Even better is to get at the digital audio data before it hits the digital-to-analog converter.
Vsound
is a free, open source program that does this under Linux.
As several people have already said, don't rely on the computers for the basic language instruction. What is far more important are good textbooks and good instructors. That said, there are two things for which computers are useful.
First, once the students have a sufficient grounding, computers can be used to provide them with opportunities to use Japanese outside the classroom. These range from reading Japanese websites through IM and email with Japanese speakers to videoconferencing, though this last
seems kind of artificial to me - I'm not sure how well it will work.
Second, computers are terrific for learning to read and write. Kanji drill programs are really helpful for both beginners and advanced students who need a refresher. Looking things up in computer dictionaries is much faster than using paper dictionaries, especially when looking up kanji. There are tools that let you enter a chunk of text and look up the characters for you,
such as this Japanese reading tool.
As a linguist who has studied a lot of languages
and has had experience teaching languages, I'm not impressed by flashy technology. Much of it is just a distraction - there's no substitute for learning vocabulary, learning the grammar, and practice speaking, listening, reading, and writing. But as someone who learned Japanese before the personal computer, I know that tools like the ones I have mentioned would have saved me a great deal of time and frustration.
This is just further evidence of a deeply flawed system. There is absolutely no reason that we can't have an honest and reliable election system in this country. You can do with old-fashioned paper ballots and hand-counting in the presence of scrutineers from all parties. Instead we've got a mishmash of systems, many of them untested, many with known flaws, some of them run by companies like Diebold known to be both incompetant and dishonest. We can't be sure who won this election.
Re:What's missing, is..
on
The Year In Ideas
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Here's the New York Times link generator. Enter a regular URL and it returns a permanent, no-registration needed link.
It's very handy, but certain sections are not supported.
Glossaries like these have their uses, and I sometimes use them myself when I'm reading something and don't know a word, but good dictionaries go way beyond these. To begin with, you often can't adequately translate a word from one language with a single word from another language. It often takes at least a phrase, and sometimes there isn't any straightforwad translation and a fairly elaborate explanation is necessary. Furthermore, especially if you're going into the language you don't know well, it is often necessary to have information about the grammar of the word in order to be able to use it properly.
What case does the object of a verb have to be?
Which conjugation does a verb belong to?
The other major limitation of simple glossaries like these is that they don't work very well for languages with complex word-formation where the citation form is not easily obtained from the inflected forms. For instance, in English it isn't a big deal to look up a plural noun because in almost all cases you just remove s or es, so someone who reads, e.g. trapezoids doesn't need to know very much in order to guess that it is a form of trapezoid and look it up under trapezoid. However, there are languages in which words have hundreds or thousands of forms and in which it is quite difficult to figure out what to look a word up under. Creating dictionaries for such languages that can be used by inexpert users is a long-standing problem for which electronic dictionaries offer a solution, but such dictionaries won't be simple glossaries; they will be databases with morphological analyzers as front ends. I've got a paper about this problem in Athabaskan languages here.
I looked at other articles and was amazed at the amount of coverage both of software in general and free software in particular. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it in a newspaper. The technology section even has a menu item for free software.
Sun has made no indication that this would be released under a real Free/Open source license.
Yes, they have, in articles linked to by Slashdot, even. Whether you choose to believe them or not is your choice, of course.
The articles talk about open source, but not about free software licensing. In other words, there's no reason to think that the code will be released under the GPL or the BSD license or some such. They might allow people to see the code but impose restrictions on use or distribution.
Any new archaeological find is potentially interesting, but I wouldn't get all excited about this, for two reasons. First, nothing much is known. Sonar doesn't tell you very much, not even whether it is really an archaeological site. It is all too common for people to decide that something must be manmade because the edges are too straight or something like that, only for it to turn out to be a natural geological formation. Without further evidence, we won't know what this is.
Secondly, supposing that these are the remains of a city, what makes this one more exciting than any other? I submit that what makes it exciting is the association with the Atlantis legend of a particularly advanced society. But that is precisely the part of Plato's story that is most likely false. Even if his story is based on a real city that was submerged, it was most likely an ordinary city of its time, perhaps well off by the standards of the day, but not the amazingly advanced civilization of sci-fi movies. We can't of course rule it out entirely, but we will only have reason to believe it if actual evidence is found, and at present there isn't any.
