polyglot conspiracy

Just after hearing about how stupid email makes you, I read that an article in the NYT Mag last week declared: Watching TV Makes You Smarter (via the Log, where Mark Liberman evaluates the article and study in question). I don’t have time to read the article right now, but I have two immediate thoughts. First, it’s kind of ironic (or merely coincidental?) that it appeared just as TV Turnoff Week started. Second, it seems like the critical part missing in these studies is (among other things, like differentiation between types of TV shows or email writing) embedding them within the totality of one’s experience with media, and this is crucial.

Author of the NYT article, Steven Johnson, also has a piece in Wired (not yet available online; thanks Zack!) about the cognitive benefits of video games. For other commentary, see this really nice piece in Slate, Reason’s blog, or Johnson’s own blog.

Erin McKean has passed on some information regarding the exciting American National Corpus Project:

The American National Corpus (ANC) project is fostering the development of a corpus comparable to the British National Corpus (BNC), covering American English…

The availability of a corpus of American English will significantly contribute to language and linguistic research, development of language understanding computer applications (e.g., language translation and search and retrieval software), compilation of reference works such as dictionaries and thesauri, as well as provide a rich national resource for use in education at all levels.

The ANC will contain a core corpus of at least 100 million words, including both written and spoken (transcripts) data comparable across genres to the BNC. The genres in the ANC will be expanded to include “new” types of language data that have become available in recent years, such as web blogs and web pages, chats, email, and rap music lyrics. In addition to the core 100 million words, the ANC will include an additional component of potentially several hundreds of millions of words, chosen to provide both the broadest and largest selection of data possible.

I’m particularly psyched about the second sentence in that last paragraph (”‘new’ types of language data”), because as I understand it, right now those sources generally aren’t admissible references for published dictionaries/thesauri.

And here’s the great part: you can help by contributing to the corpus (bloggers, round up some entries! authors, round up some stories! emailers, get permission from your friends!). You just need to be a native American English speaker (what’s that?) and have some knowledge of how to send files through your computer. Which, if you’re reading PolyCon, I’m guessing you have covered.

Get details here.

End-of-semester hilarity from The Tensor.

In a WP article on learning language as a child v. learning language as an adult (thanks Jarrett), all is well and good until:

She is sure, she said, that her aptitude is “clearly genetic,” as she comes from a long line of linguists; her great-grandfather spoke eight languages. She can speak varying degrees of five languages, including Arabic.

Uh-oh, do I spy a case of linguist/polyglot confusion?

Actually, there’s more that’s not well and good:

In the field of foreign language learning, the mantra has become “the younger the better,” with suggestions that anybody older than teen actress Lindsay Lohan should forget about learning another language. Some parents think first grade is too late to start.

It’s kind of amazing the lengths writers will go to to sex up their prose with recognizable pop culture exemplars. Lindsay Lohan is 18, which I’m pretty sure is significantly older than the early-adolescent “critical period” in mention. Here’s another:

What a focused adult learning a new language most likely won’t be able to do is pass as a native; nobody would mistake the Austrian-born California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, for a U.S. native.

Which is to imply that Schwarzenegger didn’t learn English until he was a focused adult, I suppose? Could well be true, but I’m not buying it without a google.

[...leaves wordpress window to google search in new firefox window while desperately, desperately hoping to discover that the gubernator attended bilingual elementary school in austria...also "U.S." is not exactly a language but nevermind, that's a technicality...]

Okay, I found this quote from Schwarzenegger:

In this country, it doesn’t make any difference where you were born. It doesn’t make any difference who your parents were. It doesn’t make any difference if, like me, you couldn’t even speak English until you were in your twenties.

Well, it still doesn’t prove he was ever focused.

How did I just now discover NetLingo.com? Beats me. It’s the

award-winning dictionary of Internet terms. It contains thousands of words and definitions that describe the online world of business, technology, and communication. We’re here to educate and entertain you about the lingo used in the online world :^)

Hot-damn! Actually, I approach this site with more than a bit of skepticism/fear once I see the list of NetLingo’s “partners”:

Online Schools | Online Gambling | Online Casinos | Best Gambling Sites | Home Equity Loans | Loans UK | Mortgages UK | Debt Consolidation UK | Equity Release UK | Cheapest UK Loans | Bad Credit Loans UK | Unsecured Loans UK | Secured Loans UK | Cheap Personal Loans UK | Loans

Um, on second thought, I think NetLingo might be responsible for all the stupid comment spam I get, and may be a prime contender for the .evil top-level domain suffix (thanks for the terminology, NetLingo!).

Unsurprisingly, Mark Liberman at the Log has posted a good skeptical response to the “email’s the new heroin” study.:

This seems to be another case where the press is happy to publicize a plausible alarmist result of wide interest, without any hint of the sort of aggressive skepticism that they are famous for applying to the pronouncements of politicians. Is this because there are no journalists who are smart enough and well enough educated to ask the obvious questions? Or is it a matter of high-level editorial policy? Most likely, I guess, it’s a combination of laziness and lack of editorial attention.

