“china”
8 posts under this tag.
134 sayings by John McCarthyWP (selected, presumably, by the man himself). I personally added 34 quotes to my personal quiver—a telling ratio for any quote collection, even without considering that the rest of the quotes were still excellent. It’s not only that our prejudice, tastes, and interests turned out to be surprisingly aligned (eco-bashing, optimism, Marxism-bashing…; libertarianism, existentialism…; AI, computers, technology…), the man can really turn a phrase. Check him out.
Here 8 of the very best:
As the Chinese say, 1001 words is worth more than a picture.
Malthus was right. It’s hard to see how the solar system could support much more than 10^28 people or the universe more than 10^50.
If everyone were to live for others all the time, life would be like a procession of ants following each other around in a circle.
People mourn when a person dies, but no-one mourns the billions of intestinal bacteria that his death dooms. Speciesism, I calls it.
It’s possible to program a computer in English. It’s also possible to make an airplane controlled by reins and spurs.
If you want to do good, work on the technology, not on getting power.
Asking a critic to name his favorite book is like asking a butcher to name his favorite pig.
When I see a slippery slope, my instinct is to build a terrace.
I doubt someone would find this too useful but I smiled today when I found about the guess YubNub command. You feed it text, it gulps the language it’s in. A great way to showcase YubNub’s open-ended fun, courtesy of Xerox research. It would have been a godsend when I was dealing with Imagery’s multilingual rush (Oh, how GMail angered me then! Smart enough to correctly spellcheck anything I gave her, yet coyly keeping the language name to herself!). Hope I need it again soon.
For all of you that aren’t on the YubNub wagon yet, you can play with it here—but it won’t be even half as much fun ;).
And since we already seem to be on a language landslide, some months ago I found out playing with Google Translate that when you translate a website from Chinese to English (which is currently beta), you can hover on a sentence to get the original Chinese fragment in a quick popup. Mighty cool. All the more impressive a feature coming from a website. (Now let’s only hope they plan to add it to the other language pairs too…)
Final language tidbit: translate “Hello, how are you?” to Spanish with Google. Your immediate response is “¿Hola, cómo eres?,” sucking the life out of even the hardiest machine-translation enthusiast.
Here’s a (controversial) idea for a language test inspired by the famous Turing test for artificial intelligenceWP:
a native speaker of language X engages in conversation with two other parties, one a native speaker of language X and the other a student of language X as a foreign language; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then (and only then) can the student be said to speak language X.
The test could be easily constrained to test for more specific capabilities: one could test for written command of language X by only permitting written communications, test only for accent by limiting “communication” to the spoken repeating of the judge’s written sentences, and so on.
It is simply stated but almost a “thought test”WP—it could be done, but there would be a myriad practical complications and scaling would be a bitch. What’s important about it, though, is that it is a valid test to demand of (foreign) language learning: passing it should at least be its hypothetical goal.
The problem is that ridiculously few people would pass it if it where applied today. And because it seems impossibly difficult most people turn away, dismiss the test as wrong or irrelevant, and sink their heads in the sand (“what shouldn’t be, can’t be right”). Which only highlights the current sorry state of language education. It is NOT asking too much. It is not asking for exceptional performance—it doesn’t ask of you to be a Nobel-prize, a literati, or a rapper. It’s merely demanding average, pick-a-guy-from-the-street native-speaker capabilities. Why isn’t that a valid goal to ask of language education?
You could say that most people don’t need native-speaker level to start benefiting from a foreign language and that’s entirely true. But it is just as true that not reaching it is a serious, frustrating, even painful hurdle to communication. A hurdle that will plague ever more people the more the world shrinks. Some of the world’s smartest people can’t get their r’s right hard as they try. And we mock them for it. (Soon, we will be the mocked ones for not getting our intonations right.)
Well looked, Turing level is perhaps even a modest goal. We all possess it already in the language we are born into and we all contained within us the same language potentiality at birth. So it should be perfectly achievable and shouldn’t take nearly as much time as starting from zero.