Collecting a judgement is much the same in Canada as in the US, so yes, it could be difficult for Ross to collect. In this case an additional factor is the fact that the defendant is native. If he is a status Indian living on reserve, there are further complications. For instance, the land his house is on does not legally belong to him but is technically held in trust for his band by Canada. It cannot be sold to satisfy a judgement.
Actually, I think that Canadian defamation law is not that different from American defamation law anymore. English defamation law is more pro-plaintiff in part because the requirement that the plaintiff show that the defendant acted with malice is purely nominal. For practical purposes there is no such requirement. In contrast, in the US a public figure must prove that the defendant acted with "actual malice", which is interpreted as meaning that he or she knew that the statement was false or spoke with flagrant disregard for the truth. In US law it is easier to prove libel if the plaintiff is not a public figure, but even then the requirement of malice is taken more seriously than in England.
IANAL, but I have read up on the law of defamation.
In this case, as far as the article tells us, there is no evidence that the archaeologist did anything at all with human remains. There are real disputes about the handling of human remains, but this doesn't seem to be one of them - Holley just made up allegations that Ross was a graverobber in order to damage her.
I think that a pretty severe penalty is called for, for two reasons. First, the impact on Cheryl Ross was quite serious. Universities generally take such ethical issues very seriously. She could have lost her job and been made unemployable as an archaeologist. Furthermore, native bands are very sensitive about anything to do with human remains. Even an unproven allegation could have interfered with her ability to do research. In other words, this was not simply calling her a bad name; it could have ended her career. Secondly, according to the article Holley didn't just spout off in a moment of anger. He actually went to the trouble of falsifying evidence. In other words, what he did was premeditated and unquestionably dishonest.
If somebody deliberately falsified evidence in an attempt to destroy your career, I bet you'd think
they should pay a pretty severe penalty.
I've had this happen when I wasn't even using presentation software, much less Powerpoint.
I gave a talk last year at the AAAS meeting in Seattle. I just used a little shell script with a sequence of calls to xpdf and xv. (You should have seen the looks of confusion on many people in the audience as I booted up Linux with the projector on. They had never seen anything other than MS Windows and couldn't figure out what it was.) Several people afterward referred to my "powerpoint".
Sure, I assume that the law will end up in Arabic, but I would think that if the modifications are being made by the US administration, they would first be drafted in English, then translated into Arabic.
Hardly. I'm well aware of the Schmeiser
case, familiar enough to know what actually happened. To begin with, they didn't bankrupt him. Although the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the claim that Schmeiser infringed Monsanto's patent, they also ruled that he didn't benefit from it and that therefore he didn't owe Monsanto any damages and didn't have to pay Monsanto's legal fees. Secondly, the Schmeiser case was not so clearcut - the trial court ruled that Schmeiser KNOWINGLY used seed from a portion of his field that was contaminated by Monsanto seed. (Schmeiser knew that his field had been contaminated because he sprayed Roundup on part of it and discovered that the plants were resistant.) That may well have been a bad decision by the court, but it means that the legal situation was rather different.
In any case, while contamination by patented varieties is certainly a problem, it is NOT the same thing as prohibiting outright the re-use of seed. For one thing, under current law the farmer whose field is contaminated by patented seed seems to have an alternative to just re-using the contaminated seed (which many farmers don't want anyhow). That alternative is to sue those responsible for the contamination. For another, there are ways of modifying the patent law that would address this problem, such as holding the makers and users of modified seed to a "strict liability" standard, in which it is their responsability to prevent their seed from escaping.
As I said, I'm no fan of Monsanto, but this new law isn't nearly as bad as the article claims.
I'm no fan of either the US invasion of Iraq or of the shennanigans of companies like Monsanto, but the revised IP law simply doesn't say what the article says it says. The relevant provision is on p.22,
section 66, par. B. It prohibits farmers from re-using the seed of protected varieties only. It doesn't prohibit them from re-using the seed that they've always used. And contrary to what some posters have claimed, Monsanto and other such companies cannot acquire ownership of traditional varieties. The same law provides clear criteria for patents that allow patenting only of newly developed varieties. So unless patents are granted improperly (a different, though as we know, significant problem), farmers in Iraq can go right on re-using their seed just as they always have.
