal with the humanlike science fiction version, I focus on what today’s much simpler AI is capable of. Since today’s AI relies on using trial and error to get better at predicting its training data, and its training data must necessarily be from the past, its job is really to predict the past. This has a big effect on what it’s like to use AI to predict the future.
Since we’re entering 2022, the folks at the Smithsonian thought it would be interesting if I could use AI to generate New Year’s Resolutions. What does it look like if I try to use AI trained on past data to suggest positive changes for the future?
I decided to use GPT-3, which is how people tend to refer to a group of large text-generating AI models that OpenAI trained on a huge collection of internet text. News articles, food blogs, social media, spam - it’s all in there somewhere. Including plenty of times people have talked about their own New Year’s resolutions.
Give one of the larger GPT-3 models - for example, DaVinci, the very largest - the beginning of a list of New Year’s resolutions and, since its job is to predict what text comes next, it’ll generally add more resolutions to the list.
In the example below, the only text I wrote is the list title in bold. With that as a beginning, DaVinci predicted from its internet training that what would come next is this list of resolutions.
List of New Year’s Resolutions
To attend all Orientation committee meetings
To become more involved in Plattsmouth Community
To go bowling with teammates
To become a good writer
To start a successful business and become a millionaire
They’re plausible resolutions. Ask DaVinci for more predictions and the list will be similar. People who post their resolutions on the internet tend to pick similar sorts of things. At least, they did when DaVinci’s training data was collected in October 2019 - things have probably changed a bit since then.
But I didn’t want to stop here, because I didn’t just want a generic list of resolutions from the average internet human of the past. I wanted something that felt personal. Something a bit weird.
For my next attempt, I started the list with example resolutions that three strangers had mentioned on Twitter in 2021. I chose resolutions that were a bit offbeat. My example resolutions are in bold, and DaVinci’s additions follow verbatim.
List of New Year’s Resolutions
Not to buy any clothes except underwear for a year.
Touch grass and record every time I do it.
Use more insect textures in creature design.
Draw the front cover of a writing manual.
Get the missus to go to the shops for a new hat.
Find wallpaper for the kitchen/bathroom, and then paint it.
Finish the prints for the QI drawings.
Draw more detail into the background of the QI drawings.
Leave all the Christmas trees up and then paint them, as cubist art.
Eat nothing but broccoli and paint everything broccoli related.
Grow broccoli, and paint broccoli.
Make broccoli the national currency and then paint that.
This time it’s a journey. DaVinci, when faced with predicting what would come next on this list, predicted first one drawing-related resolution, and then multiple others. Soon this became not just a list of resolutions, but specifically a list of drawing-related resolutions. It generated a broccoli-and-drawing-related resolution, and then the list became a list of resolutions by a painter/broccoli fanatic.
You can see how this goes. Each of DaVinci’s predictions feeds forward into the future, and can become self-reinforcing obsessions.
I found that I could shape DaVinci’s list by choosing a point to cut it off, deleting the end, and then having DaVinci try to generate the list again. In that way, one resolution or two at a time, I could build up a list of resolutions that, if not exactly advisable, were at least interesting.
List of New Year’s Resolutions
Not to buy any clothes except underwear for a year.
Touch grass and record every time I do it.
Use more insect textures in creature design.
Take photos of each of my toes daily.
Egg every house in the village where I was born.
Lick a branch of a tree and repeat it every day for a year.
Walk down my block backwards looking over my shoulder.
Every time I am alone in the dark I will eat an apple.
Eat my favorite book.
I quickly learned how easy it was for DaVinci to develop themes.
If it generated:
Attend the Rainforest Action Network Benefit.
Then next it might generate:
Ask a rainforest tribe what they think of eco-tourism.
Go on a tour of the Tambopata National Reserve.
Go on a tour of the Manu National Park.
Write letters to the editor about rainforest preservation.
When I let it generate a resolution to eat my favorite book, next it would suggest:
Eat a book every day
and if I didn’t delete that and have it try again, soon it would be suggesting:
Eat a picture of myself everyday.
Super charge my digestive system and then, eat a picture of myself everyday.
