Whenever you have to share digital files, think of the Internet: do it locally. Researchers at the University of Washington and Yale University have found that sharing files through peer-to-peer networking with neighbor computers instead of with far-away machines relieves pressure on the Internet-service provider by as much as five times and speeds up the transfer by 20 percent.
Besides being widely used for murky purposes, P2P is used by several media outlets to deliver legal video content and movies. Around 50 percent to 80 percent of all Internet traffic is generated by bandwidth-greedy P2P exchanges, and it is expected to grow, putting strain on Internet-service providers.
To solve this problem, the researchers propose a system they have dubbed P4P, which consists of sharing files preferentially with nearby computers. The researchers calculated that the average P2P data packet travels 1,000 miles and takes 5.5 connections through major hubs. The new system allows data to travel 160 miles on average and make only 0.89 connections, which reduces Web traffic on connections between cities, where there are more frequent bottlenecks.
A working group consisting of 80 members, including representatives from Internet-service providers and content-supplying companies has been exploring P4P since last year. The research team is presenting a paper on their system this week at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communications meeting in Seattle. —Maria José Viñas
36 Responses to Share Locally, Unclog the Internet
yabba - June 7, 2012 at 5:36 am
That’s all fine and correct. However is a perfectly respectable word, it has the uses you describe and Strunk and White are wrong again.
On the other hand, the however at the beginning of sentences, with a comma, is just one way of presenting contrasting information. Part of the skill of a good writer is to choose well among the available sentence constructions for functions like this (or even just the alternative expressions that can be used in this sentence-beginning role).
Editing English written by non-native English speakers (usually scientists), I do have a tendency to thin out (not eliminate!) the howevers. Though my impression is that badly chosen howevers are less common than superfluous furthermores, moreovers and neverthelesses, they still often seem to be a result of writers drawing on a limited palette of sentence constructions and expressions and having a less-than-skilled-native feel for the order of information and the kinds of linkages between pieces of information that make an English paragraph coherent.
I’ve seen one article (Koppel and Ordan, referred to in http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3255 ) that seems to say that however, nevertheless, furthermore and moreover are significantly overrepresented in translations into English. It’s an easy enough guess that this may be due to the translators being reluctant to recast paragraphs and turn sentences around to achieve other kinds of linkage. I’d be very interested to hear from someone who actually knows about this rather than just having seen one random paper, as I have.
djweatherford - June 7, 2012 at 6:59 am
I appear to be so old school that I never learned that “however” couldn’t start a sentence, but then we studied folks like Wilde in my day, and he seems to have used it with abandon to delightful effect. I’m not sure I understand any prohibitions against it—but then, I willingly admit I learned the “rules” a half a century ago.
David Cantor - June 7, 2012 at 8:14 am
Maybe we should just gather up all the copies of S&W and start a really big bonfire. I guess the electronic copies would have to be degaussed or something.
Richard Grayson - June 7, 2012 at 9:02 am
As a writing teacher, I’ve always told my students to ignore any “rule” saying that a sentence cannot begin with any particular word, whether it’s “however,” “but,” “so,” “and,” or others. Is there any particular sentence-beginning word that people think is forbidden?
yabba - June 7, 2012 at 9:34 am
If I were advising people on how to write, I’d just want them to be able to think of the alternatives and make a conscious choice. An alternative to beginning a sentence with So might be to combine it with the previous sentence with a because; an alternative to However might involve although. It might be possible to just drop an initial And without losing the sense that the sentence is supplying something additional to the previous one. And so on. If someone is aware of these things but still wants to begin the sentence with one of these words, then they probably have a reason for doing so.
