Asterix is aimed at small children? No, it's aimed at all ages. The stories are packed with historical (and in particular classical) allusions, and highly sophisticated plays on words. Like all works of genius, it operates on many levels.
I owe my fluency in French to Asterix - started back in 1965 while studying for A Level French, and never looked back. I not only actively encourage my secondary school English as a Second Language students to read comics, but get them to create their own - drawing and writing them as a class exercise. It's one of the most successful classroom activities that I know.
There's nothing new in this study - phoneticians have known for years that it's possible to identify a baby's mother-tongue from its earliest babblings. My phonetics professor, back in 1976, gave a lecture on this very subject.
Oh dear, hoist by mine own petard! Form and content are given equal weighting in the Cambridge examinations, which is why I find them particularly effective in preparing my students (who are Indonesian) for eventual study in overseas universities.
To return to the topic, I don't see how any machine-marking algorithm could possibly evaluate content other than by matching a pre-programmed list of words and phrases relevant to the essay topic. It would not be able to measure the taking of a stance and the development of an argument in a disputation, nor assess the effective use of adjectives, adverbs and rhetorical devices in a descriptive essay.
Marking for form would be limited to a simplistic check of elementary grammatical accuracy - one hopes it would be an improvement on the grammar checker provided by Microsoft, which is a truly dreadful piece of work. What concerns me most is that the advent of machine marking will inevitably lead to a pernicious backwash effect on teaching, as the pressure for exam passes and high grades will put an unhealthy emphasis on the learning of tricks and techniques for writing a bland, formulaic composition that contains as many of the known triggers for gaining marks as possible.
I teach IGCSE first and second language English, AS and A level English, IELTS, and the occasional TOEFL course. In these examinations there, is in fact, an "interests the reader" criterion explicitly set out in the marking scheme.
As to the argument that writing mistakes and errors correlate with poor quality writing, I can agree to a certain extent. If the examinee is a native English speaker, it may well hold true in the majority of cases. But if English is their second - or a foreign - language, there is a much weaker correlation.
Language register (degrees of formality) is important in these examinations, especially the IGCSE and AS level English. There is also an important differentiation between grammar (the basic rules of language) and structure (putting elements together using appropriate linking words and punctuation). Good structure possesses the quality that linguists call cohesion. Nowadays examinations tend to be less strict about grammar, and place more emphasis on the command of structure.
My own take on machine marking of English composition may be summed up in two words - utter bollocks.
My experience is quite the opposite. The school where I work switched to Office 2007 a few months ago. Most of the teachers and admin staff have asked for a re-install of Office 2003 because they don't like the ribbon, and don't find it intuitive. My fellow users range from power-freaks to beginners, so it's not simply a case of familiarity with menus breeding contempt for the ribbon. The obvious solution is to provide both menus and ribbons and let users decide which they prefer.
The reason I originally moved to Firefox was its no-nonsense, no frills, lean and mean functionality. Each 'upgrade' I install impresses me less and less, and it seems to me to be in danger of losing the plot.
"At Monroe, students take a Liberal Arts core and combine it with their program of choice to ensure a well rounded, comprehensive education. Programs include Accounting, Baking and Pastry, Business Management, Criminal Justice, Culinary Arts, General Business, Health Services Administration, Hospitality Management, Information Technology, Medical Administration, Medical Assisting, Nursing, and Public Health."
This mishmash of subjects doesn't inspire confidence in Monroe's academic focus, and one wonders about the academic rigour of its courses. It doesn't appear to be a traditional degree mill, but there's a disturbing vagueness behind the gushing self-adulatory rhetoric that sounds a warning note.
A mediocre degree from such an institution can't be expected to give its graduates any hope of beating stiff competition from traditional degrees awarded by more substantial institutions.
I couldn't agree more. In its day WP 5.1 was all I needed for both private and professional writing. My current word processor is TextPad because it's the words that are important, not a pot-pourri of fancy layout and formatting. I want to focus on what I'm writing without meandering through menus, writhing with ribbons and being distracted by the myriad arty-farty baubles that pass for a user interface.
Back in the early 70s a little firm in Yorkshire, the Scolar Press, specialised in the production and publication of high-quality facsimiles of old books (16th and 17th century). They were faced with the problem of scanning extremely rare and valuable volumes that were too fragile to be fully opened and placed on a flatbed scanner. Their solution was to invent a narrow glass prism that could be inserted into a slightly-opened book, and by clever optics produce an exact, undistorted, optical image of a page.