Indeed, I was struck by one provision of this law, which grants fewer rights to the patent holder than does US patent law. Section 8 on p.3. allows people who started using or manufacturing, or even preparing to use or manufacture, something covered by a patent before the issuance of the patent, to continue to do so! In other words, no submarine patents! In some ways, this new patent law is actually progressive.
By the way, parts of this law sound to me like they were not written by a native speaker of English. Maybe I just don't know the technical terminology of plant breeding. Is it normal in English to talk about the "education" of a plant?
This sounds like a mistranslation from another language to me.
So long as the files you generate are plain audio files and don't need fancy stuff like playlists, you can ensure that the WAV files you distribute don't contain any metadata by running them through one of the programs available that strip fancy WAV files down to "canonical" format. Here's a shareware program for MS Windows, and here is C source for one for GNU/Linux. These all work by eliminating everything other than the header, the format chunk, and the data chunk. These programs exist because there is a lot of software that doesn't know how to parse full WAV files.
Of course, this won't eliminate "metadata" embedded in the audio data.
The "metadata" is in a LIST INFO chunk following the data chunk. To my knowledge, this is not part of the WAV standard. I don't find it in the Microsoft multimedia Standards Update.
I think that such LIST INFO data may be a holdover from the Electronic Arts IFF format on which RIFF (of which WAV is a subpart) is based.
Not that your point about metadata isn't valid, but this isn't a typical metadata problem. The WAV format doesn't directly provide for strings indicating the program that created the audio. There is a "text" chunk in which you can put such information, but WAV files don't have to have such a chunk and they don't have any standard interpretation. Information about the file is usually placed before the audio data too. This stuff could be a text chunk placed at the end, but I suspect that it is actually included in the audio data chunk - a few odd sample values at the end will be undetectable to the ear. I can't tell for sure though without examining the WAV file, which I don't have since I don't have MS Windows.
Maybe somebody could post a link to one of the files and we could find out.
I agree. It's a mistake to think of Mandrake as just for newbies. I've used Unix since 1982, GNU/Linux since 1995, and I've been using Mandrake for several years. I've found it easy to install with good hardware detection and configuration and a good selection of software. In lots of little ways, I prefer it to Red Hat.
Slashdot Mirror
Even better is to get at the digital audio data before it hits the digital-to-analog converter. Vsound is a free, open source program that does this under Linux.
I thought the article was going to be about the kind of tower you put your motherboard in...
As several people have already said, don't rely on the computers for the basic language instruction. What is far more important are good textbooks and good instructors. That said, there are two things for which computers are useful.
First, once the students have a sufficient grounding, computers can be used to provide them with opportunities to use Japanese outside the classroom. These range from reading Japanese websites through IM and email with Japanese speakers to videoconferencing, though this last seems kind of artificial to me - I'm not sure how well it will work.
Second, computers are terrific for learning to read and write. Kanji drill programs are really helpful for both beginners and advanced students who need a refresher. Looking things up in computer dictionaries is much faster than using paper dictionaries, especially when looking up kanji. There are tools that let you enter a chunk of text and look up the characters for you, such as this Japanese reading tool.
As a linguist who has studied a lot of languages and has had experience teaching languages, I'm not impressed by flashy technology. Much of it is just a distraction - there's no substitute for learning vocabulary, learning the grammar, and practice speaking, listening, reading, and writing. But as someone who learned Japanese before the personal computer, I know that tools like the ones I have mentioned would have saved me a great deal of time and frustration.
They'd have to be able to read, and they'd have to be interested in an article making fun of bad science.
The connection to indigenous people continues. Ursula K. LeGuin's nephew Paul Kroeber is a linguist specializing in Salishan languages.
How do scilab and octave compare?
This is just further evidence of a deeply flawed system. There is absolutely no reason that we can't have an honest and reliable election system in this country. You can do with old-fashioned paper ballots and hand-counting in the presence of scrutineers from all parties. Instead we've got a mishmash of systems, many of them untested, many with known flaws, some of them run by companies like Diebold known to be both incompetant and dishonest. We can't be sure who won this election.
Here's the New York Times link generator. Enter a regular URL and it returns a permanent, no-registration needed link. It's very handy, but certain sections are not supported.
