Human pick up language naturally, without being explicitly taught. All humans (without a severe neurological disorder) do this automatically and are fluent to a nearly-adult level by the age of 5, without instruction. Yes, it is common in Western societies to "teach" kids new vocabulary, but there are cultures where this is not done. Also, correcting 2-5 year olds' grammar generally has no effect on their usage - they're just going to make certain mistakes until they get to the right stage, and then they'll stop, regardless of parents' attempts to correct them.
Apes, on the other hand, do not pick up language unless specifically taught. With explicit training, they can learn a limited vocabulary (100-200 words total, which is how many human 4-year-olds learn every couple weeks), but they can't master grammar with any amount of training. There is no denying that the human process of language acquisition is a process that is different from many other types of learning and that our primate cousins cannot replicate.
Yes, they have their own methods of communication, and we have as much trouble (if not more, since they're not training us) learning theirs as they do ours. But human language and grammar works differently from any other "animal language" studied.
Koko the signing gorilla has been pretty well debunked. Actual fluent speakers of ASL couldn't understand a word she was "saying," and outside evaluators could never manage to verify the huge vocabulary that Penny Patterson claimed she had, only a much more limited one (I think something like 100-150 words instead of 1000+). Chimps and gorillas *can* learn to use various symbols as a vocabulary, but they cannot understand grammar. To them, "me eat banana" and "banana eat me" and "me me banana eat banana me" all mean the same thing.
Wow, thanks for that link! I'm having the same problem with my firstname@university.edu email address - unfortunately, many of the bounces don't contain enough header info from the original sender to know who it's really from, but now I can report the few that do!
The same thing happens to me - I have the address myfirstname@university.edu - and unfortunately, my first name is also a dictionary word. So someone is sending out a ton of spam in my name, and I get all the bounces. My school's spam system catches about half of them, luckily when I use Mail.app at school it's good at catching the rest. Unfortunately, though, when I use the school's webmail I have to manually delete them all. And the daily number has continually gotten higher since September. I hate to think how much I'll be getting by the time I get my degree in 2011.
If it were just that sales of M-rated games were down, you'd have a point. But they actually sent teenaged "secret shoppers" into the stores, and measured how often they were turned down when they tried to buy an M-rated game (or get into an R-rated movie, etc). And really, you can figure that out by the wording in the summary, so you've got no excuse.
Strangely, that's not what I saw in my little sample of the "teeny-bopper" crowd at all. Over my winter break, I brought my 16-year-old brother blankets while he and two friends camped out at Best Buy for a Wii. And it's not like he didn't want one til the end of December - when he came to visit me over Thanksgiving, we spent an hour calling around to find one, and that was only after my mom wouldn't let him camp out on launch day.
As of January, he had two friends with 360s, several with Wiis, and none with PS3s. At no point did he ever give the illusion that he was interested in the PS3 over the Wii - at least, not since the price points and launch lineups were announced. It wasn't just the price; if he really wanted a PS3 he's the kind of kid who would have saved up for it. But he also said there were no games for it he wanted, while he actually bought Zelda on launch day and held onto it until he got the Wii.
I think that, yes, maybe the game press was blinded by their own bias - but I don't think that it had anything to do with the reality of teeny-boppers or any other crowd.
I think there's a big difference between laws that protect me from others' stupidity and those that protect them from their own stupidity. I'd only put the second under the heading "nanny state." If saying "40 years for killing someone" still isn't enough deterrent to keep them from being stupid and killing me, I'm all for smaller but more effective deterrents that prevent the behavior from escalating to the killing stage. I don't care if they get 40 years once I'm dead, and your average 16-year-old isn't going to actually believe that they're likely to kill someone by speeding. However, they *may* believe that they'll actually get a ticket for it.
Btw, having one beer generally wouldn't put you over the legal limit anyhow, unless you're in an area where anyone under 21 has a legal limit of 0. Lots of people have a few drinks but assume they're fine to drive when others can see that they're clearly not, why should we trust them all? I have a feeling you have some kind of specific bitterness about this issue.
Exactly - it's just as easy to make a link in an email that says http://www.washingtonmutual.safe as http://www.washingtonmutual.com. And people will click on either one. If you claim that all.safe sites are safe, they'll just be MORE likely to click on the second one!
