Well, not quite. Now that Katie Couric has taken the helm of “The CBS Evening News,” the network is encouraging viewers to suggest a sign-off for the new anchor. I’m not sure if teh Internets can come up with something as clever as “Good night and good luck,” or “that’s the way it is.” I’m sure fellow Viacom Stephen Colbert will offer a suggestion. It’s interesting to see the Tiffany Network embrace the web like this: perhaps they’ll also ask viewers to do their own Photochop jobs on Couric.
Last night’s free RJD2 show at Waterloo park was great. RJD2 is quite a talented DJ and sample artist, and it was fun to experience his music with an enthusiastic crowd. He said that the show was the biggest show he had ever played and expressed his appreciation for the Austin audience, which only elevated the mood.
What spoiled the mood however, was the fact that the entire perimeter of the public park was fenced in. I – and nearly everyone else – wandered around the city block looking for a way into the show. When I found the single entrance at 14th and Trinity, I called all of the people I was meeting because I was sure they would try to enter at Red River. The organizers really should have posted a few signs pointing to the entrance.
I can’t understand why a free show at a public park would be fenced in so completely. It couldn’t be to keep out drugs since the cops and bouncers did little more than check IDs and clouds of pot smoke wafted in and out all night long. The only reason I can see for the fence is to encourage concert-goers to buy four-dollar tallboys of Lone Star at the concession. (I’ve been to plenty of public events where alcohol was served that were not fenced in, so I’m not going to buy the underage drinking excuse.) The fence seem like an excessive measure for a little profit and destroyed whatever goodwill I might have felt toward AT&T and The Alamo Drafthouse for putting on a free show.
Arnold Zwicky at Language Log was kind enough to post a follow-up to my post about how the University of Oklahoma is abbreviated “OU,” which reverses the order of the initials. He calls this phenomenon “covert premodification,” and his informants also identified the universities of Kansas and Colorado as schools engaging in covert premodification. Zwicky offers an explanation for the phenomenon.
I think I understand what happened here: the Universities of California, Kentucky, and Oregon are referred to as UC, UK, and UO, respectively (Oregon even gets the URL www.uo.edu; Kentucky is www.uky.edu, and the campuses of the University of California have their own URLs), so Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma distinguish themselves with the reverse ordering.
I’m not sure I entirely buy this explanation. I suspect these abbreviations date back to before widespread mass media, and, particularly, national football coverage. Considering the dearth of media and difficulty of cross-country travel, it seems unlikely that many people would confuse the universities of Oklahoma and Oregon. Also, I can identify two other schools that engage in covert premodification. The University of Tulsa is abbreviated “TU” (although its URI is utulsa.edu), and The University of Missouri-Columbia is known as “Mizzou” or “MU.” Since Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri all border Oklahoma, I wonder if this is a southern plains regionalism.
I’m not sure how useful it is to look at domain names for how schools are named, since the abbreviations almost certainly predate the internet. I’ve already mentioned that TU’s URI is “utulsa.edu,” and the uc.edu domain went to The University of Cincinnati, which has to be one of the lesser-known Us of C. It’s worth noting, also, that until around 1997 OU’s domain was uoknor.edu, for “University of OKlahoma at NORman.” (At the time, OU also had its Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City and a branch of the med school in Tulsa.) My first web page back in 1995 was at http://www.ecn.uoknor.edu/~cmcconn01, which was darn near impossible to relate to people unfamiliar with the internet.
Since Zwicky suggests that Oklahoma uses “OU” to distinguish itself from Oregon, I thought I would relate a mildly amusing anectdote. When I was a computer magazine editior, I was out in California visiting the Irvine office. Coming back from lunch, my co-worker Rita, who was originally from Switzerland, asked me where I went to college. Preoccupied with driving in a strange place, I answered “OU.”
Rita asked, “Is that Oregon?”
“Oh, no, Oklahoma. I think Oregon uses ‘U of O’.”
“That’s confusing.”
“Yeah,” I admitted, “Actually, I had a girlfriend in college who went to Oregon for two years, then transferred to OU.”
