I am a specialist in North American indigenous languages. I work with multiple reservations on language and cultural revitalization, and while I do not work with any of the Alaskan communities, we attend the same symposiums, training sessions, conferences, etc.
You say the natives of Alaska have never been beaten or suppressed? Then why don't they have local sovereignty? They used to. Why are the lands of culturally distinct bands like the Tlingit and Haida controlled by Corporations (albeit natively owned), like Sealaska Inc.? Are you suggesting they asked for that socio-political structure? Just because we didn't just flat-out kill 95% of them (like in California), we didn't beat or suppress them? If there was no issue, why have there been two major acts of Congress designed to fix the situation?
Russia, Canada, and the United States took their lands, and changed their entire system of social organization, politics, and economics. (Only the last was inevitable.) They didn't get the same level of warfare, forced boarding schools, and outlawed religions as other groups further east and south, but to say that equals "not suppressed" doesn't follow. We forced upon them a socio-economic system that discourages the continuation of their ways and language. That's suppression, even if it is a "nicer" form of it than often otherwise practiced.
What the hell are you talking about? Their cultures and languages are dying rapidly, killed off by American and Canadian encroachment. They are healthier than most indigenous groups of North America, and they have some of the more effective revitalization programs in place; but to say they were never "discredited" or "suppressed" is just silly.
I've been using OSX since oct 2000; I have yet to experience a screwup due to an OS software upgrade. I'm sure many other people feel the same way...
4 years, never had an upgrade screw up either, though one of my co-workers has.
However, I have had hardware compatibility issues that demonstrated to me that it doesn't "just work". The free printer they give out (HP Photosmart Express) couldn't even be installed without downloading stuff from HP's website. HP bears much fault in this, but Apple shouldn't be featuring peripherals that have problems like that, or should at least have some helpful information on their website to fix the problem. I know I'm not a solitary case, because Google gave me the solution very quickly.
Last year I shared an office space with two other people. We had individualized laptops, but the three desktops were communal; each designated for a task, not a person. One of my co-workers was very possessive of one of them; and she was also the messiest of the three of us. After she left work, the other co-worker and I mirror-imaged the office--everything on the left went to the right and vice-versa. That included all the desktops, printer, telephone, the books on the bookshelves, everything. We even moved her messy piles, old coffee cups, and snack wrappers. We took before-and-after pictures so that it was exactly mirror image.
Her initial reaction--total surprise and confusion--would have been worth it alone. But she completely over-reacted, griped, complained, and swore at us all day. It went from a pretty good prank, to the most hysterical reaction I've ever seen. Lucky for us, even the boss thought it was funny, so her complaints fell on deaf ears. It was a good 9 months before she was able to laugh about it.
Does that mean when I do tech support for my family, I get to be Morgan Freeman? That'd be awesome
If we catch Bill Gates and he turns out to be the devil, I mean if he's Satan himself, that might live up to our expectations, but he's not the devil. He's just a man.
I just don't think I can continue to live with an OS that embraces and nurtures apathy as if it was virtue.
This isn't going to have a happy ending.
On the subway today, a man came up to me to start a conversation. He made small talk, a lonely man talking about big colorful icons and ribbons. I tried to be pleasant and accommodating, but my head hurt from his banality. I almost didn't notice it had happened, but I suddenly threw up all over him. He was not pleased, and I couldn't stop laughing.
A couple interesting observations about those charts.
From 1947-1977 (the first half covered) the mean household income (adjusted for inflation) goes from $26,322 to $51,925. That's almost double the household income. From 1978-2005 (the second half), it goes from $54,764 to $73,304. That's a little more than a 1/3 increase. So the rate at which our income is increasing has dropped drastically.
The further back along the time-line you go, the fewer two income households there are. So the doubling of earning power in the first 30 years of the chart was decreasingly accomplished by single individuals making more. The lesser increase in earning power in the second half is increasingly accomplished by pairs.
The passage you mean might be this from Summa Theologica (1265-1274):
Obj. 2: Further, different sciences are different habits. But the
same scientific truth belongs to different sciences: thus both the
physicist and the astronomer prove the earth to be round, as stated
in _Phys._ ii, text. 17. Therefore habits are not distinguished by
their objects.