John Given - June 7, 2012 at 10:16 am
“A spider’s web is stronger than it looks. Although it is made of thin, delicate strands, the web is not easily broken. >>>However,<<< a web gets torn every day by the insects that kick around in it …"
–Charlotte's Web, p. 55, by E. B. White.
crunchycon - June 7, 2012 at 10:42 am
Hear, hear!
crunchycon - June 7, 2012 at 10:42 am
Yabba — one note: “However is a perfectly respectable word, it has the” Runon sentence. the comma should be a semi-colon, separating 2 complete sentences. You are correct in assuming that the overuse in non-native speakers is primarily due to translations. The use of “ergo” is also very common — rather uncommon among native speakers.
crunchycon - June 7, 2012 at 10:46 am
Except in colloquial, nonformal usage, beginning a sentence with a simple conjunction, such as “but”, “so”, “and”, “or”, “nor”, etc., is bad style; it creates a fragment, as it were. You are doing a disservice to your students by not pointing this out. In creative writing or informatal usage, there is absolutely no problem, but in academic papers, articles for publication, or formal essays, it is incorrect usage.
dank48 - June 7, 2012 at 10:50 am
As has been pointed out before, E. B. White was a hell of a fine writer, but he nodded, big time, with the revival of Strunk’s little book. White broke many if not most of the rules that he had learned from Strunk, apparently without realizing it, and certainly without doing any harm to his own work.
The unquestioning acceptance of S&W over the decades, despite a plethora of evidence, internal and external, of its shortcomings, seems to me like a secular example of fundamentalism. We humans love the idea that all the answers we want (and believe we need, which isn’t the same thing, of course) can be found in one infallible book, written down for all to see. Whether that book is The Elements of Style or the Bible or the Qu’ran, every example of its fallibility is met by true-believers with frantic wagon-circling, defending the indefensible. It’s time to admit that things just aren’t as simple as we’d like them to be, and there’s no cut-and-dried, prefabricated substitute for thinking, no shortcut to understanding.
Thanks be for iconoclasts, Professor Pullum.
yabba - June 7, 2012 at 11:27 am
1. See http://grammar.about.com/od/c/g/comspliceterm.htm , including interesting quotes from Strunk and White.
2. assuming that the overuse in non-native speakers is primarily due to translations. I didn’t. I suppose you could say “due to interference by a source language / L1″. But I was thinking of a) non-native speakers not having a full spectrum of compositional tools at their disposal when writing in English (not translating), and b) translators not using the same spectrum of tools they (as competent writers of English) would probably use if they were writing freely.
lisalita - June 7, 2012 at 11:27 am
I still won’t start a sentence with “however,” and I like it that way. I don’t argue that it is a grammatical error, but I find it stylistically displeasing.
clasfaculty - June 7, 2012 at 11:35 am
crunchycon, you are absolutely wrong about that. It’s time for you to unlearn that superstition.
jffoster - June 7, 2012 at 12:40 pm
That’s fine, lisalita. One can of course use which style one ever likes, and we all have things we find varyingly displeasing. What the style and grammar pre- and proscribers are however not free to do is claim that however at the beginning of a sentence is “ungrammatical” when it manifestly empirically ain’t. I believe it was Daniel Patrick Moynihan who once said that one may be entitled to one’s own opinion, but not to one’s own facts.
Richard Grayson - June 7, 2012 at 12:56 pm
And how!
gtmarks - June 7, 2012 at 1:21 pm
Could it be that yabba simply omitted a serial comma? “However is a perfectly respectable word, it has the uses you describe[,] and Strunk and White are wrong again.” Seems perfectly grammatical to me.
And as long as we’re correcting one another—the adjective “run-on” should be hyphenated, the word “semicolon” shouldn’t be, and you should spell out the word “two” except when you’re referring to the integer between 1 and 3 as such.
gtmarks - June 7, 2012 at 1:26 pm
Never begin a sentence with “facto” unless the final word of the preceding sentence was “ipso.”
Kristen Stieffel - June 7, 2012 at 1:48 pm
I agree, three syllables and a comma are a bit of a speed bump to put at the start of a sentence. I like “however” in the middle of a sentence, though. It can have a nice rhythm. The problem, of course, is that heavy-handed editors will impose their preference (whichever it is) on writers who prefer things the other way, wasting time changing something that’s grammatically correct either way.
gtmarks - June 7, 2012 at 1:59 pm
My dear colleagues, please! I read Strunk & White with delight as a child, and I will always have fond memories of it. However, I agree with Prof. Pullum. Hopefully, he has laid this issue to rest.