I also learned to stay away from gloominess, or platitudes, or anything to do with fitness goals - it was too easy for DaVinci to get stuck in a rut. Anything shocking or mean-spirited also tended to poison the list. I had to delete these:
Every day I will blatantly eavesdrop.
Belch until my teeth explode.
Many were worse. DaVinci is trained on internet text, after all, and so it has a tendency to veer into racism or spam. I needed to be present at every point for careful hand-pruning.
In the end I deleted many, many more predictions than I kept - perhaps about 10 times more.
It began to feel like a metaphor for life choices. Become the kind of person who spends a year licking trees and eating apples in the dark, and who knows what you’ll be doing next. Spend a year trying to belch your way into exploding teeth, and that’ll have an effect on you too.
I present to you my list, my own list that emerged from each prediction that I let stand, and that was also shaped by each prediction that caused me to delete, go back, regroup, retry. These aren’t all things that I would necessarily do myself (I like my sleep far too much to be going out every night at midnight to make grass pancakes), but they are all things that I thought were interesting, that I wanted to hear more about.
Record every adjective I hear on the radio.
Act like a cabbage for a month.
At 4 o'clock every day I will climb a tree.
Speak only to apples for 24 hours.
Jump in front of a moving tree.
On the day of the first snow paint a canvas red.
Dress in a way that only a ghost could love.
Make pancakes out of grass at midnight each night.
Find old man Winter, hug him and let him know everything will be ok.
Ride out of town holding a pelican.
Under every rock I come across for a month I will write “all power to the rocks”.
Every day for a year, at a random time, shout “sausage”.
Make a film about the last sock in the world.
Put on a red shirt and scream ‘I’M NOT WEARING PANTS!’ every time I leave the house.
Throw a party for insects.
Try to convince the dog next door that he is wearing a coat of moonlight.
Every time I press a button I will say 'this is my favorite’.
Search my apartment for secret doors or hidden staircases.
Wear two superman outfits at the same time.
Every time it rains I will stir my tea anti-clockwise.
Every night for a week I will wear a hat lined with lettuce.
I will begin to believe that the trees that I see everyday are my friends.
Every time a bird flies past me I will remember to breathe.
Throw a birthday party for my favorite tree.
I will from now on tell every dog I meet that I am training to be a dragon.
Every time I see a panel van pass me I will dub it a “Slice-a-Wagon.”
Crawl on the ceiling like a spider for a month.
Attempt to find peace living with an army of puppets.
Wear a dinosaur costume to every public event I attend.
Go to the beach every day for a week and shout the names of colors into the ocean.
Go on a three-day backpacking trip dressed as a turnip.
Create messages that only the wind can hear by blowing on the blades of grass.
Give a piece of cloud to a complete stranger.
Make a mask out of grass and wear it while I’m sleeping.
I will now treat every worm I see as if it is an old friend.
When I hear a strange noise in an empty room I will assume someone is saying hello to me.
At the Smithsonian AIB website is a generator that I’ve populated with other resolutions from my list. Visit their site and grab yourself a random resolution. If you don’t like the one you got, you have my permission to reload and regenerate until you find a resolution that speaks to you. Or to apples.
Your January 2022 Smithsonian Futurist in Residence,
“Language isn’t neutral or objective. It is a vessel of cultural stories, values, and norms. And in the United States, everyday language plays into the violent, foundational myth of this country’s origin story—Europeans ‘discovering’ a virtually uninhabited wilderness and befriending the few primitive peoples who lived there—as well as other cultural myths and lies about Indigenous Peoples that are baked into U.S. culture and everyday life.
Cleve Davis (Shoshone-Bannock) points out that everyday language continues discrimination that is an extension of the centuries-long federal policy of genocide, assimilation, and oppression toward the original peoples of North America.
…
It might seem harmless when your boss mentions the need for a powwow among the company’s executives or an online quiz promises to reveal your spirit animal, but everyday language like this is a result of centuries of violence and continues to perpetuate stereotypes that have real-life impacts on Native communities.”
