The Latest from Boing Boing

Science fiction movies from around the world
UK budget, visualized
Canadian cops' history of agents provocateurs and the G20
Single comic panels that depict both cause and effect
Stiglitz: spending cuts won't cure recession
Just a mellow afternoon at the G20
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy interviewed by Dale Dougherty
Seeing Languages Differently

Science fiction movies from around the world

Posted: 28 Jun 2010 02:46 AM PDT

Israeli/UK/South Africa SF writer Lavie Tidhar writes, "At the World SF News Blog, we're running an international movie week this week at the World SF Blog, starting with short Israeli horror film EATEN, directed by Elad Rath and featuring none other than SF writer Nir Yaniv as the monster. We'll be showing trailers and whole films from South Africa, the Philippines, Russia and elsewhere."

MOVIE WEEK AT THE WSNB! (Thanks, Lavie!)

UK budget, visualized

Posted: 28 Jun 2010 02:43 AM PDT

Apropos last night's post about the new UK cost-cutting budget and its efficacy in reviving the sinking economy, this Information is Beautiful chart visualizing the cuts against the deficit (click the link for legible, full-sized version).

Budget 2010: Information is Beautiful live blogs George Osborne's speech (Thanks, Barry!)

Canadian cops' history of agents provocateurs and the G20

Posted: 28 Jun 2010 02:38 AM PDT

My inbox this morning is full of emails from friends in Toronto who want to remind me that the Canadian police have a history of building up an enormous security presence for international events and then using agents provocateurs who commit and incite acts of violence, which, in turn, leads to the use of the large police presence to shut down the legit protest.

Here's the details from the Montebello, Quebec NAFTA summit in 2007: Undercover cops tried to incite violence in Montebello: union leader; Quebec police admit they went undercover at Montebello protest:

In the footage filmed Monday afternoon, three burly men with bandanas and other covers over their faces push through protesters toward a line of riot police. One of the men has a rock in his hand.
As they move forward, Coles and other union leaders dressed in suits order the men to put the rock down and leave, accuse them of being police agents provocateurs, and try unsuccessfully to unmask them.
In the end, they squeeze behind the police line, where they are calmly handcuffed.

Humberto da Silva from Sindicalista TV notes, "It strikes me that these two cruisers were abandoned exactly where the anarchist kids were headed. There was no threat to the police, and that the riot police were actually present to escort the drivers out of the area when the vehicles were abandoned. I am trying to piece together the sequence of events leading up to the abandoning of these vehicles in an area that was entirely surrounded by riot cops. The individual in this footage I took is wearing what looks remarkably like a tactical backpack, all strapped up. He wore no mask and was trying to incite others to vandalize the cruiser and turn over the other cruiser (which was parked where the pylons were originally placed) which was burned. He struck me as a provocateur."

I don't know if I agree (wearing a tactical backpack is a good idea if you're planning on committing crimes because you're a criminal as much as it's useful if you're a cop or provocateur), but those are some very odd facts in a city where CDN$1B has been spent to make the most airtight police-state in Canadian history.

Single comic panels that depict both cause and effect

Posted: 27 Jun 2010 06:36 PM PDT

Ed Piskor, creator of the Wizzywig comic, sez, "This article contains a dozen or so examples of comic panels that handle sequences of different related actions. Usually action is broken up through a series of panels, or even pages, but master cartoonists are able to handle a lot of information within a single illustration as evidence at the link. Good examples are hard to find."

The Art Of Cause and Effect In A Solitary Comic Panel (Thanks, Ed!)

