More Perl Fun

[robinturner]

When I checked my mail this morning, I found the following:

I was driving home this evening and could think of scripts, off the top of my head, that would make all English teacher's lives much more productive...

*histogram of all words a student uses diffed against the Academic Word List

So I wrote it. OK, it's not a real histogram, but it gives a general impression. It's here in case anyone's interested.

Comments

[alsoname.livejournal.com]

At the risk of sounding totally ignorant, what's the Academic Word List?

AWL

[solri.livejournal.com]

The Academic Word List was compiled by feeding a load of academic texts from different disciplines into a computer. The most common words that weren't among the 2,000 most common words in general English were taken as representative of academic vocabulary. You can find more information on it here (http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/staff/averil-coxhead/awl/awlinfo.html). I find it a very useful research and teaching tool.

ACW

[redngold.livejournal.com]

Nuts to that! I stayed up all night installing Linux on a Microsoft Xbox (don't ask why...but this is real guerrilla computing for -what's left of- the rest of us)

MY ACW now contains several short pithy Saxon expletives that weren't there before.

Re: ACW

[solri.livejournal.com]

Guerilla computing indeed! I've heard that it is possible to install Linux on an Xbox, but you're the first person I know who's actually done it.

But I can't help asking why.

Re: ACW

[redngold.livejournal.com]

Ummm - $120 remote controllable HD Video player? For instance...plus it's about time I got my hands dirty again. Working with Linux is like herding cats, but it reeks of that ol' ZX81 experience.

Re: ACW

[solri.livejournal.com]

Ah, the ZX81. I wrote a game for that machine that had all the eye-candy and strategy of pong, and still felt really proud of myself.

Re: ACW

[hfx-ben.livejournal.com]

Ahhh ... the "card-flipping" algos I came up with for the NEC-TREK (Z80 / 1.2MHz) and the "memory" game I wrote for my kids ... the first full app I ever programmed. Such fun, to break new ground!

Re: Bravo!

[hfx-ben.livejournal.com]

When I was doing tech_docs we had to check our work by "grade level" ... neither precise nor accurate, but it gave an idea.

This is very nice ... one can specify a variety of word lists, meaning it can be checked against a user-group's likely vernacular.

Very nice, sir.

Re: Bravo!

[solri.livejournal.com]

Glad you liked it!

Re: Bravo!

[gnodal.livejournal.com]

In the list of links I just blogged (http://www.livejournal.com/users/gnodal/20338.html), there were these two that I thought might interest you:
WordNet - a lexical database (http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/); ''WordNet''; a book review (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october98/10bookreview.html)

hfx_ben