The point is that cat would be like a double click: it would just open whatever file in the default application.
Actually, no, that's not the point. The point is that data and user views are separated, so that cat sends bytes, and the program that receives cat's output then decides how to treat them. If the recipient is the terminal, then the terminal displays the content as an image.
Human language began with humans associating sounds they made with objects. Afterwards, they associate sounds with conceptual things like actions. It's only they they combined objects with actions into one meaning that grammar is developed for consistency and ease of understanding.
It probably took humans an insane amount of years before such things as grammar was developed slowly passing on each advancement to each of their generation.
You think robots can achieve something better then humans instantly? Of course this is just pre-programmed logic designed with this purpose in mind so how much cheating vs how much real adaptic logic is in their is hard to say.
But to say it's not a language, a language is but a method to communicate no matter the form of sound used. It's simply a primitive one at best.
Wow, that clears it up. Thank you for figuring out a topic that nobody has!
The links I've seen about this go on and on about how the robots invent and use "words." But language is not words; language is grammar; language is a set of rules for recursively constructing highly complex expressions from smaller subparts. This is Linguistics 101 material.
The way you distinguish somebody with Linguistics training from a layperson is that the layperson will talk about language as if it's a "bag of words" and overall focus too much on the words, whereas the linguist will tend to see most words as either (a) the filler that goes inside the phrases and sentences, or (b) the stuff whose formation is constrained by the general phonological and morphological rules of the language. Or, short and sweet: words are boring unless they're function words like "the."
The scientific method in general terms consists of observation, then hypothesis, then designing an experiment to prove the hypothesis. You are arguing "shouldn't it" and closing your mind to the understanding of the observed results - it doesn't matter what it "should" and "shouldn't" do under current models - what is important is what it actually did. Which means that either a) there were conditions that we don't know about that enabled the reaction or b) there are additional underlying scientific principles that we don't fully understand yet.
You know, in actual practice, scientists don't abandon their theories just because a single experiment contradicts them. Galileo didn't give up heliocentrism when confronted with the stellar parallax problem; in fact, he took up heliocentrism in spite of it. Einstein didn't give up on the theory of relativity because of Kaufman's 1905 experiments; he held on to it despite the experimental contradiction.
I'm not saying that they programmed using crazy network design, I'm saying that all the really great programmers I've met (say my top 3 all-time) were very skilled in networking and in hardware.
Your sampling procedure seems to be somehow biased.
No, actually -- OS X Tiger was the pinnacle, and Leopard and Snow Leopard are buggier than Tiger -- speaking as someone who uses OS X for pro audio and also has an abundance of experience with Linux, BSD, and windows.
This is my impression too, though my main experience with this comes primarily from watching Safari go from a stable browser back in the Tiger days to a horrible buggy beachballing crashing mess today...
Learn your french. "Viola" literally means "raped" which I doubt is what you meant.
Um, no, "viola" in French, just like in English (or rather the other way around), is the bowed chordophone that plays second fiddle to the violin. "Viola" is the third person singular simple present form of the verb "violar" in Spanish and Portuguese, which does mean "rape"... but it's also the noun for the musical instrument.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Italian has a verb "violare" with a third person singular present form "viola."
I am torn on the natural citizen clause. I don't want a president who has sworn allegiance to another country. The U.S. President should not be conflicted by the interests of two countries.
You don't have to swear allegiance to a second country to be a dual citizen. You can be a dual citizen involuntarily and unknowingly simply because the law of a second country says you're it's citizen. As an example, many Iranian-Americans and Korean-Americans have had this sort of problem when traveling back to their parent's countries—e.g., you go visit your grandparents in South Korea and the government forces you to stay and do military service...
OTOH, a baby has no say in when and where it is born - that is determined by its parents and doctors. Obama was in Hawaii by his second birthday (or possibly even born there if you accept the released document), attended elementary school in Indonesia (state-run school required him to pledge allegiance to the government), back in Hawaii for high school, then on the mainland for most of his adult life. Did Obama spend enough time in Indonesia to put its interests above American interests? I personally don't think so.
You're free not to vote for Obama on those insane grounds, but US citizenship law does not recognize the ability of US citizen children to renounce their citizenship, nor that of parents to do it on their behalf. Whatever pledges Indonesian schools required him to make as a child simply don't matter.
Infact, it'd make more sense if one would insist that to be eligible for president, one must hold *ONLY* American citizenship. (the current rules don't have any ban on a two-citizenship person becoming president, aslong as one of the two is American, and he's born with it).
That would be a big mistake, at least as formulated, for two (intimately related) reasons.
First, foreign citizenship is determined by foreign laws. Your proposal, as stated, would require the US government to disqualify presidential candidates based on the laws of a foreign country. This means that foreign nations get to say who can be US president.
Because of the previous point, you can be an involuntary foreign citizen. The natural-born US citizen children of the immigrants of several countries have this problem; e.g., there have been several cases where young natural-born Korean-Americans have traveled to South Korea without knowing that the government considers them to be its citizens and demands that they complete their obligatory military service. Similar (and worse) things happen from time to time with dual American-Iranian citizens traveling to Iran. Heck, US law itself actually provides for involuntary citizenship of minors; parents cannot renounce their children's US citizenship on their behalf, citizenship can only be renounced by an adult.