Speaking as one who got made fun of not two months ago for how fuzzy Heroes came in even after doing a contortion act with the rabbit ears... I think TFA author and everyone else in this thread are a bunch of whiny baby complainers.:^P
Europe has evolved their civilization to a point where there really is little threat of one peoples exploding forth in a ravenous orgy of violence.
Now, it's nothing like the scale of a world war, but it was only a year and a half ago that the muslim immigrants in France (later joined by many others) spent three weeks rioting. According to wikipedia, they caused 200 million euros worth of damage, one death, destroyed nearly 9000 vehicles and many buildings (including several schools), injured 126 police and firefighters (unknown how many civilians), and affected 274 different towns. Sounds like quite an orgy of violence, even if the death toll was rather low. Now, true, the situation would likely be worse in Turkey if the ethnic groups turned on each other, but I wouldn't exactly say that the rest of Europe is a calm, cool, collected place where everyone's learned their lesson and violence would never erupt.
The overwhelming consensus is that the technology was effective IF AND ONLY IF the professor is well versed in how to use it.
Study after study has shown exactly this. Technology doesn't make a difference - teachers who are well trained in using that technology in their classroom do. And not just a one-day workshop on "ideas for iPods in your classroom!" - often it takes sustained training over the school year, networking among the teachers to share ideas, etc. Then technology can do some great things, even if it's just freeing up the teacher's time on mundane tasks so they can prepare better lesson plans. But you just hand teachers something - an iPod, a computer, a "clicker" response system, whatever - and it doesn't do much of anything.
Yes, all of the above posts claimed that once Leopard is released, OS X will gain huge amounts of marketshare and become "mainstream."
Oh... oh wait... No they didn't. They claimed that it makes sense that Apple marketshare is stagnating, because many people who are in the market for a new Mac are holding off for Leopard. Meaning that once Leopard is released, Mac marketshare will climb a little bit.
People who try and paint anyone who says anything positive about Apple as a zealot are even more annoying than the real zealots.
So if PPC share went from 4.29 to 3.94, and total mac (PPC + Intel) went down.3 to 6.08, that means that Intel share went from 2.09 to 2.14 - so for Macs that are actually being sold right now, the market share did go up. Not buy much - but I'm betting most of these changes are within their margin of error anyhow, so the whole thing isn't worth all that much.
Seriously, though, I think $5/album is a bit of a pipe dream. You really think $10 isn't a fair price at all? How much did you pay per CD back when you were buying 10 a month?
DRM-free albums (not individual songs) will still be $9.99 in iTMS. If you can always get major release CDs for less than that, you must have a relative who works for EMI or something. Sure, maybe it's technically lower quality - but I know I sure as hell can't tell the difference between 256 kbs and a CD (which I'd just rip anyhow).
They could buy used. I got my DS for $90 - and it's bright red! They don't even offer the Lite in that color yet.;) But yeah, I'm guessing they'll either drop the price or bundle a game for Christmas.
You... do know the DS Lite has always been $129 (US), right? And considering it's been out for less than a year, I'm guessing the first possible price drop wouldn't be til Christmas, if then.
If it wasn't, they failed even more miserably than I thought. The only person I know with a PSP is my 16-year-old brother, while I know several adults in the 20-30 age range (myself included) with DSes.
Come to think of it, the DS is perfect for all the Japanese logic puzzle styles, like Nurikabe and Heyawake. They're much easier to do online than on paper (no annoying erasing), and the stylus would be way better than the mouse. Nikoli should really get into this business, my husband and I would probably buy a whole series of these.
If there ever come more rereleases for the DS then please in the form of a flashcard and downloads over the VirtualConsole, but not as full price cartridges.
I definitely agree with this. I hope we can someday put Wii retro VC games onto the DS, but I also hope they'll focus on NEW games for the actual cartridges. I just got a DS, and since DS games are still pricey I've been buying GBA games for it. Imagine my annoyance to discover that everything titled "Super Mario Advance" is in actuality something I own for my SNES and have played in the past couple of years. I'm sure that people without old consoles have been delighted to get these games (I wouldn't mind getting NES zelda), but it seems to be at the expense of actual new material. Boo.
