SPELLING BEE RUNS OUT OF WORDS AFTER EPIC DUEL
CHICAGO : A spelling bee competition in the US has been tied between a 13-year-old Indian-origin boy and a 11-year-old girl after they duelled for 66 rounds until finally the judges ran out of words. Kush Sharma, a seventh-grader at Frontier School of Innovation, and
Sophia Hoffman, a fifth-grader at Highland Park Elementary, battled in Missouri county’s annual spelling bee competition with both of them getting every word right. Finally, the judges ran out of words and the contest between them will resume on March 8 for a spot in the National Spelling Bee in Washington. “We did not want to just go through the dictionary and give them more words. We feared that someone would get a word that was too easy while the other would get an extremely difficult word,” said Mary Olive Thompson, outreach coordinator for Kansas City Public Library where the event was held. “We wanted to be a bit more calculated and neutral, and we wanted to give each an equal opportunity,” she was quoted as saying by CNN. PTI Visually-impaired people could use the phone to map out a room and use a software to get alerts about obstacles on the way IANS crust appeared just 160 million years after the very formation of the solar system. The finding supports the notion of a “cool early Earth” where temperatures were low enough to sustain oceans, and perhaps life, earlier than previously thought, a researcher said. REUTERS LONDON: A Bosnian man has claimed that he has the ability to stick just anything to his body. Muhibija Buljubasic claims that he can stick anything to his body, including forks, spoons and all manner of kitchen utensils to his body and face, by radiating a special energy, the Mirror reported. Buljubasic said that he discovered the special ability of his about five years ago. He said that he is also able to stick objects like mobile phones and TV remote controls to his face too. ANI LONDON: Linguistics experts at the University of Glasgow are launching the first project of its kind to measure how UK Parliamentary language has changed over the past 200 years.
The researchers will analyse over 2.3 billion words compiled from Parliamentary speeches made between 1803 and 2003 and use them to chart the popularity of various topics such as war, honesty, honour, homosexuality and terrorism.
The research hopes to build up a picture of when and why certain topics are raised in Parliament and how their use and significance has evolved over time. They will also be looking at how the language of individual MPs changed over the course of their terms in office, a university release said.
The 15 month project will use Hansard, the official Westminster records, which contain reports of all Parliamentary speeches, votes, ministerial statements and parliamentary questions given in the House of Lords and the House of Commons.
The project is split into two phases; in the first researchers will develop a computer programme which is capable of sorting through and aggregating the huge amounts of lexical data.
In the second part of the project, the team will use the software to hone in on key phrases and concepts that recur in the corpus over time. By measuring the frequency and context of the appearances, they will build up the most detailed analysis yet of the shifting concerns of Parliament over the past two centuries.