Yes, I know. We are nowhere near knowing how to reach such a level efficiently. It’s too hard and too long a goal—currently. But we should at least strive for it. (And be honest with students on what the status quo of our language technology is: no more “Learn to speak Chinese in 21 days!”—for now.) Languages are some of the most complex and powerful artifacts we have created. It’s only to be expected that their learning is one of the most complex and difficult challenges we face.
But it is also one of our most rewarding (and valuable) experiences. I want to commoditize it.
Chances are we are on the brink of Turing level language translationELZR. Why aren’t we even close to practical Turing level language learning? I’d still want it.
An impressive graph, both in execution and content, to be taken with one big grain of salt (read article for important considerations on the methodology and the difficulty of defining wealth):
Wealth is shared much less equitably than income: more than half of it is held by just 2% of the world’s adults. The distribution is equivalent to a world of ten people, in which one had $1,000 and the other nine had $1 each.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these the homeless, tempest-tossed to me;
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Verse engraved on the base of the statue of liberty.
Until the middle of the 1920s,this country followed a general policy of unrestricted immigration; except for some exclusion of orientals, anyone who wanted to come was welcome. From 1905 to 1907, and again in 1910, 1913, and 1914, ,over a million immigrants a year came. They and their descendants have created a large part of our economic and cultural wealth. It would be hard to find any major public figure willing to argue that this policy was a mistake.
It would be almost as hard to find a major public figure who would advocate a return to that policy. Recent debates have been on how we should allocate and enforce our limited immigration quota among different nationalities, not on whether the quota should exist
In my opinion, the restriction on immigration is a mistake: we should abolish it tomorrow and reopen the most successful attack on poverty the world has ever seen.
One danger in this policy is that poor immigrants might come with the intent of somehow surviving until they became citizens, and then going on welfare. I therefore include in my proposal the condition that new immigrants should face a fifteen year ‘resi¬dency’ requirement before they become eligible for welfare. I also suggest that the federal and state minimum wage laws be altered so as not to cover new immigrants, or, better yet, be repealed.
We would receive a vast flood of immigrants, probably more than a million a year, possibly several million. Most would come from Asian and Latin American countries. Most would be poor. Many would work as unskilled labor for the first generation, as did most of the previous immigrants. They would bring with them levels of education, nutrition, and health, which would appall our social workers; they would live, by our standards, very badly, but they would live well by their former standards, and that is why they would come.
Unrestricted immigration would make us richer, as it has in the past. Our wealth is in people, not things; America is not Kuwait. If a working wife can hire an Indian maid, who earned a few hundred dollars a year in India, to work for her at six thousand dollars a year, and so spend her own time on a 30 thousand a year job, who is worse off?
As long as the immigrants pay for what they use, they do not make the rest of the society poorer. If increased population makes the country more crowded, it does so only because the immigrants produce wealth which is worth more to the owners of land than the land is worth, and the immigrants are able to use that wealth to buy the land. The same applies to whatever the immigrants get on the free market; in order to appropriate existing resources for their own uses, the immigrants must buy them with new goods of at least equal value.
The immigrants will get some governmental services for which they will not pay directly. They will also pay taxes. Given present conditions, I see no reason to expect that they will cost government more than government will cost them.
The new immigrants will drive down the wages of unskilled labor, hurting some of the present poor. At the same time, the presence of millions of foreigners will make the most elementary acculturation, even the ability to speak English, a marketable skill; some of the poor will be able to leave their present unskilled jobs to find employment as foremen of “foreign” work gangs or front men for “foreign” enterprises.
More important than any of these economic effects is the psychological effect on the present poor; they will no longer be the bottom of the barrel, and as Liberals have pointed out with some justice, it is where you are, not what you have, which defines poverty. Mobility will be restored; each generation of immigrants will be able to struggle up to a position from which to look down on their successors.
A policy of unrestricted immigration would bring us more than cheap unskilled labor. It would bring a flood of new skills, not least among them the entrepreneurial ability that has made Indian and Chinese emigrants the merchant classes of Asia and Africa. Once the new citizens become familiar with the language and culture of their adopted country, they will probably work their way into the great American middle class just as rapidly as did their predecessors of eighty years ago.