It would be terribly unfair to forbid a natural-born US citizen from being president who doesn't even know that they have a second citizenship in a country they may have never even visited.
To make your proposal get off the ground at all we have to modify it to forbid the presidency from people who have voluntarily and knowingly been sworn as citizens of another nation, or done something equivalent to that (e.g., accept an officer's commission from a foreign military, or become part of the high political leadership of a foreign country). This sort of thing used to be grounds for loss of US citizenship, but the Supreme Court struck it down some decades ago (which might actually be precedent against the modified forms of your proposal).
For the record, this whole thing shoots down a secondary birther canard that Obama can't be a natural born citizen because he is or was a dual citizen of the US and the UK, Kenya and/or Indonesia at some point. The answer is that (a) Obama evidently has been a citizen of at least one other country, (b) he was so involuntarily, (c) he never did anything to affirm any citizenship other than his American citizenship, (d) he lost any other such citizenships long ago, and (e) it's not relevant to US law anyway.
There is no argument by Atkinson that all language change is monotonic or predictable. But the observation that, on average, phoneme diversity increases with speaker population size and decreases with distance from Africa both seem true. These observations support the hypothesis that language spread out from a single origin in Africa , going through multiple bottlenecks that left this specific pattern of change.
I think this "bottlenecks" part is helping me understand the paper's argument a lot better (though I do have to look it up, I know; I just don't want to pay to read it). Perhaps a required element is that that several of these bottlenecks must have involved substantial contact between very different languages. In this case, a bottleneck is necessary but not sufficient; the thing that generates the trend toward simplification, is that the language spoken by a founding population can either be the result of normal language change (which doesn't trend very obviously toward either simplification or complexity), or of a creole-like event (which does tend toward simplification).
I still don't know how to fit the speaker population size factor into this, though.
Founder effects can occur with large groups, too. Think of two towns that speak the same language but have some noticeable variation between the two, for example, in one town they use the voiceless dental plosive, the other they use both the interdental fricative and the voiceless dental plosive. If these towns become isolated from each other evolving distinct languages, one will have fewer phonemes than the other. This is the founder effect.
The problem there is that one of those towns will have more phonemes than the other, also because of the founder effect.
I've been saying this all over this thread (and I'm not the only one saying it): "normal" language change does not obviously lead to simplification, and in fact may tend toward complexity. If we observe simplification, radical language contact seems a more likely cause. If languages that are "farther" from the origin tend to be simpler, then it would be presumably because they are more likely to have pidgin- or creole-like events at points in their history.
The thing is that restricted dialectal variation is not the same thing as a small phoneme inventory. New World dialects of European languages are indeed less variable than their Old World counterparts, but I haven't seen an argument that they are phonologically simpler as a rule or trend. The one case I feel confident to comment on is Spanish; I don't see that the Spanish of the New World is any simpler than that of, say, Seville.
I mentioned this in another post, but pidgins and creoles are a better example here, because they normally do involve noticeably structural simplification.
Regarding the latter, they're really bad about drawing big conclusions on a handful of examples, or (worse), the linguist relies on his/her own intuition about what's gramatically correct.
That's frankly not as bad as the ones that answer factual objections to their "theories" by saying: "oh, that's performance, not competence." Intuition-based grammatical research is not too bad as long as (a) you're sufficiently skeptical of yourself and your informants, (b) you don't pretend that you're formulating grandiose theories that critically rely on obscure crucial examples. On (a), well, there's a lot of structures that sound completely wrong until you construct a conversational context where suddenly they sound not just fine, but obligatory. And about (b), too many linguists like to see themselves as akin to cognitive psychologists, mathematicians and physicists, and not enough like to see themselves as anthropologists.
Let's end this with a joke. (Well, actually, my friend claims she witnessed this, so believe it if you want! But be warned that I'm embellishing.) Two Chomskians, Mary and Joe, are in a classroom, working over a problem by drawing trees in a whiteboard. Mary is contrasting language A with language B: "In A, this DP moves from here to here and this one moves from here to there, but in B, the DP moves over here instead, and the other one goes to the place where the first one goes in A."
Joe looks at it for a minute, and asks: "So what happens in English?"
Additionally, with phonemes the act of losing one seems to require a much lower effort than creating one.
Just think about how hard it is to learn a new phoneme as an adult from a different culture. If you didn't acquire it from another culture to speak *their* language, why would you ever go to that effort, and how likely would it be you convince other people to do it as well?
As opposed to losing a phoneme - we can all think of examples of shortening words or sounds, or just being lazy with pronunciation.
It's less that a founder group is likely to consist most of people who slur something, and more that in isolation it is much easier to lose sounds than it is to gain them.
snowgirl's response is quite right, but I feel like I can add an example and a bit of explanation that shows how this whole "getting a new phoneme is hard" is just not true.
The thing is that a phoneme is not a "sound"; a phoneme is a grouping of sounds, which makes them all equivalent for the purpose of a language. Sound is continuous; phonemes are a partition of sounds into discrete units. So there are sounds that are different as sounds but which a language will treat as the same phoneme; the term for such pairs of sounds is allophones. The most famous example is quite likely the fact that native speakers of Chinese, Japanese and Korean have a hard time with the "r" and "l" sounds; in their languages, those sounds are variants of just one phoneme. Correspondingly, Spanish distinguishes two "r" phonemes where English has only one, and thus the sounds that Spanish treats as distinct phonemes are merely allophones in English.
This is at the heart of how a language can develop a new phoneme. What happens is that what was formerly two allophones of the same phoneme, after some changes, become two distinct phonemes.
Now on to the example: in Spanish, the pronunciation of many vowels varies slightly depending on what type of syllable they occur. An "o" in a open syllable (one that ends in a vowel) is pronounced differently from an "o" in a closed syllable (one that ends in a consonant). In many dialects of Spanish, there is an independent phenomenon where an "s" at the end of a syllable variable pronounced either as "s", as an aspiration (English "h" sound), or not pronounced at all. And then there are these really odd dialects in southern Spain where the loss of "s" at the end of a syllable is so severe that the vowel allophones have become phonemes; the difference between la niña ("the girl") and las niñas ("the girls"), which in standard Spanish is carried by the "s" (or the aspiration), is now carried by a phonemic distinction between open and closed "a" sounds.
And in general, creation of new phonemes follows this pattern, which I will summarize:
An original phoneme X has allophone x in context 1, x' in context 2.
The language changes so as to eliminate the difference between contexts 1 and 2.
The former allophones x and x' now become distinct phonemes.
Phonemes themselves are lost over time. This is less related to this so-called "founder effect" than on the existence of small, isolated groups of speakers. As these isolated speakers interact more and more, they are bound to lose specific phonemes, morphemes, even full words and syntatic structures (and possibly create novel forms of the same) as a result of common usage patterns. Elsewhere, these patterns may reflect different "choices" by different isolated groups which originally spoke the same language. Your Scandanavian example is a perfect representation of this commonly-seen phenomenon.
The idea is that isolated groups tend to lose much more than they gain. Eventually these groups may come in contact with outsiders, intermingle, and then split off into other isolated groups again, where the process can repeat.
I this this is flawed in multiple ways. snowgirl pointed out that isolated language communities tend to preserve more stuff; the completementary observation can be made that the simplest languages tend to develop in the least isolated communities, where a large variety of substantially different languages are found. Pidgins are the prime example here.
In addition, while you claim that language change will somehow naturally tend toward simplification, the actual theory of language change as taught to me by actual linguists does not entail that at all. Language change, as traditionally conceived, is a ying-yang process of analogy and sound change. On the one side, analogy produces simpler, more regular systems, while on the outher, sound change destroys the regularity and simplicity of systems, with no obvious trend toward either simplification or complexity.
You know, actually, there are many linguists that reject Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar, on all sorts of grounds. The Chomskians like to pretend like they're the only game in town, but they're far from it.
There is no argument by Atkinson that all language change is monotonic or predictable. But the observation that, on average, phoneme diversity increases with speaker population size and decreases with distance from Africa both seem true.
Based on what? His statistics that shows extremely high variance? I bet he would be laughed out of any statistics department trying to extrapolate the linear model that he demonstrates. And let's not forget, that Navajo traveled a significantly longer distance from Africa than Hawaiian did, why does Navajo though have about 33 some consonants while Hawaiian only has 8?
I'm certainly not trying to argue for the paper, but my guess is that the strongest argument for a trend toward phonological simplification is some form linguistic leveling tied to migration and contact between speakers of different varieties. Creolistics provides the most extreme examples of this; pidgins and creoles tend toward relatively simple phonological systems because they result from a sort of compromise between speakers of very different languages, and they fall back toward making fewer phonological distinctions because many of the community members can't hear them anyway.
Leveling also happens between speakers of different dialects of the same language when they migrate and intermix (see, e.g., the relative dearth of variation between New World dialects of Old World languages, or even just USA east vs. west coast), though I'd have to check to what extent that involves simplification as opposed to just convergence. (New World Spanish is certainly no less complex phonologically than most Andalusian Spanish).
So if this is the case, smaller number of phonemes would indicate intense contact between languages that are dramatically different.
This is still hella speculative at best, and I don't doubt you'll agree.
The number of phonemes in a language has nothing to do with intelligence. In theory, the more modern languages have fewer phonemes because of the "founder effect". If you think about this in terms of vocabulary, it is obvious -- no-one knows all the words in any language, so if a small group set off to start their own colony, the language of that colony won't have the words that none of the founders knew. New words may be invented to substitute for the missing words but they will be different. It is the same with sounds (and genetic diversity, where this was first observed). Since new sound formation is a very slow process, the signal remains for a long time.
Your argument for the founder effect works for words, but not necessarily for phonemes. In order for a phoneme to be dropped by founder effect, the phoneme would have to occur in none of the words that the founders brought over. The idea of a phoneme rare enough in a vocabulary large enough for use by a small colony seems unlikely...
No, it's much worse than that. Why? Because phonemes aren't just bits that haphazardly occur in words. Rather, the phonemes are the resulting units of a phonological system that organizes continuous sound into discrete units that can be used for speech. As such, the phonemes of a language are more fundamental than its vocabulary; it's a constraint on the vocabulary. The set of phonemes of a language isn't determined by what phonemes its word has, but rather, the other way around: which phonemes the words have is determined by the set of phonemes in the language.
For example, take the phenomenon of glossolalia, popularly known as "speaking in tongues." One of the fundamental facts about glossolalia is that the sounds produced conform to the phonology of the languages that the speaker knows. I.e., if you're native language is English and you don't speak any other languages, and you're speaking in tongues, your gibberish is gonna be English-sounding gibberish. This is a pretty good demonstration that a language's phoneme inventory is something separate from its vocabulary.
I thought the whole reason why NoSQL is "better" than SQL is it's based on column based storage, while most SQL databased are row based storage. Couldn't you make a column-based database that uses SQL as a query language? There is nothing wrong with SQL as a language, there are just some workloads where column based storage is faster (mostly data analytics).
There are a number of column-oriented SQL databases. Another commenter pointed out Sybase IQ; I'll point out Vertica, and leave you to Google others if you want.
That's a very interesting article, and I'm going to have to look up the research and read it a lot more carefully. But I'm worried that a lot of their analysis just assumes too strongly that relational model = SQL.
For example, their claim that SQL is "not compositional." They define "compositionality" like this:
What we observe here is SQL's lack of compositionality—the ability arbitrarily to combine complex values from simpler values without falling outside the system.
Leaving aside that "compositional" is an odd word to use for this, the first problem here is that the relational model is in fact agnostic about this so-called "compositionality" of column's value's types. The relational model, strictly speaking, doesn't forbid you from having composite-typed columns.
Some, some proposed purely relational solutions to the problems tackled by outer joins is to allow non-base columns to have relations (i.e., sets) as their values. To put it in more SQL-like terms, you could have queries whose result sets had columns whose value was also a multi-row result set. This sort of thing solves the Figure 4 problem from TFA—you would have one row in the result, with Title="The Right Stuff" and Keywords={"Book", "Hardcover", "American"} (a set-valued Keywords column in the result). We can even sketch a SQL-like query for this (not actually valid SQL):
SELECT p.title AS Title, (SELECT k.keyword FROM keywords k WHERE k.productId = p.ID) AS Keywords FROM products p WHERE p.rating = '****'
Or this, with a fictional "SET" aggregate function: (again, not actually valid SQL):
SELECT p.title AS Title, SET(k.keyword) AS Keywords FROM products p INNER JOIN keywords k on p.ID = k.productId WHERE p.rating = '****'
The theory and effects of electron tunneling through doped materials once belonged to the "more distant explorations of science", and yet today we sit here typing on machines that use those applied effects (transistors) as a matter of course.
...and, of course, you almost certainly only know that because experts tell you! "We have all these machines that work because of science" doesn't defeat the point of TFA, because of this regress.
That which is not reproducible or testable is not science.
That which is not theoretically testable, you mean. First you have to do it once if you want to repeat it. But if you want to test for evolution you're going to need an awfully long test.
By this logic, a lot of Christianity is "theoretically" testable. You just have to die and see if you have an afterlife where you go to hell or heaven.
So far nobody has shown a really great reason why evolution can't work, though, via tests or otherwise. That doesn't make it science fact or whatever, but it doesn't make it science falsehood either.
So you can make up anything you want about stuff that can't be tested in practice, and it always falls to other people to give reasons why it couldn't work? That's great. Don't forget to throw in a bunch of ad-hoc hypotheses to counter each objection.
Macro and micro evolution are the same thing on different time scales, and if one works, the other has to.
By this logic if I can walk from my house to the store, I should be able to walk from Boston to London. They're just at different scales!
Well, there are people who have walked across America and other continents, so the distance is not a problem. You're only making it more difficult/impossible by adding water, whereas the original argument does not have any significant hurdles to overcome.
The Boston-to-London argument implicitly assumes there is no ocean in between the two cities. The original argument correspondingly assumes that there are no analogous hurdles in the jump from microevolution to macroevolution. How do you know there aren't any?
If you want a mathematical analogy, it's like assuming that you can get to omega by counting one by one from zero.
You need an extremely detailed theory that explains how the accumulation of relatively small changes to the genotype can produce viable intermediate forms between dramatically different species. There really isn't much in the way of such a theory, and developing such a thing is always hampered by the fact that the past already happened and can't be reconstructed in full detail.
The fact is that I see the results of science every time I use a computer, ride a car, take a medicine, watch TV, etc, etc, etc.
...how do you know that those in fact are the results of science, without consulting and relying on the opinion of experts?
The problem here is that classic epistemology is messed up, and talks about knowledge as if it was an individual affair and not a communal one. Too many people talk about scientific results being "reproducible," but nobody ever reproduces anything other than a trivial amount of the results that they accept.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that cat would be like a double click: it would just open whatever file in the default application.
Actually, no, that's not the point. The point is that data and user views are separated, so that cat sends bytes, and the program that receives cat's output then decides how to treat them. If the recipient is the terminal, then the terminal displays the content as an image.
Human language began with humans associating sounds they made with objects. Afterwards, they associate sounds with conceptual things like actions. It's only they they combined objects with actions into one meaning that grammar is developed for consistency and ease of understanding.
It probably took humans an insane amount of years before such things as grammar was developed slowly passing on each advancement to each of their generation.
You think robots can achieve something better then humans instantly? Of course this is just pre-programmed logic designed with this purpose in mind so how much cheating vs how much real adaptic logic is in their is hard to say.
But to say it's not a language, a language is but a method to communicate no matter the form of sound used. It's simply a primitive one at best.
Wow, that clears it up. Thank you for figuring out a topic that nobody has!
The links I've seen about this go on and on about how the robots invent and use "words." But language is not words; language is grammar; language is a set of rules for recursively constructing highly complex expressions from smaller subparts. This is Linguistics 101 material.
The way you distinguish somebody with Linguistics training from a layperson is that the layperson will talk about language as if it's a "bag of words" and overall focus too much on the words, whereas the linguist will tend to see most words as either (a) the filler that goes inside the phrases and sentences, or (b) the stuff whose formation is constrained by the general phonological and morphological rules of the language. Or, short and sweet: words are boring unless they're function words like "the."
The scientific method in general terms consists of observation, then hypothesis, then designing an experiment to prove the hypothesis. You are arguing "shouldn't it" and closing your mind to the understanding of the observed results - it doesn't matter what it "should" and "shouldn't" do under current models - what is important is what it actually did. Which means that either a) there were conditions that we don't know about that enabled the reaction or b) there are additional underlying scientific principles that we don't fully understand yet.
You know, in actual practice, scientists don't abandon their theories just because a single experiment contradicts them. Galileo didn't give up heliocentrism when confronted with the stellar parallax problem; in fact, he took up heliocentrism in spite of it. Einstein didn't give up on the theory of relativity because of Kaufman's 1905 experiments; he held on to it despite the experimental contradiction.
I'm not saying that they programmed using crazy network design, I'm saying that all the really great programmers I've met (say my top 3 all-time) were very skilled in networking and in hardware.
Your sampling procedure seems to be somehow biased.
No, actually -- OS X Tiger was the pinnacle, and Leopard and Snow Leopard are buggier than Tiger -- speaking as someone who uses OS X for pro audio and also has an abundance of experience with Linux, BSD, and windows.
This is my impression too, though my main experience with this comes primarily from watching Safari go from a stable browser back in the Tiger days to a horrible buggy beachballing crashing mess today...
Learn your french. "Viola" literally means "raped" which I doubt is what you meant.
Um, no, "viola" in French, just like in English (or rather the other way around), is the bowed chordophone that plays second fiddle to the violin. "Viola" is the third person singular simple present form of the verb "violar" in Spanish and Portuguese, which does mean "rape"... but it's also the noun for the musical instrument.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Italian has a verb "violare" with a third person singular present form "viola."
I am torn on the natural citizen clause. I don't want a president who has sworn allegiance to another country. The U.S. President should not be conflicted by the interests of two countries.
You don't have to swear allegiance to a second country to be a dual citizen. You can be a dual citizen involuntarily and unknowingly simply because the law of a second country says you're it's citizen. As an example, many Iranian-Americans and Korean-Americans have had this sort of problem when traveling back to their parent's countries—e.g., you go visit your grandparents in South Korea and the government forces you to stay and do military service...
OTOH, a baby has no say in when and where it is born - that is determined by its parents and doctors. Obama was in Hawaii by his second birthday (or possibly even born there if you accept the released document), attended elementary school in Indonesia (state-run school required him to pledge allegiance to the government), back in Hawaii for high school, then on the mainland for most of his adult life. Did Obama spend enough time in Indonesia to put its interests above American interests? I personally don't think so.
You're free not to vote for Obama on those insane grounds, but US citizenship law does not recognize the ability of US citizen children to renounce their citizenship, nor that of parents to do it on their behalf. Whatever pledges Indonesian schools required him to make as a child simply don't matter.
Infact, it'd make more sense if one would insist that to be eligible for president, one must hold *ONLY* American citizenship. (the current rules don't have any ban on a two-citizenship person becoming president, aslong as one of the two is American, and he's born with it).
That would be a big mistake, at least as formulated, for two (intimately related) reasons.
First, foreign citizenship is determined by foreign laws. Your proposal, as stated, would require the US government to disqualify presidential candidates based on the laws of a foreign country. This means that foreign nations get to say who can be US president.
Because of the previous point, you can be an involuntary foreign citizen. The natural-born US citizen children of the immigrants of several countries have this problem; e.g., there have been several cases where young natural-born Korean-Americans have traveled to South Korea without knowing that the government considers them to be its citizens and demands that they complete their obligatory military service. Similar (and worse) things happen from time to time with dual American-Iranian citizens traveling to Iran. Heck, US law itself actually provides for involuntary citizenship of minors; parents cannot renounce their children's US citizenship on their behalf, citizenship can only be renounced by an adult.
It would be terribly unfair to forbid a natural-born US citizen from being president who doesn't even know that they have a second citizenship in a country they may have never even visited.
To make your proposal get off the ground at all we have to modify it to forbid the presidency from people who have voluntarily and knowingly been sworn as citizens of another nation, or done something equivalent to that (e.g., accept an officer's commission from a foreign military, or become part of the high political leadership of a foreign country). This sort of thing used to be grounds for loss of US citizenship, but the Supreme Court struck it down some decades ago (which might actually be precedent against the modified forms of your proposal).
For the record, this whole thing shoots down a secondary birther canard that Obama can't be a natural born citizen because he is or was a dual citizen of the US and the UK, Kenya and/or Indonesia at some point. The answer is that (a) Obama evidently has been a citizen of at least one other country, (b) he was so involuntarily, (c) he never did anything to affirm any citizenship other than his American citizenship, (d) he lost any other such citizenships long ago, and (e) it's not relevant to US law anyway.
There is no argument by Atkinson that all language change is monotonic or predictable. But the observation that, on average, phoneme diversity increases with speaker population size and decreases with distance from Africa both seem true. These observations support the hypothesis that language spread out from a single origin in Africa , going through multiple bottlenecks that left this specific pattern of change.
I think this "bottlenecks" part is helping me understand the paper's argument a lot better (though I do have to look it up, I know; I just don't want to pay to read it). Perhaps a required element is that that several of these bottlenecks must have involved substantial contact between very different languages. In this case, a bottleneck is necessary but not sufficient; the thing that generates the trend toward simplification, is that the language spoken by a founding population can either be the result of normal language change (which doesn't trend very obviously toward either simplification or complexity), or of a creole-like event (which does tend toward simplification).
I still don't know how to fit the speaker population size factor into this, though.
Founder effects can occur with large groups, too. Think of two towns that speak the same language but have some noticeable variation between the two, for example, in one town they use the voiceless dental plosive, the other they use both the interdental fricative and the voiceless dental plosive. If these towns become isolated from each other evolving distinct languages, one will have fewer phonemes than the other. This is the founder effect.
The problem there is that one of those towns will have more phonemes than the other, also because of the founder effect.
I've been saying this all over this thread (and I'm not the only one saying it): "normal" language change does not obviously lead to simplification, and in fact may tend toward complexity. If we observe simplification, radical language contact seems a more likely cause. If languages that are "farther" from the origin tend to be simpler, then it would be presumably because they are more likely to have pidgin- or creole-like events at points in their history.
The thing is that restricted dialectal variation is not the same thing as a small phoneme inventory. New World dialects of European languages are indeed less variable than their Old World counterparts, but I haven't seen an argument that they are phonologically simpler as a rule or trend. The one case I feel confident to comment on is Spanish; I don't see that the Spanish of the New World is any simpler than that of, say, Seville.
I mentioned this in another post, but pidgins and creoles are a better example here, because they normally do involve noticeably structural simplification.
Regarding the latter, they're really bad about drawing big conclusions on a handful of examples, or (worse), the linguist relies on his/her own intuition about what's gramatically correct.
That's frankly not as bad as the ones that answer factual objections to their "theories" by saying: "oh, that's performance, not competence." Intuition-based grammatical research is not too bad as long as (a) you're sufficiently skeptical of yourself and your informants, (b) you don't pretend that you're formulating grandiose theories that critically rely on obscure crucial examples. On (a), well, there's a lot of structures that sound completely wrong until you construct a conversational context where suddenly they sound not just fine, but obligatory. And about (b), too many linguists like to see themselves as akin to cognitive psychologists, mathematicians and physicists, and not enough like to see themselves as anthropologists.
Let's end this with a joke. (Well, actually, my friend claims she witnessed this, so believe it if you want! But be warned that I'm embellishing.) Two Chomskians, Mary and Joe, are in a classroom, working over a problem by drawing trees in a whiteboard. Mary is contrasting language A with language B: "In A, this DP moves from here to here and this one moves from here to there, but in B, the DP moves over here instead, and the other one goes to the place where the first one goes in A."
Joe looks at it for a minute, and asks: "So what happens in English?"
Mary answers: "Oh, in English nothing moves!"
Additionally, with phonemes the act of losing one seems to require a much lower effort than creating one.
Just think about how hard it is to learn a new phoneme as an adult from a different culture. If you didn't acquire it from another culture to speak *their* language, why would you ever go to that effort, and how likely would it be you convince other people to do it as well?
As opposed to losing a phoneme - we can all think of examples of shortening words or sounds, or just being lazy with pronunciation.
