language - Jimmy Breeze on Diigo

27 Nov 09

08 Nov 09

Amazon.com: Telenovelas (Spanish TV Series Soap Opera). DVD has English Subtitles

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language learning

17 Oct 09

What is Design Thinking Anyway? : Observatory: Design Observer

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design language essential philosophy future books

Tim Brown of IDEO has written that design thinking is “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”
The design-thinking organization applies the designer’s most crucial tool to the problems of business. That tool is abductive reasoning.
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- Deductive logic — the logic of what must be — reasons from the general to the specific. If the general rule is that all crows are black, and I see a brown bird, I can declare deductively that this bird is not a crow.
- Inductive logic — the logic of what is operative — reasons from the specific to the general. If I study sales per square foot across a thousand stores and find a pattern that suggests stores in small towns generate significantly higher sales per square foot than stores in cities, I can inductively declare that small towns are my more valuable market.
- Yet a reasoning toolbox that holds only deduction and induction is incomplete. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, American philosophers such as William James and John Dewey began to explore the limits of formal declarative logic — that is, inductive and deductive reasoning. They were less interested in how one declares a statement true or false than in the process by which we come to know and understand. To them, the acquisition of knowledge was not an abstract, purely conceptual exercise, but one involving interaction with and inquiry into the world around them. Understanding did not entail progress toward an absolute truth but rather an evolving interaction with a context or environment.
- New ideas came into being, Peirce posited, by way of “logical leaps of the mind.” New ideas arose when a thinker observed data (or even a single data point) that didn’t fit with the existing model or models. The thinker sought to make sense of the observation by making what Peirce called an “inference to the best explanation.” The true first step of reasoning, he concluded, was not observation but wondering. Peirce named his form of reasoning abductive logic. It is not declarative reasoning; its goal is not to declare a conclusion to be true or false. It is modal reasoning; its goal is to posit what could possibly be true.
- Whether they realize it or not, designers live in Peirce’s world of abduction; they actively look for new data points, challenge accepted explanations, and infer possible new worlds. By doing so, they scare the hell out of a lot of businesspeople. For a middle manager forced to deal with flighty, exuberant “creative types,” who seem to regard prevailing wisdom as a mere trifle and deadlines as an inconvenience, the admonition to “be like a designer” is tantamount to saying “be less productive, less efficient, more subversive, and more flaky” — not an attractive proposition. And it is a fair critique that abduction can lead to poor results; unproved inferences might lead to success in time, but then again, they might not.
- Some abductive thinkers fail to heed Brown’s requirement that the design must be matched to what is technologically feasible, launching products that do not yet have supporting technology. Consider the software designers who inferred from the growth of the Internet that consumers would want to do all their shopping online, from pet supplies to toys to groceries. Online security and back-end infrastructure had not yet caught up to their ideas, dooming them to failure.
- Other abductive thinkers fail to address Brown’s second requirement: that the innovation must make business sense. Looking back on the dot-com crash, Michael Dell, founder of Dell, argues that little has changed. “Still today in our industry, if you go to a trade show, you walk around and you will find a lot of technology for which there is no problem that exists,” he says. “It’s like, ‘Hey, look at this, we’ve got a great solution and there is no problem to solve here.’ ” [2]
- Making Peirce’s logical leaps is not consistent or reliable; nor does it faithfully adhere to predetermined budgets. But the far greater risk is to maintain an environment hostile to abductive reasoning, the proverbial lifeblood of design thinkers and the design of business. Without the logic of what might be, a corporation can only refine its current heuristic or algorithm, leaving it at the mercy of competitors that look upstream to find a more powerful route out of the mystery or a clever new way to drive the prevailing heuristic to algorithm.

04 Oct 09

Doug Richard's School for Startups

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marketing language

28 Sep 09

Johnny Holland - It’s all about interaction » Blog Archive » Good IxDers borrow, great ones steal ….

