SSS 2010-12-17
时间：2018-12-02 作者：英语课 分类：Scientific American(十二)月
This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Cynthia Graber. This will just take a minute.
They call it culturomics: the obvious play on the word "genomics" looks at trends in human thought and culture. But scientists say culturomics has been hampered 1 by a lack of quantitative 2 data. So researchers at Harvard, along with Google, Encyclopedia 3 Britannica, and the American Heritage Dictionary, have come up with a new tool.
It's a database of 5.2 million books, published since the year 1500. That's four percent of all the books ever published, with a total of 500 billion words. The focus is on English language culture, so three quarters of the books are in English.
Among the first findings of the research, published in the journal Science: about, 8500 new words enter the English language annually 4. But many of them don't end up in dictionaries. And about fame—actors become famous around age 30, writers around 40, and politicians around 50. But the fame of politicians can eventually exceed that of actors.
A Google tool called the Books Ngram Viewer is available based on this data—users can track the usage and frequency of a word or phrase over the past few centuries. Thus, we can watch the fall and rise of Melville. And soon the rise and fall of Snooki.
Thanks for the minute. For Scientific American's 60-Second Science, I'm Cynthia Graber.
- The search was hampered by appalling weather conditions. 恶劣的天气妨碍了搜寻工作。
- So thought every harassed, hampered, respectable boy in St. Petersburg. 圣彼德堡镇的那些受折磨、受拘束的体面孩子们个个都是这么想的。
- He said it was only a quantitative difference.他说这仅仅是数量上的差别。
- We need to do some quantitative analysis of the drugs.我们对药物要进行定量分析。
- The encyclopedia fell to the floor with a thud.那本百科全书砰的一声掉到地上。
- Geoff is a walking encyclopedia.He knows about everything.杰夫是个活百科全书，他什么都懂。