Stiglitz: spending cuts won't cure recession

Posted: 27 Jun 2010 06:19 PM PDT

Nobel prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank, blasts UK exchequer George Osborne for cutting spending during a recession. Stiglitz says it's a recipe for disaster:

"If you have a household that can't pay its debts, you tell it to cut back on spending to free up the cash to pay the debts. But in a national economy, if you cut back on your spending, then economic activity goes down, nobody invests, the amount of tax you take goes down, the amount you pay out in unemployment benefits goes up - and you don't have enough money to pay your debts.
"The old story is still true: you cut expenditures and the economy goes down. We have lots of experiments which show this, thanks to Herbert Hoover and the IMF," he adds. The IMF imposed that mistaken policy in Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Argentina and hosts of other developing countries in the 1980s and 1990s. "So we know what will happen: economies will get weaker, investment will get stymied and it's a downward vicious spiral. How far down we don't know - it could be a Japanese malaise. Japan did an experiment just like this in 1997; just as it was recovering, it raised VAT and went into another recession."
Then why have we not learned from all that? Because politicians like George Osborne are driven by ideology; the national deficit is an excuse to shrink the state because that is what he wanted anyway. Because the financial market only cares about one thing - getting repaid. And because other European governments are panicking because of the market's wild attack on Greece and Spain, and they don't want to be next.

I like this: "There's absolutely no reason why you couldn't tax speculative gains [from rising house or land prices] by 40 per cent. There's no social return on it and land is going to be there whether people have speculated or not. But you lower the tax on investment in things like R&D."

Osborne's first Budget? It's wrong, wrong, wrong!

Just a mellow afternoon at the G20

Posted: 27 Jun 2010 08:22 PM PDT

Riot police charge and strike at peaceful protesters at the G20 Summit in Toronto, Canada. The Guardian and other news outlets report that Canada spent a billion dollars on security for the event (by comparison, London last year spent some $30 million). (via Matt Forsythe).

Many more videos are here at blogto.com.

Below, a riot policeman shoots a woman at near point-blank range with a ~~canister of~~ "muzzle shot" that delivers a load of tear gas. She appears to be a photographer/journalist, and is carrying an SLR camera around her neck. I hope she is okay.

(Thanks, Sparkdale, via The Star)

More: here's a photograph of police taking down two photographers who work for the National Post.

Toronto 680News reporter Kevin Misener describes his experience with riot police in this radio interview (thanks, Ray Pride).

A couple of people who've been tweeting first-hand experiences: @acourtroom @spaikin, and I welcome more in the comments.

Toronto's secret ID law used to arrest G20 protestor

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy interviewed by Dale Dougherty

Posted: 27 Jun 2010 04:03 PM PDT

At O'Reilly Media's FOO Camp this weekend, BB pal Dale Dougherty, founder of MAKE:, interviewed Steven Levy about his seminal 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. The book was just republished by O'Reilly in a 25th Anniversary Edition. If you haven't read it yet, Hackers is a terrific telling of how the DIY mindset (and of course some shrewd business dealings) gave birth to the personal computer industry. The new edition includes recent interviews with Bill Gates, Mark Zukerberg, Richard Stallman, and Steven Wozniak. Hindsight is 20/20 but damn, those were different times.
"Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition" (Amazon)

Seeing Languages Differently

Posted: 27 Jun 2010 10:29 AM PDT

How we see the world impacts our use of language and our use of language impacts how we see the world. Cognitive scientists in the vein of Benjamin Whorf regularly investigate the connections to thought and language use, including how visual perception varies across languages. Since I use (authentic) visual media to assist in foreign language acquisition, my research does have a practical side to the normally impenetrable fields of visual cognition and psycholinguistics. I use photographs at the earliest stages of language learning to train the brain not only in the use of new words, but literally how to "see" in the new language. Seeing a language differently embeds that language into a visual cultural context for the learner and makes for more effective recall later.

Let's look at two aspects of the visual world that provide good examples of how the visual impacts language and vary between languages and cultures: Color & Space.

Color

In order to highlight how color perceptions vary among cultures, I like to use the example of how we linguistically categorize certain colors. Let's take the range of colors in what we call "blue" and "red" in English.

When you look at the following colors, typical native English speaking respondents will describe these two colors as existing with the range of colors we call "blue".

