(New York, NY) — New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is calling on the state to decriminalize sex workers. The mayor wants the energy focused on going after those who he says exploit and profit from the human trafficking instead. The city will create state legislative framework to end criminal penalties for sex workers. The mayor says the NYPD is currently reducing the number of sex worker arrests.
Scott Pringle Copyright © 2021 TTWN Media Networks Inc.
SALT LAKE CITY — It appears that people can now mispronounce a word to such an extent that it will eventually appear in the dictionary.
Dictionary.com announced that the word supposably, which is a mispronunciation of supposedly, has been added to its dictionary.
The definition of the adverb is "as may be assumed, imagined, or supposed:," and an example of how it should be used in a sentence was also given:
In our modern and supposably transparent era, the government’s motives for war have come into question.
Supposably was one of 600 new words and definitions added to the dictionary.
In addition to supposably, finna was also added, matching Merriam-Webster.com's move to add the word.
Issued on:
France has long defended the purity of its language with an official list of permitted words, but the launch of a new online dictionary with state support on Tuesday underlines how attitudes have shifted.
For three centuries, the venerable Academie Francaise in Paris has produced state-sanctioned dictionaries that document and approve new terms or expressions.
The first version dates back to the 17th-century creation of the Academie, while work on its latest tome, the ninth, has been underway since 1986.
The backers of the new dictionary, which include French President Emmanuel Macron, are lightning quick in comparison and hope to reach many more people with an online resource based on the Wikipedia model.
"This dictionary will enable everyone who loves our language, and they are 300 million to speak it today, to appreciate its richness," Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot told a launch ceremony on Tuesday.
Called the "Dictionnaire des Francophones" (The Francophones' Dictionary), it was proposed by Macron in 2018 as a way of bringing together and celebrating the diversity of modern French.
So far, it contains around 600,000 terms and expressions, Bachelot said, but users across the world have been invited to submit suggestions that will be vetted by other users and a team of linguists.
Apart from the works of the Academie Francaise, only one other dictionary has been ordered by the French state: the Tresor de la Langue Francaise (the Treasures of the French State), by President Charles de Gaulle in 1962.
Other commercial French dictionaries, such as the Le Petit Robert and Larousse, are regularly updated.
World French
The project reflects how France is home to a minority of modern French-speakers, with the language more commonly used in the fast-growing populations of former colonies in Africa.
In a speech in 2018, Macron broke with tradition by saying that France needed to acknowledge that it did "not carry the destiny of the French language on its own."
"France must take pride in being ultimately a country among others which learns, speaks and writes in French, and it's this decentralisation that we need to re-think," he told an audience at the French Institute, which houses the Academie.
>> 'Françaises, Français': Could the French language be less sexist?
Macron has not given up on the global language battle, however, with the French president keen to increase funding for French language schools globally, and challenging the use of English in the European Union.
Bernard Cerquiglini, who was asked to lead the dictionary project, told the magazine Express that the dictionary aimed to bring together online resources from Africa, Belgium, Quebec and others.
"We're building. We're going to include little by little everything that exists on the internet on the French language," he said, adding that the dictionary could reach one million entries.
Results given to a user will depend on their location, which will be detected by the search engine, meaning that a word like "baton" would show as golf club in Quebec, a cigarette in Senegal, or a penis in Ivory Coast.
"The idea is to create a dictionary of world French, and decentralised," Cerquiglini added.
Louise Mushikiwabo, the head of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF), which groups French countries, proposed adding the word "techniquer" during Tuesday's ceremony, which means finding an ingenious solution on a budget in Rwanda.
Cerquiglini replied that it would be added in the afternoon.
(AFP)
To keep up with the ever-evolving English language, Dictionary.com has added many new words including “finna” and “supposably.”
According to the website, the term “supposably” is used as an adverb meaning “as may be assumed, imagined, or supposed.” The website goes on to explain the word “finna” is an English variant of “fixing to,” and is a “phonetic spelling representing the African American vernacular.”
-Advertisement-
These two aforementioned words are only two of 600 news words added to the Dictionary.
We want to know – What do you think about these new entries? Are you for or against them? Let us know in the comments below.
“Memmius thinks he’s such a towering figure that when he comes into the Forum, he has to duck under the Fabian arch,” quipped Cicero, a pointed joke that still works more than 2,000 years later.
