I’m very proud to be Chair of St Werburgh’s Community Association and in that capacity am pleased to announce the return of our very popular Raking & Baking sessions, made possible by the kind support of the Big Lottery Fund.
All the details are on the poster below.
Yesterday’s Mirror reports that Afghan linguists who assisted British troops in Afghanistan as part of George Bush Jr.’s so-called War on Terror (how can one wage war on an abstract noun anyway? Ed.) face a double dilemma.
Firstly, there’s the threat of attacks by UK extremists.
Secondly, there’s the threat of being killed by the Taliban if they return to Afghanistan.
So even with the first threat hanging over them, most are now fighting for visas to remain in the United Kingdom.
Regarding the threat from the Taliban, the Mirror writes:
One, Mohammed Rafi Hottak, last week urged High Court judges to watch a video of the Taliban beheading translators [sic] as “traitors”.
Talking of the threat facing him in the UK, one linguist told the Mirror:
“There are a lot of lunatics in this country and I’m scared.
“There are really extreme people here. I have met them. One told me he wanted to hang me by the tongue. That’s how much he hated me.”
Other countries including the US and Germany have already granted their interpreters asylum while the UK continues to drag its feet, as per usual. Some 260 Afghan interpreters have applied for asylum in the UK but only a handful have so far been granted visas.
Only last month The Guardian reported on the case of one Afghan interpreter who had been refused asylum in the UK. The Guardian piece quotes Stephen Hale, chief executive of the charity Refugee Action, as saying: “Afghan interpreters put their lives on the line to work with British forces, as well as the lives of their families. We cannot abandon them.”
The Bristol Post, no stranger to the pages of this blog, has a sister paper, the Western Daily Press.
Both used to be produced in Bristol and were printed at the – now vanished – print hall of the Temple Way Ministry of Truth.
There used to be an old Bristol joke about the local press. It ran as follows: there are 2 newspapers in Bristol; there’s the Western Daily Press, which carries stories about far-flung corners of the West Country such as London, Manchester and Edinburgh (or any other 3 major UK cities of your choice. Ed.), and the Bristol Evening Post (as it was then called. Ed.), which carries stories about far-flung corners of the West Country such as London, Manchester and Edinburgh and 50 pages of classified advertising.
However, both the Post and the Press have more in common than their heritage and ownership. They are both badly written.
Thursday’s Press carried a piece which puts it firmly in homophone corner with a dunce’s hat on its head, as shown by the following screenshot.
For the benefit of passing Press “journalists”, here’s where your anonymous colleague went wrong.
You confused the heterographic verbs to break and to brake.
The former, which you used, is a strong verb, also called an irregular verb; these verbs form the past tense or the past participle (or both) in various ways but most often by changing the vowel of the present tense form. In this instance, break (present tense), broke (past tense), broken (past participle).
The latter, which you should have used in this case, is a weak verb. These (also called regular verbs) form the past tense by adding -ed, -d, or -t to the base form (or present tense form) of the verb (e.g. call, called).
Got it now?
Good! 🙂
Yesterday The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 4.4.3, the third minor release of the LibreOffice 4.4 “fresh” family, with over 80 fixes compared with the previous version, LibreOffice 4.4.2. The new features in LibreOffice 4.4.3 are listed on The Document Foundation wiki.
People interested in technical details about the release can access the change logs for RC1 fixes and RC2 fixes respectively.
LibreOffice 4.4.3 is available for immediate download. By following the download link, more conservative users can find the more tested LibreOffice 4.3.7. The document Foundation recommends all users update their installations to one of these two LibreOffice releases for security reasons.
The LibreOffice community is actively working at next major release, LibreOffice 5.0, expected in late July 2015 and your correspondent is already using a development release, LibreOffice 5.0.0.0 alpha1. Pre-release versions such as this are available from http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/pre-releases/.
The first bug hunting session on the 5.0 beta release is scheduled from 22nd to 24th May. Details of this session are on The Document Foundation wiki.
Furthermore, the Call for Papers for LibreOffice Conference 2015 is open 15th July. The conference itself will be hosted by the Danish city of Aarhus from 23rd to 25th September.
The LibreOffice community is growing, and the bug hunting session and conference represent exceptional opportunities to join the fun together with over 900 developers who have contributed to the code and over 3,000 volunteers who have localised the software, squashed bugs, written the manuals, spoken at conferences and acted as advocates for LibreOffice both at global and local levels.
Any resemblance to the new Mad Max Fury Road film is purely coincidental.
UKIP is due to launch its Scottish manifesto today, the BBC reports.
This blog has been privileged to have had a shot of the manifesto’s cover smuggled south of Gretna Green for the benefit of readers.