I had to laugh and cry when this story broke. The benighted members of the Authors Guild are either ignorant of - or have conveniently forgotten - that in the early days of the novel, public reading was the norm: private reading was for those fortunate enough to be able to read. The widespread popularity and renown of our most famous novelists grew from oral dissemination. Charles Dickens himself was famous for his dramatic and emotional renderings of his masterpieces in packed public reading events. Shame on the so-called, self-styled 'Authors Guild'. They are the true inheritors of Grub Street.
Yes, 'casualty' can mean death or injury. The language point is that 'minor casualty' sounds wrong. In linguistic terms, these words don't usually go together (make a collocation), whereas 'minor' and 'injury' do.
More to the point perhaps is that the Queen has the Order of Merit in her say, and someone as pre-eminent as Stephen Hawking would be a most appropriate recipient of this honour. However, membership is limited to 24 worthies, and there's no vacancy at the moment.
I can tolerate infantile tantrums, but I really hate sloppy use of language. Is our esteemed correspondent referring to people who copulate with coprophiliac goats, or coprophiliac individuals who enjoy the carnal pleasures afforded by goats?
William Shakespeare himself was a victim of piracy by Elizabethan and Jacobean printers, who would send their agents to see his plays in order to memorize and reproduce them for illicit reproduction and sale. An excellent account of this practice may be found in "Shakespeare's Fight with the Pirates" by Alfred W Pollard. Plus ca change...
For anyone who'd like to tell the clowns at this legal sideshow exactly what they think of them, there's a Legal Matter Submission form at http://www.cybertriallawyer.com/legal-matter/.
I own my telephones: they do not own me. My house phone is unplugged every night, and during the day when I need peace and quiet. My mobile is switched off when I don't want to receive calls: recorded messages allow me to call back who I want, when I want. Unless callers identify themselves I disconnect without hesitation. If it's someone calling me cold who launches into a sales patter, I just put the phone down and make myself a leisurely cup of coffee. If it's someone I don't know and don't want to talk to, I politely say goodbye and disconnect.
Telemarketers predicate their activity on the human compulsion to answer the phone, and they abuse people's innate politeness and good nature. They work on the fear factor - that any call might be an emergency, or their boss.
Time is precious. Tranquility is important. Sleep is essential. The telemarketing brigades deprive us of these things, and seriously affect our quality of life. Getting your number on a 'do not call' list is only one item in the armoury against intrusion - simply asserting our right to privacy is our greatest weapon.
As a long-time Jakarta resident I have but one comment to make on this sorry state of affairs - whatever money changes hands, it will only go to enrich certain members of the greedy ruling elite in this corruption-riddled country. The poor will see neither monetary relief nor cheap vaccine.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pasta caring.
Asterix is aimed at small children? No, it's aimed at all ages. The stories are packed with historical (and in particular classical) allusions, and highly sophisticated plays on words. Like all works of genius, it operates on many levels.
I owe my fluency in French to Asterix - started back in 1965 while studying for A Level French, and never looked back. I not only actively encourage my secondary school English as a Second Language students to read comics, but get them to create their own - drawing and writing them as a class exercise. It's one of the most successful classroom activities that I know.
There's nothing new in this study - phoneticians have known for years that it's possible to identify a baby's mother-tongue from its earliest babblings. My phonetics professor, back in 1976, gave a lecture on this very subject.
F***!
Oh dear, hoist by mine own petard! Form and content are given equal weighting in the Cambridge examinations, which is why I find them particularly effective in preparing my students (who are Indonesian) for eventual study in overseas universities.
To return to the topic, I don't see how any machine-marking algorithm could possibly evaluate content other than by matching a pre-programmed list of words and phrases relevant to the essay topic. It would not be able to measure the taking of a stance and the development of an argument in a disputation, nor assess the effective use of adjectives, adverbs and rhetorical devices in a descriptive essay.
Marking for form would be limited to a simplistic check of elementary grammatical accuracy - one hopes it would be an improvement on the grammar checker provided by Microsoft, which is a truly dreadful piece of work. What concerns me most is that the advent of machine marking will inevitably lead to a pernicious backwash effect on teaching, as the pressure for exam passes and high grades will put an unhealthy emphasis on the learning of tricks and techniques for writing a bland, formulaic composition that contains as many of the known triggers for gaining marks as possible.
I teach IGCSE first and second language English, AS and A level English, IELTS, and the occasional TOEFL course. In these examinations there, is in fact, an "interests the reader" criterion explicitly set out in the marking scheme.
As to the argument that writing mistakes and errors correlate with poor quality writing, I can agree to a certain extent. If the examinee is a native English speaker, it may well hold true in the majority of cases. But if English is their second - or a foreign - language, there is a much weaker correlation.
Language register (degrees of formality) is important in these examinations, especially the IGCSE and AS level English. There is also an important differentiation between grammar (the basic rules of language) and structure (putting elements together using appropriate linking words and punctuation). Good structure possesses the quality that linguists call cohesion. Nowadays examinations tend to be less strict about grammar, and place more emphasis on the command of structure.