Michael Fontaine’s lively new translation of Cicero’s ancient text on humor, “How to Tell a Joke: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Humor,” amuses as well as instructs – as Cicero, called by his enemies “the stand-up Consul,” no doubt intended.
Cicero’s treatise is part of his longer masterpiece, “On the Ideal Orator”, written in 55 BCE. Fontaine’s book also includes Quintilian’s humor treatise, part of his “The Education of the Orator,” written in 95 CE.
In his introduction, Fontaine writes that both Cicero and Quintilian thought of humor as a source of power – jokes not just as entertainment, but as “weapons of war.”
According to Fontaine, Cicero proved that jokes are not just for fun: “His enemies said, this guy's a total buffoon. He’s a clown. He’s telling jokes, he breaks protocol. And yet he keeps winning and winning and winning,” Fontaine said.
“How to Tell a Joke” was commissioned during the last presidential campaign cycle, which Fontaine said felt quite timely. The text is all about how to use humor to get ahead, to win elections and trials – “It’s ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ using humor,” said Fontaine, professor of classics in the College of Arts and Sciences.
While Cicero used his techniques as both a politician and a lawyer, Quintilian was an academic who “didn't really have the guts to tell a joke in a murder trial,” Fontaine said. He noted that the difference in their approaches was probably due to their political environment: Cicero lived in the late Roman Republic when free speech could win elections, while Quintilian came of age in an autocracy, where saying what you think could lead to trouble.
“The palpable difference in how they handle these jokes has relevance today,” said Fontaine. “Cicero’s time was the equivalent of pre-social media, whereas Quintilian’s more aware that you have to think long-term about these jokes, as though they could live forever on Instagram or Twitter.”
As Quintilian wrote, “humor is risky, since ‘wit’ is so close to ‘twit.’”
Capturing the humor in the texts made it the most difficult translation Fontaine has ever done, and he understands why earlier translations did not even try to make the humor accessible. He drew heavily on modern idiomatic expressions to communicate meaning.
“The whole point of my translation is to make it funny the way the authors intended,” said Fontaine, who sometimes had to go for the sense of the wordplay rather than its literal meaning. “In some cases, though, the colloquialisms I used reflect exactly what the Latin says.”
Fontaine believes so strongly of the value in these humor techniques for getting ahead that he has teamed up with eCornell to develop two courses for their executive education series. “These are all algorithms that work – timeless, proven techniques,” he said.
Despite their effectiveness, though, Fontaine noted that Cicero’s humor is occasionally offensive. “Even for his own time and place, as this book shows, Cicero sometimes took it way too far,” said Fontaine. “In recognizing the power of his techniques, it’s also important to recognize that Cicero himself was a flawed individual, even though we can still draw important lessons from his writing.”
“How to Tell a Joke” is part of Princeton University Press’ series of “how to” texts from antiquity. Fontaine’s previous contribution, “How to Drink,” proved highly popular; German and Turkish translations are underway. His next for the series, also by Cicero, will be a text on how to grieve – particularly appropriate for the current times, he added.
Fontaine will speak on “How to Tell a Joke” in a Chat in the Stacks at the Cornell Library on March 24 at 4 p.m. and in an eCornell keynote talk April 1.
Linda B. Glaser is news and media relations manager for the College of Arts and Sciences.
By Rob Farber, contributing writer for the Exascale Computing Project
Clacc is a Software Technology development effort funded by the US Exascale Computing Project (ECP) PROTEAS-TUNE project to develop production OpenACC compiler support for Clang and the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure Project (LLVM). The Clacc project page notes, “OpenACC support in Clang and LLVM will facilitate the programming of GPUs and other accelerators in DOE applications, and it will provide a popular compiler platform on which to perform research and development for related optimizations and tools (e.g., static analyzers, debuggers, editor extensions).” [i] OpenACC continues to be the second most popular programming model for GPUs on the ORNL Summit supercomputer.
Joel Denny, Computer Scientist at ORNL and member of the ECP Software Technology Development Tools team, observed that “When the Clacc project began, NVIDIA was the dominant OpenACC compiler vendor. The Clacc project was initiated to provide the HPC and scientific communities with a new, production quality, open source OpenACC compiler option.” Denny further observed that “there has been a strong push in DOE toward LLVM. It makes sense to utilize that ecosystem to support DOE and the OpenACC users.” Currently, the Clacc project is focused on feature completeness. Even though compiler-based performance optimizations are not a current focus, preliminary benchmark results show Clacc can deliver acceptable GPU performance.