Glossaries like these have their uses, and I sometimes use them myself when I'm reading something and don't know a word, but good dictionaries go way beyond these. To begin with, you often can't adequately translate a word from one language with a single word from another language. It often takes at least a phrase, and sometimes there isn't any straightforwad translation and a fairly elaborate explanation is necessary. Furthermore, especially if you're going into the language you don't know well, it is often necessary to have information about the grammar of the word in order to be able to use it properly. What case does the object of a verb have to be? Which conjugation does a verb belong to?
The other major limitation of simple glossaries like these is that they don't work very well for languages with complex word-formation where the citation form is not easily obtained from the inflected forms. For instance, in English it isn't a big deal to look up a plural noun because in almost all cases you just remove s or es, so someone who reads, e.g. trapezoids doesn't need to know very much in order to guess that it is a form of trapezoid and look it up under trapezoid. However, there are languages in which words have hundreds or thousands of forms and in which it is quite difficult to figure out what to look a word up under. Creating dictionaries for such languages that can be used by inexpert users is a long-standing problem for which electronic dictionaries offer a solution, but such dictionaries won't be simple glossaries; they will be databases with morphological analyzers as front ends. I've got a paper about this problem in Athabaskan languages here.
Ruby is interesting, but at least for me its lack of Unicode support is enough to keep it out of contention with Python.
I looked at other articles and was amazed at the amount of coverage both of software in general and free software in particular. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it in a newspaper. The technology section even has a menu item for free software.
The articles talk about open source, but not about free software licensing. In other words, there's no reason to think that the code will be released under the GPL or the BSD license or some such. They might allow people to see the code but impose restrictions on use or distribution.
Any new archaeological find is potentially interesting, but I wouldn't get all excited about this, for two reasons. First, nothing much is known. Sonar doesn't tell you very much, not even whether it is really an archaeological site. It is all too common for people to decide that something must be manmade because the edges are too straight or something like that, only for it to turn out to be a natural geological formation. Without further evidence, we won't know what this is.
Secondly, supposing that these are the remains of a city, what makes this one more exciting than any other? I submit that what makes it exciting is the association with the Atlantis legend of a particularly advanced society. But that is precisely the part of Plato's story that is most likely false. Even if his story is based on a real city that was submerged, it was most likely an ordinary city of its time, perhaps well off by the standards of the day, but not the amazingly advanced civilization of sci-fi movies. We can't of course rule it out entirely, but we will only have reason to believe it if actual evidence is found, and at present there isn't any.
Collecting a judgement is much the same in Canada as in the US, so yes, it could be difficult for Ross to collect. In this case an additional factor is the fact that the defendant is native. If he is a status Indian living on reserve, there are further complications. For instance, the land his house is on does not legally belong to him but is technically held in trust for his band by Canada. It cannot be sold to satisfy a judgement.
Actually, I think that Canadian defamation law is not that different from American defamation law anymore. English defamation law is more pro-plaintiff in part because the requirement that the plaintiff show that the defendant acted with malice is purely nominal. For practical purposes there is no such requirement. In contrast, in the US a public figure must prove that the defendant acted with "actual malice", which is interpreted as meaning that he or she knew that the statement was false or spoke with flagrant disregard for the truth. In US law it is easier to prove libel if the plaintiff is not a public figure, but even then the requirement of malice is taken more seriously than in England.
IANAL, but I have read up on the law of defamation.
In this case, as far as the article tells us, there is no evidence that the archaeologist did anything at all with human remains. There are real disputes about the handling of human remains, but this doesn't seem to be one of them - Holley just made up allegations that Ross was a graverobber in order to damage her.
I think that a pretty severe penalty is called for, for two reasons. First, the impact on Cheryl Ross was quite serious. Universities generally take such ethical issues very seriously. She could have lost her job and been made unemployable as an archaeologist. Furthermore, native bands are very sensitive about anything to do with human remains. Even an unproven allegation could have interfered with her ability to do research. In other words, this was not simply calling her a bad name; it could have ended her career. Secondly, according to the article Holley didn't just spout off in a moment of anger. He actually went to the trouble of falsifying evidence. In other words, what he did was premeditated and unquestionably dishonest. If somebody deliberately falsified evidence in an attempt to destroy your career, I bet you'd think they should pay a pretty severe penalty.
I've had this happen when I wasn't even using presentation software, much less Powerpoint. I gave a talk last year at the AAAS meeting in Seattle. I just used a little shell script with a sequence of calls to xpdf and xv. (You should have seen the looks of confusion on many people in the audience as I booted up Linux with the projector on. They had never seen anything other than MS Windows and couldn't figure out what it was.) Several people afterward referred to my "powerpoint".
