Actually, I find that I have to keep both on my computer for easier work. I do a lot of work with text heavy CSV files, like linguistic concordances drawn from a database. Libre has features that Excel doesn't, such as regular expressions in filters/searches, and much much better handling of UTF-8 for export. I often find myself with workflows that require BOTH, which is absurd. Luckily, I don't have to pay for Excel, my employer does, so it could be worse.
I teach language classes, and this would be useful since I often use Youtube to show songs, listening exercises, etc. Sometimes I'm forced to use the in-class room computer, and nothing throws off a listening exercise like warming everyone up, getting their mental schemata activated, and then some ridiculous ad immediately preceding a listening. I hope that perhaps my university could get some sort of educational rate, since this is really for my work rather than my personal use.
I'd also love to make the scourge of autoplay go away somehow - suddenly it's everywhere that shows videos.
Actually, the issue here are the incentives in academia. Textbook publishing is not considered meaningful academic publishing in almost any field. The 'coin of the realm' in academia is peer reviewed argumentative publications - this is what 'buys' you tenure, promotion to Full Professor, etc - and those promotions are one of the few ways to get a raise.
Writing a textbook is time consuming, difficult, and basically unappreciated. From TFA: "He spent seven years on it, saying later that with his teaching, research and writing, he worked 13 hours a day for 364 days of the year." That textbook was unlikely to get him tenure or a promotion, so the only way to get a return on that investment is to try to make money off of it.
So basically the problem is that academia doesn't incentivize, and really disincentivizes, the production of things like textbooks. It's part of a larger problem that keeps academia disconnected from the public - the only thing that academics are encouraged to produce are generally those things that are least relevant to the real world. Writing something accessible to a non-specialist audience is a waste of time and potentially career suicide.
Sorry, but while that argument is appealing, it's bullshit because you're not specifying WHAT functions you eliminate with the meaningless statement, "reduced spending and smaller government." Where are you reducing the spending? What functions does this "smaller government" fulfill, and which functions does it not fulfill? Unless you specify exactly what to cut, this is just empty rhetoric with very little meaning - like saying, "We need to get rid of regulations" - which ones? Why? What is the cost-benefit analysis?
Moreover, it is absolutely possible to have a much smaller government that focuses all or most of its efforts on military and intelligence services - the Syrian government is an excellent example of this, focusing very little (in terms of expenditures) on actual effective social welfare functions (providing subsidized housing, etc. which it did, but very badly), but almost exclusively on maintaining a police and military state, and I'm sure the same can be said for many dictatorial regimes. Indeed, libertarian approaches often cede only military and possible intelligence services as necessary state functions, producing exactly that type of outcome.
What "reduced spending" and "smaller government" actually seem to result in is decreased social services (education, health care, etc) while leaving military and intelligence budgets intact (often beyond what the military is actually requesting, as we've seen often enough in recent years in the US, e.g. the F35 controversy). I imagine as the number of people at the bottom increase and become restless due the lack of social services, you'd find even more support from everyone else to INCREASE the domestic intelligence presence and law enforcement, rather than to reduce them.
So, are any of these reviews going to give us any idea, at all, of call or sound quality on these phones? Or have we just completely given up on the "phone" part of the functionality?
Speaking as a linguist (working on my Ph.D.) this is something of a tempest in a tea-pot. The most relevant use would be for glottochronology - a field that's largely been abandoned by anyone seriously working on historical linguistics because of the various problems involved with that approach, including what the authors of the paper find, that the rate of word loss is not constant over time. They have a better idea of the rate of word loss, which could help improve glottochronology, but the method has a lot of flaws regardless.
Also, the question they're asking - how do words change over time, in terms of coining, becoming current, and becoming obsolete - really isn't a question historical linguists are that concerned about. Historical linguists are much more interested in how the forms of words change over time (phonological change), or how their function changes over time (grammaticalization), whereas the coinage and loss of words isn't often so important, especially on the large scale statistical level. Furthermore, this type of model probably handles languages with phenomena like avoidance speech poorly, since that would change how and why words are kept or lost.
Their language sample is at heart a convenience sample - they happened to have access to lots of data in those three languages, and it is largely written data. Spanish and English are both related languages with very similar cultural contexts, while Hebrew is a strange choice in that is has an ancient history, but only quite recent revitalised usage. Whether most spoken interaction (which is what linguists tend to be more interested in) has even a tiny subset of the total number of words they are talking about is an open question and would be better tested against corpora with a large quantity of spoken data such as the British National Corpus or the International Corpus of English.
It's an interesting study, but if it hadn't been written by physicists I'm not sure if it would have ended up in Diachronica or the Journal of Historical Lingiustics, much less Science. Their "statistical rules" are interesting, but really not of any great use to wider linguistic inquiry. I think its import is really just exaggerated by the fact that science editors read Science and NOT most linguistics journals, and therefore they think it's really impressive.
I think the above poster makes an excellent point, and I think this is what posters are missing here in the discussion. There's piracy in the developed, western countries that is well known here on Slashdot, where people who can probably afford the price of the media (they might not be able to buy a 6 pack that weekend or something, but it's within their budget) choose to pirate instead.
On the other hand, as the OP notes, in developing countries, piracy IS the market. I lived in Syria, and honestly I don't know where I'd buy a legitimate version of something. The markets are dominated by pirated goods, because if you do eventually find the one fancy mall* that has a legitimate outlet, the goods will be priced at the same price as in the US or Europe. I wanted to get a DVD in Jordan, and at the Virgin Megastore, it was priced HIGHER than most DVDs in the US - few Jordanians could afford such a thing, and so they turn to piracy.
