“Today, we can find a kind of wife auction in Shanghai. It’s more of a super market than a simple wife auction and it’s merely another form of the dating or match-making websites that we know in the west. Little papers are hung in the park, and a quick description is written. Then people come and choose a woman, as in the supermarket. This is not, however, a financial transaction”.

Potentially, this technology works from far away which means we will not necessarily be aware of the analysis being applied to our speech.

What’s worse is the prospect of this technology being democratised, as an iPhone application for example. Everyone will be checking everyone else with regards the veracity of their speech.

That said, as a high school English teacher, this might be useful as a means to check whether the dog really did eat your homework. I guess there’s a positive side to everything!

I’ll try and get some transcripts and translations prepared for the videos you’ve added. There’s some rich vocabulary in there.

It was a great idea to include Mika’s comments about the man that inspired him to write the song. Some people are never happy, I guess!