I don't know what you are talking about, Mr. Nay-Saying Anonymous Coward. I have been using Netflix for four years. I use three profiles--one for TV series, one for American movies, and one for foreign movies. I *always* get either the first or second item for all three lists.
I do have my complaints with Netflix, though. The main one is the well-known fact that they throttle disk delivery. I understand why they do it from on economic perspective; but I don't think their practice matches their rhetoric. It annoys me, but not enough to stop. The reality of their service is fair, I think.
The U.S. Government outlawed many traditional songs and dances performed by Native American tribes, because they were viewed as subversive or counter to the government's policy of integration. Some tribes started performing these activities in secret, others shifted to performing them to coincide with American holidays. If they weren't allowed to do an Eagle Dance, they would do it on the Fourth of July and say they were celebrating the founding of America. If they otherwise kept their noses clean, the FBI and BIA agents let them get away with it. But this wasn't a sign of embracing American culture. What they were really doing was finding a way to keep the memory of their culture alive against an oppressive regime.
So, does this Chinese math professor really commemorate the massacre? Or has she found a way to remind her students and colleagues of what happened, using rhetoric that won't get her pegged as a dissident and punished? And, how do you, or the Chinese government, tell the difference?
When you see tables in a coffee shop, do you assume they are free for anyone or do you assume they are for customers? Why should wifi be any different?
When you see a house with the front door open, do you assume they are inviting everyone to come in and look around? Why should wifi be any different?
It's insane. People around here freak out when laws are written to exclude activities over the internet that are already illegal off the internet, and when old practices are patented for use on computers. But normal social behavior is supposed to be different now that wifi is involved?
I thought pretexting was a subcategory of fraud anyway.
Yes, it is. There is so much fraud and deceit coming out of corporations and politicians these days that the English speaking public is scrambling for new words to accurately differentiate it so that it isn't one big opaque mass of lies.
The complaint is that "pretexting" doesn't have negative connotations yet. I suspect because the word is still too new. If people want to change that, they need to pepper the internet/media with clearly derogatory uses of the word. Make sure that people can't search the term without seeing a reference to how negative a practice it is.
There is a reason the FDA's summary is so vague---the proposal isn't about chocolate. Well, not just about chocolate. The proposal is supported by a substantial range of food manufacturer's and distributors, touching on chocolate, meat, poultry, frozen food, and more.
The proposed changes affect divergences from standard labeling guidelines for a lot of reasons, including things like "improvements in nutritional properties", "use of safe suitable flavors and flavor enhancers", "alternate manufacturing processes", etc.
You can read the whole thing yourself (pdf warning) here. See especially the last 4 pages or so.
Is the change in guidelines a good thing for consumers? I don't know. I don't know enough about food manufacturing to judge.
Do children get stereotyped as "the problem child" with no possible second chance? Are they doomed once teachers look for this type of behavior.
Yes, they do get stereotyped and blamed for behavior they didn't do.
My mother transfered to a new school as a third grade teacher. She had a student in her class who, the year before (second grade), had pulled a knife on a girl and then tried to cut the principal. My mother didn't have any preconceived notions about him, and treated him just like the other students. Because she was virtually the only person (student, teacher, administrator) that treated him like a good albeit troubled child, he latched onto her. He would often spend his recess with her, instead of with the other kids; same with lunch. Sometimes he would stay after school awhile (bad home life). During these times when he was with her, bad things would happen (kids getting beat up, windows broken, etc.), and the lunch duty people would insist that he had done them. They would claim that they had personally seen him do it. But he was with my mother at the time.
Do "problem" kids get stereotyped and scapegoated? Absolutely.
Replying to overturn a mistaken mod. I really need to remember to stop using the new comment system when I'm moderating. Or better yet, they need to fix the code for it.
Even your interpretation doesn't admit to the possibility that a scientist may not wish to bother fighting the regulations. That is, by accepting the workplace requirements it's not an endorcement of pseudoscience, but simply not wishing to bother fighting the regulations.
How long would you stay at a job that tested your honesty through leg-wrestling the head of security?