There was interestingly, while I was in Syria, an independent record label that managed to distribute a fair number of CDs actually managed to control piracy a little bit by distributing to the same places that sold pirated CDs, and working out agreements with the owners of the shops not to pirate the CDs. However, sales of CDs at $4 each still had trouble finding a market, versus $.50 pirated CDs in a country where $.75 could buy you a takeaway lunch ($4 could get you a pretty nice lunch at a good restaurant). If you think of that in terms of a $6 sub sandwich in the US, it was the equivalent of pricing a CD at about $32 US. If a US company tried to charge $15 for a CD, it would be like charging $80 for a CD in terms of buying power.
*Actually, in one mall, they had a store that LOOKED like Best Buy or something, but all of their DVDs were indeed pirated.
It currently looks like people are switching to more old fashioned means and using leaflets and word of mouth. Hold in mind that though Cairo, and many other Arab capitals are gigantic, they are often much more similar to a huge collection of small towns where everyone knows everyone (and everyone's business). Taking out the internet seems like a particularly desperate act, especially since the protests are expected to begin following Friday prayer (which the government can't forbid completely without REALLY losing legitimacy) when people will be gathered together already (and thus able to communicate.)
By that set of criteria, Iraq and Syria are "secular" states as well, based on largely secular principles. If you use Roman alphabets as a criteria, then you'd have to include Malaysia and Indonesia, two of the largest Muslim population countries in the world. The whole problem with the original poster's (troll's) assertions is that they're a flawed generalization.
There. Is no such thing as a progressive muslim state. They are all horrendous in one form or another. Human rights, crime, despotism, corruption, justice, the works.
Jesus, where to even start with this modded "Insightful" and the other terrible comments coming off it.
First, all the issues you cite, "Human rights, crime, despotism, corruption, justice, the works" characterize the vast majority of countries outside of Western Europe (and you can include the Commonwealth in that) and North America, and don't correlate per se with states with majority Muslim populations any more than it correlates with years since the end of colonization or national GDP (and obviously probably much much less.) Most of those "more progressive" states have had quite a good amount of time to develop as nation states and many have had similar human rights problems in the past (e.g. much of Eastern Europe, Spain), while most of the Middle Eastern and North African countries are still one or two major regimes off of colonialism. So you have made a false equivalence of Muslim majority state=horrendous when there are exceptions on both sides of that equation.
Furthermore, in many of the "worst" states, the governments have been aggressively secular, since they were run by minority groups (Syria, Iraq before the fall of Saddamn) and were not particularly "Islamic" in character.
As for another poster who wonders whether they have honor killings, not so much, that tends to be in the Levant, and is a cultural rather than a religious ideal per se. Egypt does have issues with "female circumcision" (or whatever you want to call it) but again it's a cultural rather than religious practice.
None of that is pertinent to what's going on, though.
What is important is that these are incredibly courageous youth going out into the streets and facing who knows what - recent videos have shown what appears to be snipers firing on protesters, and one thing that has contributed to this movement has been videos of police brutally torturing prisoners - in the hope of changing their situation. They are putting their money where their mouths are, and are defying death to make themselves heard. This is a government that is willing to shut off an entire country's internet access, with all that entails for the economy and communication, to keep people from gather together, a basic right in many countries in the world. Coptic Christians are standing beside Muslims and asking for change - one of the main chants is "al-halaal wa-ya saliib did al-qatal wa-t-ta`dhiib" "Cross and Crescent against torture and murder."
So lets stop making meaningless and false generalizations, and asking kind of silly questions about culture, and support a people trying to win back their freedoms, something that should appeal quite highly to the Slashdot crowd.
So that link you provide (modded informative?!) doesn't actually say anything about translations of the Quran - it's mostly about apostasy, which in the early years of Islam (during which those hadith were uttered) was politically equivalent to treason (which is often greeted with a death penalty around the world). In the early years of Islam, it really was Islam against the world, and the religious and political element were aligned such that all supporters of Muhammad were Muslim and vise-versa (plus or minus some civil wars). In modern society, the application of these hadith I think is questionable, but I'm not an Islamic studies scholar (just an Arabic Ph.D. student). There's also an image attached to the article that is just a judgment regarding apostasy rendered by the extremely conservative al-Azhar mosque, and has nothing to do with translation. Clearly non-Arabic readers would assume it does, which makes it rather sneaky.
As for translating the Quran, that's not controversial at all - the idea is that you can't really get the same thing out of it by translation that you'd get out of it by reading it (and in fact, that's not the same as what you get out of it by reading the commentaries, which are long and voluminous). A translation by necessity is one particular person's interpretation of the text, so to impose your interpretation is in a sense to change the original text. I might add one persons READING of a text is necessarily an interpretation, but at least they can bring their intellect, background, etc to bear on the original text. If you read someone else's translation, the idea is that you're not reading the word of god, but rather the word of god filtered through someone else's lense. So if you get a Saudi Wahhabi translation, it might have a significantly different take on the text than a liberal western educated translator.
With other texts, obviously, it's not quite as critical, and its often more accepted to translate hadiith (sayings of the prophet), and non-religious stuff has always been fair game - where do you think we get Greek philosophical works from? They were primarily translated out of Syrian and Greek by Arab translators, particularly under the Caliph al-Ma'muun.
I will add to this as a grad student in Arabic linguistics and culture:
In Arab/Middle Eastern and generally third world culture, there is a lot more value placed on getting a degree in something that will be lucrative. Becoming a doctor or engineer is extremely important in these societies (lawyers don't make much, so it's not as important), and a system of testing reinforces this: only students who get the highest scores on the tests can enroll in the medical and engineering faculty of most Middle Eastern universities, while the lower the test score is the more liberal artsy the degree will be. I knew a couple of girls who really wanted to study biomedical engineering, but ended up in the English language and literature department due to their test scores.
There is also an immense amount of pressure to get a degree in a prestigious, money making field, which pushes a lot of students to pursue these degrees.