Sure, I assume that the law will end up in Arabic, but I would think that if the modifications are being made by the US administration, they would first be drafted in English, then translated into Arabic.
Hardly. I'm well aware of the Schmeiser case, familiar enough to know what actually happened. To begin with, they didn't bankrupt him. Although the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the claim that Schmeiser infringed Monsanto's patent, they also ruled that he didn't benefit from it and that therefore he didn't owe Monsanto any damages and didn't have to pay Monsanto's legal fees. Secondly, the Schmeiser case was not so clearcut - the trial court ruled that Schmeiser KNOWINGLY used seed from a portion of his field that was contaminated by Monsanto seed. (Schmeiser knew that his field had been contaminated because he sprayed Roundup on part of it and discovered that the plants were resistant.) That may well have been a bad decision by the court, but it means that the legal situation was rather different.
In any case, while contamination by patented varieties is certainly a problem, it is NOT the same thing as prohibiting outright the re-use of seed. For one thing, under current law the farmer whose field is contaminated by patented seed seems to have an alternative to just re-using the contaminated seed (which many farmers don't want anyhow). That alternative is to sue those responsible for the contamination. For another, there are ways of modifying the patent law that would address this problem, such as holding the makers and users of modified seed to a "strict liability" standard, in which it is their responsability to prevent their seed from escaping.
As I said, I'm no fan of Monsanto, but this new law isn't nearly as bad as the article claims.
I'm no fan of either the US invasion of Iraq or of the shennanigans of companies like Monsanto, but the revised IP law simply doesn't say what the article says it says. The relevant provision is on p.22, section 66, par. B. It prohibits farmers from re-using the seed of protected varieties only. It doesn't prohibit them from re-using the seed that they've always used. And contrary to what some posters have claimed, Monsanto and other such companies cannot acquire ownership of traditional varieties. The same law provides clear criteria for patents that allow patenting only of newly developed varieties. So unless patents are granted improperly (a different, though as we know, significant problem), farmers in Iraq can go right on re-using their seed just as they always have.
Indeed, I was struck by one provision of this law, which grants fewer rights to the patent holder than does US patent law. Section 8 on p.3. allows people who started using or manufacturing, or even preparing to use or manufacture, something covered by a patent before the issuance of the patent, to continue to do so! In other words, no submarine patents! In some ways, this new patent law is actually progressive.
By the way, parts of this law sound to me like they were not written by a native speaker of English. Maybe I just don't know the technical terminology of plant breeding. Is it normal in English to talk about the "education" of a plant? This sounds like a mistranslation from another language to me.
So long as the files you generate are plain audio files and don't need fancy stuff like playlists, you can ensure that the WAV files you distribute don't contain any metadata by running them through one of the programs available that strip fancy WAV files down to "canonical" format. Here's a shareware program for MS Windows, and here is C source for one for GNU/Linux. These all work by eliminating everything other than the header, the format chunk, and the data chunk. These programs exist because there is a lot of software that doesn't know how to parse full WAV files. Of course, this won't eliminate "metadata" embedded in the audio data.
The "metadata" is in a LIST INFO chunk following the data chunk. To my knowledge, this is not part of the WAV standard. I don't find it in the Microsoft multimedia Standards Update. I think that such LIST INFO data may be a holdover from the Electronic Arts IFF format on which RIFF (of which WAV is a subpart) is based.
Not that your point about metadata isn't valid, but this isn't a typical metadata problem. The WAV format doesn't directly provide for strings indicating the program that created the audio. There is a "text" chunk in which you can put such information, but WAV files don't have to have such a chunk and they don't have any standard interpretation. Information about the file is usually placed before the audio data too. This stuff could be a text chunk placed at the end, but I suspect that it is actually included in the audio data chunk - a few odd sample values at the end will be undetectable to the ear. I can't tell for sure though without examining the WAV file, which I don't have since I don't have MS Windows. Maybe somebody could post a link to one of the files and we could find out.
I agree. It's a mistake to think of Mandrake as just for newbies. I've used Unix since 1982, GNU/Linux since 1995, and I've been using Mandrake for several years. I've found it easy to install with good hardware detection and configuration and a good selection of software. In lots of little ways, I prefer it to Red Hat.