Enjoy! 🙂
The world’s first drone powered by the Ubuntu Linux distribution has arrived, Softpedia reports.
Erle Robotics, a Spanish company known for all types of robots powered by Linux, launched the world’s first Ubuntu-powered drone on 3rd May.
The Erle-Copter has a flight time of some 20 minutes and can handle a payload of 2 kg.
As regards price, the Erle-Copter Ubuntu Core special edition drone costs €399 for the very basic version, which won’t fly. If you want to buy an Erle-Copter that flies and has the basic components, you will have to pay at least €574.
“Erle-Copter Ubuntu Core special edition drone is a Ubuntu-powered quadcopter that includes official support for new app store for drones and robots. It has official ROS support, capable of the different flight modes and [is] ideal for outdoor operations,” says Erle Robotics’ Alejandro Hernández.
The version of Ubuntu used by the Erle-Copter is Snappy Ubuntu Core, a new version of Ubuntu for clouds and devices comprising a minimal server image with the same libraries as the conventional Ubuntu distribution, but applications are provided through a simpler mechanism.
Openwords, the foreign language learning app for the world’s open language data the world’s under-served languages, which was reported on some weeks ago by this blog (posts passim), recently launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.
At the time of writing the Kickstarter campaign has 16 days to go and aims to raise $10,000 to take the project to the next stage.
There are millions of people around the world who can’t learn the languages in which they’re interested.
While the learning of major languages like Chinese, Spanish and French are supported by large companies, these firms tend to ignore lesser-known languages.
Openwords is doing things differently to solve this problem. Openwords is mining data from the public domain assets like the Wiktionary to provide educational content for all the languages, large and small.
So far Openwords has mined data for 1,000 languages.
The Openwords app has various learning modules for vocabulary, hearing, typing, amongst others. In addition, the Openwords developers are working on simple sentence translation problems. Furthermore, learners have control over the content they want to learn.
Finally, Openwords will be an open source project.
The aim of the Kickstarter campaign is to raise $10,000, which will be enough to develop a beta model of the Openwords app.
In research that was published recently in Psychological Science, German-English bilinguals and German and English monoglots were studied to find out how different language patterns affected how they reacted in experiments.
This research shows that bilinguals can also view the world in different ways depending on the specific language in which they are operating, according to Mashable.
The past 15 years have seen extensive research on the bilingual mind, with most of the evidence pointing to the tangible advantages of being bilingual. Going back and forth between languages appears to be a kind of brain training, pushing your brain to be flexible.
To quote the abstract for the research paper:
People make sense of objects and events around them by classifying them into identifiable categories. The extent to which language affects this process has been the focus of a long-standing debate: Do different languages cause their speakers to behave differently? Here, we show that fluent German-English bilinguals categorize motion events according to the grammatical constraints of the language in which they operate. First, as predicted from cross-linguistic differences in motion encoding, bilingual participants functioning in a German testing context prefer to match events on the basis of motion completion to a greater extent than do bilingual participants in an English context. Second, when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in English, their categorization behavior is congruent with that predicted for German; when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in German, their categorization becomes congruent with that predicted for English. These findings show that language effects on cognition are context-bound and transient, revealing unprecedented levels of malleability in human cognition.
German-English bilinguals were shown video clips of events with a motion in them, such as a woman walking towards a car or a man cycling towards the supermarket. The participants were then asked to describe the scenes.
When such a scene is presented to a monoglot German speaker they will tend to describe the action and the goal of the action. Thus they would tend to say “A woman walks towards her car” or “a man cycles towards the supermarket”. English monoglot speakers would simply describe those scenes as “A woman is walking” or “a man is cycling”, without mentioning the goal of the action.
As regards the effect of the language being spoken on bilingual speakers’ perceptions of the world, they seemed to switch between these perspectives based on the language in which they were given the task. Germans fluent in English were just as goal-focused as any other native speaker when tested in German in their home country. However, a similar group of German-English bilinguals tested in English in the UK were just as action-focused as native English speakers.
Hat tip: Katya Ford.
Walking down Stapleton Road this morning, I stopped to take the picture below in readiness for reporting the fly-tipping to Bristol City Council.
The gentleman passing on the right of the picture and half caught by the camera saw what I was doing, thanked me effusively and shook my hand when I told him I was reporting it to the council.
We then had a brief conversation about how such anti-social behaviour detracted from the pleasantness of Bristol, which he described as a “beautiful city”, the health implications of fly-tipping and the way they encouraged the spread of vermin such as rats (posts passim).
As we parted with waves, he asked me whether I was a member of the Green Party. Unfortunately I have no affiliation, but that’s no barrier to being an active and caring citizen.