The results of this study, however, aren't necessarily applicable to the situation in the Middle East, I feel. First, liberal arts educations in the Middle East do NOT emphasize critical thinking. Like almost all fields, they focus on memorization - all tests in almost all departments are multiple choice. Some of my friends who study liberal arts subjects there have never had to write an essay - when one of them did, it was terrible, and failed to advance a critical thesis in any way shape or form. It's not like the US, where students are trained to deconstruct everything in liberal arts, while in engineering its more mathmatical. In the Middle East, both science and liberal arts are taught in substantially similar ways, with a strong emphasis on memorization.
Second, many students who do become engineers do so for economic reasons, not because of their personal interests. Almost all major literary figures in the Middle East had day jobs, and engineering is not necessarily a bad choice. A friend in Damascus is a struggling actor, but he's enrolled in a engineering program since his parents wouldn't support him otherwise. Thus, the kind of self selection that is important to the authors' argument really isn't at play to the same degree in the Middle East as it would be in the US.
I think the point that people miss is that every country has some degree of corruption, but it is what levels it is active at and how they deal with that corruption that is important.
In the US, what we might term "corruption" in the sense of favoritism (or deviations from a US sense of "meritocracy") tend to occur at the very local level (small town nepotism, "networking", etc), or at the more rarefied levels of government and business (quod pro quos from both of the political parties, lobbying, the kind of no-bid blackwater/Halliburton sort of think, insider trading, etc). This isn't to say that corruption at the top is not a problem (in fact, it is much more influential in the long run than corruption at the bottom), but simply in the US it tends to be limited to the upper reaches of government and finance.
In many other countries, the striking contrast to this is corruption in the middle, in addition to the top and bottom. Getting a job is basically impossible in some countries without appropriate connections, bribery is rampant and expected for basic "government provided" services, public works are often mired in those same problems of bribery (not scratching enough backs, etc). Even worse is when the guardians of civil society, the police, are dangerous to approach and more often on the side of criminals, as in Russia.
The other major dividing line is the public reaction to exposure of corruption. In societies where corruption is most widespread, "revelations" are generally shrugged off (and have been probably more widely known prior to their revelation), whereas in less corrupt economies, there is at least some backlash against corruption, rather than simple apathy or active suppression. Being a whistleblower in the US can be bad for your job. Being a whistleblower in other countries (as shown by many of the posts pointing out other instances where political opponents have been assassinated, etc) can result in indefinite incarceration and torture, perhaps with an "accidental" death in prison.
The advent of youtube, on the other hand, gives a voice to those who would be otherwise suppressed. Take the story of Imad Kabir, an Egyptian taxi driver. He was arrested (without charges) for participating in a fight. He was subsequently sodomized with a broomstick, which was video taped by the perpetrators. They were so sure of their immunity that they showed it to his co-workers, perhaps as a warning. When Kabir initially complained, he was actually prosecuted and jailed for assaulting an officer (dating back to his original assault arrest), but as the youtube video spread on various blogs, the officers were finally arrested. Without the internet, the officers who tortured Kabir probably would still be doing that kind of shit. Even the people who did post it to their blogs were threatened by the authorities.
Now I finally know what it'll take to put together a winning application package...just have to cut and paste some naughty pictures into my statement of purpose, and voila!
Latex is really the solution. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel. In fact, reinventing the wheel might cause problems when submitting papers. From what I have seen, many academic journals prefer.tex and.eps files. I can't imagine what they would do with HTML.
Actually, that may be true of some academic journals, but most deal primarily with MS Word documents. Some publishers might grudgingly deal with Latex documents (I know John Benjamin's mentions it in their style requirements), but the people who run conferences and therefore are in charge of submitting the proceedings tend not to be computer saavy enough to work with anything other than MS Word files (god save whoever has to deal with the millions of random fonts people use, use/non-use of styles, etc).
This of course depends on your field - in Comp Sci, I'd wager there're many more journals that regularly accept latex files. In linguistics, it's somewhat rarer, and as you get further into the humanities, it becomes increasingly difficult to find anyone who's heard of Latex at all.
First of all, let me just say that it's a good fucking thing that your wife is the lawyer and not you; perhaps SHE understands that federal law is just one layer, and there are others on top of it. If you tried to apply these laws in California, you would fail. My responses are California-centric:
cyclists can ride as 'close as practicable from the side of the road', meaning they do NOT have to ride within the boundary of the shoulder, especially if there is debris on the far side. -motorists MUST obey all road laws when dealing with cyclists, including passing laws. It is against the law to pass cyclists with a solid yellow 'no pass' line on their side, just as it is when passing a car. Furthermore, motorists must use the same discretion when passing cyclists, say on a hill or around a curve, as they would when passing another automobile.
And yet, it is still illegal for a bicyclist to ride in a fashion such that they create a road hazard, and they must pull over to permit passing if five or more vehicles stack up behind them, regardless of the speed at which they travel. (Same for cars and bicycles)
-cyclists have the right to ride 2x2 in the road, but must let traffic pass when appropriate
Just like motorcycles, except that you need to get out of my fucking way when it's possible.
cyclists MAY take up an entire lane if they deem the situation to be potentially hazardous to them, eg when going over a hill. If the cyclists suspects that their well being will be endangered by a driver wanting to pass them from behind while going over a hill or around a curve, they can effectively stop this from happening by taking up the lane. This is a tricky predicament because the aggressive driver behind you may want to pass anyway
It's also a tricky predicament because if you're going too slow up the middle of the lane, you're creating an unsafe situation, which is illegal even when your action is otherwise permitted by law.
Actually, California law VC 21202 States:
a) Any person operating a bicycle upon a roadway at a speed less than the normal speed of traffic moving in the same direction at such time shall ride as close as practicable to the right-hand curb or edge of the roadway except under any of the following situations:... When reasonably necessary to avoid conditions (including, but not limited to, fixed or moving objects, vehicles, bicycles, pedestrians, animals, surface hazards, or substandard width lanes) that make it unsafe to continue along the right-hand curb or edge. For purposes of this section, a "substandard width lane" is a lane that is too narrow for a bicycle and a vehicle to travel safely side by side within the lane.