OpenACC is a relatively new programming standard that was launched in 2010 to provide a portable directive-based programming model for the C, C++, and Fortran computer languages. Jointly developed by Cray, NVIDIA, and PGI, the OpenACC standard is designed to simplify parallel programming of heterogeneous CPU/GPU systems. [iii] [iv] The OpenACC organization notes that a goal of OpenACC is to help the research and developer communities advance science by expanding their accelerated and parallel computing skills.[v] The addition of OpenACC support to the open source Clang and LLVM projects, described next, leverages the extensive effort these projects have put into the creation of a production quality open source parallel compiler and runtime system over the past number of years in support of the OpenMP standard.
There is a natural synergy between the OpenACC and OpenMP compiler frontends and runtime systems. Of course there are differences, but broadly speaking both OpenMP and OpenACC are directive based standards that provide programming statements called pragmas that programmers utilize to create applications that can use the parallel capabilities of multi-core CPUs and massively parallel accelerators like GPUs. The Clacc project highlights the generality of the Clang compiler and LLVM projects as compiler writers can leverage the work of others when supporting either or both of the OpenACC and OpenMP programming standards.
Leveraging the LLVM Compiler and Toolchain Technologies
The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure Project (LLVM) is an open source collection of compiler and toolchain technologies. Doug Kothe, Director of the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Exascale Computing Project, believes “LLVM compiler technology is becoming the nexus for vendor and community compiler development and evolution.”
LLVM is becoming so prevalent that Johannes Doerfert, a researcher at Argonne National Laboratory, observes, “Numerous companies and organizations are collaborating on LLVM, which is one of the many benefits of using the LLVM compiler infrastructure. LLVM-based compilers from the system manufacturers are common throughout the HPC community,” Doerfert observes. “Improvements in collaboration as well as improvements to LLVM benefit the entire HPC community, including system manufacturers, software suppliers and the end users.
The PROTEAS-TUNE project complements and collaborates with the SOLLVE project, [vi],[vii] which is an ECP effort focused on standardizing HPC features in OpenMP and developing an efficient, portable, and complete implementation in the LLVM compiler framework. [viii]
These projects are possible due to the extremely permissive terms of the LLVM licensing agreement, which gives the HPC community the ability to create and release software using the LLVM compiler infrastructure. This includes profilers, parallel compilers, debuggers, Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) and new programming models. It also means that the HPC community does not have to go through the process of filing a bug report with a compiler or hardware vendor and waiting/hoping for a bug fix. Instead, HPC developers can find and submit fixes to the open-source code base.
Leveraging the Clang Compiler Front End to Support OpenACC
Clang is a compiler front end for the C family of computer languages that include both C and C++. Clang fully supports the OpenMP 4.5 standard. The ECP-funded SOLLVE project is working to bring the features of the OpenMP 5.1 specification to LLVM-based compilers. Analogous to OpenACC, the OpenMP 5.1 specification is intended to strengthen and optimize features that support the handling of accelerators such as GPUs. [ix]
Clacc Provides Two Paths to an Executable Binary
Figure 1: Two paths to create an executable (source: https://ift.tt/3f028WT)
A key feature of the Clacc design is to translate OpenACC to OpenMP, which leverages the extensive effort that has already been put into the LLVM OpenMP compiler and runtime support over the past number of years. These two paths to generate an executable are illustrated in Figure 1. Depending on what the programmer wants, Clacc can follow a direct path from source code to the LLVM intermediate representation (CodeGen) or it can be used as a source-to-source translator (RewriteOpenACC) to convert the OpenACC code to OpenMP source code.
There are benefits to both modes:
According to Denny, Clacc currently takes a straightforward approach when mapping OpenACC code to OpenMP be it for internal Clacc use or for later compilation by an OpenMP compiler. He explains that the three levels of OpenACC parallelism (e.g. gang, worker, vector lane) are mapped to the OpenMP equivalents (teams, threads, and SIMD lanes). Denny notes that alternative approaches are also being explored.
Leveraging Profiling Infrastructure
Profiling is a requirement for any parallel programming language – in particular when being developed in support of the various hardware platforms being used, or slated to be used in the DOE complex.