It's less that a founder group is likely to consist most of people who slur something, and more that in isolation it is much easier to lose sounds than it is to gain them.
snowgirl's response is quite right, but I feel like I can add an example and a bit of explanation that shows how this whole "getting a new phoneme is hard" is just not true.
The thing is that a phoneme is not a "sound"; a phoneme is a grouping of sounds, which makes them all equivalent for the purpose of a language. Sound is continuous; phonemes are a partition of sounds into discrete units. So there are sounds that are different as sounds but which a language will treat as the same phoneme; the term for such pairs of sounds is allophones. The most famous example is quite likely the fact that native speakers of Chinese, Japanese and Korean have a hard time with the "r" and "l" sounds; in their languages, those sounds are variants of just one phoneme. Correspondingly, Spanish distinguishes two "r" phonemes where English has only one, and thus the sounds that Spanish treats as distinct phonemes are merely allophones in English.
This is at the heart of how a language can develop a new phoneme. What happens is that what was formerly two allophones of the same phoneme, after some changes, become two distinct phonemes.
Now on to the example: in Spanish, the pronunciation of many vowels varies slightly depending on what type of syllable they occur. An "o" in a open syllable (one that ends in a vowel) is pronounced differently from an "o" in a closed syllable (one that ends in a consonant). In many dialects of Spanish, there is an independent phenomenon where an "s" at the end of a syllable variable pronounced either as "s", as an aspiration (English "h" sound), or not pronounced at all. And then there are these really odd dialects in southern Spain where the loss of "s" at the end of a syllable is so severe that the vowel allophones have become phonemes; the difference between la niña ("the girl") and las niñas ("the girls"), which in standard Spanish is carried by the "s" (or the aspiration), is now carried by a phonemic distinction between open and closed "a" sounds.
And in general, creation of new phonemes follows this pattern, which I will summarize:
Phonemes themselves are lost over time. This is less related to this so-called "founder effect" than on the existence of small, isolated groups of speakers. As these isolated speakers interact more and more, they are bound to lose specific phonemes, morphemes, even full words and syntatic structures (and possibly create novel forms of the same) as a result of common usage patterns. Elsewhere, these patterns may reflect different "choices" by different isolated groups which originally spoke the same language. Your Scandanavian example is a perfect representation of this commonly-seen phenomenon.
The idea is that isolated groups tend to lose much more than they gain. Eventually these groups may come in contact with outsiders, intermingle, and then split off into other isolated groups again, where the process can repeat.
I this this is flawed in multiple ways. snowgirl pointed out that isolated language communities tend to preserve more stuff; the completementary observation can be made that the simplest languages tend to develop in the least isolated communities, where a large variety of substantially different languages are found. Pidgins are the prime example here.
In addition, while you claim that language change will somehow naturally tend toward simplification, the actual theory of language change as taught to me by actual linguists does not entail that at all. Language change, as traditionally conceived, is a ying-yang process of analogy and sound change. On the one side, analogy produces simpler, more regular systems, while on the outher, sound change destroys the regularity and simplicity of systems, with no obvious trend toward either simplification or complexity.
You know, actually, there are many linguists that reject Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar, on all sorts of grounds. The Chomskians like to pretend like they're the only game in town, but they're far from it.
There is no argument by Atkinson that all language change is monotonic or predictable. But the observation that, on average, phoneme diversity increases with speaker population size and decreases with distance from Africa both seem true.
Based on what? His statistics that shows extremely high variance? I bet he would be laughed out of any statistics department trying to extrapolate the linear model that he demonstrates. And let's not forget, that Navajo traveled a significantly longer distance from Africa than Hawaiian did, why does Navajo though have about 33 some consonants while Hawaiian only has 8?
I'm certainly not trying to argue for the paper, but my guess is that the strongest argument for a trend toward phonological simplification is some form linguistic leveling tied to migration and contact between speakers of different varieties. Creolistics provides the most extreme examples of this; pidgins and creoles tend toward relatively simple phonological systems because they result from a sort of compromise between speakers of very different languages, and they fall back toward making fewer phonological distinctions because many of the community members can't hear them anyway.
Leveling also happens between speakers of different dialects of the same language when they migrate and intermix (see, e.g., the relative dearth of variation between New World dialects of Old World languages, or even just USA east vs. west coast), though I'd have to check to what extent that involves simplification as opposed to just convergence. (New World Spanish is certainly no less complex phonologically than most Andalusian Spanish).
So if this is the case, smaller number of phonemes would indicate intense contact between languages that are dramatically different.
This is still hella speculative at best, and I don't doubt you'll agree.
The number of phonemes in a language has nothing to do with intelligence. In theory, the more modern languages have fewer phonemes because of the "founder effect". If you think about this in terms of vocabulary, it is obvious -- no-one knows all the words in any language, so if a small group set off to start their own colony, the language of that colony won't have the words that none of the founders knew. New words may be invented to substitute for the missing words but they will be different. It is the same with sounds (and genetic diversity, where this was first observed). Since new sound formation is a very slow process, the signal remains for a long time.
