Daily Archives: Monday, February 17, 2014

  • Cambridgeshire Police spends nothing on linguists

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics

    When work restrictions on Bulgarian and Romanian migrants were relaxed at the start of the year, the usual xenophobic elements of the British media stoked fears that every criminal in eastern Europe would make a beeline for the UK and crime would soar.

    Emotive language was (ab)used, with the nation being told Bulgarians and Romanians would ‘flood’ into the country and dear old Blighty would be ‘swamped’ and similar such tosh.

    If crime had increased due to Bulgarian and Romanian migrants, this would have resulted in a massive rise in the criminal justice system’s use of linguists, as suspects and defendants are entitled to understand and follow the proceedings in their mother tongue.

    However, this surge in the use of East European linguists hasn’t actually happened.

    Indeed in response to Freedom of Information (FoI) Act queries, Cambridgeshire Police has revealed its spending on services for Bulgarian and Romanian linguists has actually declined, as revealed by the Cambridge News:

    Data has revealed the force spent just £9.10 on Bulgarian and £1,357.84 on Romanian translators in January last year when the restrictions were in place.

    But after they were lifted at the start of the year, the force spent zero pence on translators for the two languages.

    Read the full article.

    Hat tip: Katya Ford

  • Mozilla boss defends Firefox advertising plans

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

    Firefox logoIt was announced a few days ago that future versions of the open source Firefox browser could show advertising in freshly opened browser tabs (posts passim). To date these have shown up to nine thumbnails of frequently visited websites. However, on a newly installed browser these so-called ’tiles’ are blank and only fill up over time and with use. Heise writes that Mozilla Foundation boss Mitchell Baker has now justified the plans in a blog post.

    photo of Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker
    Mozilla Foundation CEO Mitchell Baker
    In the past, Mozilla developers have always declined to display content with no previous user activity. Baker writes: ” This made sense at first when the web was so young. But over the years many people have come to expect and want their software to do things on their behalf, to take note of what one has done before and do something useful with it.”

    She continues: “So we look at the Tiles and wonder if we can do more for people. We think we can. I’ve heard some people say they still don’t want any content offered. They want their experience to be new, to be the same as it was the day they installed the browser, the same as anyone else might experience. I understand this view, and think it’s not the default most people are choosing. We think we can offer people useful content in the Tiles.”

    Baker promises that the advertisements shown in the tiles will definitely have no tracking functions. It’s ultimately a matter of gaining revenue for the Mozilla Foundation. The Foundation has so far survived mostly on funding from search engine companies like Google and other web companies. In 2012 these revenues amounted to more than $300 mn.