Conversely, the following two colors here represent two distinct color categories in English, namely "red" and "pink"

If one looks at other languages, this same categorization scheme is not evident. For example, the blues above are distinct color categories in Russian. Plain or dark blue (синий, siniy) is a distinct color from light blue (голубой, goluboy). Each of these color categories has its own associated meanings, invoking a specific thought for many Russians. In Moscow, there are separate blue lines on the city metro system which helped me finally learn the difference between синий & голубой . Winawer and other at MIT take a close look at this subject in "Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination." (2007)
For the red & pink example, there is a correlating opposite in Chinese. The color distinction is not as prevalent as the colors are in the same category linguistically. Red is 红 (hóng) and pink as 粉红, (fěn hóng) or literally "powder red", a linguistic derivation similar to 'light-blue' in English. Where Russian blues are distinct, so are the Reds in English, but in Chinese, they are linguistically related.

The Winawer study takes this a step further. What does it mean for the function of our brain when we categorize what we see in different ways? They show that Russian concepts of blue affect visual performance, particularly on the language users' ability to discriminate between colors.

They state " ... our results suggest that language-specific distortions in perceptual performance arise as a function of the interaction of lower level perceptual processing and higher level knowledge systems (e.g. language)."

This insight/observation points towards a direct connection between the language one speaks and the functionality of the visual cortex and the brain. In other words, the vocabulary you use and how you categorize the world affects the speed at which you brain can recall certain information through your optic nerves. They also hint that left brain hemisphere tasks may be affected by language and visual perception as this is the hemisphere of the brain where language and logical performance is organized. Interestingly enough, this is switched in infants as visual perception is not yet attached to a language center. Apparently, babies see color purely as what they see is not filtered through the lens of language. I am not sure what it means to see a color "purely", but the Color label wheel from Dolores Labs provides an interesting look at color perceptions within the English language.

Space

In addition to color, spatial perception varies among cultures according to researchers. These differences in how we perceive space (eg. size, distance, depth, and direction, etc) lead to corresponding linguistic differences manifested in the words we use to describe our surroundings in different language. This lens of language here affects how we perceive and feel about our surroundings. One might easily imagine how a phrase like "that is a large house", "it is within walking distance", or "it is located off to the right" would vary in meaning between cultures, but there are more subtle and stark differences in how we perceive space differently. The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics has several examples of cultural variances. Researcher Steven C. Levinson has interesting insights and states that in "...many cultures (as suggested by at least a third of the small sample) spatial conception is organized in a fundamentally different way than expected on the basis of familiar western languages."

According to Levinson, a linguistic example can be found in the lack of spatial descriptors as in front of, in back, left of, and right of. Some languages instead use absolute terms or "fixed" cardinal direction such as north, south, upstream, downstream that are irrelevant of the direction of the speaker.

Perhaps it is that certain languages are less ego-centric, linguistically speaking, and focus more on cardinal directions. Apparently, the only universal content in regards to spatial perception in language appears to be the direction 'up' since it is a function of the gravity that we all feel, regardless of our cultural or linguistic background.

Geography, culture, and even technology shape how we view space in our world. In addition to variance among cultures, there is constant change within languages. Additionally, it is not solely a function of this 'lens of language'; it is both a function of our language and our experiences. For example, the exposure to mathematics and science has an impact on how we perceive space.

The following figures represent some classic optical illusions to demonstrate examples of how cultures perceive length differently. In the first image, the question is "which center line is longer?

In the second image, the question is whether the blue line is longer than the red.

In both cases, the lines are the same length, we only perceive them to be different lengths; an optical illusion. Interestingly enough, these optical illusions are only perceptible by members of traditional 'western cultures'. Segall, et al. in "The Influence of Culture on Visual Perception " wrote in 1968 that susceptibility to optical illusion is, indeed, a culturally determined factor. Their experiments conclude that the "European and American samples made significantly more illusions-supported responses than did the non-Western samples."

I use these examples of visual differences between cultures to highlight the point that the visual impacts language, and if you use media to teach a language, you need to use authentic media. Clip art and generic stock photography don't take advantage of the benefits of media in learning. Many language learning software developers use inauthentic images, stock photos, or clip art simply because of cost issues. A full description of the design problems in language learning software can be found in my 2003 article: CALL, commercialism and culture: inherent software design conflicts and their results ReCALL, 2003 - Cambridge Univ Press. In the mean time, I will continue to ponder how what I see affects how I think and how I think in a given language affects how I see.

Monday, June 28, 2010