So it looks like that's not only permitted, but explicitly defined by law - if the lane it too narrow for a car to safely pass the bike, then it's the bikes right to ride in the lane.
cyclists DO NOT have to come to a complete stop at stop signs, and they CAN travel through red lights.
Not in California.
at night, bikes MUST have both front and rear lights, clearly visible to the driver, as well as side reflectors, and preferably reflective clothing.
In California, you need a front light and rear reflector, that's it.
in general, a bicycle is just another vehicle on the roadway.
Though I agree that the summary was rather ridiculous, I think that it does point to one of the problems of archival research in the Middle East. I'm a linguist, so I don't do too much with this, but a friend was trying to find some documents about the Fatimid era in an Egyptian archive (obviously much more recent historically than the cuneiform mentioned here.)
The archive she used was a total mess. The indices were almost useless - when she could find what she was looking for, the index number didn't match any manuscripts, or the manuscript itself was in the wrong place (and therefore could not be found without a multiday search.) Even worse, another researcher was trying to find works on mathematics (riyaadiyaat in Arabic), and when looking through the index, found the letter "r" missing from an index that went "d-dh-z", when "r" comes in between "dh" and "z." (As if the index in English went "L-N-O"). When he asked, he was told to look under "h" for "hisaabaat" 'calculations', but wasn't told what would happen if he actually needed something from 'r'.
Contrast this to American and European libraries with thorough records, a consistent indexing system, and access to resources like Worldcat. Even the American open-stacks library is a bit of a rarity world-wide, and as anyone who has done research in closed-stack libraries can tell you, that makes things a lot easier.
At the turn of the last century, if you wanted a science or engineering degree, you had to learn German, as all the best journals were printed in that language.
Actually, this is still true to a certain degree in academia even today. In my field (Arabic linguistics) much of the work is done by Germans, often in German. My "German for Reading" course had students from a number of departments for the same reason, including a couple of engineers who were working on areas that are apparently quite hot in Germany right now but less so in the US.
Part of the reason for this is that German universities are much more lax in what they require from professors vs. the US. German professors often have a much lighter teaching load than in the US, freeing them up to do a lot more research.
If you're really working on important photography stuff, why not just buy an external monitor that has much better color reproduction and viewing angles. If you're working on this for a job, you should invest in the proper equipment for that job. I'm not even totally clear on why you need a laptop for final photographic production work.
I'm a linguist, and I can tell you that I wouldn't write an article on how bad the built-in speakers are for transcription of complex language data. I buy high quality headphones instead.
Actually, Sayyid Qutub started out as an extremely liberal secular cultural thinker, but became somewhat disenchanted with Western Liberalism. However, he didn't begin writing such radical works until he was jailed under Gamal Abd an-Nasr, and tortured heavily. His philosophy was not actually aimed at the west per se, but rather at the secular government of Nasr, whose legitimacy he tried to challenge on the basis of the idea of "daar al-haarb" and "daar as-salaam."
The quote you show above is not about Western powers per se, but rather about the illegitimacy of the Nasr regime. The "daar al-harb" here is Egypt, not the US.
In fact, his ideas would probably have been better articulated had he NOT died from torture in prison. However, the important point here is that acts of torture actually significantly radicallized Qutub, and led to him producing this sort of highly malleable doctrine, something we should think about with respect to our own actions today (torture of possibly innocent people in Guantanamo, bombing of Gaza).
And IAGSIAS(I Am a Graduate Student in Arabic Studies)
The irony is that most people who are classified as Jews have never been to Israel and neither have their ancestors - ie they're genetically diverse and not at all a "people group".
Second, I think you forget that under the Ottomans, and in fact, throughout the history of the Middle East, the area now thought of as Palestine was one of the most cosmopolitan and dense areas in the region, due to the presence of important ports along the coast, as well as important religious sites (i.e. Jerusalem). It was a mercantile region focusing on crafts and trade as well as agriculture. To imply that the area west of the Jordan river was sparsely populated solely by bedouin nomads is not historically accurate.
I will come right out and say I have a bias - I did my undergrad in linguistics, and am doing my graduate work in Arabic linguistics (emphasizing pedagogy). However, I think a lot of people have been absolutely right that you should learn another language. The thing that a lot of the people here haven't really touched on here is that regardless of WHAT language you choose (and there are a lot of good suggestions) what you get out of learning language goes beyond the language itself. What you really learn is how different and varied language can be, which in turn makes you think about your own language in a lot of interesting ways, as well as making learning a third language even easier.
Think about it like a computer language - I originally learned BASIC, then went on to C/C++, then Java. With each language, it got easier, and I learned what to expect out of a computer language - methods to move data around, conditional statements, subroutines and functions. I learned how things fit together, and what to expect when I encounter a new language.
The same is true when learning another language - you find the startling, but totally logical way that other languages express concepts you take for granted. You learn words and phrases which barely have any equivalent your own language, and which are sort of a new world of concepts and vocabulary. It gets you thinking. And when you come to another language, no matter how closely or distantly related it might be to what you know, you'll look at things and think, "hey, I've seen that sort of thing before."
And this is true of any language - just because Spanish, French or German are related to English doesn't mean they're any less different or exotic than many other languages like Arabic and Chinese. You'll get fluent faster if you choose them, because vocabulary is one of the biggest limiting factors on fluency, but I really say you should something for the sake of the process as much as the result.