My own take on machine marking of English composition may be summed up in two words - utter bollocks.
My experience is quite the opposite. The school where I work switched to Office 2007 a few months ago. Most of the teachers and admin staff have asked for a re-install of Office 2003 because they don't like the ribbon, and don't find it intuitive. My fellow users range from power-freaks to beginners, so it's not simply a case of familiarity with menus breeding contempt for the ribbon. The obvious solution is to provide both menus and ribbons and let users decide which they prefer.
The reason I originally moved to Firefox was its no-nonsense, no frills, lean and mean functionality. Each 'upgrade' I install impresses me less and less, and it seems to me to be in danger of losing the plot.
"At Monroe, students take a Liberal Arts core and combine it with their program of choice to ensure a well rounded, comprehensive education. Programs include Accounting, Baking and Pastry, Business Management, Criminal Justice, Culinary Arts, General Business, Health Services Administration, Hospitality Management, Information Technology, Medical Administration, Medical Assisting, Nursing, and Public Health."
This mishmash of subjects doesn't inspire confidence in Monroe's academic focus, and one wonders about the academic rigour of its courses. It doesn't appear to be a traditional degree mill, but there's a disturbing vagueness behind the gushing self-adulatory rhetoric that sounds a warning note.
A mediocre degree from such an institution can't be expected to give its graduates any hope of beating stiff competition from traditional degrees awarded by more substantial institutions.
I couldn't agree more. In its day WP 5.1 was all I needed for both private and professional writing. My current word processor is TextPad because it's the words that are important, not a pot-pourri of fancy layout and formatting. I want to focus on what I'm writing without meandering through menus, writhing with ribbons and being distracted by the myriad arty-farty baubles that pass for a user interface.
Back in the early 70s a little firm in Yorkshire, the Scolar Press, specialised in the production and publication of high-quality facsimiles of old books (16th and 17th century). They were faced with the problem of scanning extremely rare and valuable volumes that were too fragile to be fully opened and placed on a flatbed scanner. Their solution was to invent a narrow glass prism that could be inserted into a slightly-opened book, and by clever optics produce an exact, undistorted, optical image of a page.
I had to laugh and cry when this story broke. The benighted members of the Authors Guild are either ignorant of - or have conveniently forgotten - that in the early days of the novel, public reading was the norm: private reading was for those fortunate enough to be able to read. The widespread popularity and renown of our most famous novelists grew from oral dissemination. Charles Dickens himself was famous for his dramatic and emotional renderings of his masterpieces in packed public reading events. Shame on the so-called, self-styled 'Authors Guild'. They are the true inheritors of Grub Street.
Yes, 'casualty' can mean death or injury. The language point is that 'minor casualty' sounds wrong. In linguistic terms, these words don't usually go together (make a collocation), whereas 'minor' and 'injury' do.
Comodo has got to be a contender. Their new Internet Security package looks very good: http://www.comodo.com/
Even better, just say the only copy was on a laptop that was accidentally left on a commuter train at the London railway station of your choice.
More to the point perhaps is that the Queen has the Order of Merit in her say, and someone as pre-eminent as Stephen Hawking would be a most appropriate recipient of this honour. However, membership is limited to 24 worthies, and there's no vacancy at the moment.
I can tolerate infantile tantrums, but I really hate sloppy use of language. Is our esteemed correspondent referring to people who copulate with coprophiliac goats, or coprophiliac individuals who enjoy the carnal pleasures afforded by goats?
William Shakespeare himself was a victim of piracy by Elizabethan and Jacobean printers, who would send their agents to see his plays in order to memorize and reproduce them for illicit reproduction and sale. An excellent account of this practice may be found in "Shakespeare's Fight with the Pirates" by Alfred W Pollard. Plus ca change...
For anyone who'd like to tell the clowns at this legal sideshow exactly what they think of them, there's a Legal Matter Submission form at http://www.cybertriallawyer.com/legal-matter/.
Sticking a 'Windows Vista' label on it should do the trick.
Don't blame the poor chap - he was obviously using Excel 2007 for the calculations.
Time is precious. Tranquility is important. Sleep is essential. The telemarketing brigades deprive us of these things, and seriously affect our quality of life. Getting your number on a 'do not call' list is only one item in the armoury against intrusion - simply asserting our right to privacy is our greatest weapon.
As a long-time Jakarta resident I have but one comment to make on this sorry state of affairs - whatever money changes hands, it will only go to enrich certain members of the greedy ruling elite in this corruption-riddled country. The poor will see neither monetary relief nor cheap vaccine.