K, this is one of those things that really gets me. I am very, very tired of it.
I am a dyke (one might say, cunning linguist) and the use of the term "gay" as meaning "lame" does not bother me. Plenty of words have more than one meaning. Frankly, it's kind of too bad that "gay" no longer means "happy, spirited," but, well, that seems to be the way the cookie's crumbled.
There's a large contingent of people who believe in a Whorfian fallacy of the sort that ones use of language has a causal link with ones cognition. But I don't really think that their views are justified in this case. No one is saying that this article has sexual relations with articles of the same gender, nor are they judging it for doing so.
In fact, the people in my life who use the term "gay" to mean lame are, themselves, queer people. And even when teenage boys (the other large demographic of lame-"gay" utterers) use the term that way, it does not bother me. Maybe it's ignorant, but I think I and the "community" are strong enough to deal.
What I do object to, with regards to the term "gay" is when it is used in the substantive -- as in, "Those gays are always out to recruit your children." It's an adjective. It should be used to describe people, not to define them.
Well, so I'm not strictly speaking, a techie. But as a University student, I have had occasion to notice the difference that different styles of dress have on my own behaviour.
For instance, once while having terrible trouble focusing on writing a paper, I decided to take the indirect advice of an old Bugs Bunny cartoon: I dubbed an old hallowe'en witch hat my "essay-writing hat" and put it on. I was focused, not due to the hat, but due to the power I imbued it with. It's silly, but even now, it still works. I feel like I can write better and quicker when wearing the hat than when not doing so.
If you associate a suit and tie with working, it's likely that you'll work better while wearing them. It's purely psychological, but people are fetishistic like that. Exploit that symbolic potential all you can!
But I had to point this out: when abortion is illegal, it leads women to go to desperate means. You're not going to prevent abortions unless you outlaw knitting needles, coathangers, tree-branches, letter openers, twist-ties, lengths of wire.... basically anything that can be used to stab a fetus. All of these methods have severe risks to the mother. Tell me when you believe abortion to be justified, and perhaps we can come to an agreement. But reproduction is a burden borne disproportionately by women. It is a risk for them to take it; the fetus risks nothing, on the other hand, remaining in the woman. Unless and until there is some alternate means for women to give up their fetus into the responsible womb of another, I do not see why the fetus's rights should trump theirs.
Your argument is upsetting. I, as a Canadian, could make the same argument about doing business with the States -- you guys could quite literally cripple us by not buying our wood, our oil, most of our intellectual property (though of course, you'd be doing everyone a favour to muzzle Avril Lavigne/Celine Dione etc.)... You guys could crush us like the ants that we are; but nobody's arguing that we should cut off trade relations completely because you guys might come, in about 30 years when your freshwater supply runs out due to global warming, and annex us for our many lakes and rivers.
Increased trade with China is making it possible for workers to live better lives; economics really shouldn't be viewed as this nationalistic "US versus Them" kind of thing. If your nation isn't competitive in one arena, educate people to be competitive in another.
Yes. I am aware; it's just that there isn't as much data available as there needs to be in order to be able to say with any confidence that, yes, this is what speech to children looks like, and this is what speech spoken by children looks like. Because like it or not, you have to get your grad students transcribing things for hours in order to get anything out of it. You want to research bilingual acquisition? Fine, but you're probably going to have to do years of legwork to get data for even three children learning the same two languages at the same time.
Speech recognition would cut down significantly on the amount of time it took to take down utterances on either end. Which would be an enormous plus.
I'm a linguist, and it seems to me that Speech Recognition would be incredibly, incredibly useful in the research that's going on right now into Language Acquisition.
You see, the problem right now is that there's really not much data that's in the public domain for linguists/psychologists/what-have-you to study, because it's incredibly, incredibly laborious to do longitudinal studies of children's utterances, or of input to the child. People spend hours and hours and hours transcribing 20 minutes of tape. They're understandably reticent to just share their data out of the goodness of their hearts. Even when they do, it's never a large sampling of children-and-their-interlocutors from-birth-to-age-X, it's usually just one child and maybe his or her parents from age 8 months to 3 years.
So we have arguments about whether or not kids hear certain forms of input (Have you used passive voice with your child recently? Where's your child going to learn subjacency?) that go back and forth between psychologists and linguists, and people perform corpus studies on 3 children and feel that that's representative -- never mind the fact that these three kids were all harvested from the MIT daycare centre, and were the children of grad students or faculty members, and thus may not be representative of the population at large.
Speech recognition would make it much, much easier to amass large corpora of data for larger samples of the population. It'd make it much more likely for people to share their data. And, what's more, it'd likely be possible to have a phonetic and syntactic-word-stub (for lack of a better word) transcription made from the same recording. We'd have a better idea of how the input determines how language is acquired by children, and what sorts of stages children go through.
Slashdot Mirror
K, this is one of those things that really gets me. I am very, very tired of it.