I was quite excited by the fact that they also uploaded Arabic titles...except that their cataloging system is horrible, and the titles end up extremely messed up, if not completely unreadable. I wonder if the Mandarin is any better.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I find that I have to keep both on my computer for easier work. I do a lot of work with text heavy CSV files, like linguistic concordances drawn from a database. Libre has features that Excel doesn't, such as regular expressions in filters/searches, and much much better handling of UTF-8 for export. I often find myself with workflows that require BOTH, which is absurd. Luckily, I don't have to pay for Excel, my employer does, so it could be worse.
I teach language classes, and this would be useful since I often use Youtube to show songs, listening exercises, etc. Sometimes I'm forced to use the in-class room computer, and nothing throws off a listening exercise like warming everyone up, getting their mental schemata activated, and then some ridiculous ad immediately preceding a listening. I hope that perhaps my university could get some sort of educational rate, since this is really for my work rather than my personal use.
I'd also love to make the scourge of autoplay go away somehow - suddenly it's everywhere that shows videos.
Honestly, based on TFA, it has already.
Actually, the issue here are the incentives in academia. Textbook publishing is not considered meaningful academic publishing in almost any field. The 'coin of the realm' in academia is peer reviewed argumentative publications - this is what 'buys' you tenure, promotion to Full Professor, etc - and those promotions are one of the few ways to get a raise.
Writing a textbook is time consuming, difficult, and basically unappreciated. From TFA: "He spent seven years on it, saying later that with his teaching, research and writing, he worked 13 hours a day for 364 days of the year." That textbook was unlikely to get him tenure or a promotion, so the only way to get a return on that investment is to try to make money off of it.
So basically the problem is that academia doesn't incentivize, and really disincentivizes, the production of things like textbooks. It's part of a larger problem that keeps academia disconnected from the public - the only thing that academics are encouraged to produce are generally those things that are least relevant to the real world. Writing something accessible to a non-specialist audience is a waste of time and potentially career suicide.
Sorry, but while that argument is appealing, it's bullshit because you're not specifying WHAT functions you eliminate with the meaningless statement, "reduced spending and smaller government." Where are you reducing the spending? What functions does this "smaller government" fulfill, and which functions does it not fulfill? Unless you specify exactly what to cut, this is just empty rhetoric with very little meaning - like saying, "We need to get rid of regulations" - which ones? Why? What is the cost-benefit analysis?
Moreover, it is absolutely possible to have a much smaller government that focuses all or most of its efforts on military and intelligence services - the Syrian government is an excellent example of this, focusing very little (in terms of expenditures) on actual effective social welfare functions (providing subsidized housing, etc. which it did, but very badly), but almost exclusively on maintaining a police and military state, and I'm sure the same can be said for many dictatorial regimes. Indeed, libertarian approaches often cede only military and possible intelligence services as necessary state functions, producing exactly that type of outcome.
What "reduced spending" and "smaller government" actually seem to result in is decreased social services (education, health care, etc) while leaving military and intelligence budgets intact (often beyond what the military is actually requesting, as we've seen often enough in recent years in the US, e.g. the F35 controversy). I imagine as the number of people at the bottom increase and become restless due the lack of social services, you'd find even more support from everyone else to INCREASE the domestic intelligence presence and law enforcement, rather than to reduce them.
So, are any of these reviews going to give us any idea, at all, of call or sound quality on these phones? Or have we just completely given up on the "phone" part of the functionality?
Speaking as a linguist (working on my Ph.D.) this is something of a tempest in a tea-pot. The most relevant use would be for glottochronology - a field that's largely been abandoned by anyone seriously working on historical linguistics because of the various problems involved with that approach, including what the authors of the paper find, that the rate of word loss is not constant over time. They have a better idea of the rate of word loss, which could help improve glottochronology, but the method has a lot of flaws regardless.
Also, the question they're asking - how do words change over time, in terms of coining, becoming current, and becoming obsolete - really isn't a question historical linguists are that concerned about. Historical linguists are much more interested in how the forms of words change over time (phonological change), or how their function changes over time (grammaticalization), whereas the coinage and loss of words isn't often so important, especially on the large scale statistical level. Furthermore, this type of model probably handles languages with phenomena like avoidance speech poorly, since that would change how and why words are kept or lost.
Their language sample is at heart a convenience sample - they happened to have access to lots of data in those three languages, and it is largely written data. Spanish and English are both related languages with very similar cultural contexts, while Hebrew is a strange choice in that is has an ancient history, but only quite recent revitalised usage. Whether most spoken interaction (which is what linguists tend to be more interested in) has even a tiny subset of the total number of words they are talking about is an open question and would be better tested against corpora with a large quantity of spoken data such as the British National Corpus or the International Corpus of English.
It's an interesting study, but if it hadn't been written by physicists I'm not sure if it would have ended up in Diachronica or the Journal of Historical Lingiustics, much less Science. Their "statistical rules" are interesting, but really not of any great use to wider linguistic inquiry. I think its import is really just exaggerated by the fact that science editors read Science and NOT most linguistics journals, and therefore they think it's really impressive.
I think the above poster makes an excellent point, and I think this is what posters are missing here in the discussion. There's piracy in the developed, western countries that is well known here on Slashdot, where people who can probably afford the price of the media (they might not be able to buy a 6 pack that weekend or something, but it's within their budget) choose to pirate instead.
On the other hand, as the OP notes, in developing countries, piracy IS the market. I lived in Syria, and honestly I don't know where I'd buy a legitimate version of something. The markets are dominated by pirated goods, because if you do eventually find the one fancy mall* that has a legitimate outlet, the goods will be priced at the same price as in the US or Europe. I wanted to get a DVD in Jordan, and at the Virgin Megastore, it was priced HIGHER than most DVDs in the US - few Jordanians could afford such a thing, and so they turn to piracy.