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design interesting video architecture language society anthropology research

But what is it that they actually do that’s so useful to design? Social scientists are essentially professional observers, using ethnographic tools to understand what they see, and manage any potential biases they might have. My favourite ethnographic technique or term is that of ‘thick description’: coined by Clifford Gertz as a way to sum up how we should analyse objects including their multiple meanings, rather than just what it was (a ‘thin description’).
Erving Goffman’s idea of front and back stage actions (for example, how waiters act in the public part of the restaurant vs. behind the swinging door, amongst other examples)
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- Cultures use myth, storytelling, and rituals in similar ways to help make meaning and sense out of the world - Joseph Campbell lays this out in his book “The Hero With a Thousand Faces”, while Claude Levi-Strauss does it more densely in “The Raw and The Cooked“
- Actor-network theory (ANT) - created by Bruno Latour and others with the main gist that a lot happens between people and other agents (even inanimate objects), and that this is in a continual state of change.
- Why: While architecture may seem to be at the opposite end of the design spectrum to IxD - we deal with the personal and ephemeral, they the collective and permanent - it has a few points worth noting:
  
  a need to deal with complex living systems
  a history of encouraging research in their field (something that pushes it far ahead of say, industrial design)
  and a general philosophical bent to their work (no wonder Ayn Rand was able to set a book and ideology behind an architect!)
- Why: Mental models didn’t start with Indy Young, and affordances didn’t start with Don Norman. Some of the ideas behind affordances can be traced back to the Gestalt theorists - a school of thought believing in the importance of patterns and that the sum of something is greater than the parts.
- Why: There’s been a growing discussion in the last few years on the role of language in design, including Adaptive Path and Cooper. However, linguists assert that language has a profound effect on how we perceive the world in general. Lakoff and Johnson’s ‘Metaphors We Live By’ is a classic that suggests we have fundamental linguistic metaphors that shape our lives e.g.:
  
  IDEAS are CONTAINERS
  TIME is IN FRONT OF US and we MOVE THROUGH IT
  HAPPINESS is UP, SADNESS is DOWN
- Interaction design or experience design is about just that - interactions and experiences. Literature explores these thing - slowly, carefully, leaving room for interpretation.
- The general steal: The ultimate in low-fi experience prototyping, literature can give inspiration and a method of slowing down.

Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

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philosophy language history education qualitative

16 Sep 09

How the British Invented “Development” to Keep the Empire and Substitute for Racism (Aid Watch)

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language development economics

03 Sep 09

Teaching English in Argentina

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learning language LatinAmerica

There are many small institutes where you can find work ranging from one-on-one teaching in peoples’ homes to small classes to teaching English for companies. The teaching could be as basic conversation classes or for advanced learners it could be teaching grammar and more technical language. Bringing a CV and attending an interview is usually enough to get started. A TEFL qualification will put you at a greater advantage. The basic pay for an EFL teacher could range from $15 - $30 Argentine pesos ($4 - $8) per hour. In an institute you will have a more structured day of work. However, if teaching privately, it could depend on the client and could be quite unreliable due to their time table. This could incur frequent cancelations.
Good references for jobseekers are www.esljobs.com, www.TEFLonline.net, www.eslcafe.com and the local English written news paper The Buenos Herald.
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- There are also opportunities to teach in schools as a classroom assistant. This work would include taking small groups or individuals of children for workshops in reading or writing, or covering teachers by taking a whole class and continuing with the subject which they are being taught. Obviously, this would be a very structured time-table. Schools usually begin at 8am and finish at 4pm. Wages could range from $1000 - $3000 pesos (US.$260 - $780) per month.

19 Aug 09

Detecting Sadness in 140 Characters: : Web Ecology Project

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language twitter research methodology

13 Aug 09

George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

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language politics learning

06 Aug 09

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks

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funny language

05 Aug 09

What is wealth? — Social Edge

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economics language

15 Jul 09

Spanish class recommendation in Buenos Aires | Wanderlusting

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language learning travel

In preparation for taking the Diploma de Español como lengua extranjera, I spent our last two weeks studying Spanish in Buenos Aires. Through craigslist, I found Natalia, an incredible teacher with very reasonable rates. I've been taking Spanish classes much of my life, and Natalia is hands down the best Spanish teacher I've ever had. En serio.

She offers classes downtown, and mostly does individual classes but can teach group classes. She really knows what she's doing, and has a great way of explaining concepts in a new and different way. I've learned the subjunctive so many times, but her way of presenting the information really made sense to me. She expects students to be motivated and do their homework, and in doing so, she helps students get to a new level. ¡Suerte!