Except - “aggressive skepticism that they are famous for applying to the pronouncements of politicians”? Is THAT how the president managed to win another election and remain so popular despite his obvious lying and probable cheating? Also, in answer to the question of if it’s an editorial oversight or an issue of uneducated reporters - it’s most certainly both, but it’s mainly a product of the PR-drivenness of the news. Just put a phrase like “email is worse than drugs” in your press release, and let the wire machine do the rest.

So at first I became interested in this news ditty, which I heard on BBC World Service radio, because it uses the term infomanic and is about the detriments of communication to our brains, time, and psyches (declarations of which I’m always ready to consider, debate, and worry myself over).

But after a Google News search on the study about infomania, I’m more interested in how many different ways headlines can say “[ICT ACTION] [VP MEANING 'IS WORSE THAN'] [WORD FOR MARIIJUANA],” since that is the point of comparison for IQ damage used by the study. Here’s a sample of headlines and links (unless noted, they’re from the UK):

E-mails ‘hurt IQ more than pot’ - CNN International
E-mails fog brain worse than cannabis - Manchester Evening News
E-mails ‘make you stooopid’ - News24 (South Africa)
‘Infomania’ worse than marijuana - BBC News
Emails ‘pose threat to IQ’ - Guardian
Texting hits IQ harder than pot! - Webindia123
It lowers your IQ more than smoking cannabis - Mirror.co.uk
IQ tumbles with too much texting - The Herald
Texting is worse than pot - The Sun
Emails worse than drugs, says study - ITV.com
Txt and email ‘reduce IQ more than cannabis’ - Daily Mail UK
Why texting harms your IQ - Times Online
Emails more danaging than cannabis - VNUNet.com

And my favorite:

It’s not clever to send too many texts and e-mails - Scotsman

[A: "Hey, Scotland! Just how bad IS sending too many texts and emails?" B: "Well, you know...it's just not clever." A: "Well, shit then. I gotta throw away my phone and computer, like, today." B: "Yeah. Let's go smoke some weed instead, man."]

(Notice, no headlines used weed - is this an American thing?)

This is not to downplay the issue of infomania, email overload, or whatever else you want to call it (from CNN):

But the mental impact of trying to balance a steady inflow of messages with getting on with normal work took its toll, the UK’s Press Association reported.

In 80 clinical trials, Dr. Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist at King’s College London University, monitored the IQ of workers throughout the day.

He found the IQ of those who tried to juggle messages and work fell by 10 points — the equivalent to missing a whole night’s sleep and more than double the 4-point fall seen after smoking marijuana.

“This is a very real and widespread phenomenon,” Wilson said. “We have found that this obsession with looking at messages, if unchecked, will damage a worker’s performance by reducing their mental sharpness.

And that’s a serious issue, but come on! Using the salacious “marijuana” for comparison is such a blatant cry for news coverage! As is, of course, the mention of IQ dropping at all (which seems misplaced to me - it seems like the issue is simply one of distraction and can be explained without reference to controversial notions like IQ). Then again, the study was commissioned by HP, and we all know how I feel about them lately.

On the other hand, this is AWESOME news for these people.

As perhaps a companion to yesterday’s post re: West Virginia, but from the other side, here’s an article in the NYT today about the lack of sufficient translation services in NYC hospitals, which is the focus of an official civil rights complaint coordinated by the New York Immigration Coalition.

The complaint, to be formally submitted today to the New York attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, was compiled by a coalition of advocates for immigrants who spent two years surveying patients, monitoring area hospitals and pressing for the translation services required by laws against discrimination on the basis of national origin.

Juanita Scarlett, a spokeswoman for Mr. Spitzer, said the attorney general’s office was already conducting an inquiry into language barriers at the four hospitals, which besides St. Vincent’s include the Flushing and Jamaica Hospital Medical Centers in Queens and Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center in Brooklyn.

“We’re greatly concerned that the health care needs of patients with limited English proficiency are not being met,” Ms. Scarlett said.

From the FULP (Files of Unnecessary Language Policy): Bill Poser at Language Log writes about the state legislature in West Virginia, my friendly neighbor state, unwittingly passing a bill that declared English the state’s official language. The bill was then vetoed by the governor (who actually favors the bill, according to Poser), on the grounds that it violates the state constitution. Yet the bill probably will be revived, and might well pass. For the AP story go here. And for me, the following quote from that story basically sums it up:

Andrew Schneider, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia, said English-only laws are based on the false premise that immigrants will not learn English without government coercion.

“And English-only laws do nothing constructive to increase English proficiency. They simply discriminate and punish those who have not yet learned English,” Schneider said.

Yet more than half the states in the union DO have English as their official language, of which I was unaware. Poser points out that this does not mean we shouldn’t pick on WVa just because it’s WVa and gets picked on enough already:

Mr. Kabler [a Charleston Gazette columnist] laments the fact that West Virginia has been singled out for derision when 28 other states have passed similar legislation, citing a previous incident in which West Virginia was made the butt of jokes when it passed a law allowing people to eat roadkill. I at least have no intention of singling out West Virginia. As far as I’m concerned, West Virginia is merely one of 29 states with an excess of legislators who at best are misguided and at worst are ignorant bigots.

Take THAT English, English Only!

This site is awesome (and has quickly surpassed the Log as the main source of referrals for PC - thanks, Sandwich!).