When Mary Porter walked into Manhattan's newest Aldi store hunting for bargains, the long-time resident found what she considered a retail miracle in plain sight: a $4 jar of almond butter that costs $22 in her own neighbourhood. Aldi has the reputation for being inexpensive, so I thought I would come and check it out, and by golly, it is amazing, Porter, 79, told the BBC, marvelling at the savings alongside the fresh spinach and organic raspberries filling her basket. To the unassuming passer-by, the storefront is completely hidden, tucked away in an underground parking lot beneath The Ellery, a luxury apartment complex where the cheapest rent starts at nearly $5,000 (£3,725) a month. In fact, the building's own website completely omits the discount grocer from its curated online neighbourhood guide, choosing instead to highlight pricier nearby options like Whole Foods and Brooklyn Fare. But step past the luxury façade into the basement, and the quiet disappears.

But Google Maps has been causing chaos for some shoppers after pranksters set up a'phantom' Aldi in the middle of the Welsh countryside. The small village of Cyffylliog has been inundated with an'endless stream' of confused shoppers looking for somewhere to buy their groceries. Following Google's directions actually brought them to an empty field on a remote farm tens of miles away from the nearest supermarket. While it might have been added as a joke, the fake Aldi has since led to chaos for this small community as deliveries have begun to arrive in search of the non-existent supermarket. The misguided prank has even led to real Aldi deliveries arriving on one farmer's doorstep and becoming stuck on the narrow lanes.

Transcribed speech and user-generated text in Arabic typically contain a mixture of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), the standardized language taught in schools, and Dialectal Arabic (DA), used in daily communications. To handle this variation, previous work in Arabic NLP has focused on Dialect Identification (DI) on the sentence or the token level. However, DI treats the task as binary, whereas we argue that Arabic speakers perceive a spectrum of dialectness, which we operationalize at the sentence level as the Arabic Level of Dialectness (ALDi), a continuous linguistic variable. We introduce the AOC-ALDi dataset (derived from the AOC dataset), containing 127,835 sentences (17% from news articles and 83% from user comments on those articles) which are manually labeled with their level of dialectness. We provide a detailed analysis of AOC-ALDi and show that a model trained on it can effectively identify levels of dialectness on a range of other corpora (including dialects and genres not included in AOC-ALDi), providing a more nuanced picture than traditional DI systems. Through case studies, we illustrate how ALDi can reveal Arabic speakers' stylistic choices in different situations, a useful property for sociolinguistic analyses.

Owing to the data deluge and the Cambrian explosion of machine learning techniques over the past decade, one might have expected the transformation of marketing strategy into a predominantly quantitative discipline by now. The fact that it hasn't happened yet, and the observation that marketing is still influenced by a lot of qualitative inputs can be ascribed to two reasons, in my opinion. The first and principal reason continues to be institutional inertia. Second, there is a significant communication and knowledge gap between data scientists and marketers, owing to their relative lack of familiarity with the other side's perspectives and paradigms. The successful marketer of the next decade is someone who is conversant with management theories of Kotler[1] as well as machine learning advances by Hinton[2]/LeCun[3]/ Ng[4].