22 Jun 09

Edge: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? By Lera Boroditsky

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language brain behaviour interesting

For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong.
What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world.
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- Language is so fundamental to our experience, so deeply a part of being human, that it's hard to imagine life without it. But are languages merely tools for expressing our thoughts, or do they actually shape our thoughts?
- Certainly, speakers of different languages must attend to and encode strikingly different aspects of the world just so they can use their language properly.
- It's possible that everyone thinks the same way, notices the same things, but just talks differently.
- learning to speak these languages requires something more than just learning vocabulary: it requires paying attention to the right things in the world so that you have the correct information to include in what you say.
- Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1
- This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."
- The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English).2
- Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language.
- People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. So if the Kuuk Thaayorre think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time?
- Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on.
- People's ideas of time differ across languages in other ways. For example, English speakers tend to talk about time using horizontal spatial metaphors (e.g., "The best is ahead of us," "The worst is behind us"), whereas Mandarin speakers have a vertical metaphor for time (e.g., the next month is the "down month" and the last month is the "up month").
- Our research into such basic cognitive abilities as estimating duration shows that speakers of different languages differ in ways predicted by the patterns of metaphors in their language. (For example, when asked to estimate duration, English speakers are more likely to be confused by distance information, estimating that a line of greater length remains on the test screen for a longer period of time, whereas Greek speakers are more likely to be confused by amount, estimating that a container that is fuller remains longer on the screen.)5
- One way to answer this question is to teach people new ways of talking and see if that changes the way they think.
- English speakers were taught to use size metaphors (as in Greek) to describe duration (e.g., a movie is larger than a sneeze), or vertical metaphors (as in Mandarin) to describe event order. Once the English speakers had learned to talk about time in these new ways, their cognitive performance began to resemble that of Greek or Mandarin speakers. This suggests that patterns in a language can indeed play a causal role in constructing how we think.6
- when you're learning a new language, you're not simply learning a new way of talking, you are also inadvertently learning a new way of thinking.
- In Russian there is no single word that covers all the colors that English speakers call "blue." Russian makes an obligatory distinction between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). Does this distinction mean that siniy blues look more different from goluboy blues to Russian speakers? Indeed, the data say yes. Russian speakers are quicker to distinguish two shades of blue that are called by the different names in Russian (i.e., one being siniy and the other being goluboy) than if the two fall into the same category.
- descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a "key" — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like "hard," "heavy," "jagged," "metal," "serrated," and "useful," whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden," "intricate," "little," "lovely," "shiny," and "tiny."
- And we can also show that it is aspects of language per se that shape how people think: teaching English speakers new grammatical gender systems influences mental representations of objects in the same way it does with German and Spanish speakers. Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people's ideas of concrete objects in the world.7
- in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist's native language. So, for example, German painters are more likely to paint death as a man, whereas Russian painters are more likely to paint death as a woman.
- Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.

07 May 09

Luv is all around MySpace | Technology | The Guardian

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socialnetworks communication language

The majority of comments throb with emotion, and that cool aunty comment has a positive emotional strength factor of five.
That is, according to Professor Mike Thelwall, who is analysing hundreds of thousands of MySpace comments to understand how people use emotion when they communicate with friends in social networks, and whether there are good strategies for applying it.
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- He's surprised by this. "Compared to other ways of studying communication with people, in some ways it's a million times better. In the past you might have recorded friends talking, and had a sample of 100 conversations. We can get 100,000."
- Thelwall's research into sentiment analysis of MySpace involves categorising sentiments into two categories: positive and negative; then into a five-point scale representing very good, good, satisfactory, bad, very bad. Difficulties in programming the machine-learning of this analysis involve the creative grammar, punctuation and spelling of commenters; the ubiquity of phrases ("I love you", possibly the strongest emotion you can express, only scores a positive three, because it's so common); and effects such as sarcasm. Not.
- This year, as well as his sentiment paper, Thelwall has published research on homophily in MySpace – the tendency for friendships to occur between similar people (based on ethnicity, religion, age and sexual orientation). He found that homophily is thriving in MySpace, but not necessarily based on gender. Yet in every offline context, the majority of friends of men and boys over the age of five would be male. "It's a really odd switch," says Thelwall.
- Thelwall is planning to talk to schoolteachers over the next few weeks about social networking. He intends to stress to them the importance of their students using "bad" language. Not just swearing, though that's pretty key (and covered in his paper, Fk yea I swear, but their embracing of the whole creative power of this form of communication.
- "Social networking sites are so important for younger people – you could literally ruin your life by not being able to maintain friendships in them," he says. "One clear mistake to make is writing in standard English in comments to your friends – it's too boring, you're obviously an outsider. [You should] vary the way you express things."