I am a dyke (one might say, cunning linguist) and the use of the term "gay" as meaning "lame" does not bother me. Plenty of words have more than one meaning. Frankly, it's kind of too bad that "gay" no longer means "happy, spirited," but, well, that seems to be the way the cookie's crumbled.
There's a large contingent of people who believe in a Whorfian fallacy of the sort that ones use of language has a causal link with ones cognition. But I don't really think that their views are justified in this case. No one is saying that this article has sexual relations with articles of the same gender, nor are they judging it for doing so.
In fact, the people in my life who use the term "gay" to mean lame are, themselves, queer people. And even when teenage boys (the other large demographic of lame-"gay" utterers) use the term that way, it does not bother me. Maybe it's ignorant, but I think I and the "community" are strong enough to deal.
What I do object to, with regards to the term "gay" is when it is used in the substantive -- as in, "Those gays are always out to recruit your children." It's an adjective. It should be used to describe people, not to define them.
Well, so I'm not strictly speaking, a techie. But as a University student, I have had occasion to notice the difference that different styles of dress have on my own behaviour.
For instance, once while having terrible trouble focusing on writing a paper, I decided to take the indirect advice of an old Bugs Bunny cartoon: I dubbed an old hallowe'en witch hat my "essay-writing hat" and put it on. I was focused, not due to the hat, but due to the power I imbued it with. It's silly, but even now, it still works. I feel like I can write better and quicker when wearing the hat than when not doing so.
If you associate a suit and tie with working, it's likely that you'll work better while wearing them. It's purely psychological, but people are fetishistic like that. Exploit that symbolic potential all you can!
This is the sort of attitude that allowing your children to watch Mythbusters will foment. The price of freedom is eternal vigilence.
But I had to point this out: when abortion is illegal, it leads women to go to desperate means. You're not going to prevent abortions unless you outlaw knitting needles, coathangers, tree-branches, letter openers, twist-ties, lengths of wire.... basically anything that can be used to stab a fetus. All of these methods have severe risks to the mother. Tell me when you believe abortion to be justified, and perhaps we can come to an agreement. But reproduction is a burden borne disproportionately by women. It is a risk for them to take it; the fetus risks nothing, on the other hand, remaining in the woman. Unless and until there is some alternate means for women to give up their fetus into the responsible womb of another, I do not see why the fetus's rights should trump theirs.
Your argument is upsetting. I, as a Canadian, could make the same argument about doing business with the States -- you guys could quite literally cripple us by not buying our wood, our oil, most of our intellectual property (though of course, you'd be doing everyone a favour to muzzle Avril Lavigne/Celine Dione etc.)... You guys could crush us like the ants that we are; but nobody's arguing that we should cut off trade relations completely because you guys might come, in about 30 years when your freshwater supply runs out due to global warming, and annex us for our many lakes and rivers.
Increased trade with China is making it possible for workers to live better lives; economics really shouldn't be viewed as this nationalistic "US versus Them" kind of thing. If your nation isn't competitive in one arena, educate people to be competitive in another.
Like, say, academic navel-gazing.
Yes. I am aware; it's just that there isn't as much data available as there needs to be in order to be able to say with any confidence that, yes, this is what speech to children looks like, and this is what speech spoken by children looks like. Because like it or not, you have to get your grad students transcribing things for hours in order to get anything out of it. You want to research bilingual acquisition? Fine, but you're probably going to have to do years of legwork to get data for even three children learning the same two languages at the same time. Speech recognition would cut down significantly on the amount of time it took to take down utterances on either end. Which would be an enormous plus.
I'm a linguist, and it seems to me that Speech Recognition would be incredibly, incredibly useful in the research that's going on right now into Language Acquisition.
You see, the problem right now is that there's really not much data that's in the public domain for linguists/psychologists/what-have-you to study, because it's incredibly, incredibly laborious to do longitudinal studies of children's utterances, or of input to the child. People spend hours and hours and hours transcribing 20 minutes of tape. They're understandably reticent to just share their data out of the goodness of their hearts. Even when they do, it's never a large sampling of children-and-their-interlocutors from-birth-to-age-X, it's usually just one child and maybe his or her parents from age 8 months to 3 years.
So we have arguments about whether or not kids hear certain forms of input (Have you used passive voice with your child recently? Where's your child going to learn subjacency?) that go back and forth between psychologists and linguists, and people perform corpus studies on 3 children and feel that that's representative -- never mind the fact that these three kids were all harvested from the MIT daycare centre, and were the children of grad students or faculty members, and thus may not be representative of the population at large.
Speech recognition would make it much, much easier to amass large corpora of data for larger samples of the population. It'd make it much more likely for people to share their data. And, what's more, it'd likely be possible to have a phonetic and syntactic-word-stub (for lack of a better word) transcription made from the same recording. We'd have a better idea of how the input determines how language is acquired by children, and what sorts of stages children go through.