Clacc supports the OpenACC Profiling Interface, a critical component of the OpenACC specification that standardizes an interface that profiling tools and libraries can depend upon across OpenACC implementations.[x] Such information can be gathered and viewed with powerful tools such as the Tuning and Analysis Utilities (TAU) Performance System;[xi] TAU is also funded by ECP’s PROTEAS-TUNE project.
A recent 2020 IEEE paper[xii] by the Clacc and Tau teams discusses Clacc profiling support for OpenACC in greater detail and presents example visualizations for several SPEC ACCEL OpenACC benchmarks with the TAU performance tool. The paper claims that the associated performance overhead is negligible.
TAU gives HPC programmers the ability to measure performance and see bottlenecks via one profiling tool that works well across a broad spectrum of widely differing HPC systems, architectures, languages, and software/hardware execution models.
Figure 2: The TAU profiling system. (Source: https://ift.tt/3cC4Sa4)
TAU can be installed via Spack and is distributed in the Extreme-Scale Scientific Software Stack (E4S). Just install TAU with the target back-end CUDA, ROCm, L0 for OneAPI, etcetera.
Summary
The OpenACC directive-based programming model is designed to provide a simple, yet powerful, approach to accelerators without significant programming effort. The Clacc project is working to bring an open source OpenACC compiler and source code translation capability to the HPC and scientific communities.
Rob Farber is a global technology consultant and author with an extensive background in HPC and in developing machine learning technology that he applies at national laboratories and commercial organizations. Rob can be reached at info@techenablement.com
[i] https://ift.tt/3f028WT
[ii] As of 3/1/2021
[iii] https://ift.tt/3lvdJOH
[iv] https://ift.tt/3cFyB1F
[v] https://ift.tt/2tmjdzF
[vi] https://ift.tt/3rUPvzD
[vii] https://ift.tt/3lmmoTD
[viii] https://ift.tt/313FzbD
[ix] https://www.openmp.org/
[x] https://ift.tt/30RrWMw
[xi] https://ift.tt/3rTRlkA
[xii] OpenACC Profiling Support for Clang and LLVM using Clacc and TAU, Camille Coti, Joel E. Denny, Kevin Huck, Seyong Lee, Allen D. Malony, Sameer Shende, and Jeffrey S. Vetter, ProTools, GA, USA (November 2020)
Dragon Ball fans have their favorite forms when it comes to the Saiyans, and there are some that rank well above others. While Super Saiyan 3 is often left in the dust, some of Goku's other forms are lauded by fans with unanimous praise. Of course, this means fans like to debate which of the Saiyan forms is the most powerful, and the argument popped up this month when a certain set of translations went live. But as it turns out, things aren't quite what they seem.
The whole ordeal began when Dragon Ball FighterZ announced its newest DLC packs. A slew of screenshots went live in English showing how fighters like Gohan reacted to Super Saiyan 4 Goku, and the boy's comment took plenty by surprise.
So the transalarion of the game is not 100% accurate. The Japanese version says “That form of my dad and Vegeta is different from Super Saiyajin Blue and Migate no Gokui ... that transformation exists ......” FighterZ has a weird issue with the English translation in general pic.twitter.com/u8S2g0Dag3
— dragonzero7 (@akai_dragon) March 11, 2021
After all, Gohan was shown saying that Super Saiyan 4 is "nothing like Super Saiyan Blue or Ultra Instinct." The fighter went on to say he's never seen anything as powerful as the new form, so fans began to theorize whether Super Saiyan 4 had gotten a big power boost where scaling is concerned. But now, the Dragon Ball argument has deflated as the line's original Japanese text has gone live with a clearer translation.
According to users like Chronicles on Twitter, the Japanese translates a bit differently than the English localized text. A majority of fan-translators agree Gohan says something more along the lines of, "That form of my Dad and Vegeta is so different from Super Saiyan Blue & Ultra Instinct. I can't believe such a transformation exists."
0commentsRather than pitting the two forms against Super Saiyan 4, this take on the line just says the new look is different. There is nothing to suggest Super Saiyan 4 is more powerful than Super Saiyan Blue or Ultra Instinct. Such a line goes against everything Dragon Ball fans have been told before, so this retcon has stopped the debate in its tracks. So if you were surprised by Gohan's comment, well - you can ignore it for now.
What do you make of this updated translation? Did you ever give mind to the Gohan controversy? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below or hit me up on Twitter @MeganPetersCB.
