Blogs / Discoblog

For many people, texting serves as a useful tool. But for British student Caroline Tagg, a study of text-messaging earned her a PhD.

That’s right, Dr. Tagg now has a doctorate of philosophy in texting—the first of its kind.

To earn the degree, Tagg spent nearly four years studying a total of 11,000 text messages containing 190,000 words and sent by 235 people, all of which she compiled and analyzed in a database. The Telegraph reports:

[Tagg] discovered that people text in the same way as if they were talking, using unnecessary words such as ‘oh’, ‘erm’ and often use grammatical abbreviations like ‘dunno’….

And she discovered from her 80,000 word thesis that there is more to texting that just abbreviations—something most people associate with texting.

“Actually, not many people use abbreviations,” she said. “People use playful manipulation and metaphors. It is a playful language. Not only are they quite creative, it is also quite expressive.”

She found that the average text message contains 17.5 words and that (shocker) some texts can be about incredibly mundane matters—”Hi. I know you are at work but I just wanted you to know I found my pen lid” being a prime example. She also called the experience “enlightening.”

So what do you think: Was the research a waste of time, or is Tagg a pioneer in exploring the linguistics of our newest communication method?

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Image: flickr / samantha celera

Cell phones that just make phone calls are so last millennium. Today, those pocket-sized wonders can perform myriad tasks, from checking email to taking photos. Bet you didn’t know what your phone is missing: The ability to survive being driven over by an SUV, blasted with a high-pressure water hose, or trampled by an elephant.

Lucky for us all, Land Rover’s new cell phone, which is touted as the toughest phone in the world, is now on the market. According to the Telegraph:

Staff at The Sun, who laid hands on the S1 a day before it was released, managed to crush the gadget under the weight of a three-tonne forklift truck.

Before it was finally broken, the phone had survived being roasted in an oven at 150 degrees centigrade, soaked in a pint of lager and tossed from the second floor of a building.

Check out a video of some extreme testing of the new phone:

The phone is reportedly shockproof, puncture-proof, water resistant, and dirt and dust-proof. Its plastic case is made primarily from recycled film and bottles.
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If you’re too far away from your honey to exchange real kisses, you may soon be able to kiss him or her over the phone, using the—you guessed it—KissPhone.

You actually kiss the phone—on its big, pink lips, to be precise—and the pressure, temperature, percussion speed, and “sucking force” of your mouth are measured. The phone then transmits these signals to your partner’s KissPhone, which reproduces the conditions of the kiss.

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Love ‘em or hate ‘em, social networking tools are growing faster than anyone can keep track of, and are being used plenty of unexpected ways.

Some developments are questionably beneficial, like new education standards in England that may require students to learn to use online tools like Twitter and Wikipedia, while scrapping history. Who needs a textbook to teach the Second World War when you can learn about it from a user-generated encyclopedia?

Other ideas have ambition, like Nokia’s investment in a California startup that will allow cell phones to act, essentially, like credit cards. Now, the developed world may not need additional forms of credit, but in countries where people often lack bank accounts, the ability to use prepaid phone credit as cash—or to transfer funds for a loan to a friend, for example—will facilitate transactions and a lot of everyday life.

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Looks like radiation may not be the biggest health concern posed by cell phones. Turns out our trusty phones may be making us sick in a more direct way: by spreading bacteria in hospitals.

Turkish researchers have found that 95 percent of cell phones were contaminated with at least one kind of illness-causing bacteria. They tested the phones and dominant hands of 200 hospital doctors and nurses, and found that almost 35 percent carried two types of bacteria, and more than 11 percent carried at least three types. Perhaps scariest, though, is that one in eight phones were found to carry the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a virulent strain of bacteria that has raised health concerns in hospitals worldwide.

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Roman Catholic bishops have called for a new kind of abstinence this Lent: no text messaging. They have deemed every Friday during Lent “no SMS day,” partly to honor “concrete” rather than “virtual” relationships. But the refrain from phones is also an attempt to bring attention to the ongoing conflict in Congo, which is partly fueled by coltan, a mineral found aplenty in the eastern part of the country and which is crucial for many technologies, including cell phones.

Others, meanwhile,  are embracing technology to the fullest—enough to try and turn magic carpet rides into reality. In space, no less. A Japanese astronaut will try to fly on a carpet when he arrives at the International Space Station later this month—he’ll also try 16 other challenges out of the total 1,597 total suggestions submitted.

Over in Italy, a “vampire” skeleton has been exhumed from a mass grave in Venice. It is thought to be from a period during the Middle Ages when vampires were believed to spread the plague by chewing on people’s shrouds after dying—an act that grave-diggers sought to prevent by putting bricks in the mouths of suspected vampires.

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• German twenty-somethings would rather give up sex than the Internet: In an industry survey, 84 percent of 19- to 29-year-olds said they would rather live without their current partner or an automobile than their Internet connection, and 97 percent found it “unthinkable” to live without a cell phone.

• The “Bodies” exhibit has reached Poland, and government officials are investigating whether the human cadavers on display amount to desecration of the human body. Next in the investigation queue: this woman.

• Meanwhile, Mother Russia “disproves” [sic] of the “monopolizing” American control over the Internet. A government official has spoken out against the California-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which creates top-level domain names (like .com) and manages IP addresses. The goverment reportedly plans to release suggestions for how to “demonopolize” the Internet—like oh, say, put a few crooked billionaires in charge.

Cell phones are fragile: One slip of the fingers and yours can be headed for a disastrous meeting with the sidewalk, leaving you headed to the store for a replacement. Once again, however, nanotechnology might be coming to our rescue.

Clemson University scientists led by Apparao Rao say they’ve created a new process to help make phones, car bumpers, or other often-broken items a little more resilient. The researchers built beds of tiny coiled carbon nanotubes that act as spring-like shock absorbers, protecting the object from a fall or collision.

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Mainstream news outlets are buzzing today about a new study from UCLA that found an apparent link between mothers using cell phones during pregnancy and their children developing behavioral problems. The story broke on Sunday, when Britain’s Daily Mail and The Independent both reported its findings.

From the headlines in these two papers (”Warning: Using a mobile phone while pregnant can seriously damage your baby” in The Independent) to the claims (”Women who use mobile phones when pregnant are more likely to give birth to children with behavioural problems, according to authoritative research”) and categorizations (stating that the study was conducted by “top scientists”) to … just about every other sentence, these stories do a pretty spectacular job of diluting the facts. And while The Independent may win the award for “most egregious science coverage,” with the Mail a close second, they certainly weren’t alone.

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