Saturday, February 26, 2011

"Racial Tension"



Survey finds NSW has most racial tension
Knowing that Victoria, and Tasmania, have lower levels of racial tensions is not very comforting at all, especially since:
Unlike the rest of the states, the Victorian poll did not test racist attitudes towards the African community - ''an oversight'', Dr Paradies says, and a problematic one.
 Yep, just calling Australia a fair country that gives everyone a fair go doesn't actually make it that.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Ngrams on government-type words


Just found this neat little tool. (click on the image to go to the original site) Notice that the frequency of the word 'democracy' increases around the time of WW1 and WW2 --and those other bumps probably also represent times-of-war.

Now look at this one:
The word government appears with a high frequency - I guess that it would cover up whether or not that state was a 'democracy' or not. But the word 'military' is also occurs with a high frequency- though, admittedly I thought it would occur higher considering the apparent preoccupation with war and violence in world-leaders' minds. Again, these two words increase in freuqncy around the times of war.

For some information on the above, read Culturomics and Google Books