There was interestingly, while I was in Syria, an independent record label that managed to distribute a fair number of CDs actually managed to control piracy a little bit by distributing to the same places that sold pirated CDs, and working out agreements with the owners of the shops not to pirate the CDs. However, sales of CDs at $4 each still had trouble finding a market, versus $.50 pirated CDs in a country where $.75 could buy you a takeaway lunch ($4 could get you a pretty nice lunch at a good restaurant). If you think of that in terms of a $6 sub sandwich in the US, it was the equivalent of pricing a CD at about $32 US. If a US company tried to charge $15 for a CD, it would be like charging $80 for a CD in terms of buying power.
*Actually, in one mall, they had a store that LOOKED like Best Buy or something, but all of their DVDs were indeed pirated.
It currently looks like people are switching to more old fashioned means and using leaflets and word of mouth. Hold in mind that though Cairo, and many other Arab capitals are gigantic, they are often much more similar to a huge collection of small towns where everyone knows everyone (and everyone's business). Taking out the internet seems like a particularly desperate act, especially since the protests are expected to begin following Friday prayer (which the government can't forbid completely without REALLY losing legitimacy) when people will be gathered together already (and thus able to communicate.)
By that set of criteria, Iraq and Syria are "secular" states as well, based on largely secular principles. If you use Roman alphabets as a criteria, then you'd have to include Malaysia and Indonesia, two of the largest Muslim population countries in the world. The whole problem with the original poster's (troll's) assertions is that they're a flawed generalization.
There. Is no such thing as a progressive muslim state. They are all horrendous in one form or another. Human rights, crime, despotism, corruption, justice, the works.
Jesus, where to even start with this modded "Insightful" and the other terrible comments coming off it.
First, all the issues you cite, "Human rights, crime, despotism, corruption, justice, the works" characterize the vast majority of countries outside of Western Europe (and you can include the Commonwealth in that) and North America, and don't correlate per se with states with majority Muslim populations any more than it correlates with years since the end of colonization or national GDP (and obviously probably much much less.) Most of those "more progressive" states have had quite a good amount of time to develop as nation states and many have had similar human rights problems in the past (e.g. much of Eastern Europe, Spain), while most of the Middle Eastern and North African countries are still one or two major regimes off of colonialism. So you have made a false equivalence of Muslim majority state=horrendous when there are exceptions on both sides of that equation.
Furthermore, in many of the "worst" states, the governments have been aggressively secular, since they were run by minority groups (Syria, Iraq before the fall of Saddamn) and were not particularly "Islamic" in character.
As for another poster who wonders whether they have honor killings, not so much, that tends to be in the Levant, and is a cultural rather than a religious ideal per se. Egypt does have issues with "female circumcision" (or whatever you want to call it) but again it's a cultural rather than religious practice.
None of that is pertinent to what's going on, though.
What is important is that these are incredibly courageous youth going out into the streets and facing who knows what - recent videos have shown what appears to be snipers firing on protesters, and one thing that has contributed to this movement has been videos of police brutally torturing prisoners - in the hope of changing their situation. They are putting their money where their mouths are, and are defying death to make themselves heard. This is a government that is willing to shut off an entire country's internet access, with all that entails for the economy and communication, to keep people from gather together, a basic right in many countries in the world. Coptic Christians are standing beside Muslims and asking for change - one of the main chants is "al-halaal wa-ya saliib did al-qatal wa-t-ta`dhiib" "Cross and Crescent against torture and murder."
So lets stop making meaningless and false generalizations, and asking kind of silly questions about culture, and support a people trying to win back their freedoms, something that should appeal quite highly to the Slashdot crowd.
So that link you provide (modded informative?!) doesn't actually say anything about translations of the Quran - it's mostly about apostasy, which in the early years of Islam (during which those hadith were uttered) was politically equivalent to treason (which is often greeted with a death penalty around the world). In the early years of Islam, it really was Islam against the world, and the religious and political element were aligned such that all supporters of Muhammad were Muslim and vise-versa (plus or minus some civil wars). In modern society, the application of these hadith I think is questionable, but I'm not an Islamic studies scholar (just an Arabic Ph.D. student). There's also an image attached to the article that is just a judgment regarding apostasy rendered by the extremely conservative al-Azhar mosque, and has nothing to do with translation. Clearly non-Arabic readers would assume it does, which makes it rather sneaky.
As for translating the Quran, that's not controversial at all - the idea is that you can't really get the same thing out of it by translation that you'd get out of it by reading it (and in fact, that's not the same as what you get out of it by reading the commentaries, which are long and voluminous). A translation by necessity is one particular person's interpretation of the text, so to impose your interpretation is in a sense to change the original text. I might add one persons READING of a text is necessarily an interpretation, but at least they can bring their intellect, background, etc to bear on the original text. If you read someone else's translation, the idea is that you're not reading the word of god, but rather the word of god filtered through someone else's lense. So if you get a Saudi Wahhabi translation, it might have a significantly different take on the text than a liberal western educated translator.
With other texts, obviously, it's not quite as critical, and its often more accepted to translate hadiith (sayings of the prophet), and non-religious stuff has always been fair game - where do you think we get Greek philosophical works from? They were primarily translated out of Syrian and Greek by Arab translators, particularly under the Caliph al-Ma'muun.
I will add to this as a grad student in Arabic linguistics and culture:
In Arab/Middle Eastern and generally third world culture, there is a lot more value placed on getting a degree in something that will be lucrative. Becoming a doctor or engineer is extremely important in these societies (lawyers don't make much, so it's not as important), and a system of testing reinforces this: only students who get the highest scores on the tests can enroll in the medical and engineering faculty of most Middle Eastern universities, while the lower the test score is the more liberal artsy the degree will be. I knew a couple of girls who really wanted to study biomedical engineering, but ended up in the English language and literature department due to their test scores.
There is also an immense amount of pressure to get a degree in a prestigious, money making field, which pushes a lot of students to pursue these degrees.