I don't know Mapuche attitudes, so I can't comment specifically on them, but:
These are societies with their own customs, own protocols, own laws. If Microsoft did not go through the proper channels, then they might have done something the locals considered anything from a minor faux pas to an offense against God. Of course, there are also societies where the permission of one tribe member would have been good enough, and Microsoft surely had that if they can do the translation adequately.
Most tribes in the Americas and Australia have been horribly brutalized by Europeans coming in and telling them how to live their lives and run their societies. If Microsoft did not go through the proper channels, then they may be viewed as another group pushing their world view on the society, forcing them to conform. I'm sure Microsoft had no such intentions, but a privileged majority has a very different perspective on these kinds of things from an oppressed minority.
Many tribes consider their language sacred. Depending on how the language localization is being distributed, Microsoft may be sending sacred material out to all their customers. And if the majority of the society does not like the way some of the things are translated, they might even be distributing a mockery of sacred material. This is an area where people need to tread carefully. Again, I am sure Microsoft had the best of intentions; but these are tricky issues even if you are intimately involved with them. (I have a friend who reviewed the Estonian translation before it was shipped, and she told me there were a large number of ridiculous problems that no native speaker would have made. She thought they must have just opened up a comprehensive English-Estonian dictionary and put stuff in; which is a terrible way to translate. That's a language that is well-documented, and a culture quite similar to our own, so fewer chances for mistakes.)
Maybe the lawsuit is dumb. I don't know the specifics, so I will withhold judgment. But the lawsuit may also be their attempt to regain control over the direction their language and culture is going.
Legality was not the point I was making. The point was to show why native groups are trying to put legal protection on their cultural knowledge and language. It takes thousands of years for the language and culture to become the way it is. Now some outsider can come in and borrow their knowledge, profit off of it, and in some cases have all legal authority to records of it; and the natives get little to nothing for it. It is illegal to deal in many types of physical native artifacts. They want the same kind of protection to their non-physical artifacts as well.
(And on the issue of tribes "failing" to preserve their knowledge---go read a decent history book of North America, South America, or Australia. Read about assassinations, massacres, forced boarding schools, banned religions, and other actions specifically aimed at destroying these people and cultures. Then we can talk about their "failure".)
A language is a way for people to communicate. That is, it is a system known to both of them, using which they can send each other messages. One can patent such a system to prevent others from using it. I am not sure, but I do not think that the tribe patented their language. Therefore, I doubt that they have any grounds on which to sue.
As a linguist who works closely with native communities, let me try to offer some insight into this issue.
Copyright law was not designed with oral traditions in mind. Therefore, a lot of previously unwritten languages face strange legal problems. For example, a person records elders telling a traditional story and publishes them as recordings or a transcribed text. The person who did the publishing has the copyright for those recordings, not the original storyteller. Thus, if the storyteller performs that same story in public, he is violating the law. Central texts of a society's religion are now the intellectual property of an outsider. There has been some work to fix this issue, but things are not perfect yet.
Concrete example (with all distinguishing features withheld for obvious reasons): The last knowledgeable elder of a tribe died. A linguist who could not get a job in academia has many hours of recordings of this elder, but won't release them to the tribe, unless they pay him lots and lots of money. The tribe is trying to recover its religious stories, fables, tribal history, and revitalize its language, but it is all held hostage by one man who is not affiliated with the tribe in any way. The tribe's position is that they should have some rights to the material, since it has been in the tribe forever. But the law says the material belongs to the man who made the recordings. (Oh, and the tribe is reluctant to take it to court until all other options are exhausted, because they are afraid of possible precedents.)
Also, many native religions have a different relationship between people and language. In the Judeo-Christian approach, we speak a variety of languages because we angered God and he confounded our languages, losing the original one He gave us. Now, most people here regard Babel as a metaphor; but it is a metaphor that has shaped the way we view language--as something not inherently sacred. Lots of tribes still speak the language their God gave them (from their perspective), which makes it a religious artifact. For a company like Microsoft to come in and use their language without permissions would be an intrusion on their religious rights.
What many tribes are doing, then, is asserting intellectual property over everything related to their language (stories, words, grammar, etc.) in the hopes that they can exert some control over the outsiders who want to come in and take advantage of them. (And many times an outsider's best intentions are actually harmful to the native community, we just don't understand all the issues.)
