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October 29, 2005
Jonathan Ross, Stephen Fry and British TV
Caught Jonathan Ross's Friday Night show on the BBC tonight. Like many good people he's a radio guy (as opposed to a TV creature). Unlike many cinema critics, he's actually a pretty good show host. And his team was smart enough to invite Mr. Stephen Fry over - the man is as witty and British as it gets, a Perrier Prize winner (Edinburgh fringe) and Doctor Who author.
Maybe I'll revise my plan to not pay for a £120 TV license...
Posted by dr at 12:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 25, 2005
Fresh Feshie
Spent the weekend in the Scottish Highlands, staying with the friendly Cairngorm Gliding Club at Feshiebridge.
Posted by dr at 12:08 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
October 16, 2005
Jobs for Women and Whites
Discussion on a mailing list for European researchers in the field of language technology:
Should a job announcement for a female lecturer be allowed?
The Prince Sultan University-College for Women, Saudi-Arabia, is currently looking for a lecturer / assistant professor in Computational Linguistics. The catch: they're looking for a woman, and a woman only. The reaction from one reader was strong: I believe it unacceptable ... to accept advertisements for positions which are not reflecting equal opportunities between men and women (Christopher Brewster, U Sheffield).
Obviously, the university is established as a men-free space, and that's not surprising given that Saudi-Arabia is one of the most strict and old-fashioned muslim countries in the world, despised even by their slightly more easygoing neighbors (as I've found out myself when I was in the UAE). Female students can't be taught by male lecturers, of course.
The question that immediately popped up (and it usually does) is: should be apply Western cultural standards to foreign countries? Well, the answer is simple. Human rights are universal: we should condemn racism and intolerance, no matter where. The cry for tolerance between cultures is not more than a '68-style lala-land ignorance. Or, would you be happy about an ad like the following (fiction, due to Eric Atwell, U Leeds):
Springbok University - College for Whites is a newly established institution of higher education in S.A. ...
As we are starting computational Linguistic courses this
spring (Feb 5th), we are searching for a full-time qualified
white lecturer with an MA or Ph.D degree [...]
In our western society, women and men now have similar professional opportunities. In most cases, jobs are given to people based on merit, not their gender. Affirmative Action, that is, positive discrimination againt the majority, will give advantages to individuals who don't deserve it. It violates the basic principle of equality.
But we're not using the same reference. This is about Saudi-Arabia, where "literacy figures for women ... are 48%, compared to 73% for men;", and where "opportunities for university education are still slim, gender-biased and religiously oriented, and restrictions put in place for overseas study as female students would have to be without male chaperone" (Sasha Calhoun, U Edinburgh).
Women and men do not have similar basic options in Saudi-Arabia, and the retrovert, conservative society does have a negative and even violent impact on every free country in the world. We should applaud every attempt to improve education for women. Of course, it is only one step on the way to equality and fairness. But making a step forward is better than going sideways.
Pragmatics at work: Violate the principle of men and women working together in order to improve conditions for everyone in the long run.
That said, I guess they'd have to promise me an oil-field before I'd go to Saudi-Arabia for a job. As a man, or as a woman.
Posted by dr at 5:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 9, 2005
Today is 한글 day!
On October 9th, 1446, King Sejong the Great proposed to reform Korean writing, which had used complicated Chinese characters, which the common people could rarely read and write. Korean's Hangul (한글), widely used today, was a proper alphabet that is, even from today's phonological (slash, linguistic) perspective a pretty smart way of writing, as Bill Poser at the Language Log points out.
On a side-note for us computer geeks: Aquamacs Emacs, the friendly editor for OS X that I've been working on recently, now has support for Hangul characters thanks to 최만수.
Computing in general has come a long way in supporting different input methods and making a variety of languages available to users concurrently. For example, I could easily copy the above characters from a web page into Emacs in between English text, save and load them, copy & paste them into Movable Type, and they rendered perfectly in the resulting webpage (this one!). This all happened without specifying any encodings, without changing the system's general language (for input methods). It all works perfectly as expected, mainly thanks to Unicode and its consequent use on the Mac. A couple of years ago, these things were not natural. American English was the standard, and everything else just plain difficult, as you can see from E-mail addresses and URLs that -- even now -- rarely use diacritical characters such as ü or é.
Posted by dr at 10:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 4, 2005
English Spelling Nazi
Once I've become rich, I will donate a lot of money to a good cause. The good cause of the week is the (imaginary) "Spelling Foundation Ireland". Someone needs to tell people who put big letters on signs on busses and in airports that "Please insure you have a valid ticket" should give up an 'i' and add an 'e'. They should write "airport by-laws" when they prohibit passengers to step down on the tarmac, not "bye-laws" (bye-bye!). PS.: A reader points out, that bye-law is a correct alternative. He is right. Language is illogical.
Honestly: grammar Nazis aren't what the world needs, and I find spelling utterly unimportant. In my view, the documentary Spellbound exposed a ridiculous amount of iditotic überachievement in a completely unhelpful category of human ability.
But the bottom line is: knowing and adhering to conventions (and that's what spelling is all about) helps us communicate. It's easier to read: you don't get that itchy feeling in the back of your head.
As some of my Irish friends would put it: "For fuck's sake, John, laarrrrrn to spell before you put up any more soigns, will you?"
Posted by dr at 2:31 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack