Teacher, Translator, Interpreter (English, Italian, French, Chinese)

Enduring voices project

2012-03-02T15:23:00.001-08:00

Every 14 days a language dies. By 2100, more than half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth—many of them not yet recorded—may disappear, taking with them a wealth of knowledge about history, culture, the natural environment, and the human brain.

National Geographic's Enduring Voices Project (conducted in collaboration with the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages) strives to preserve endangered languages by identifying language hotspots—the places on our planet with the most unique, poorly understood, or threatened indigenous languages—and documenting the languages and cultures within them.

Why Is It Important?

Language defines a culture, through the people who speak it and what it allows speakers to say. Words that describe a particular cultural practice or idea may not translate precisely into another language. Many endangered languages have rich oral cultures with stories, songs, and histories passed on to younger generations, but no written forms. With the extinction of a language, an entire culture is lost.

Much of what humans know about nature is encoded only in oral languages. Indigenous groups that have interacted closely with the natural world for thousands of years often have profound insights into local lands, plants, animals, and ecosystems—many still undocumented by science. Studying indigenous languages therefore benefits environmental understanding and conservation efforts.

Studying various languages also increases our understanding of how humans communicate and store knowledge. Every time a language dies, we lose part of the picture of what our brains can do.

Why Do Languages Die Out?

Throughout human history, the languages of powerful groups have spread while the languages of smaller cultures have become extinct. This occurs through official language policies or through the allure that the high prestige of speaking an imperial language can bring. These trends explain, for instance, why more language diversity exists in Bolivia than on the entire European continent, which has a long history of large states and imperial powers.

As big languages spread, children whose parents speak a small language often grow up learning the dominant language. Depending on attitudes toward the ancestral language, those children or their children may never learn the smaller language, or they may forget it as it falls out of use. This has occurred throughout human history, but the rate of language disappearance has accelerated dramatically in recent years.

by National Geographic

135 Phrases coined by William Shakespeare

2012-02-22T16:38:00.000-08:00

Barry Manilow may claim to write the songs, but it was William Shakespeare who coined the phrases - he contributed more phrases and sayings to the English language than any other individual, and most of them are still in daily use.

Here's a collection of well-known quotations that are associated with Shakespeare. Most of these were the Bard's own work, but he wasn't averse to stealing a good line occasionally and a few of these were 'popularised by' rather than 'coined by' Shakespeare.

A countenance more in sorrow than in anger
A Daniel come to judgement
A dish fit for the gods
A fool's paradise
A foregone conclusion
A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse
A ministering angel shall my sister be
A plague on both your houses
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet
A sea change
A sorry sight
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio
All corners of the world
All of a sudden
All one to me
All that glitters is not gold / All that glisters is not gold
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players
All's well that ends well
An ill-favoured thing sir, but mine own
And shining morning face, creeping like a snail unwillingly to school
And thereby hangs a tale
As cold as any stone
As dead as a doornail
As good luck would have it
As merry as the day is long
As pure as the driven snow
At one fell swoop
Bag and baggage
Beast with two backs
Beware the ides of March
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks
Brevity is the soul of wit
But screw your courage to the sticking-place
But, for my own part, it was Greek to me
Come the three corners of the world in arms
Come what come may
Comparisons are odorous
Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war
Dash to pieces
Discretion is the better part of valour
Double, double toil and trouble, fire burn, and cauldron bubble
Eaten out of house and home
Et tu, Brute
Even at the turning of the tide
Exceedingly well read
Eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog
Fair play
Fancy free
Fie, foh, and fum, I smell the blood of a British man
Fight fire with fire
For ever and a day
Frailty, thy name is woman
Foul play
Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears
Good men and true
Good riddance
Green eyed monster
Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings
He will give the Devil his due
Heart's content
High time
His beard was as white as snow
Hoist by your own petard
Hot-blooded
Household words
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child
I bear a charmed life
I have not slept one wink
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips
I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
If music be the food of love, play on
In a pickle
In my mind's eye, Horatio
In stitches
In the twinkling of an eye
Is this a dagger which I see before me?
It beggar'd all description
It is meat and drink to me
Lay it on with a trowel
Lie low
Like the Dickens
Love is blind
Make your hair stand on end
Men's evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water
Milk of human kindness
Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows
More fool you
More honoured in the breach than in the observance
Much Ado about Nothing

by http://www.phrases.org.uk

Padded Thoughts

2012-01-11T16:43:00.000-08:00

I have long been a fan of the GTD approach and have recently been rereading David Allen’s book on Getting Things Done. Indeed I bought 10 copies and passed them out to colleagues working on the OLnet project as I believe his ideas and methods can only help people. BUT in reading his book I have had some difficulty in getting the match between PROJECTS and ACTIONS. The focus is on action but unless these make sense in terms of projects then it is hard to get going and decide what to do. GTD offers good advice compressed into about a few pages (p62-p81 in my UK edition) yet somehow I could not make that advice stick or pass on the ideas to other people. Until the beginning of the summer when I came up with a variant: AVOID planning!

In AVOID planning you focus on five elements:

AIMS: What you need to achieve
VISION: The impact and hopes you have for what you will achieve
OPTIONS: The ideas and choices you have for things you might do
ITINERARY: The outputs you are after and the deadlines to do them by
DO: The next actions that need to happen to move forward (and then the next and so on ….)
Notice the split between aims and vision. I have found that people are often asking for what is the vision behind a project – but then treating the result as if it was the guide to what has to be done. Splitting this into an aim and a separate vision has solved this dilemma for me.

The AIM is then something that might be relatively straightforward such as to “write a blog post about the AVOID planning”. The aim should in general something you would be happy to be held to. In effect the promise you are making yourself that you can deliver on.

The VISION is where you let yourself imagine the other side of success. In the vision think about impact and everything working out. So the vision might be “Blogging about AVOID planning helps those I work with to be more efficient and know what each other are doing and then it gets picked up as an approach for the unit, the university, the world … leading to a new role as an efficiency guru.” Visions, including this one , may contain aspects that you might not expect to achieve but if you miss spotting them may rein in what you do and the connections that can be made.

OPTIONS is where ideas should flow. Gathering all the things that you might do. In this section remain in brainstorm mode without being too critical about the ideas generated. Options are optional so record each idea without thinking of them as commitments. So can have options such as “Make a Powerpoint presentation about AVOID/Put an animated podcast together with voiceover on YouTube/Blog onto my personal openpad site/Link the method to olnet.org/Run a session at the next team meeting/Write an AVOID planning book/….”.

In ITINERARY is the chance to pause and put in a reality check. What actually has to be done and when by. If there are hard deadlines then they go here. This would be a good place to link up with any more traditional planning that is going on. E.g. if you want to make a Gantt chart or spreadsheet then put it here. This can also be where to describe deliverables if that is what the driver is for the outputs. For the blogging example the hard deadlines were initially missing but having now said that I will run a mini session at a meeting I have an Itinerary of “Blog post/Put slides together/Team meeting (October 12)”. [Of the letters in AVOID the I is the one I am least sure about – for a while it was Inventory but I found Itinerary fits better but is a bit tricky to spell. I would consider other options.]

Finally DO. At the planning level too much effort can go on trying to get the list of things to do right and to be sure about the options that have been selected. Rather the DO section is really a hand over to however you track your actions. What does need to be identified is the Next Action level. A project without any Next Action is one that is not going anywhere. So again in my self-referencing example the Next Action was “Set a date to talk about AVOID” and now is “Draft a blog post about AVOID”.

How to AVOID plan

I have now been running AVOID planning myself for about 3 months and shared the method with 5 or 6 other people. I have found two key ways to apply it. First as a solo activity, second as small group planning/brainstorming. The process is similar in each case but in the solo version it can be carried out fairly quickly with worthwhile results in 15-30minutes while as a group activity it will take a bit longer but combine very well with other techniques to draw out the options (for example with think-pair-share). I will describe what I do when working this through with myself of perhaps one other person:

Think about something you are working on that is perhaps just getting going or a bit stuck. E.g. writing a report. This should be viewed as a project with steps along the way. Create a document call it e.g. [project]-AVOID-[date] with headings:

AIM:

VISION:

OPTIONS:

ITINERARY

DO:

Now work your way down the list as quickly as is feasible. Write the commitment under AIM (you might find at first you need to list some alternatives and refine) then let your ambitions loose and write out all that might happen when you succeed under VISION.

In independent brainstorming mode then fill in the OPTIONS. I find this can be quite liberating and make you realise that you have ideas that you need to get down before you let them go – even if you cannot see them as feasible or even necessarily good ideas. In this category for me are the ones that would be good if they happened but might cause everyone far too much work! But record it without being too critical.

Then the ITINERARY pause – what is really pressing and has to be done soon. What is the eventual target. It is often the case that there is no real end date imposed in which case put in best guesses. This can also provide the section that is a checklist of progress. If there need to be visible outputs such as progress reports, final reports etc. then note here. Treat this section as grounding after the options section but do not over plan.

Under DO it might be that there is not very much to record at this stage but there should be for yourself at least a clear Next thing to do.

Working with Toodledo

I find Toodledo a great help in running a GTD style ToDo list. Now that they have added notes it is also a good platform for organising projects and a home for AVOID plans. I won’t go into the details here but do advise signing up for a free account (following this link with note that I recommended you or just go direct).

Credits

I think most of what I have written here can be found in David Allen’s GTD book. What I have done is pick out the section that matters when planning and also come up with the AVOID acronym. Whether this makes a difference for others I don’t know; it has helped me remember and adopt this five stage approach to planning and to bring a few others on board without just saying “read the book”!

by
Dr Patrick McAndrew
Senior Lecturer
Institute of Educational Technology
IET Academic Team

General Teaching Tips

2011-12-28T06:53:00.000-08:00

What makes a good teacher? Well, that probably depends on the subject matter and the level of the students. However, some teachers can make even the most boring material seem interesting (and alternately, some teachers can make interesting materials boring). Some of it has to do with personality and charisma, but part of a teacher's effectiveness is due to his/her knowledge and application of good teaching practices. These teaching practices range from setting goals for the class to making effective presentations to listening to students questions.

Effective teaching begins prior to the teacher entering the classroom. Teachers must formulate their goals and think about how they will achieve them before facing the students. Once in the classroom, the teacher must be able to apply a number of different methods of teaching to reach students with different learning styles. In order to encourage critical thinking and real life application, students must be pushed to think outside the box. This means teachers need to be able to create an environment for this to occur.

The materials presented in this section were developed to share information on teaching practices that have been found to be effective. The materials are broken into two section. The first section contains general teaching behaviors and strategies that lead to successful teaching, and the second section contains tips specific to teaching concepts about nondestructive testing. Educators are encouraged to share their "secrets of success" with other educators by contributing short summaries of their favored teaching practices

by Mohammad Zia

Keyboard internationalization

2011-12-09T03:38:00.000-08:00

Congratulations, your software is now shipping throughout the world. Now, what happens to folks who need to enter data? What happens if your clients want to enter Japanese ideograms? Could they do that with a U.S. keyboard? Conversely, what if Japanese users need to type in U.S. text? Is your application able to handle switching from one locale to another and still let the user enter data?

The above is a common scenario for medical device manufacturers who are only just setting out on the road to internationalize their device software. Depending on the device, keyboard data entry may or may not be applicable.

Luckily, when it comes to software internationalization, few folks are as knowledgeable as our friends at Lingoport. And they just published a white paper called "Keyboards and Internationalization". You can access it on their web site or download a PDF version.

Data entry is, of course, only one aspect of getting ready for a global release. Device software also needs to be internationalized regarding display, sort order, search functionality, and many other areas. However, for those devices that require keyboard input, Lingoport's white paper offers a valuable resource.

by http://blog.fxtrans.com/

Green Style

2011-11-15T06:02:00.000-08:00

http://www.greenstyle.it/cacciatori-vs-animalisti-opinioni-a-confronto-5489.html

Dal 1980 al 2006 il numero dei cacciatori è sceso di un milione. Otto italiani su dieci sono contrari alla caccia, mentre vegetariani e vegani hanno raggiunto quasi il 7% della popolazione. Tuttavia, con gli emendamenti alla legge quadro del ’92 si è permesso di sparare fino a un’ora prima del tramonto o ridurre la lista delle specie protette: i successi dei cacciatori sono in sostanza più visibili e tangibili di quelli degli animalisti.

Chi ha ragione? La caccia è uno sport o un massacro di innocenti? Ecco i pro e contro classici dei due punti di vista.

Cacciatori

La caccia è sicura, efficiente e necessaria. Il tasso di ferita da armi da caccia è più basso di altre forme di sport, come il calcio o il ciclismo. Inoltre, la caccia è una forma effettiva di controllo delle specie perché contiene il numero di ogni esemplare, tenendolo in equilibrio ed evitando che si riproducano in maniera eccessiva.

Da quando i grandi predatori naturali si sono estinti in molte regioni, i cacciatori fanno le veci dei lupi, ad esempio riducendo anche gli incidenti tra uomini e animali come quelli d’auto, la malattia di Lyme e i danni al paesaggio.

Al contrario dei tiratori scelti e degli immunocontraccettivi, la caccia non incide molto sulle tasche dei contribuenti perché i cacciatori uccidono gli animali “gratis”. Inoltre per ottenere il tesserino regionale di caccia è richiesto un contributo, ad esempio, di 84 Euro in Friuli Venezia Giulia e in altre regioni italiane. Quindi, nel loro piccolo supportano l’economia nostrana.

Per quanto riguarda il fattore etico, uccidere una lepre per mangiarla non è poi cosi diverso da comprare una bistecca dal macellaio. Inoltre, gli animali selvatici hanno la fortuna di vivere liberi e hanno la possibilità di scappare prima di essere uccisi. In conclusione, la caccia fa bene all’intero ecosistema. Alcuni cacciatori sono contrari ad alcune tipologie come quella competitiva o quella con animali da allevamento immessi in natura.

Animalisti

La caccia è pericolosa, inefficace, non necessaria e costosa per gli italiani. Al contrario di altri “hobby”, le ferite provocate dai cacciatori non sono delle mere fatalità. Circa 50 morti e 80 feriti, come appreso dal sito CacciaIlCacciatore, è un bilancio medio di ogni stagione, coinvolgendo non solo i singoli cacciatori, ma anche i cittadini che non praticano questa attività.

La caccia è inefficace per risolvere gli incidenti tra umani e animali. Studi dimostrano che gli incidenti d’auto con animali selvatici aumentano durante la stagione venatoria, perché i cacciatori spaventano gli animali e questi scappano dai boschi correndo in direzione delle strade. Inoltre, la malattia di Lyme è trasmessa all’uomo tramite le zecche dei ratti e non ad esempio da quaglie e folaghe.

A proposito della deturpazione paesaggistica, anche questa è una falsità perché, tanto per dirne una, dove sono i rododendri ci saranno i cervi attratti da essi, non importa quanti questi siano. La caccia non riduce il numero delle specie perché rimuovendo alcuni individui risulta più cibo per quelli restanti, portando a nuove nascite (soprattutto parti plurigemellari) ed evidenziando l’autoregolazione degli animali. Per la riduzione si possono usare gli immunocontraccettivi.

I territori di caccia sono acquistati e curati anche da chi cacciatore non è, cioè la quasi totalità degli italiani. La caccia non è etica da vari punti di vista. Prima di tutto uccidere un animale per cibarsene è moralmente opinabile, cervo o mucca che sia. Molti credono sia irragionevole definire la caccia come uno sport. Inoltre, la tecnologia moderna ha cancellato ogni tipo di “giustizia” tra cacciatore e preda.

Il dibattito sulla caccia non potrà essere risolto in tempi brevi. Entrambi gli interlocutori discuteranno di sicurezza, costi ed efficacia, ma probabilmente non saranno mai d’accordo sull’eticità della pratica.

Three Layer Method

2011-10-13T03:01:00.001-07:00

an interesting teaching Method by Intensive Business English

North American Dialects

2011-09-11T09:56:00.000-07:00

http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Porto http://www.ontheroadnews.eu/indexa-id-2803_0-206-2007.html

2011-08-20T01:34:00.001-07:00

Portogallo, ti ci Porto?
Portogallo, ti ci Porto?Poco lontana dall’Oceano Atlantico, adagiata sulla riva settentrionale del fiume Douro, sorge la 'Capitale del Nord'. Circondata da una serie di colline e intersecata da ponti, Porto conquista il turista più curioso, immergendolo nella cultura locale. Durante le ultime due settimane di giugno si celebra la festa di San Joao e l’amore per sole e cibo, diventa protagonista di una inconsueta kermesse per papille gustative. Grazie alle diverse crociere, si può comprendere il perimetro cittadino: antica, splendida e fatiscente a tratti, moderna. Il corso principale, l’Avenida dos Aliados, è una delle strade più antiche del quartiere centrale Ribeira, in cui si può ammirare l’Art Noveau dei suoi palazzi.
A est dell’Avenida, si trova Rua Santa Catarina, la via dello shopping. Allontanadosi dal centro storico, vi è il quartiere Boa Vista, il quale si estende a raggiera da Praça de Mouzinho de Albuquerque. Qui, l’attrazione principale è la Casa da Musica, progettata dall’architetto olandese Rem Koolhaas. Andando verso sud, oltre al Parco dei Romantici, vi è il museo d’arte contemporanea Serravalves, ideato dall’architetto portoghese Alvaro Siza, il quale ospita fino a ottobre l’artista José Barria. Si può visitare la città comodamente a piedi, sebbene vi sia una estesa rete di autobus e una metropolitana operante anche in superficie. Le bellezze architettoniche di Porto non si contano: dalle chiese romaniche millenarie, al mosaico della stazione di Sao Bento, gli incantevoli giardini del Palacio de Cristal, fino alla Torre dos Clérigos, vera e propria icona di Porto, progettata dall’architetto italiano Nicolau Nasoni nel 1754. Degna di nota è Rua 31 de Janeiro. Ospita il mercato Bolhao, dove si può davvero gustare la cucina locale e scoprire innumerevoli chincaglierie portoghesi.
Porto non è solo cultura e gente simpatica. Porto è anche Vinho du Porto. Assemblato tra uve di differenti vigneti, annate e con tecniche diverse, il Vinho è unico al palato. Nella sponda destra del fiume, si possono visitare diverse cantine e degustarlo, senza fretta e gratuitamente. Ce ne sono di sette tipi: dal bianco Tawny, al rosso Ruby fino al più pregiato Vintage. Sorseggiatelo, camminate in Rua Nova da Alfandega, chiudete gli occhi per un momento, riapriteli: ecco a voi il respiro dell’Oceano Atlantico!
E se non siete ancora stanchi e la musica vi appassiona, la notte potete passarla al Bai la tarde, in Rua da Torrinha 111. Musicisti locali si mescolano con il pubblico per delle jam session, fino al mattino.

Matteo Preabianca

university of Toronto

2011-08-11T00:06:00.001-07:00

TheThe Emilio Goggio Chair in Italian Studies was established in the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto in 1995 with funds donated by members of the Goggio family resident in the United States to honour the memory of their parents: their father Emilio, who served as Chair of the Department of Italian and Spanish of the University of Toronto from 1946 to 1956, and their mother Emma. The fund was matched by the University and slightly augmented by a grant from the Italian government.

The endowment covers two areas: first, it is intended to support research in Italian studies through the invitation of a distinguished Visiting Professor to teach and/or lecture in the Department each year, sponsorship of one annual public lecture to be given in English and to be known as the Emilio Goggio Annual Lecture, and also funding for occasional conferences and some publications. The incumbent of the Goggio Chair is the Chair of the Department, at present Professor Salvatore Bancheri.

Emilio Goggio Visiting Professors

1997 REMO BODEI, Università di Pisa
1998 UMBERTO ECO, Università di Bologna
1999 GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA, Yale University
2000 GIULIO LEPSCHY, Universities of Reading and London
2001 LUCA CODIGNOLA, Università di Genova
2002 MILLICENT MARCUS, University of Pennsylvania
2003 PIER GIORGIO DI CICCO, Poet & Independent Scholar
2004 CESARE MOLINARI, Università degli Studi di Firenze
2005 ROMANO LUPERINI, Università di Siena
2006 RUGGERO PIERANTONI, Academia di Belle Arti, Urbino, CNR
2007 GINO TELLINI, Università degli Studi di Firenze
2008 CARLA MARCATO, Università di Udine
2010 RITA LIBRANDI, Università di Napoli Orientale

The Goggio Chair supports other initiatives as well. Two of Professor Goggio's special interests were the Renaissance and Italian Canadian studies and these are the focus of many of the activities sponsored by the Goggio Chair.

The Goggio Chair supports our undergraduate program in Italian Canadian studies and sponsors the publication of our Departmental newsletter. Through the Goggio Chair, the University of Toronto Press has launched a Goggio Publication Series. The following volumes have been published:

Umberto Eco, Experiences in Translation, 2000
Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Renaissance Experiment, 2001
Giulio Lepschy, Mother Tongues & Other Reflections on the Italian Language, 2002
Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Shadows of Auschwitz, 2007

Part of the endowment by the Goggio family has also been directed towards The Emilio Goggio Italian Studies Collection. This fund is used to build on the approximately 40,000 titles found in the Italian collection in the Robarts Library of the University of Toronto. The John P. Robarts Library is Canada's leading research university library and the Italian collection it houses is among the largest and most comprehensive in North America, ranking just after those of Harvard and Yale. One of its outstanding features is the holdings on the Renaissance. The Goggio fund serves to enhance this and other important areas of strength of the collection.

Goggio Committee for 2011-12

All correspondence concerning the Emilio Goggio Chair in Italian Studies should be addressed to Professor Salvatore Bancheri, Emilio Goggio Chair in Italian Studies, Department of Italian Studies, University of Toronto, 100 St. Joseph Street, Toronto, ON M5S 1J4. Announcements concerning the activities and operation of the Goggio Chair will be routinely posted on the Departmental website.

The Goggio Committee for 2011-12 will be announced by mid-September. The committee will meet in December 2011 and April 2012 to consider suggestions, proposals and applications for conference support from members of the University community.

Applications for Conference Support

Applications for conference support should be submitted on paper (and not in electronic form) and should include (i) a detailed description of the conference or the conference program itself, (ii) a budget, (iii) a copy of the call for papers, and (iv) a statement on student participation. Responses will be mailed one week after each committee meeting. Applications should be addressed to the Emilio Goggio Chair in Italian Studies, Department of Italian Studies, University of Toronto, 100 St. Joseph Street, Toronto, ON M5S 1J4.

Activities for 2011-2012

Sherry Roush (Penn State University)
'To Be or Not to Be?': Tommaso Campanella's Implicit Question in his Philosophical Poems
September 15, 2011, 4.00-6.00 pm

Alfredo Luzi (Università di Macerata)
Dal romanzo al film: Il Gattopardo
September 28, 2011, 4.00-6.00 pm

Anthony Mollica (Brock University)
Recreational Linguistics and the Teaching of Italian
March 20, 2012, 4.00-6.00 pm

Activities for 2010-11

Course in Italian Canadian Literature: ITA334H1 (Fall)
Guest Instructor: Dr. Lisa Fiorindi, University of Toronto

LECTURES

Gian Mario Anselmi (Università di Bologna)
Il 'Principe' di Machiavelli fra etica e politica
September 23, 2010

Stefana Sabin
The convert as cosmopolitan. Lorenzo Da Ponte, 'Aryanization' and the Mozart Diaspora.
September 29, 2010

Harro Stammerjohann (University of Chemnitz)
Immagini della lingua italiana
September 30, 2010

Jean Luc Nardone (University of Tolouse)
Michelangelo e il corpo di Michelangelo
October 8, 2010

Angela Nuovo, (Università di Udine)
La biblioteca di Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (1535-1601) e la Respublica Litteraria nell'Italia del Tardo Rinascimento"
October, 18 2010

Carla Marcato (Università di Udine)
Cognomi italiani: aspetti storici, culturali, linguistici
October 19, 2010

Frank Nuessel, (University of Louisville)
The Depiction of Women in Italian Proverbial Language
November 12, 2010

Simone Sarasso e Jadel Andreetto, Writers
La curva sinuosoidale della narrativa italiana: 1999 - 2009
November 18, 2010

Julius Kirshner (University of Chicago)
Jews as Citizens in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy: The Case of Isacco da Pisa
January 19th, 2011
co-sponsored with the Centre for Medieval Studies

Donato Santeramo (Queen's University)
Pirandello: oltre la scrittura...la recitazione
January 27th, 2011

Rita Librandi (Università di Napoli l'Orientale)
Tra documentazione storica e letteratura: il caso del modernismo
February 3, 2011

Paul Colilli (Laurentian University)
Giorgio Agamben's L'aperto and the Idea of a Rational Astrology
February 10, 2011

Emanuele Cutinelli-Rendina (University of Strasbourg)
La geografia nella Storia d'Italia di Francesco Guicciardini
March 3, 2011

Matthias Heinz (University of Tubingen)
L'italiano d'altrove: sfide lessicografiche e potenzialità del Dizionario degli italianismi in francese, inglese, tedesco (DIFIT)

Rodolfo Delmonte (Università di Venezia)
La poesia italiana del Novecento e la linguistica computazionale
March 17, 2011

Francesco Bruni, (Università di Venezia)
Le nascite dell'Italia come idea
March 23, 2011

Wladimir Krysinski, (University of Montreal)
Le universalità incerte della letteratura mondiale
April 1, 2011

Enrico Bernard, (University of Zurich)
La questione letteraria del teatro
April 11, 2011

Giuseppe Mazzotta (Yale University)
Music and Politics: Paradiso XV-XXII
April 12, 2011

Simply Hired Blog

2011-06-14T12:18:00.000-07:00

8 Cover Letter Mistakes to Avoid

During your job search, you'll probably apply to hundreds of jobs, creating customized resumes and cover letters for each position. Most people spend a considerable amount of time perfecting their resume to best reflect their experience and show off their accomplishments, but throw their cover letter together quickly or worse—don't write a cover letter at all.

To make sure your cover letter gets noticed, make sure to avoid the following mistakes:

Not personalizing your greeting – If possible, address your cover letter to the person doing the hiring (Ex: "Dear Mr. Thompson" or "Dear Ms. Fleming"). However, if the recruiter or hiring manager's name is unisex, include their full name: "Dear Pat Chang." If you can't find the hiring manager or recruiter's name, avoid addressing the cover letter to "Dear Sir" or "Dear Madam" in the 50/50 chance you guess wrong. Instead, use a gender-neutral phrase such as "Dear Hiring Manager" or "Dear Selection Committee."

Writing a generic cover letter – Although creating a template cover letter can be a time-saver during your job search, you should customize each one to each employer and job to show how you fit the requirements. Not to mention, accidentally inserting the wrong job title or forgetting to switch out the name of the employer is a sure-fire way to get your application dumped in the trash or deleted.

Writing too much or too little – Many recruiters and hiring managers won't spend a lot of time reading your cover letter, but you need to include enough information to sell yourself. Keep your cover letter to two or three high-impact paragraphs that describe how you fit the role's requirements and are a perfect candidate for the position.

Making it all about you – While it's important to show off all of your awesome experience, the cover letter should equally be about you and the employer. Through your cover letter, show how you can benefit the company if they hire you and how you fit the employer’s needs.

Forgetting to include your contact information – Resumes and cover letters can easily become separated, so make sure to include you contact information on both documents. By doing so, an employer can still know how to contact you by referring to your cover letter.

Forgetting to proofread – Many job seekers forget to proofread their cover letter or do it too quickly and miss some of those pesky typos. If your cover letter has too many misspellings, typos, or grammar mistakes, you won't send a positive message to the employer. Ask some friends or family members to review before sending.

Not following directions – If the employer has asked that you address a certain question in your cover letter or send it in a particular format, make sure you follow these directions. Employers often base their decisions on information they ask you to include and sometimes include application instructions—such as including the cover letter in the body of the email—as a way to test how well candidates can follow directions. If you can't follow their instructions, it's an easy way to eliminate you from consideration.

Not sending a cover letter – Some job seekers don't even attach a cover letter when they apply for a job or include a quick note such as "My resume is attached." Take the time to write a clean, professional and direct cover letter that introduces you to the employer and addresses how you fit the specific requirements for the role.

Cover letters are a way to introduce yourself to an employer and show how you are the best candidate, so use it to your advantage! It's worth it to spend the extra time creating a great cover letter if it helps you land the job!

Do you have other tips for writing cover letters or things to avoid? Share your thoughts in the comments!

The Mother of All Languages

2011-04-25T10:17:00.000-07:00

The world's 6,000 or so modern languages may have all descended from a single ancestral tongue spoken by early African humans between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, a new study suggests.

The finding, published Thursday in the journal Science, could help explain how the first spoken language emerged, spread and contributed to the evolutionary success of the human species.

Quentin Atkinson, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and author of the study, found that the first migrating populations leaving Africa laid the groundwork for all the world's cultures by taking their single language with them—the mother of all mother tongues.

"It was the catalyst that spurred the human expansion that we all are a product of," Dr. Atkinson said.

About 50,000 years ago—the exact timeline is debated—there was a sudden and marked shift in how modern humans behaved. They began to create cave art and bone artifacts and developed far more sophisticated hunting tools. Many experts argue that this unusual spurt in creative activity was likely caused by a key innovation: complex language, which enabled abstract thought. The work done by Dr. Atkinson supports this notion.

His research is based on phonemes, distinct units of sound such as vowels, consonants and tones, and an idea borrowed from population genetics known as "the founder effect." That principle holds that when a very small number of individuals break off from a larger population, there is a gradual loss of genetic variation and complexity in the breakaway group.

Dr. Atkinson figured that if a similar founder effect could be discerned in phonemes, it would support the idea that modern verbal communication originated on that continent and only then expanded elsewhere.

In an analysis of 504 world languages, Dr. Atkinson found that, on average, dialects with the most phonemes are spoken in Africa, while those with the fewest phonemes are spoken in South America and on tropical islands in the Pacific.

The study also found that the pattern of phoneme usage globally mirrors the pattern of human genetic diversity, which also declined as modern humans set up colonies elsewhere. Today, areas such as sub-Saharan Africa that have hosted human life for millennia still use far more phonemes in their languages than more recently colonized regions do.

"It's a wonderful contribution and another piece of the mosaic" supporting the out-of-Africa hypothesis, said Ekkehard Wolff, professor emeritus of African Languages and Linguistics at the University of Leipzig in Germany, who read the paper.

Dr. Atkinson's findings are consistent with the prevailing view of the origin of modern humans, known as the "out of Africa" hypothesis. Bolstered by recent genetic evidence, it says that modern humans emerged in Africa alone, about 200,000 years ago. Then, about 50,000 to 70,000 years ago, a small number of them moved out and colonized the rest of the world, becoming the ancestors of all non-African populations on the planet.

The origin of early languages is fuzzier. Truly ancient languages haven't left empirical evidence that scientists can study. And many linguists believe it is hard to say anything definitive about languages prior to 8,000 years ago, as their relationships would have become jumbled over the millennia.

But the latest Science paper "and our own observations suggest that it is possible to detect an arrow of time" underlying proto-human languages spoken more than 8,000 years ago, said Murray Gell-Mann of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, who read the Science paper and supports it. The "arrow of time" is based on the notion that it is possible to use data from modern languages to trace their origins back 10,000 years or even further.

Dr. Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist with a keen interest in historical linguistics, is co-founder of a project known as Evolution of Human Languages. He concedes that his "arrow of time" view is a minority one.

Only humans have the biological capacity to communicate with a rich language based on symbols and rules, enabling us to pass on cultural ideas to future generations. Without language, culture as we know it wouldn't exist, so scientists are keen to pin down where it sprang from.

Dr. Atkinson's approach has its limits. Genes change slowly, over many generations, while the diversity of phonemes amid a population group can change rapidly as language evolves. While distance from Africa can explain as much as 85% of the genetic diversity of populations, a similar distance measurement can explain only 19% of the variation in phonemic diversity. Dr. Atkinson said the measure is still statistically significant.

Another theory of the origin of modern humans, known as the multiregional hypothesis, holds that earlier forms of humans originated in Africa and then slowly developed their anatomically modern form in every area of the Old World. This scenario implies that several variants of modern human language could have emerged somewhat independently in different locations, rather than solely in Africa.

Early migrants from Africa probably had to battle significant odds. A founder effect on a breakaway human population tends to reduce its size, genetic complexity and fitness. A similar effect could have limited "the size and cultural complexity of societies at the vanguard of the human expansion" out of Africa, the paper notes.

Write to Gautam Naik at gautam.naik@wsj.com

La journée européenne des langues

2011-04-11T09:34:00.000-07:00

Les méthodes pour apprendre une ou des langues étrangères ne manquent pas. En voici quelques-unes

Utilisez un cours d'auto-apprentissage qui peut être composé de CD, de cassettes vidéo ou audio ainsi que de manuels et d'exercices; vous suivez le cours seul et évaluez vos progrès vous-même au fil du temps. Il existe des cours pour de nombreuses langues et pour la plupart des niveaux d'apprentissage (de "débutants" à "avancés"). Vous en trouverez dans de nombreuses librairies et pourrez même dans certains cas en emprunter à votre bibliothèque locale.

Regardez la TV! De nombreuses chaînes proposent des cours de langue sous la forme de programmes TV ou radio.

Surfez sur le Web! De plus en plus de sites Internet proposent des leçons, souvent agrémentées d'images et dotées d'un accompagnement vocal, pour apprendre des langues étrangères.

Apprenez avec un professeur. Presque partout en Europe, il existe des cours de langues destinés aux adultes. Ces cours se déroulent souvent en soirée. L'avantage de suivre des cours avec un groupe d'apprenants et que vous avez des compagnons pour vous encourager dans votre apprentissage ainsi qu'un professeur pour vous orienter en fonction de vos besoins spécifiques.

Apprenez au travail. De plus en plus d'employeurs se rendent compte que les compétences linguistiques de leur personnel sont essentielles à la réussite de leur entreprise. De nombreuses grandes sociétés proposent des cours de langues gratuits ou subventionnés.

Vous pouvez bien entendu combiner certaines ou la totalité de ces méthodes, ou utiliser différentes méthodes à chaque stade de votre apprentissage. Vous pouvez retenir la méthode qui vous convient le mieux en fonction de votre style d'apprentissage et de votre situation personnelle, c'est-à-dire:

l'endroit où vous vivez (par ex. y a-t-il un cours de langue à proximité de votre domicile ?);

le temps que vous pouvez consacrer à l'apprentissage d'une langue;

les langues qui vous intéressent;

les raisons qui vous poussent à apprendre une langue.

Voici quelques conseils et idées qui peuvent vous servir lorsque vous envisagez d'apprendre une langue.

Expérience utile

Si les langues, y compris votre langue maternelle, vous intéressent pour elles-mêmes, vous ferez un bon apprenant.

Une expérience antérieure d'apprentissage linguistique est également utile. Si vous avez déjà appris une langue, vous aurez acquis certaines techniques que vous pourrez appliquer à la nouvelle langue, car apprendre une langue... cela s'apprend!

Et si vous n'avez jamais appris de langue étrangère auparavant, pas de panique: tout le monde peut y arriver!

Techniques d'étude

À l'instar de tout ce qui en vaut la peine, vous devrez investir un peu de temps et d'énergie à l'apprentissage d'une langue supplémentaire, mais cela peut également se faire dans la bonne humeur! Voici quelques idées qui pourront vous faciliter la tâche:

La rapidité de vos progrès dépendra de vous, mais votre apprentissage sera plus aisé si vous parvenez à réserver une période régulière de chaque journée ou semaine pour étudier. Deux à quatre heures par semaine suffisent pour bien avancer.

Contrôlez vos progrès. De nombreux cours comprennent désormais des tests qui vous aident à voir ce que vous avez appris et les sujets sur lesquels vous devez concentrer.

Il existe de nombreuses façons de consolider ce que vous avez appris pendant le cours: vous pouvez par exemple écouter une radio étrangère ou regarder des films en version originale. La lecture de livres pour enfants peut même s'avérer instructive!

Rappelez-vous que chacun apprend à sa manière. Par conséquent, essayez différentes méthodes et adoptez celle qui fonctionne le mieux.

N'ayez pas peur de parler votre nouvelle langue dès que vous en avez l'occasion. Vous pouvez également rencontrer des gens qui parlent la langue que vous apprenez ou correspondre par courrier ordinaire ou électronique avec des locuteurs de cette langue à l'étranger.

Voyager donne bien entendu tout son sens à l'apprentissage d'une langue étrangère et vos nouvelles compétences vous permettront de nouer des contacts. Essayez de planifier un séjour à l'étranger - même de courte durée - et faites-en votre objectif. Lorsque vous vous trouvez à l'étranger, profitez de chaque occasion pour mettre vos connaissances en pratique. En règle générale, la population locale apprécie d'entendre des étrangers essayer de parler leur langue et vous pardonnera vos erreurs. Bonne étude!

Leading Successfully in the Global Multicultural Environment: Assessment Tools for Selection and Development

2011-02-27T08:35:00.000-08:00

t's no secret that our work place, an increasingly global workscape, is transforming faster than our ability to deal effectively with the changes. We are experiencing, to reference the five megatrends outlined in Andres Tapia's recent book The Inclusion Paradox, political and economic volatility, a multilayered globalization, rapidly evolving game-changing technology, fewer government and corporate guarantees, and a multifaceted unprecedented diversity. Within this environment, Tapia says, the emerging workforce is increasingly “diverse, smaller and less skilled, autonomous and empowered, both global and virtual, with multilayered responsibilities. The competencies of problem-solving, adaptability, learning agility, and innovation are more critical than ever. Unfortunately, these competencies are in short supply."

Tapia's comments echo Robert Kegan's 1994 book, In Over Our Heads, which also noted that our environment was evolving faster than our ability to manage it. Interestingly both Kegan and Tapia arrived at similar conclusions. The answer to the challenge of ever greater complexity is to increase the developmental level of the workforce. But what kind of development? How do we measure it, and how can it be achieved?

The core is captured in the concept of intercultural competence, along with competing terms such as 'cultural intelligence" and 'global mindset," A competence is usually defined behaviorally: how we do things. However, our complex actions in the world such as problem solving, decision-making, or managing multicultural workgroups, arise from how we interpret our environment. Such competence comes from the inside out, with internal and external components, which include attitude, knowledge, and behavior. We first need an attitude of open ness in order to pay attention to new things and decide how to deal with them, vs. just ignoring/rejecting them. Openness and the curiosity that comes with it leads us to new information and the organization of it into applicable knowledge. The knowledge.in turn, guides us to new, more competent behavior within our workscape. It allows us to process more complexity take more things into account in our decision making. hold contradictory tendencies side by side, and process their negotiation. This represents a developmental change, beyond the mere acquisition of new information or learning.

Developmental change happens in discreet stages, each of which can be considered a level of competence. To measure it, we use the Intercultural Development Inventory (lDI,) based on a theoretical scale called the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS).The model has five stages, from least to most developed:

1. DENIAL, not very common in our contemporary corporations, government, or educational systems, assumes all humans to be the same. Encounter with significant human difference causes fear, the denial of humanity to members of the different group, and possible violent behavior against perceived threats. We see this daily in the news, but thankfully we don't encounter it often in the workplace.
2. POLARIZATION, the next level, is much milder but still involves prejudicial attitudes toward human difference, polarizing it in terms of us and them. Most frequently, the polarization is positive for us and negative for them, and supports formal or informal practices to exclude "them" from the majority's groups and activities. This is also what 40-plus years of diversity practice has worked successfully to help eliminate.
3. MINIMIZATION is the result of successful diversity work. We accept differences, we work side by side with otherness, and we focus on our similarities in a politically correct environment where there are penalties for discussing most differences and for outright exclusion. This tolerance has been a great step forward in our human development and has created considerable opportunity for formally disadvantaged groups. But in today’s competitive workplace, this is no longer sufficient The Question, as Tapia puts it, is no longer 'What's your mix?" but 'How's your mix working" Often, it's not working as well as it needs to.
4. ACCEPTANCE takes us into the inclusion space where we are comfortable enough with difference to ask among our different selves, "Why isn't this mix working better?" And this Question requires us to look at how we are different in significant cultural ways, in our values and how we enact them inaction and communication. We can then begin to ask the follow- up questions of how to deal with them, how to select the behaviors we need in order to interact and communicate more effectively and to create a more collaborative and productive workplace culture in which all groups and individuals contribute more equally. We must solve the twin problems of how to minimize the differences that cause dissonance while simultaneously leveraging those that allow us all to contribute from our individual and sub-group uniqueness.
5. ADAPTATION arises as we begin to solve the challenges of the acceptance stage by mutually discovering and implementing the processes that produce increasingly effective collaboration and communication. Adaptation requires internal development in each of us, which is then expressed and slowly refined experimentally in our daily workplace interactions.

Proceeding through these stages is a requirement of today's workplace. We do not develop automatically, but only through the often uncomfortable experience of learning to operate in new ways in changing situations. We all have a natural resistance to this, but our environment requires that we evolve in order to compete successfully in the global marketplace.

We can measure where we are as individuals and groups using the IDI, and we can devise effective interventions to help us progress from our current developmental stage to the next one, with each transition requiring a different modality. While this is difficult and cannot be accomplished through simple one-time training interventions, a number of organizations have developed successful programs, generally focusing on the transition from minimization to acceptance, crucial for moving from diverse to inclusive. The work can be demanding, but the rewards can be substantial for our organization, our person al relations with family and friends, and our individual selves.

To see this all from a more comprehensive perspective, consider part of Kegan’s five-stage model of human development. Stage three is the good community member who accepts the organization's values and contributes with in the established parameters. We need these people, lots of them. But they can't take us forward as a society or an organization. They are comfortable with the status quo, which is precisely what has to change.

In Kegan's stage four, we incorporate our own set of values that differ somewhat from those of the community, and we operate from those without too much concern for how our decisions and actions are received by the group. We can manage ourselves, so we are also capable of managing others. While not particularly open to feedback, we are professionals and capable of leading change movements. This is the ID’s acceptance stage, and we need a lot more people at this level.

Finally, in Kegan's stage five, we recognize that, for our own continued development we need others at least as developed as we are to reflect us back to ourselves. They help illuminate the dark corners of self and environment so that we can continue to grow personally and contribute strongly to our community and organizations. This is the leadership and adaptation level of lDI.
Not all of us need to become leaders, but we can all strive to develop into the acceptance stage. into which to take our organizations. In a changing environment, all the inhabitants must change with it. This is the challenge of human development today, and measurement is the first step.

Published in the Autumn 2010 issue of Diversity MBA Magazine
Dr. Douglas Stuart, IOR Director of Training
Reprinted from the December 2010 issue of Diversity MBA Magazine with permission.

Multiculturalismo? Non tradire ma tradurre le culture

2011-02-16T09:25:00.001-08:00

Teresa Panini, delle mitiche edizioni Panini, si dedica adesso alle edizioni d'arte e mi ha chiesto di collaborare a un volume sulla Cappella Palatina di Palermo, consacrata il 28 di aprile del 1140, uno dei capolavori più visitati nella mia città, a me particolarmente caro perché là si sposarono i miei genitori.
Chi ora alza il naso verso quei magnifici mosaici di scuola bizantina, o ammira, sulle foto o dal vivo, il soffitto in legno con le classiche decorazioni islamiche "muqarnas", percorrendo la pianta latina voluta dal contestato re Ruggero II (né gli aristocratici, né il Papa, simpatizzavano per quel monarca normanno innamorato del Mediterraneo) è di fronte a un capolavoro multiculturale.

Le culture dell'Isola vengono tutte chiamate da Ruggero a collaborare alla Cappella, monumento religioso, scrigno d'arte, ma soprattutto manifesto politico. Ruggero, accusato di aver collaborato con l'antipapa Anacleto II, detestato dal teologo Bernardo di Chiaravalle, da re Luigi VI di Francia, da Enrico I di Inghilterra, da Lotario III, imperatore del Sacro Romano Impero, e inviso al Papa, deve dimostrare di essere Re, Re senza dubbi e che cosa rende un Re davvero Re, nella storia come nelle fiabe, se non un palazzo con meravigliosa cappella al centro?

Se leggete dunque le preoccupazioni di questi giorni dei leader europei, il giovane premier inglese Cameron, la cocciuta cancelliera tedesca Merkel, il frivolo presidente francese Sarkozy (da noi? Da noi nessuno si preoccupa di quel di cui il mondo si preoccupa, illusi di «cavarcela all'italiana»...) vi ritrovate dritti alle preoccupazioni di Ruggero II.
«Multiculturalismo» è parola ostica da definire, perfino Wikipedia, l'ubiqua enciclopedia online che tutto incasella nella sua sterminata tassonomia di base, rinuncia: «difficile definire». E se chiedete ai vostri amici che cosa possa mai voler dire «multiculturale», vi ritroverete con una macedonia di idee e sentimenti che hanno però passato in frigo un pomeriggio di troppo, qualche pezzetto di mela e pera fragranti, la banana ingiallita.

«Multiculturale» può volere dire non darsele di santa ragione tra diversi, accettare, come negli asili di Manhattan, che i bambini decorino l'albero di Natale, facciano prillare le trottoline ebraiche dreidel alla festa di Hanukkah, e cantino insieme gli inni di Kwanzaa, il festival panafricano costruito a tavolino da Maulana Karenga nel 1967, che tra non troppi anni sarà «tradizionale».

sole24Ore

Doris Lessing

2011-01-31T07:51:00.000-08:00

Doris Lessing on The Grandmothers

Over what period of time were these novellas written?

I wrote these novellas in about a year. It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.

How do you see the stories linking — thematically and otherwise — to your previous work?

What these have in common is that they were all told to me — the three that are realistic — by the people who thought they were remarkable enough to interest an author. I have been saving them up for years, for the right time. Why was the year before the last the right time? The last one told me, Victoria & The Straveneys meant the length was about right. The fourth, The Reason for It, I had been wanting to write for some time.

The Grandmothers was told to me some years ago by a man who has been a friend of the two boys, and who envied them and wished he was in their place. But when he approached older women the response was usually on the lines of "Run along, sonny." The convention is that boys are the prey of lustful older women, but usually it is the youngsters who approach the older women. And it is nearly always the older women who end it. But conventional morality has to have its say. I was struck by how the man telling me this tale repeated, again and again, that the women had been cruel to the end of the affairs. I kept asking him, "But what did you think could happen?" They were in their early fifties by then, and they were right to end it before they got too old. But he couldn't see it. "They were all so happy," he kept saying. His view of the thing as ten years of unmitigated bliss did rather influence the writing. Though my view of the story was darker than his. Life seldom comes up with ten years of perfect bliss. This man, my informant, was very funny: he was much older, and was putting past heartaches into perspective.

Victoria & The Straveneys was originally a tale from the United States, and what surprised and interested me, for I hadn't expected it, was that as an American tale, it was about money whereas in Britain it became about class.

The Love Child was told to me over decades. The soldier in question went back and back to the scene of his love, Cape Town, to find his son. He did not find his son, nor meet again with his great love. This story is true I think to wartime loves and losses. Writing it made me remember again that terrible war and how pervasive it was, how it drew in the whole world. Twice, talking about this story publicly, a man from the audience has come up and said he had been in the US navy and my description of that voyage was like something he and his mates had experienced. And in Britain, three times men have come up, after I had finished talking, to say yes, I had described how things were. I got the information about the voyages from the R.A.F., every one of whom had made those terrible trips, and everyone used the words "The worst thing that has ever happened to me."

The Reason for It I suppose will be classified as sci-fi. I very much enjoy writing this kind of tale — historical speculation.

Do you see Victoria & The Staveneys and The Love Child as optimistic stories?

Optimistic? I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story. Victoria & The Straveneys I suppose is optimistic. The Love Child is about a man living inside delusion.

One gets the sense, from reading your work, that you are someone who has a great amount of faith in the role that storytelling can play in affecting moral and ethical change. Where does this faith come from?

The human race has been telling stories since it began. Storytelling began with the songs and ceremonies of the shamans and priests, began in religion, and for thousands of years has been instructing us all. It is easy to see the process in the parables of the Bible. Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest it can be: He/she was born, lived, died. Probably that is the template of our stories — a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.

Chinese lesson

2011-01-24T10:00:00.000-08:00

a good website in order to learn Chinese...in Spanish!

click here.

Which language for Europe?

2010-12-29T06:53:00.000-08:00

More than half of Europe's citizens did not vote in the elections for the European Parliament, but the institution faces more challenges than those of credibility. One of the great challeges faced by the Parliament is the number of languages it uses: after the admission of Bulgaria and Romania these now total 23, practically one per European state. Etymologically, the word Parliament derives from a word actually meaning "speaking", but if the members of Parliament speak 23 different languages, what kind of Parliament can this be?

The European Parliament is not the only one to use several languages: the Belgian parliament, for instance, has two and the Swiss use four. However the MPs of these individual countries are able to understand one another without the need for interpreters. (Despite its tremendous linguistic diversity, India's parliament has only two official procedural languages - English and Hindi. If they feel unable to address the assembly in either of the two languages, members are allowed to speak in any of the country's nearly two dozen languages, with translation provided.) This is not so in the European Parliament: the work of the Assembly and the Committees entail the MPs being assisted by a team of interpreters. The possible language combinations have increased with the growing number of languages. You need a calculator to work out how many they are - 23*22 - a total of 506! This requires the help of 403 full time interpreters and several thousand external collaborators so that Euro MPs can speak and listen in their own language.

It is no easy task, even for the European Parliament, to find translators from Finnish to Greek, or from Portuguese to Bulgarian. However, Eurocracy is ingenious, and to reduce costs it uses double translation: those who speak less widely known languages are first translated into the principal languages (English, French or German) and then retranslated into all the other less common languages. One wonders how much the substance of the MPs speeches is altered by the second or third translation.

Woe betide anyone trying to include a truly amusing joke in a parliamentary speech: it is nothing like the British House of Commons where the quips and the responses make the parliamentary debates more lively than a stage play. If an unwary MP cracks a joke in the European Parliament you first hear the roar of laughter of those following the speech in the original language and then one after the other of those listening in the first, second and umpteenth translation. However, the linguistic machine manages to work: the Parliament has only 403 interpreters, even if they are also helped by several thousand external collaborators; no one is prevented from speaking and listening in their own language.

But not even 23 official languages are enough to keep everyone happy. The linguistic minorities are also demanding to be able to use their own language. Among the more insistent are the Catalans, on the grounds that they alone make up nearly 10 million Europeans, practically twice as many as the Danes and Finns, four times more than the Slovenes and 25 times more than the Maltese. Similar demands are made by the Basques and the Corsicans. And then what about the approximately thirty million "third-country citizens" living in Europe and who speak all the languages of the planet?

It seems impossible that all these demands can be met. Some are now calling for the number of official languages to be reduced, or indeed to raise English to the status of sole official language of the Parliament. But to formally accord this privilege to the language of two states could lead to resentment being felt in all the other states. To tell the truth, even Ireland must be a little skeptical; it demanded successfully that Gaelic should become an official language. If we account that only a few Irish are able to understand and even fewer to speak Gaelic, it is clear that language policy, in this instance, has been used as an instrument of identity rather than of communication (for a further discussion of language and identity in the EU, see Patrizia Nanz, Europolis. Constitutional Patriotism Beyond the Nation State, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007; and Peter A. Kraus, A Union of Diversity. Language, Identity and Polity-Building in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

But a lingua franca is desperately needed. The Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, has suggested reviving Latin , an idea that would place all the MPs in a condition of equality (and certainly of similar difficulty), although Latin would further alienate the people from European institutions.

Will English become the single official language of the European Parliament, defeating its many diplomatic resisters? After all, English is already the most popular second language in the world as well as in Europe (see Eurobarometer, Europeans and their Languages, February 2006). But it is one thing to use English in business, tourism and education, and quite another to grant a special political privilege to the language of one of the 27 member countries. To ask the Euro MPs to speak a foreign language would enormously restrict the number of those eligible for election. There would be a risk of creating an assembly of technocrats that is distant from the people's needs. And certainly it does not help that English is also the language of an EU member state with a large density of euro-skeptics and which has not adopted the European currency.

But the march of English as lingua franca is difficult to stop. Even in the Swiss Parliament it is increasingly common to hear MPs of the French and German cantons communicating in English.

Perhaps the European Parliament should try to be part of the solution rather than of the problem. If all European students would study English as a second language, then in a couple of generations, both the MPs and their electorate would finally be able to understand each other. This might well be the most far-sighted measure to propose to the new European Parliament to bring back to the European polls at least some of those who stayed at home.

Daniele Archibugi (opendemocracy.net)

Food deserts' depriving towns of fresh fruit and vegetables

2010-12-22T02:11:00.000-08:00

The demise of greengrocers has turned large areas of the country into "food deserts" where people have inadequate access to fresh fruit and vegetables, according to a retailing academic.

Even market towns such as Shrewsbury and Winchester have pockets of nutritional barrenness where residents fail to obtain five portions of fresh food a day, said Dr Hillary Shaw, of Harper Adams University College, in Shropshire.

He estimated that ensuing health problems such as heart disease and diabetes were costing Britain 10bn a year in healthcare costs and lost productivity.

Dr Shaw began his research in 2000, plotting the location of residential areas and shops on 500sq m grids. Since then he has checked around 6,000sq km, covering the whole of Birmingham, much of Hampshire, Somerset, Shrewsbury and parts of north London and Stevenage. In each area, he has visited shops to see if they sold 10 or more items of fresh produce.

He found that around 20 per cent of rural areas and 25 per cent of urban areas were "food deserts" where people have to walk more than 500 metres to reach a shop selling a good amount of fruit and vegetables.

In 1997, Tessa Jowell, then a health minister, defined a food desert as an area "where people do not have easy access to healthy, fresh foods particularly if they are poor and have limited mobility" and said, ideally, there would be a supply of fresh food within 500 metres of every home.

In Scunthorpe, Dr Shaw found the number of food deserts had increased markedly between 2000 and 2004 but now the increase had slowed or stopped. He said food deserts most disadvantaged the poor, the disabled and the elderly.

Deprived urban housing estates were particularly prone to practical or cultural difficulties sourcing fresh food. But Dr Shaw said there were also problems in villages where the only shop had closed, leaving car-less pensioners stranded, and in more affluent estates and towns, where most residents drove to out-of-town superstores.

Dr Shaw blamed the closure of small local stores for increasing food deserts nationally, 29 per cent of unaffiliated independent grocers closed down between 2001 and 2007, while supermarkets have expanded. He also said that affordability and attitudes towards food exacerbated the problem and called for more education to improve diets in deprived areas.

Referring to places such as Shrewsbury, he said: "We tend to think 'It's a nice picturesque town' but there are areas that are food deserts, where people have to walk 750m or a kilometre to reach the shops. This pushes people into eating unhealthily. They are eating ready meals and tins high in sugar, fat and salt.

"As a result they get type-II diabetes, which can result in blindness and amputations; and obesity, which can result in heart disease and cancer."

'It is particularly problematic for residents without cars'

The medieval market town of Shrewsbury in Shropshire has five food deserts, Dr Shaw claims.

Residents in the suburbs of Shirehall and Monkmoor to the west, Meole Brace and Belle Vue to the south and Copthorne to the east all have accessibility problems. So, too, do those in the poor Coton Hill area and the relatively affluent estate at Mount Pleasant to the north of the town.

To the concern of local politicians, Dr Shaw found some residents had to travel more than a kilometre for fresh produce. "It is particularly problematic for residents without a car, have mobility problems or are elderly," said Maxwell Winchester, a member of Shrewsbury and Atcham Borough Council.

Daniel Kawczynski, the town's Tory MP, added: "The effects of these food deserts are so wide-ranging, from eating unhealthy processed foods, through to the environmental impact of travelling further afield to buy groceries, through to the negative impact on local farmers."

By Martin Hickman, Consumer Affairs Correspondent (The Independent)

Thursday, 13 December 2007

The 6 myths about online translation tools

2010-12-15T05:04:00.000-08:00

If you're like most translators, you spend a lot of time translating documents on your computer. But are you aware that the latest advances in translation technology could make your life easier? There are many myths about translation tools so read on to find out the truth about these myths.

Most translators don't need any translation tools.

On the contrary, every translator can benefit from translation tools to work more efficiently producing higher quality work in less time. By using translation memory, glossaries and quality assurance you will ensure that your translations are more consistent and on time.

With XTM you will quickly realize the real benefits of using translation tools. XTM is the leading on- line translation environment.

I use traditional desktop tools so don't need an alternative.

Most traditional translation tools are desktop applications that need to be installed, maintained and upgraded on your PC. This is both expensive and time consuming.

What's more many desktop translation tools are too complex, require you to spend a huge amount of effort to learn them and then probably you will not use all the features.

Online translation is the future. Specifically, XTM gives you a full set of tools that you access via a web browser. This means that you can collaborate easily with colleagues and there is no need to worry about loading updates.

Translation tools are difficult to learn.

It certainly takes lots of time and effort to install and learn traditional translation tools with their perplexing array of icons and long menus, when all you want to do is translate! But what if you could find a remarkably fast, easy, and collaborative way to translate?

Firstly you don't need to install XTM, all you need is a PC with Internet Explorer or Firefox and a connection to the internet. XTM has a clean simple interface that allows you to focus on what you do best - translation!

Translation tools are too expensive.

Many translation tools require you to buy the software and then pay for regular upgrades, in addition to paying for any training sessions.