The results of this study, however, aren't necessarily applicable to the situation in the Middle East, I feel. First, liberal arts educations in the Middle East do NOT emphasize critical thinking. Like almost all fields, they focus on memorization - all tests in almost all departments are multiple choice. Some of my friends who study liberal arts subjects there have never had to write an essay - when one of them did, it was terrible, and failed to advance a critical thesis in any way shape or form. It's not like the US, where students are trained to deconstruct everything in liberal arts, while in engineering its more mathmatical. In the Middle East, both science and liberal arts are taught in substantially similar ways, with a strong emphasis on memorization.
Second, many students who do become engineers do so for economic reasons, not because of their personal interests. Almost all major literary figures in the Middle East had day jobs, and engineering is not necessarily a bad choice. A friend in Damascus is a struggling actor, but he's enrolled in a engineering program since his parents wouldn't support him otherwise. Thus, the kind of self selection that is important to the authors' argument really isn't at play to the same degree in the Middle East as it would be in the US.
I think the point that people miss is that every country has some degree of corruption, but it is what levels it is active at and how they deal with that corruption that is important.
In the US, what we might term "corruption" in the sense of favoritism (or deviations from a US sense of "meritocracy") tend to occur at the very local level (small town nepotism, "networking", etc), or at the more rarefied levels of government and business (quod pro quos from both of the political parties, lobbying, the kind of no-bid blackwater/Halliburton sort of think, insider trading, etc). This isn't to say that corruption at the top is not a problem (in fact, it is much more influential in the long run than corruption at the bottom), but simply in the US it tends to be limited to the upper reaches of government and finance.
In many other countries, the striking contrast to this is corruption in the middle, in addition to the top and bottom. Getting a job is basically impossible in some countries without appropriate connections, bribery is rampant and expected for basic "government provided" services, public works are often mired in those same problems of bribery (not scratching enough backs, etc). Even worse is when the guardians of civil society, the police, are dangerous to approach and more often on the side of criminals, as in Russia.
The other major dividing line is the public reaction to exposure of corruption. In societies where corruption is most widespread, "revelations" are generally shrugged off (and have been probably more widely known prior to their revelation), whereas in less corrupt economies, there is at least some backlash against corruption, rather than simple apathy or active suppression. Being a whistleblower in the US can be bad for your job. Being a whistleblower in other countries (as shown by many of the posts pointing out other instances where political opponents have been assassinated, etc) can result in indefinite incarceration and torture, perhaps with an "accidental" death in prison.
The advent of youtube, on the other hand, gives a voice to those who would be otherwise suppressed. Take the story of Imad Kabir, an Egyptian taxi driver. He was arrested (without charges) for participating in a fight. He was subsequently sodomized with a broomstick, which was video taped by the perpetrators. They were so sure of their immunity that they showed it to his co-workers, perhaps as a warning. When Kabir initially complained, he was actually prosecuted and jailed for assaulting an officer (dating back to his original assault arrest), but as the youtube video spread on various blogs, the officers were finally arrested. Without the internet, the officers who tortured Kabir probably would still be doing that kind of shit. Even the people who did post it to their blogs were threatened by the authorities.
Now I finally know what it'll take to put together a winning application package...just have to cut and paste some naughty pictures into my statement of purpose, and voila!
Latex is really the solution. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel. In fact, reinventing the wheel might cause problems when submitting papers. From what I have seen, many academic journals prefer .tex and .eps files. I can't imagine what they would do with HTML.
Actually, that may be true of some academic journals, but most deal primarily with MS Word documents. Some publishers might grudgingly deal with Latex documents (I know John Benjamin's mentions it in their style requirements), but the people who run conferences and therefore are in charge of submitting the proceedings tend not to be computer saavy enough to work with anything other than MS Word files (god save whoever has to deal with the millions of random fonts people use, use/non-use of styles, etc).
This of course depends on your field - in Comp Sci, I'd wager there're many more journals that regularly accept latex files. In linguistics, it's somewhat rarer, and as you get further into the humanities, it becomes increasingly difficult to find anyone who's heard of Latex at all.
First of all, let me just say that it's a good fucking thing that your wife is the lawyer and not you; perhaps SHE understands that federal law is just one layer, and there are others on top of it. If you tried to apply these laws in California, you would fail. My responses are California-centric:
cyclists can ride as 'close as practicable from the side of the road', meaning they do NOT have to ride within the boundary of the shoulder, especially if there is debris on the far side.
-motorists MUST obey all road laws when dealing with cyclists, including passing laws. It is against the law to pass cyclists with a solid yellow 'no pass' line on their side, just as it is when passing a car. Furthermore, motorists must use the same discretion when passing cyclists, say on a hill or around a curve, as they would when passing another automobile.
And yet, it is still illegal for a bicyclist to ride in a fashion such that they create a road hazard, and they must pull over to permit passing if five or more vehicles stack up behind them, regardless of the speed at which they travel. (Same for cars and bicycles)
-cyclists have the right to ride 2x2 in the road, but must let traffic pass when appropriate
Just like motorcycles, except that you need to get out of my fucking way when it's possible.
cyclists MAY take up an entire lane if they deem the situation to be potentially hazardous to them, eg when going over a hill. If the cyclists suspects that their well being will be endangered by a driver wanting to pass them from behind while going over a hill or around a curve, they can effectively stop this from happening by taking up the lane. This is a tricky predicament because the aggressive driver behind you may want to pass anyway
It's also a tricky predicament because if you're going too slow up the middle of the lane, you're creating an unsafe situation, which is illegal even when your action is otherwise permitted by law.
Actually, California law VC 21202 States:
a) Any person operating a bicycle upon a roadway at a speed less than the normal speed of traffic moving in the same direction at such time shall ride as close as practicable to the right-hand curb or edge of the roadway except under any of the following situations: ...
When reasonably necessary to avoid conditions (including, but not limited to, fixed or moving objects, vehicles, bicycles, pedestrians, animals, surface hazards, or substandard width lanes) that make it unsafe to continue along the right-hand curb or edge. For purposes of this section, a "substandard width lane" is a lane that is too narrow for a bicycle and a vehicle to travel safely side by side within the lane.