Rita asked, “What did she call Oklahoma, then?”
“OU.”
“Then what did she call Oregon?”
“Eugene.”
2 Comments The blogosphere has been abuzz about Google Image Labeler, which uses data generated by users to categorize and label images. Like the ESP Game, users try to guess what another anonymous online user uses to describe the image. When the users’ labels match, the label is used to categorize the image. Tim O’Reilly discusses the potential of using games to get humans to label unstructured data like images. Citing a video by Carnegie-Mellon professor Luis von Ahn he notes, “In 2003, 9 billion hours were spent playing solitaire. By comparison, it took only 7 million human hours (6.8 hours of solitaire) to build the Empire State Building, and only 20 million human hours (less than a day of solitaire) to build the Panama Canal.” Clearly, if humans have the spare “processor cycles” to play a repetive game like solitaire, Google can benefit by getting people to do its categorization work for free.
Although no one’s forcing people to label images, I do wonder about the social implications of a profitable company taking advantage of all of this free labor. In “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy” Tiziana Terranova discusses how companies like AOL take advantage of free labor to manage their operations and create content. For example, AOL uses “volunteer” community leaders to manage discussions on the online service, duties that are essential for keeping the for-profit company’s content family-friendly and civil. I’m simplifying her argument substantially, but she takes issue with the abilty of capital to generate profit off of work done for free. Moreover, this labor is gendered – the masculine work of open-source developers is regarded as a surprising contribution to society, while the feminized work of managing people in the case of the AOL community leaders is taken for granted.
I wonder if a similar thing is going on. Neither von Ahn nor O’Reilly make gender claims about solitaire, but I suspect it’s a game largely played by receptionists, call center employees, and other pink-collar workers to pass time at work. Can we read Google Image Labeler as a situation where Google does the masculine heavy-lifting of writing code for money while users do the feminized work of classification for free?
Language Log has a post on an issue that has beguiled me since I was a child. It discusses where colleges and universities with place names place their place names. It identifies the “premodifying form” like “New York University” and the “prepositional form” in “The University of Pennsylvania.” It tries to find a loose grammatical rule to little success, but generally in North America, public schools are “University of…”, unless they have the “state” modifier. Although it discusses how colleges are abbreviated in conversation, it doesn’t directly address the issue that beguiled me as a child.
My alma mater, The University of Oklahoma has used the prepositional form since it was established in 1890, but it is abbreviated in conversation and by the institution as “OU”, the premodifying form. It’s not “Oklahoma University,” so why are the letters switched? This switch isn’t universal, as the universities of Texas1 and Illinois2 are “UT” and “UI” in conversation. I But OU isn’t alone in the switch, either, Kansas and Colorado are “KU” and “CU.” I’m sure in all of these cases local custom and tradition trump whatever grammatical rules apply to university naming.
The post also doesn’t address the school I find most baffling of all, The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. It seems like a stretch to get “Virginia Tech” out of that mouthful. I could see ‘VPI,’ which I’ve seen used in some places, or “Virginia Poly,” like “Cal Poly.” I asked a VPIASU alumna a few years ago, and she said the adminstration decided to go with “Virginia Tech” for marketing reasons. I suppose this is less radical than Texas Tech and Texas A&M, where the abbreviations don’t actually stand for anything. One issue remains, however: why is it “and State University” when Virginia is technically a commonwealth and not a state?
1.Of course, many Aggies refer to UT-Austin as “TU,” since TAMU was the first university established in the Lone Star State. If you encounter one of these folks, remind them that their school was established during Reconstruction as a condition of Texas’ re-entry into the US.
2.Whenever I hear “UI” I think “User Interface,” rather than “University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.” I only seem to hear this spoken by Illinois natives; I always see it written as “UIUC,” which my dyslexic mind confuses with “UIC,” the University of Illinois at Chicago.
3 Comments 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
WordPress took 1.163 seconds to generate this XHTML page. Theme based on Minim8 theme designed by Phu Ly.