Your argument for the founder effect works for words, but not necessarily for phonemes. In order for a phoneme to be dropped by founder effect, the phoneme would have to occur in none of the words that the founders brought over. The idea of a phoneme rare enough in a vocabulary large enough for use by a small colony seems unlikely...
No, it's much worse than that. Why? Because phonemes aren't just bits that haphazardly occur in words. Rather, the phonemes are the resulting units of a phonological system that organizes continuous sound into discrete units that can be used for speech. As such, the phonemes of a language are more fundamental than its vocabulary; it's a constraint on the vocabulary. The set of phonemes of a language isn't determined by what phonemes its word has, but rather, the other way around: which phonemes the words have is determined by the set of phonemes in the language.
For example, take the phenomenon of glossolalia, popularly known as "speaking in tongues." One of the fundamental facts about glossolalia is that the sounds produced conform to the phonology of the languages that the speaker knows. I.e., if you're native language is English and you don't speak any other languages, and you're speaking in tongues, your gibberish is gonna be English-sounding gibberish. This is a pretty good demonstration that a language's phoneme inventory is something separate from its vocabulary.
Composite value types violate 1NF (as defined by some people in the field.) since they are isomorphic to relations.
Yeah, but you wouldn't have them in the base relvars of your schema. You'd just allow queries and views to have set-valued attributes.
I thought the whole reason why NoSQL is "better" than SQL is it's based on column based storage, while most SQL databased are row based storage. Couldn't you make a column-based database that uses SQL as a query language? There is nothing wrong with SQL as a language, there are just some workloads where column based storage is faster (mostly data analytics).
There are a number of column-oriented SQL databases. Another commenter pointed out Sybase IQ; I'll point out Vertica, and leave you to Google others if you want.
That's a very interesting article, and I'm going to have to look up the research and read it a lot more carefully. But I'm worried that a lot of their analysis just assumes too strongly that relational model = SQL.
For example, their claim that SQL is "not compositional." They define "compositionality" like this:
What we observe here is SQL's lack of compositionality—the ability arbitrarily to combine complex values from simpler values without falling outside the system.
Leaving aside that "compositional" is an odd word to use for this, the first problem here is that the relational model is in fact agnostic about this so-called "compositionality" of column's value's types. The relational model, strictly speaking, doesn't forbid you from having composite-typed columns.
Some, some proposed purely relational solutions to the problems tackled by outer joins is to allow non-base columns to have relations (i.e., sets) as their values. To put it in more SQL-like terms, you could have queries whose result sets had columns whose value was also a multi-row result set. This sort of thing solves the Figure 4 problem from TFA—you would have one row in the result, with Title="The Right Stuff" and Keywords={"Book", "Hardcover", "American"} (a set-valued Keywords column in the result). We can even sketch a SQL-like query for this (not actually valid SQL):
Or this, with a fictional "SET" aggregate function: (again, not actually valid SQL):
The theory and effects of electron tunneling through doped materials once belonged to the "more distant explorations of science", and yet today we sit here typing on machines that use those applied effects (transistors) as a matter of course.
...and, of course, you almost certainly only know that because experts tell you! "We have all these machines that work because of science" doesn't defeat the point of TFA, because of this regress.
That which is not reproducible or testable is not science.
That which is not theoretically testable, you mean. First you have to do it once if you want to repeat it. But if you want to test for evolution you're going to need an awfully long test.
By this logic, a lot of Christianity is "theoretically" testable. You just have to die and see if you have an afterlife where you go to hell or heaven.
So far nobody has shown a really great reason why evolution can't work, though, via tests or otherwise. That doesn't make it science fact or whatever, but it doesn't make it science falsehood either.
So you can make up anything you want about stuff that can't be tested in practice, and it always falls to other people to give reasons why it couldn't work? That's great. Don't forget to throw in a bunch of ad-hoc hypotheses to counter each objection.
Macro and micro evolution are the same thing on different time scales, and if one works, the other has to.
By this logic if I can walk from my house to the store, I should be able to walk from Boston to London. They're just at different scales!
Well, there are people who have walked across America and other continents, so the distance is not a problem. You're only making it more difficult/impossible by adding water, whereas the original argument does not have any significant hurdles to overcome.
The Boston-to-London argument implicitly assumes there is no ocean in between the two cities. The original argument correspondingly assumes that there are no analogous hurdles in the jump from microevolution to macroevolution. How do you know there aren't any?
If you want a mathematical analogy, it's like assuming that you can get to omega by counting one by one from zero.
You need an extremely detailed theory that explains how the accumulation of relatively small changes to the genotype can produce viable intermediate forms between dramatically different species. There really isn't much in the way of such a theory, and developing such a thing is always hampered by the fact that the past already happened and can't be reconstructed in full detail.
The fact is that I see the results of science every time I use a computer, ride a car, take a medicine, watch TV, etc, etc, etc.
...how do you know that those in fact are the results of science, without consulting and relying on the opinion of experts?
The problem here is that classic epistemology is messed up, and talks about knowledge as if it was an individual affair and not a communal one. Too many people talk about scientific results being "reproducible," but nobody ever reproduces anything other than a trivial amount of the results that they accept.