The UCLA Biomedical Library used to have texts in Russian on construction of nuclear power plants. I worked there as an undergraduate, and was tasked with pulling them from the shelf to send to the unused book storage library (the SRLF). I could only read enough Russian to figure out the titles, so I don't know how detailed they were, but they did have lots of interesting looking diagrams.
I never did figure out why there were such books in a biomedical library.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a specialist in North American indigenous languages. I work with multiple reservations on language and cultural revitalization, and while I do not work with any of the Alaskan communities, we attend the same symposiums, training sessions, conferences, etc.
You say the natives of Alaska have never been beaten or suppressed? Then why don't they have local sovereignty? They used to. Why are the lands of culturally distinct bands like the Tlingit and Haida controlled by Corporations (albeit natively owned), like Sealaska Inc.? Are you suggesting they asked for that socio-political structure? Just because we didn't just flat-out kill 95% of them (like in California), we didn't beat or suppress them? If there was no issue, why have there been two major acts of Congress designed to fix the situation?
Russia, Canada, and the United States took their lands, and changed their entire system of social organization, politics, and economics. (Only the last was inevitable.) They didn't get the same level of warfare, forced boarding schools, and outlawed religions as other groups further east and south, but to say that equals "not suppressed" doesn't follow. We forced upon them a socio-economic system that discourages the continuation of their ways and language. That's suppression, even if it is a "nicer" form of it than often otherwise practiced.
What the hell are you talking about? Their cultures and languages are dying rapidly, killed off by American and Canadian encroachment. They are healthier than most indigenous groups of North America, and they have some of the more effective revitalization programs in place; but to say they were never "discredited" or "suppressed" is just silly.
4 years, never had an upgrade screw up either, though one of my co-workers has.
However, I have had hardware compatibility issues that demonstrated to me that it doesn't "just work". The free printer they give out (HP Photosmart Express) couldn't even be installed without downloading stuff from HP's website. HP bears much fault in this, but Apple shouldn't be featuring peripherals that have problems like that, or should at least have some helpful information on their website to fix the problem. I know I'm not a solitary case, because Google gave me the solution very quickly.
Iraq is no longer threatening to move its oil currency over to the Euro. Mission Accomplished!
Last year I shared an office space with two other people. We had individualized laptops, but the three desktops were communal; each designated for a task, not a person. One of my co-workers was very possessive of one of them; and she was also the messiest of the three of us. After she left work, the other co-worker and I mirror-imaged the office--everything on the left went to the right and vice-versa. That included all the desktops, printer, telephone, the books on the bookshelves, everything. We even moved her messy piles, old coffee cups, and snack wrappers. We took before-and-after pictures so that it was exactly mirror image.
Her initial reaction--total surprise and confusion--would have been worth it alone. But she completely over-reacted, griped, complained, and swore at us all day. It went from a pretty good prank, to the most hysterical reaction I've ever seen. Lucky for us, even the boss thought it was funny, so her complaints fell on deaf ears. It was a good 9 months before she was able to laugh about it.
Does that mean when I do tech support for my family, I get to be Morgan Freeman? That'd be awesome
Are you sure it shouldn't be FAST search and transfer?
If they could take care of black holes at will, you'd think they'd be able to take care of their own black holes without help.
Actually, I should give credit to Project Gutenberg. I just pulled up Aquinas's works, and searched for "round". Found it in an instant.
The passage you mean might be this from Summa Theologica (1265-1274):
I don't know what you are talking about, Mr. Nay-Saying Anonymous Coward. I have been using Netflix for four years. I use three profiles--one for TV series, one for American movies, and one for foreign movies. I *always* get either the first or second item for all three lists.
I do have my complaints with Netflix, though. The main one is the well-known fact that they throttle disk delivery. I understand why they do it from on economic perspective; but I don't think their practice matches their rhetoric. It annoys me, but not enough to stop. The reality of their service is fair, I think.
