less than singular
Cosma Shalizi (click through to the original for important links):
The Singularity has happened; we call it “the industrial revolution” or “the long nineteenth century”. It was over by the…
Most ‘cheating’ (I truly believe) is undertaken as an act of desperation, a means of coping with failure as measured by receipt of lower-than-average academic grades. 'Cheating’ is a means of striving to succeed within a system which provides extrinsic rewards for optimal performance rather than intrinsic rewards for authentic mastery and authorship. I cannot but believe that the vast majority of students would welcome an academic system in which the goal is not to earn high marks but rather to learn, and that students accustomed to this system would see no need to game the system by 'cheating.’ I’m not so naive as to suppose that every student will respond well: there will always be those so acculturated by thirteen-plus years of a largely competitive educational system that it’s in their blood to fight tooth and nail for every last percentage point that might tip them from a B+ to an A-…but I believe that even those who are very comfortable with this traditional system will abandon it if given the chance to do so.
Daily Lit
Here’s the place to go if you would like to have books emailed to you in installments, at a frequency you set yourself. At first I strongly disliked this idea: I thought, “But what if I get to an…
A company composed wholly of men of learning, though greatly to be valued and respected, is not meant by the words “good company”; they cannot have the easy manners and tournure of the world, as they do not live in it. If you can bear your part well in such company, it is extremely right to be in it sometimes, and you will be but more esteemed in other companies for having a place in that; but then do not let it engross you, for, if you do, you will be only considered as one of the literati by profession, which is not the way either to shine or rise in the world.
The very notion in America of four years of a post-high school liberal arts education as a default experience for people between 18 and 21 is a post-World War II novelty. It is unclear that it has created a populace significantly better informed or intellectually curious. Consider our rampant voter apathy, the ever dismaying revelations of general ignorance as shown in the recent Pew Forum poll on knowledge about religion, and the fact that many younger people get most of their news from a satiric television show.Ideally, high school should be a more concentrated experience than it is now, possibly extending through a 13th grade. Its curriculum would inculcate a healthy volume of knowledge, reasoning skills, and aesthetic awareness. Schools like Bard College at Simon’s Rock, immersing students in college-level work after tenth instead of 12th grade, prove year after year that young people can thrive under such conditions (I was one of them). Or – remember the Civil War soldiers’ letters. It was typical then to leave school after eighth grade, and people then had the same mental equipment as we do.
email, we hardly knew ye
Cringely is sad about the decline and fall of email. Me? Not so much. I like the lightweight minimalism of text/IM/Twitter, and use them when I can in preference to email.
When the NME voted him 26th in its annual Cool List, one place above his hero Dr Dre, [James] Murphy just found this preposterous. ‘Things like that make me want to go home and never come out again,’ he says.
Ostler has faith in a virtual system, which he claims will revolutionize global communications, and make foreign language learning a thing of the past. The traditional culture of Theravada Buddhism may not be the most receptive context for such radical change, but the internet serves as a low-cost, low-risk testing ground for new translation technologies. Google Translate, Babel Fish, and Microsoft’s Bing Translator all offer instant, automatic translation across a range of languages, and are constantly expanding their services. The results are often riddled with mistakes, sometimes amusingly. But Ostler believes that improvements in the technology will eventually ‘remove the requirement for a human intermediary to interpret or translate.’ Printed texts and recorded speeches will be accessible to anyone with the right software as 'virtual media.’It is a bold vision of the future, and a particularly attractive one to Ostler, who is chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages. A technological revolution could save declining tongues from extinction. Those who now neglect their traditional regional language in favor of English would no longer need a lingua franca to access the same commercial and cultural opportunities. For Ostler, this is not just a desirable outcome. It also affirms 'the social order created by mother tongues, where each community has its own language, as if by nature.’ He does not admit the irony that this natural order could only be enforced by digital means, but the belief in its enduring integrity is perhaps enough. Such beliefs, he argues, can be a powerful force for change: 'The survival of a lingua franca is always a matter of confidence and ideology as much as reasoned calculation.’
Burrator Reservoir, Sharpitor, Devon, UK