It is a shame that the argument must be put in terms of the economic or psychological “interest” of the present generation of Americans. It is simpler than that. There are people, probably many millions, who would like to come here, live here, work here, raise their children here, die here. There are people who would like to become Americans, as our parents and grandparents did.
If we want to be honest, we can ship the Statue of Liberty back to France or replace the outdated verse with new lines, ”America the closed preserve/That dirty foreigners don’t deserve.” Or we can open the gates again.
David Friedman, The Machinery of FreedomAM – Open The Gates
The American flag.. is worthless except as a symbol, a symbol of men achieving their ends by voluntary association, cooperating through mutual exchange in a free society. Capitalism.
David Friedman, The Machinery of FreedomAM – Might have been
Muhammad Waqar, Avi Wolfman-Arent, Yiran Xia, Victoria Sandoval, Jacqueline Orellana-Flores, Elizabeth Packer, Ramona Singh, Anuja Shah, Mayra Ramos, Emily-Kate Hannapel, Natasha Perez, Samir Paul, Ekta Taneja, Linden Vongsathorn, Michael Tsai, Nardos Teklebrahan, Matiwos Wondwosen…
I went to [my daughter Natalie’s] high school graduation Monday and a United Nations meeting broke out..
..If there is one reason to still be optimistic about America it is represented by the stunning diversity of the Montgomery Blair class of 2006. America is still the world’s greatest human magnet. We are not the only country that embraces diversity, but there is something about our free society and free market that still attracts people like no other. Our greatest asset is our ability to still cream off not only the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world but the low-skilled-high-aspiring ones as well, and that is the main reason that I am not yet ready to cede the 21st century to China. Our Chinese will still beat their Chinese.
This influx of brainy and brawny immigrants is our oil well—one that never runs dry. It is an endless source of renewable human energy and creativity. Congress ought to stop debating gay marriage and finally give us a framework to maintain a free flow of legal immigration..
It is hard to watch a graduation like this and not think about our enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan—the Taliban, Islamo-totalitarians like bin Laden and Zarqawi, and the retrograde regimes that support them. Their whole mind-set is about how to purify their world from “the other,” from diversity, from “infidels.” With enough brutality, they may win in Iraq. I still hope not.
But they will never win the future—because as soon as their oil wells run dry, their societies will be as barren, bland and unproductive as their deserts.
Our oil wells, by contrast, will still be pumping. They’re right there, hiding in plain sight, in the Blair commencement book:
Yueyang Li, Kenia Lopez-Reyes, Lucy Fromyer, Raya Steinberg, Zahra Gordon, Sreva Ghosh, Juan-Jesus Louis, Yendil Furcal, Yenusa Eke, Sofonias Frezghi, Yohanes Dejen, Edra Comegys-Brisbane, Yoel Castillio-Ortiz, Elijah Zuares, Placido Zelaya, Mimi Zou. And Jessica Smith.
I love Friedman. This is one of his best pieces ever.
The subject of the U.S.-Mexico migration (the biggest in the world, one hears) is everywhere right now. But unfortunately, almost all one always hears is pessimism, fear, nationalism, and prejudice. Most people don’t realize there’s something new and wonderful emerging. It’s a shame one doesn’t hear more often from Richard Rodriguez, a profoundly polemical Mexican-American writer. In his books, his essays, and his interviews he reinvents the concept of being Mexican. He lies about it, of course (he is the first to acknowledge it), but his is a fiction that describes me, his is a fiction I want to believe in.
You’ll have to excuse me but I’ve never felt as a victim of the US, I am American! I’ve been devouring the US all my life! But then again, that’s just weird old me—always suffering from multiple-nationality-disorder, from dislocation (I’m of the web! How could it be otherwise? “My kingdom is not of this world”); perpetually naive, perpetually “falling in love with cultures not my own”, perpetually imbued with the “arrogance” that “the individual is in control of the culture.”
I’ve compiled here a long list of quotations from several of Rodriguez’s interviews and articles. I tried to stick with the topic of migration but I did a lousy job at that, this man is too interesting.
|
RSS
email
