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This week Rebecca and I worked together on creating person and patient objects in python. It had been a while since I had done this in python, so I took some time getting familiarized with how to do this. Our code is pretty basic, it takes in user input (name, smoking status, diabetes status, etc) and assigned it to a person/patient object. Next week we will be working on reworking the code so that is takes in this information from the tags in our patient files.

 

....the word "blog" has now lost all meaning and I might never use it properly again.

Okay, so my goal has been to have something (preferably a Mystery Linguistics Theater something) posted every Wednesday, but this week has been really busy, so I don't even has a short prepared for you.  Instead, please accept this list of other really awesome linguistics-related blogs!

(I'm working on some pretty cool MLT posts, but I need to do a bit more research before they are ready. Please stay tuned!)

Awesome blogs that I learn stuff from:

Language Log -- I don't really know what to say about this blog, because I've been following it for years and it covers such a wide variety of topics in a very in-depth way.  In some ways LL inspired my MLT posts... except for the part where the contributors to LL are actual linguists and all my degrees are in Computer Science.

The Lingua File is another source for really interesting linguistics news and research, with an added bonus of some nice "Intro to Linguistics" posts.  I also enjoy their "Get it Right" posts, which address common errors in English.

Speaking of getting things right, i adore Grammar Girl.  While it's true that language is always changing, this site is an awesome resource for checking common errors in formal writing.  I still go back to it when I'm not sure about passive voice or who vs. whom.http://zipfslaw.org/

Heather Froehlich researches linguistics and gender, and has some really interesting findings.  Her blog hasn't been updated in a few months, but the archives are worth checking out, especially if you are interested in corpus linguistics.

Lynne Murphy writes the "Separated by a common language" blog, which examines the differences between American and British English.  While certain differences between them are fairly well known (e.g., pants versus trousers), this blog gets into some of the nitty-gritty that you might not be aware of, (ir)regardless* of what side of the ocean you are on.

Kevin B. Cohen posts interesting things about other languages (mostly French and Chinese lately over at his Zipf's Law blog. Kevin also does research in Biomedical Text Mining, so he's the only person on this list I've actually met in person (that totally makes me basically famous now, right? Because I know someone from the Internet?)

*just kidding, never use irrergardless.  I mean, language changes and all but COME ON.**

** I bet there is a really interesting paper somewhere on the phrase "come on".