I had intended to add to his stockpile of literary examples of the forbidden “however” usage one from Shakespeare, but I was surprised to discover that “however” is quite rare in Shakespeare’s plays. Counting both “however” and “howe’er” (in any position in a sentence), there is just one occurrence in Hamlet, two occurrences in King Lear, one occurrence in Macbeth, one occurrence in Othello, and not a single occurrence in either part of Henry IV or in Henry V. Has the frequency of use of this word increased over the last four centuries?
Socratease2 - June 7, 2012 at 2:43 pm
Bad style? And who exactly is the arbiter of that? Academic papers, published or not, are riddled with this bad style of which you speak. A focus on achieving a clarity of expression that creates smooth transitions and ease of understanding for the reader seems a better use of time than trying to find static rules and arbitrarily elevating them into sacrosanct laws of expression.
lisalita - June 7, 2012 at 3:03 pm
[mildly] jffoster, I just *said* it wasn’t a grammatical error….
Jonathon Owen - June 7, 2012 at 3:35 pm
“Yet anyone who reports on what the facts show is likely to be charged with dumbing down, or ignoring the rules, or being left-wing, or thinking that anything goes.”
I think this is the biggest problem with traditional prescriptivism—a frustrating refusal to address criticisms. How do you argue with someone who assumes a priori that the rules are valid? At best, you get baseless assertions about how English grammar works. At worst, you get turned into a twisted strawman.
And yes, there are reasonable prescriptivists who accept evidence and are willing to revise or discard rules, but they are sadly too rare.
jffoster - June 7, 2012 at 3:45 pm
Which is why I said “That’s fine….” and agreed with you. Sorry if my meaning wasn’t clear. You arent guilty of the commission indicted in my last two sentences.
crunchycon - June 7, 2012 at 3:53 pm
Were that yabba’s intent, then, yes, it would be perfectly correct. :-) As for run-on and semicolon, point taken. As for the use of the “2″, I plead texting interference.
crunchycon - June 7, 2012 at 3:57 pm
Nope. Not wrong. “but” etc. create fragments. they are coordinating conjunctions and are not properly used, in FORMAL writing (please note) beginning a sentence, when used as coordinating conjunctions. The sentence “But for the bad weather, we could enjoy the garden.” is correct because in this case, “but” is not a coordinating conjunction.
clasfaculty - June 8, 2012 at 11:06 am
[In reply to crunchycon's repeated assertion.]
No, wrong, even for “formal” writing. Please consult a reputable style guide. I’ll help. Here’s what Garner says about beginning sentences with “and”: “It is rank superstition that this coordinating conjunction cannot properly begin a sentence.” To support this assertion, he lists eight quotes from grammarians spanning 1870 to 1997. One of them points out that the “OED gives examples ranging from the 10th to the 19th century,” and that “the Bible is full of them.” Garner adds seven examples (spanning the 20th century) of outstanding writers starting sentences with “and” in their “formal” writing. It’s trivially easy to find thousands of more examples of this type.
You are of course free to avoid such constructions in your own prose. But they have never been wrong. (And my last two sentences are not fragments!) So please stop inflicting this superstition on others.
11117994 - June 9, 2012 at 12:04 pm
The problem is one of absolutes, which is not a problem White has in this case. The word he used is “avoid.” He could certainly have used a stronger word had he chosen to. In his day, the semicolon was still alive and well; sentences containing one were not a rare sight. Today, we’ve all but lost the subtle one-two timing punch no other sentence structure can deliver.