The U.S. Government outlawed many traditional songs and dances performed by Native American tribes, because they were viewed as subversive or counter to the government's policy of integration. Some tribes started performing these activities in secret, others shifted to performing them to coincide with American holidays. If they weren't allowed to do an Eagle Dance, they would do it on the Fourth of July and say they were celebrating the founding of America. If they otherwise kept their noses clean, the FBI and BIA agents let them get away with it. But this wasn't a sign of embracing American culture. What they were really doing was finding a way to keep the memory of their culture alive against an oppressive regime.
So, does this Chinese math professor really commemorate the massacre? Or has she found a way to remind her students and colleagues of what happened, using rhetoric that won't get her pegged as a dissident and punished? And, how do you, or the Chinese government, tell the difference?
When you see tables in a coffee shop, do you assume they are free for anyone or do you assume they are for customers? Why should wifi be any different?
When you see a house with the front door open, do you assume they are inviting everyone to come in and look around? Why should wifi be any different?
It's insane. People around here freak out when laws are written to exclude activities over the internet that are already illegal off the internet, and when old practices are patented for use on computers. But normal social behavior is supposed to be different now that wifi is involved?
Yes, it is. There is so much fraud and deceit coming out of corporations and politicians these days that the English speaking public is scrambling for new words to accurately differentiate it so that it isn't one big opaque mass of lies.
The complaint is that "pretexting" doesn't have negative connotations yet. I suspect because the word is still too new. If people want to change that, they need to pepper the internet/media with clearly derogatory uses of the word. Make sure that people can't search the term without seeing a reference to how negative a practice it is.
There is a reason the FDA's summary is so vague---the proposal isn't about chocolate. Well, not just about chocolate. The proposal is supported by a substantial range of food manufacturer's and distributors, touching on chocolate, meat, poultry, frozen food, and more.
The proposed changes affect divergences from standard labeling guidelines for a lot of reasons, including things like "improvements in nutritional properties", "use of safe suitable flavors and flavor enhancers", "alternate manufacturing processes", etc.
You can read the whole thing yourself (pdf warning) here. See especially the last 4 pages or so.
Is the change in guidelines a good thing for consumers? I don't know. I don't know enough about food manufacturing to judge.
Do children get stereotyped as "the problem child" with no possible second chance? Are they doomed once teachers look for this type of behavior.
Yes, they do get stereotyped and blamed for behavior they didn't do.
My mother transfered to a new school as a third grade teacher. She had a student in her class who, the year before (second grade), had pulled a knife on a girl and then tried to cut the principal. My mother didn't have any preconceived notions about him, and treated him just like the other students. Because she was virtually the only person (student, teacher, administrator) that treated him like a good albeit troubled child, he latched onto her. He would often spend his recess with her, instead of with the other kids; same with lunch. Sometimes he would stay after school awhile (bad home life). During these times when he was with her, bad things would happen (kids getting beat up, windows broken, etc.), and the lunch duty people would insist that he had done them. They would claim that they had personally seen him do it. But he was with my mother at the time.
Do "problem" kids get stereotyped and scapegoated? Absolutely.
Replying to overturn a mistaken mod. I really need to remember to stop using the new comment system when I'm moderating. Or better yet, they need to fix the code for it.
Even your interpretation doesn't admit to the possibility that a scientist may not wish to bother fighting the regulations. That is, by accepting the workplace requirements it's not an endorcement of pseudoscience, but simply not wishing to bother fighting the regulations.
How long would you stay at a job that tested your honesty through leg-wrestling the head of security?
The Blockbuster in my parent's town also does---or at least used to a short time ago. My mother is boycotting it for exactly that reason.
There might be a corporate versus franchise difference. I don't know.
If Texans want to take themselves out of the gene pool, who are we to stop them?
I don't know Mapuche attitudes, so I can't comment specifically on them, but:
- These are societies with their own customs, own protocols, own laws. If Microsoft did not go through the proper channels, then they might have done something the locals considered anything from a minor faux pas to an offense against God. Of course, there are also societies where the permission of one tribe member would have been good enough, and Microsoft surely had that if they can do the translation adequately.
