data minding

“Google unveiled ... a new tool that reports on ... government monitoring the internet ...Google’s new tool showed, at its launch, the number of requests for information from various countries between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2009. The data is broken down by country, and if you click on a specific country, you get details like what percentage of requests for data removal the company complied with. Google has been candid about the fact that the data is not complete” ("Google and Government Monitoring"/NYT 5/2/10).
Is the data incomplete or are the data incomplete? Many argue that the singular verb is justified by data being a non-count or mass noun. However, non-count nouns refer to entities that “are viewed as an undifferentiated mass, like furniture, bread, cheese, coffee” (Greenbaum, Oxford English Grammar). This definition does not quite work for data since data are “facts that were gathered in order to be studied,” clearly indicating a collection (=similar things brought and kept together) of different pieces of information, for example "all your activities online and off," that are to be scrutinized. This scrutiny is called data mining and a rather spooky business .
Data (plural of datum), like many other nouns is borrowed from Latin. Nouns with a Latin or Greek origin often retain their foreign plural forms. Thus former students of a university are alumni (alumnus), many books have indices (index), and bacteria (bacterium) can cause diseases.
Another Latin word, antenna, takes two different plurals, antennas when it refers to the rabbit ears on top of an outmoded TV or antennae when it denotes the two feelers on an insect’s head. For again other nouns, two different plural forms commonly are accepted, e.g. formulae/formulas or memoranda/memorandums.
But back to data and those nouns that end in –a. They are often treated as singular although they are indeed plural, for example media, trivia or memorabilia. Since the word media refers to all types of news organizations, from newspapers to TV, its meaning is plural. Trivia, unimportant facts - or the stuff of Jeopardy, and memorabilia, the stuff we collect, similarly refer to a group of very distinct pieces and should be followed by a plural verb - as does the word data. Only someone who collects all the right data “can produce an effect which seems remarkable to his neighbor, because the latter has missed the one little point which is the basis of the deduction"(Sherlock Holmes).
By the way, the spaghetti (or rigatoni or gnocchi or ravioli) are cooked, graffiti were painted on the wall, and one cannot eat only one biscotti.

Here are some examples of foreign nouns and their plurals.

alga/algae
amoeba/amoebae
analysis/analyses
antenna/1)antennae/2)antennas
appendix/appendices
axis/axes
bacterium/bacteria
bacillus/bacilli
basis/bases
cactus/cacti
crisis/crises
criterion/criteria
(datum)/data
diagnosis/diagnoses
emphasis/emphases
(erratum)/errata
focus/foci
fungus/fungi
formula/formulae/formulas
hypothesis/hypotheses
index/indices
larva/larvae
matrix/matrices
medium/media
(memorabilium)/memorabilia
(minutia)/minutiae
neurosis/neuroses
oasis/oases
parenthesis/parentheses
phenomenon/phenomena
radius/radii
stimulus/stimuli
syllabus/syllabuses/syllabi
thesis/theses
vertebra/vertebrae

What were they thinking?

Not from The Onion but from Congress:

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing entitled
"Running Out of Time:
Telecommunications Transition Delays Wasting Millions of Federal Dollars"
has been postponed. A new hearing date will be announced soon.

This iffy whether

David Sax does not like the idea of restaurants charging a gratuity fee. After all, “Once that tip is locked in, who cares if the fish is cold” ("Hey, Waiter, How Much Extra Do You Really Expect?"/NYT). Actually, if (or in case, under the condition that) the fish is cold, David Sax has every right to send it back to the kitchen. What the gratuity fee generates, however, is that the personnel may stop caring whether the fish is served steaming hot or lukewarm.
If introduces a condition, a chance that something might happen while whether announces an alternative. For Luis Tavarez, the parent of sixth- and eighth-graders at Creighton it, therefore, doesn’t “matter if my children are learning" ("Arizona Grades Teachers on Fluency"/WSJ). What matters to him, one might hope, is whether they learn something in school.
It might also matter to him how much his children follow every trend, and he may ask them whether they would also follow “if everyone else jumped off a cliff.” Another, similarly trite question is “if the old rule, ‘Men and women can’t be friends’ still remains true” (“Friendships without benefits”/The Daily Aztec). This question requires whether instead of if since it suggests the alternative of this rule being true or false.
A complete mess was created by Donald Rumsfeld (not only) when he declared that “The Federal Government should be the last resort, not the first. Ask if a potential program is truly a federal responsibility or whether it can better be handled privately, by voluntary organizations, or by local or state governments.” Since he addresses the alternative of programs being federal, state, or private responsibilities, he should have encouraged his audience to “ask whether a potential program is truly a federal responsibility or can better be handled by local or state governments, or privately by voluntary organizations.”
Whether the answer would be in favor of government or private organizations, it should be honest because “Lying to a federal investigator is illegal under oath or not” (”Who’s Not Sorry Now?”/NYT), although this sentence should have included the word whether before the alternative “under oath or not.”
The puzzle whether to use if or whether can be solved by asking whether it is possible to replace if with “in case.” Then if is correct. When, however, an alternative is suggested, whether is correct. Hence, the Vicomte’s exclamation “God help us whether or no!” (S. Weyman, The Abbess of Vlaye ) is indeed "senile," while Charles Dickens' wondering “whether she was engaged, whether she was pretty, whether she wore much bustle, and many other whethers of equal importance” ("Sentiment") is deft.