So it looks like that's not only permitted, but explicitly defined by law - if the lane it too narrow for a car to safely pass the bike, then it's the bikes right to ride in the lane.
cyclists DO NOT have to come to a complete stop at stop signs, and they CAN travel through red lights.
Not in California.
at night, bikes MUST have both front and rear lights, clearly visible to the driver, as well as side reflectors, and preferably reflective clothing.
In California, you need a front light and rear reflector, that's it.
in general, a bicycle is just another vehicle on the roadway.
Which is why most of what you said is nonsense.
Oh no! Does this mean they'll have to use a sound stage in Vancouver?
Though I agree that the summary was rather ridiculous, I think that it does point to one of the problems of archival research in the Middle East. I'm a linguist, so I don't do too much with this, but a friend was trying to find some documents about the Fatimid era in an Egyptian archive (obviously much more recent historically than the cuneiform mentioned here.)
The archive she used was a total mess. The indices were almost useless - when she could find what she was looking for, the index number didn't match any manuscripts, or the manuscript itself was in the wrong place (and therefore could not be found without a multiday search.) Even worse, another researcher was trying to find works on mathematics (riyaadiyaat in Arabic), and when looking through the index, found the letter "r" missing from an index that went "d-dh-z", when "r" comes in between "dh" and "z." (As if the index in English went "L-N-O"). When he asked, he was told to look under "h" for "hisaabaat" 'calculations', but wasn't told what would happen if he actually needed something from 'r'.
Contrast this to American and European libraries with thorough records, a consistent indexing system, and access to resources like Worldcat. Even the American open-stacks library is a bit of a rarity world-wide, and as anyone who has done research in closed-stack libraries can tell you, that makes things a lot easier.
At the turn of the last century, if you wanted a science or engineering degree, you had to learn German, as all the best journals were printed in that language.
Actually, this is still true to a certain degree in academia even today. In my field (Arabic linguistics) much of the work is done by Germans, often in German. My "German for Reading" course had students from a number of departments for the same reason, including a couple of engineers who were working on areas that are apparently quite hot in Germany right now but less so in the US.
Part of the reason for this is that German universities are much more lax in what they require from professors vs. the US. German professors often have a much lighter teaching load than in the US, freeing them up to do a lot more research.
If you're really working on important photography stuff, why not just buy an external monitor that has much better color reproduction and viewing angles. If you're working on this for a job, you should invest in the proper equipment for that job. I'm not even totally clear on why you need a laptop for final photographic production work.
I'm a linguist, and I can tell you that I wouldn't write an article on how bad the built-in speakers are for transcription of complex language data. I buy high quality headphones instead.
Actually, Sayyid Qutub started out as an extremely liberal secular cultural thinker, but became somewhat disenchanted with Western Liberalism. However, he didn't begin writing such radical works until he was jailed under Gamal Abd an-Nasr, and tortured heavily. His philosophy was not actually aimed at the west per se, but rather at the secular government of Nasr, whose legitimacy he tried to challenge on the basis of the idea of "daar al-haarb" and "daar as-salaam."
The quote you show above is not about Western powers per se, but rather about the illegitimacy of the Nasr regime. The "daar al-harb" here is Egypt, not the US.
In fact, his ideas would probably have been better articulated had he NOT died from torture in prison. However, the important point here is that acts of torture actually significantly radicallized Qutub, and led to him producing this sort of highly malleable doctrine, something we should think about with respect to our own actions today (torture of possibly innocent people in Guantanamo, bombing of Gaza).
And IAGSIAS(I Am a Graduate Student in Arabic Studies)
First, try this edit on for size:
The irony is that most people who are classified as Jews have never been to Israel and neither have their ancestors - ie they're genetically diverse and not at all a "people group".
Second, I think you forget that under the Ottomans, and in fact, throughout the history of the Middle East, the area now thought of as Palestine was one of the most cosmopolitan and dense areas in the region, due to the presence of important ports along the coast, as well as important religious sites (i.e. Jerusalem). It was a mercantile region focusing on crafts and trade as well as agriculture. To imply that the area west of the Jordan river was sparsely populated solely by bedouin nomads is not historically accurate.
I will come right out and say I have a bias - I did my undergrad in linguistics, and am doing my graduate work in Arabic linguistics (emphasizing pedagogy). However, I think a lot of people have been absolutely right that you should learn another language. The thing that a lot of the people here haven't really touched on here is that regardless of WHAT language you choose (and there are a lot of good suggestions) what you get out of learning language goes beyond the language itself. What you really learn is how different and varied language can be, which in turn makes you think about your own language in a lot of interesting ways, as well as making learning a third language even easier.
Think about it like a computer language - I originally learned BASIC, then went on to C/C++, then Java. With each language, it got easier, and I learned what to expect out of a computer language - methods to move data around, conditional statements, subroutines and functions. I learned how things fit together, and what to expect when I encounter a new language.
The same is true when learning another language - you find the startling, but totally logical way that other languages express concepts you take for granted. You learn words and phrases which barely have any equivalent your own language, and which are sort of a new world of concepts and vocabulary. It gets you thinking. And when you come to another language, no matter how closely or distantly related it might be to what you know, you'll look at things and think, "hey, I've seen that sort of thing before."
And this is true of any language - just because Spanish, French or German are related to English doesn't mean they're any less different or exotic than many other languages like Arabic and Chinese. You'll get fluent faster if you choose them, because vocabulary is one of the biggest limiting factors on fluency, but I really say you should something for the sake of the process as much as the result.
I was quite excited by the fact that they also uploaded Arabic titles...except that their cataloging system is horrible, and the titles end up extremely messed up, if not completely unreadable. I wonder if the Mandarin is any better.