But we do hold *someone* legally accountable - the parents. We have to do *something* to protect 5-year-old #2's right to life, or it's meaningless. Now, I'm talking about legal rights here - you can argue all you want that 5-year-olds or chimps or whoever have a "right" in a more general, ethical, sort of sense. Which is not enforceable by law but also doesn't cease to exist due to lack of a law. But legally, once you grant someone a right you have to have some way of preventing that right from being violated or the legal right has no meaning.
With children, we hold their parents responsible for their actions until we've decided that they're old enough to be responsible themselves - which happens at varying ages depending on the circumstances. With chimps, we have a) no way of communicating to them that they need to respect each others' rights and how to do that, and b) no way to hold them or anyone who might prevent it responsible when they do violate each other's rights. And chimps kill each other a lot more often than 5-year-olds do, and more often purposefully rather than by accident.
Technically, chimps and gorillas can learn human words. Vocabulary only. They cannot learn sign language as in, fluent in ASL. They have no concept of grammar - signing "me eat banana" and "banana eat me" are exactly the same to them. As is "me banana banana me me eat banana me," which is closer to what they usually sign when they want to eat a banana.
See the case of Nim Chimpsky - they set out hoping to replicate the claims of a previous study, and instead the researchers involved became some of the most outspoken debunkers of the whole "chimps can use human language" thing.
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Apes, on the other hand, do not pick up language unless specifically taught. With explicit training, they can learn a limited vocabulary (100-200 words total, which is how many human 4-year-olds learn every couple weeks), but they can't master grammar with any amount of training. There is no denying that the human process of language acquisition is a process that is different from many other types of learning and that our primate cousins cannot replicate.
Yes, they have their own methods of communication, and we have as much trouble (if not more, since they're not training us) learning theirs as they do ours. But human language and grammar works differently from any other "animal language" studied.
Koko the signing gorilla has been pretty well debunked. Actual fluent speakers of ASL couldn't understand a word she was "saying," and outside evaluators could never manage to verify the huge vocabulary that Penny Patterson claimed she had, only a much more limited one (I think something like 100-150 words instead of 1000+). Chimps and gorillas *can* learn to use various symbols as a vocabulary, but they cannot understand grammar. To them, "me eat banana" and "banana eat me" and "me me banana eat banana me" all mean the same thing.
Wow, thanks for that link! I'm having the same problem with my firstname@university.edu email address - unfortunately, many of the bounces don't contain enough header info from the original sender to know who it's really from, but now I can report the few that do!
The same thing happens to me - I have the address myfirstname@university.edu - and unfortunately, my first name is also a dictionary word. So someone is sending out a ton of spam in my name, and I get all the bounces. My school's spam system catches about half of them, luckily when I use Mail.app at school it's good at catching the rest. Unfortunately, though, when I use the school's webmail I have to manually delete them all. And the daily number has continually gotten higher since September. I hate to think how much I'll be getting by the time I get my degree in 2011.
If it were just that sales of M-rated games were down, you'd have a point. But they actually sent teenaged "secret shoppers" into the stores, and measured how often they were turned down when they tried to buy an M-rated game (or get into an R-rated movie, etc). And really, you can figure that out by the wording in the summary, so you've got no excuse.
But ironically, the Social Security Administration was one of the eight As.
As of January, he had two friends with 360s, several with Wiis, and none with PS3s. At no point did he ever give the illusion that he was interested in the PS3 over the Wii - at least, not since the price points and launch lineups were announced. It wasn't just the price; if he really wanted a PS3 he's the kind of kid who would have saved up for it. But he also said there were no games for it he wanted, while he actually bought Zelda on launch day and held onto it until he got the Wii.
I think that, yes, maybe the game press was blinded by their own bias - but I don't think that it had anything to do with the reality of teeny-boppers or any other crowd.
Btw, having one beer generally wouldn't put you over the legal limit anyhow, unless you're in an area where anyone under 21 has a legal limit of 0. Lots of people have a few drinks but assume they're fine to drive when others can see that they're clearly not, why should we trust them all? I have a feeling you have some kind of specific bitterness about this issue.
Exactly - it's just as easy to make a link in an email that says http://www.washingtonmutual.safe as http://www.washingtonmutual.com. And people will click on either one. If you claim that all .safe sites are safe, they'll just be MORE likely to click on the second one!