Everyone who likes this comic needs to read @aiweirdness ’s amazing book on the limitations of AI and how we silly humans like to pretend it’s a lot better than it is — You Look Like A Thing and I Love You.
That hearing infants come with the potential to distinguish/produce all sorts of language sounds, and then their brains start paring down to the ones they’ll need as they hear more speech around them. For example, babies born to people who don’t have contrastive aspirated vs. unaspirated [p] in their language can differentiate /pʰ/ from /p/, but by the time they’re toddlers they’ll start losing that skill as their brains prioritize relevance of speech sounds.
ALSO, the paradigms of “how you should talk to your kids for their best language development” are based a lot on white Western individualism. Throughout the world, there are various attitudes toward children and language, and all of them produce successful speakers/signers! In some cultures, babies are spoken to in simplified baby talk; in others, they are spoken to as adults; in others, children are not directly addressed until they can speak in return so they pick up ambient language. Some cultures expect children to speak in simple but concrete phrases; some expect children to learn oral traditions first; and some expect children to speak in indirect metaphorical language and gain concreteness as they grow.
All of these methods are successful, and it’s harmful to shame non-USian caregivers for not obeying the school curriculum, or to shame working/busy caregivers for not reading a book to their kid every night and teaching them a Pimsleur course every morning.
Good morning folks, and welcome to today’s statistical map - it’s about something I’ve tracked here for ten years, and about which I am passionate: linguistic diversity (or lack thereof) at Eurovision. ESC was envisioned not just as a peace project but as a showcase of European cultural diversity, and so I personally find the prospect of an almost entirely anglophone contest to be a concerning one.
In 2013, 17 countries out of 39 - some 44% - sang entirely or almost entirely not in English, but it’s a proportion we have seldom come close to since. In the following three years, no doubt partially because so many of the non-English entries did not qualify, we saw annual reductions to a historic nadir of only 15% non-English songs in 2016. We got a modest 1% bump after Jamala’s victory, and a major jump to 33% after Salvador - but in 2019-20, after two English language winners, the number went back down to 22%.
This year, the proportion is slightly lower yet - only 21% of songs have no or next to no English lyrical content, whilst 69% of songs have no or negligible (think individual words like in San Marino or Cyprus) non-English content, which is higher than even last year, and the highest since 2016. With even Portugal,who had never before sung entirely in English, breaking that streak, all bets seem to be off the table as to which countries will sing in their native language outside of Serbia, Albania and the Romance-speaking trio inside the Big 5.
That being said, it’s not all doom and gloom this year - we’re getting a prominent language début in the form of Jeangu’s Sranan Tongo choruses, which is also the first time NL sends a song with some non-English content since 2010. The miniature Eastern Slavic language revival continues, with Go_A once again sending a song in Ukrainian and Russia sending their first song mostly in Russian since 2009. Denmarksent their first song entirely in Danish since 1997. Switzerland’sGjon’s tears once again opted for French, and his will be the first francophone song performed from Switzerland since 2010. With France, who have only their 2nd entirely French language song since 2016, also perched at the top of the bookies’ odds, the possibility for an influential non-English win is not negligible.
We also get to hear a little Azeri for the first time ever; a little Czech for the first time since Czechia’s début in 2007; a little Germanfor the first time since the same year. I really hope for a year of success for songs in other languages so that delegations are encouraged to not just use their native languages as a spice to be sprinkled very sparingly over songs, but rather to send songs almost entirely in them in the near future.
I believe this person is referring to the research review done by Deborah James and Janice Drakich, which was published in 1993 but still couldn’t stop the myth while other popular linguists like Deborah Tannen kept insisting on “gender = speech patterns” instead of the reality, which is closer to “social power [which can include gender, race, class, etc] = valuation or devaluation of speech patterns”.
A review of 56 studies conducted by linguistics researcher Deborah James and social psychologist Janice Drakich found only two studies showing that women talked more than men, while 34 studies found men talked more than women. Sixteen of the studies found they talked the same and four showed no clear pattern.
I’ve been a Tannen apologist before, because linguists are still taught that there is such a thing as masculine and feminine speech ideologies. But then I paid attention to the real world!