- Most tribes in the Americas and Australia have been horribly brutalized by Europeans coming in and telling them how to live their lives and run their societies. If Microsoft did not go through the proper channels, then they may be viewed as another group pushing their world view on the society, forcing them to conform. I'm sure Microsoft had no such intentions, but a privileged majority has a very different perspective on these kinds of things from an oppressed minority.
- Many tribes consider their language sacred. Depending on how the language localization is being distributed, Microsoft may be sending sacred material out to all their customers. And if the majority of the society does not like the way some of the things are translated, they might even be distributing a mockery of sacred material. This is an area where people need to tread carefully. Again, I am sure Microsoft had the best of intentions; but these are tricky issues even if you are intimately involved with them. (I have a friend who reviewed the Estonian translation before it was shipped, and she told me there were a large number of ridiculous problems that no native speaker would have made. She thought they must have just opened up a comprehensive English-Estonian dictionary and put stuff in; which is a terrible way to translate. That's a language that is well-documented, and a culture quite similar to our own, so fewer chances for mistakes.)
Maybe the lawsuit is dumb. I don't know the specifics, so I will withhold judgment. But the lawsuit may also be their attempt to regain control over the direction their language and culture is going.Legality was not the point I was making. The point was to show why native groups are trying to put legal protection on their cultural knowledge and language. It takes thousands of years for the language and culture to become the way it is. Now some outsider can come in and borrow their knowledge, profit off of it, and in some cases have all legal authority to records of it; and the natives get little to nothing for it. It is illegal to deal in many types of physical native artifacts. They want the same kind of protection to their non-physical artifacts as well.
(And on the issue of tribes "failing" to preserve their knowledge---go read a decent history book of North America, South America, or Australia. Read about assassinations, massacres, forced boarding schools, banned religions, and other actions specifically aimed at destroying these people and cultures. Then we can talk about their "failure".)
A language is a way for people to communicate. That is, it is a system known to both of them, using which they can send each other messages. One can patent such a system to prevent others from using it. I am not sure, but I do not think that the tribe patented their language. Therefore, I doubt that they have any grounds on which to sue.
As a linguist who works closely with native communities, let me try to offer some insight into this issue.
Copyright law was not designed with oral traditions in mind. Therefore, a lot of previously unwritten languages face strange legal problems. For example, a person records elders telling a traditional story and publishes them as recordings or a transcribed text. The person who did the publishing has the copyright for those recordings, not the original storyteller. Thus, if the storyteller performs that same story in public, he is violating the law. Central texts of a society's religion are now the intellectual property of an outsider. There has been some work to fix this issue, but things are not perfect yet.
Concrete example (with all distinguishing features withheld for obvious reasons): The last knowledgeable elder of a tribe died. A linguist who could not get a job in academia has many hours of recordings of this elder, but won't release them to the tribe, unless they pay him lots and lots of money. The tribe is trying to recover its religious stories, fables, tribal history, and revitalize its language, but it is all held hostage by one man who is not affiliated with the tribe in any way. The tribe's position is that they should have some rights to the material, since it has been in the tribe forever. But the law says the material belongs to the man who made the recordings. (Oh, and the tribe is reluctant to take it to court until all other options are exhausted, because they are afraid of possible precedents.)
Also, many native religions have a different relationship between people and language. In the Judeo-Christian approach, we speak a variety of languages because we angered God and he confounded our languages, losing the original one He gave us. Now, most people here regard Babel as a metaphor; but it is a metaphor that has shaped the way we view language--as something not inherently sacred. Lots of tribes still speak the language their God gave them (from their perspective), which makes it a religious artifact. For a company like Microsoft to come in and use their language without permissions would be an intrusion on their religious rights.
What many tribes are doing, then, is asserting intellectual property over everything related to their language (stories, words, grammar, etc.) in the hopes that they can exert some control over the outsiders who want to come in and take advantage of them. (And many times an outsider's best intentions are actually harmful to the native community, we just don't understand all the issues.)
The UCLA Biomedical Library used to have texts in Russian on construction of nuclear power plants. I worked there as an undergraduate, and was tasked with pulling them from the shelf to send to the unused book storage library (the SRLF). I could only read enough Russian to figure out the titles, so I don't know how detailed they were, but they did have lots of interesting looking diagrams.
I never did figure out why there were such books in a biomedical library.