Speaking as one who got made fun of not two months ago for how fuzzy Heroes came in even after doing a contortion act with the rabbit ears... I think TFA author and everyone else in this thread are a bunch of whiny baby complainers. :^P
Now, it's nothing like the scale of a world war, but it was only a year and a half ago that the muslim immigrants in France (later joined by many others) spent three weeks rioting. According to wikipedia, they caused 200 million euros worth of damage, one death, destroyed nearly 9000 vehicles and many buildings (including several schools), injured 126 police and firefighters (unknown how many civilians), and affected 274 different towns. Sounds like quite an orgy of violence, even if the death toll was rather low. Now, true, the situation would likely be worse in Turkey if the ethnic groups turned on each other, but I wouldn't exactly say that the rest of Europe is a calm, cool, collected place where everyone's learned their lesson and violence would never erupt.
Study after study has shown exactly this. Technology doesn't make a difference - teachers who are well trained in using that technology in their classroom do. And not just a one-day workshop on "ideas for iPods in your classroom!" - often it takes sustained training over the school year, networking among the teachers to share ideas, etc. Then technology can do some great things, even if it's just freeing up the teacher's time on mundane tasks so they can prepare better lesson plans. But you just hand teachers something - an iPod, a computer, a "clicker" response system, whatever - and it doesn't do much of anything.
Oh... oh wait... No they didn't. They claimed that it makes sense that Apple marketshare is stagnating, because many people who are in the market for a new Mac are holding off for Leopard. Meaning that once Leopard is released, Mac marketshare will climb a little bit.
People who try and paint anyone who says anything positive about Apple as a zealot are even more annoying than the real zealots.
So if PPC share went from 4.29 to 3.94, and total mac (PPC + Intel) went down .3 to 6.08, that means that Intel share went from 2.09 to 2.14 - so for Macs that are actually being sold right now, the market share did go up. Not buy much - but I'm betting most of these changes are within their margin of error anyhow, so the whole thing isn't worth all that much.
Seriously, though, I think $5/album is a bit of a pipe dream. You really think $10 isn't a fair price at all? How much did you pay per CD back when you were buying 10 a month?
So since they're $10/album, are you going to buy 50 albums and 5 more each month?
DRM-free albums (not individual songs) will still be $9.99 in iTMS. If you can always get major release CDs for less than that, you must have a relative who works for EMI or something. Sure, maybe it's technically lower quality - but I know I sure as hell can't tell the difference between 256 kbs and a CD (which I'd just rip anyhow).
They could buy used. I got my DS for $90 - and it's bright red! They don't even offer the Lite in that color yet. ;) But yeah, I'm guessing they'll either drop the price or bundle a game for Christmas.
I still have the SNES my siblings and I saved up for and bought with our own money when I was 14...
You... do know the DS Lite has always been $129 (US), right? And considering it's been out for less than a year, I'm guessing the first possible price drop wouldn't be til Christmas, if then.
If it wasn't, they failed even more miserably than I thought. The only person I know with a PSP is my 16-year-old brother, while I know several adults in the 20-30 age range (myself included) with DSes.
Come to think of it, the DS is perfect for all the Japanese logic puzzle styles, like Nurikabe and Heyawake. They're much easier to do online than on paper (no annoying erasing), and the stylus would be way better than the mouse. Nikoli should really get into this business, my husband and I would probably buy a whole series of these.
I definitely agree with this. I hope we can someday put Wii retro VC games onto the DS, but I also hope they'll focus on NEW games for the actual cartridges. I just got a DS, and since DS games are still pricey I've been buying GBA games for it. Imagine my annoyance to discover that everything titled "Super Mario Advance" is in actuality something I own for my SNES and have played in the past couple of years. I'm sure that people without old consoles have been delighted to get these games (I wouldn't mind getting NES zelda), but it seems to be at the expense of actual new material. Boo.
With children, we hold their parents responsible for their actions until we've decided that they're old enough to be responsible themselves - which happens at varying ages depending on the circumstances. With chimps, we have a) no way of communicating to them that they need to respect each others' rights and how to do that, and b) no way to hold them or anyone who might prevent it responsible when they do violate each other's rights. And chimps kill each other a lot more often than 5-year-olds do, and more often purposefully rather than by accident.
See the case of Nim Chimpsky - they set out hoping to replicate the claims of a previous study, and instead the researchers involved became some of the most outspoken debunkers of the whole "chimps can use human language" thing.