Independent clauses have long been started with adverbs, whether single-word, phrases, or clauses. “However” and “therefore” (frequently tagged with the sick-sounding label “conjunctive adverbs”) are among the many choices for modifying the clause that follows them. Their unique quality is their utility in conveying the same meaning carried by the conjunctions ”but” and “so”, but without quite the quick jump past a mere comma; the second punch comes with a slight delay. Yes, most of the time the difference goes unnoticed. Not always, however.
px7_mq9 - June 9, 2012 at 7:16 pm
I often wonder how much this myth is caused by students of Latin, who learn from Wheelock et al. that words like “audem” (do I remember correctly?) must be used post-positively. I suspect even the Romans treated this as a matter of style rather than correctness, but I have no real evidence on this account. Any help out there?
yabba - June 10, 2012 at 7:32 am
But there are more alternatives to however. Sometimes the information “A. However, B.” could be better presented as “Although B, A.” (where there are many alternatives to although). Or you could use an “on the one hand … on the other” construction. There might be a feature of the information that you can use to create the contast, e.g. if you are reporting contrasting opinions (“A proposed …, which was criticized by B, who pointed out …). And even if you keep the same sentence construction, there’s a list of alternative expressions such as In contrast, On the contrary:, Despite this, Having said that, Anyhow, Instead, Rather, Nevertheless, Conversely …
wclibrary - June 11, 2012 at 11:58 am
Two reasons to tell students not to begin with “however”: 1.) makes them a tiny bit less likely to splice; 2.) makes them dimly recall parts of speech, which might discourage mistaking other adverbs–”thus,” “therefore,” “hence,” “rather,” etc.–for conjunctions.
And maybe 2a.), in common English syntax sentences rarely begin with adverbs (“Quickly I ran”? etc.)
Karl Narveson - June 12, 2012 at 5:07 pm
“Ago” comes to mind.
gtmarks - June 12, 2012 at 9:23 pm
Surely you jest.
dank48 - June 13, 2012 at 10:28 am
Students of Latin who became teachers of English (and other languages) have caused all kinds of confusion. The unsplittable Latin infinitive is probably the source of the idiotic prohibition in English. As if the grammar of Latin had anything to do with that of English . . .
And once upon a time, German textbooks (I mean English-language texts teaching the German language) mindlessly insisted on presenting forms in the sequence:
Singular Plural
Masc. Fem. Neut. Masc. Fem. Neut.
Nominative der die das die die die
Genitive des (s) der des (s) der der der
Dative dem (e) der dem (e) den (n) den (n) den (n)
Accusative den die das die die die
and for all I know may still do so, because that makes sense in Latin. (Well, it would if Latin had definite articles, but you see what I mean.) It’s crazy in German because it obscures the easy-to-remember groupings:
Singular Plural
Masc. Neut. Fem. M./F./N.
Nominative der das die die
Accusative den das die die
Dative dem (e) dem (e) der den (n)
Genitive des (s) des (s) der der
As if that had anything to do with the discussion . . .
mbelvadi - June 16, 2012 at 6:02 pm
Wouldn’t telling them not to begin a sentence with “however” increase the chance that they’ll splice, as they decide to convert “blah, blah. However, blah” to “blah blah, however, blah” in an effort to blindly avoid starting the second sentence with “however”?
leembrown - June 19, 2012 at 9:21 pm
Author Geoff Pullum (“The ‘However’ Myth”) apparently misunderstands Elements of Style by Strunk and White. That excellent and enduring book is about style, not grammatical correctness, a distinction that Pullum does not note and may not understand. However (sorry about that!), he would do well to note the Strunk and White admonition to “keep related words together.” The last sentence of his essay is, “Break free, and leave such linguistically unmotivated nonsense behind.” While correct, the sentence would be improved if he had written, “Break free, and leave behind such linguistically unmotivated nonsense.”
Lee Brown
shar6480 - July 19, 2012 at 10:54 pm
OK, I’m admittedly a wee bit behind on my reading. I thoroughly enjoyed Professor Pullman’s treatise on “However”. However (couldn’t resist), he does presume that Oscar Wilde represents his characters “as speaking Standard English correctly.” But what about Act I wherein Algernon states: ”If it wasn’t for Bunbury’s extraordinary bad health, …” or in Act 2, “If it was my business, I wouldn’t talk about it.” Should not the word be “were” and not “was”?