XTM provides you with access to a complete set of translation tools starting from the low price of only $12 per month. Our online training videos mean that you can be up and running quickly.

I need to be compatible with my LSP and have to use their recommended solution.

Once, this statement was true. But today there is an increasing move to open standards. Open standards are now accepted industry wide as the best way of exchanging data.

XTM uses open standards throughout. This ensures that you can process all the common file types, produce standard word counts and statistics, plus import and export translation memories and terminology databases. And at the end of the translation process you can easily return the target document in the required format together with any other material.

6

If I translate my files on line, other people might access them.

This is a common misconception. And it leads many LSPs and translators to ask, "Can I be confident about uploading my confidential files online or can a hacker gain access to my data?" But the reality is that online translation is extremely secure, as long as you choose your translation solution wisely.

R is for Repetition

2010-12-11T11:13:00.001-08:00

In her latest book, Claire Kramsch (2009) argues – among other things – for the value of repetition:

“In an effort to make language use more authentic and spontaneous, communicative language teaching has moved away from memorisation, recitation, and choral responses. It has put a premium on the unique, individual, and repeatable utterance in unpredictable conversational situations. And yet, there is value in repetition as an educational device: utterances repeated are also resignified” (p. 209).

That is to say, simply repeating something gives it an added or even different signifiance. Walt Whitman captured this principle in this brilliant little poem:

What am I, after all, but a child, pleas’d with the sound of my own name? repeating it over and over;
I stand apart to hear—it never tires me.

To you, your name also;
Did you think there was nothing but two or three pronunciations in the sound of your name?

Whitman Whitman Whitman...

Kramsch goes on to argue that “we may want to put the principle of iterability to work…: the same text, reread silently or aloud, can yield new meanings. The same utterance, repeated in various contexts, with different inflections, can index different emotions, evoke different associations. The same poem, memorised and performed two or three times in front of the same class, yields each time new pleasures of recognition and anticipation. The same story, told to three different interlocutors, can enable the storyteller to put different emphases on the same general theme depending on the listener…” (ibid.)

The value of repetition as a means of achieving fluency has also been acknowledged in the recent literature on task-based learning. When learners repeat a task, even a relatively long time after its first performance, gains have been shown in both fluency and linguistic complexity. Bygate (2009) suggests that this is because “previous experience of a task is available for speakers to build on in subsequent performance” (p. 269). He makes a similar point to Kramsch’s: that the communicative approach tends to value spontaneity and creativity. “And yet to provide speaking practice only under these conditions runs the risk that learners will constantly be improvising, constantly experimenting with new forms, but also constantly doing so while having to pay some considerable attention to the content of what they want to say” (ibid.). In other words, ‘free expression’ may come at considerable cost to fluency.

Corpus linguistics has shown, too, that a large proportion of what we say and write is ‘second-hand’: we recycle our own utterances repeatedly, as well as those of the discourse community we are affiliated to (or wish to be affiliated to). As Hopper (1998) puts it, echoing the Russian scholar M. Bakhtin, “We say things that have been said before. Our speech is a vast collection of hand-me-downs that reaches back in time to the beginnings of language” (p. 159). He adds that, from this perspective, “language is … to be viewed as a kind of pastiche, pasted together in an improvised way out of ready-made elements” (op. cit. p. 166). A good writer of academic text, for example, knows how to select formulations that are already part of what T.S. Eliot called ‘the dialect of the tribe’ in order to create “an easy commerce of the old and the new” (The Four Quartets).

The problem with repetition, from a pedagogical point of view, is that there is a tension between the need to repeat, on the one hand, and the boredom factor, on the other. It requires skilful management to balance repetitive language practice with the need for variety and a change of focus. One way is to change some element in the task for each iteration. Here are some ideas:

1. Change the amount of support: e.g. ‘Disappearing Dialogues’: learners practice a dialogue that is written on the board or projected, chunks of which are progressively hidden or erased, until they are perfroming the entire dialogue from memory.

2. Change the mode: e.g. ‘Paper conversations’: students interact passing paper and pen back and forth (like on-line chat), then repeat the exchange speaking.

3. Change the time: e.g. the 4-2-1 technique: students take turns to talk to their partner about a topic, for – at first – 4 minutes, then again for 2, and finally for 1, trying to keep the content constant.

4. Change the speakers: e.g. the ‘onion’ technique, whereby students are seated in two concentric circles, the inner circle facing the outer. Students perform a speaking task in pairs (e.g. a role play) and then the outer circle students move one seat clockwise, and the task is repeated with new partners.

References:

Bygate, M. 2009. Effects of task repetition on the structure and control of oral language. In Van den Branden, K., Bygate, M., Norris, J. (eds.) Task-based Language Teaching: A Reader. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hopper, P.J. 1998. Emergent language. In Tomasello, M. (ed.) The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure. Mahwah, NJ.: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Kramsch, C. 2009. The Multilingual Subject. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Southern Togo

2010-12-06T01:49:00.000-08:00

The formation of a new urban dialect: the case of Ewe in southern Togo

This paper will test the hypothesis developed by Peter Trudgill, Paul Kerswill, Ann Williams, Gabriel
Manessy and other scholars that similar linguistic processes are involved in the formation of an urban
dialect.

On the African part of the research, as early as in the 1960s, Irvine Richardson (1963:145), tried to
find “(...) some general system or systems by which tribal languages are urbanized.” Gabriel Manessy
(1992) also studied the question and concluded that, considering the numerous differences between
African urban linguistic varieties, analogies cannot be the result of an improbable piece of luck. They
rather are the outcomes of identical evolutionary processes and urban areas are responsible for their
activation or reactivation. According to Trudgill (1986, 1998, 2004); Trudgill et al. (2000); Jeff Siegel
(1985), Manessy (1992), Kerswill and Williams (2000), Kerswill and Trudgill (2005), etc., when
dialects come in contact in urban areas
1
, and when speakers of different dialects are in situations of
frequent interaction, similar linguistic processes take place. Those are: mixing, levelling, simplification
and reallocation.

Data from my two doctoral fieldworks (January to February and November to December 2006) in
Togo with 60 speakers from three places (a capital city, Lome, and two rural areas, Tsevie and Aneho)
will provide evidence that the processes previously mentioned are occurring in urban Ewe language in Lome. I will show how those processes are at work in linguistic areas such as phonology and
grammar. To give a few examples:

Phonology-wise, I’ll show that bilabial fricatives and alveolar affricates are undergoing a
simplification process. Because rural phonemes [Ø] and [ß] cannot be uttered by many urban
speakers, they tend to become [p] and [hw] (or [h] in some cases). In the same way, alveolar affricates
/Å/ /ÿ/ are often palatalized and uttered as [©] and [®].

Grammatically, I’ll provide evidence of a reallocation process with the refunctionalization of a rural
verbal auxiliary. In rural places, the verbal auxiliary “kè” is used to express unreal situations and
imperfective aspect. In urban Ewe, however, this auxiliary has been refunctionalized to express a
perfective aspect and a real event.

For example:
néªÃ kófi kè vá á mí kè wÒ À

COND Koffi AUX come DET 1PL AUX do OBJ

« Had Koffi come, we would have done it »

In rural Ewe (in the Gen dialect), the conditional is the only situation this morpheme appears in. In
urban Ewe it is very frequent to have:
mù kè vá jí wò esÒ
1SG AUX come look for PRN = you yesterday

«I came to visit you yesterday»
This is a clear case of reallocation.
Some other examples will evidence the mixing and levelling processes that are also happening in
urban Ewe and that this variety is becoming an intradialect and is focusing to become a sociolect.

The data has been analyzed with statistical software packages SPPS and Goldvarb. These
packages allow me to correlate linguistic factors and social parameters.

A pass for tree-seekers and free people in Italy

2010-12-01T09:20:00.000-08:00

Looking at myself, some years ago, I remember asking: What were you made for? I have long reflected on possible answers. In the meantime I have written and published twelve books of poems in my native land Italy, and some further anthologies in other countries as I toured north America, Europe and South East Asia.

I have been committed to the creation of what I call ‘environmental poetry’, writing that can transfer me directly into a different style of life, or even better - into a new way of breathing and of stepping out. I begin to look at the countryside as if it were part of me, or I of it. I become again what I was before starting to learn or to think, a living being in a landscape: nothing more, nothing less.

In my travels I have begun to sense the voices of trees, the old and monumental trees living in our countryside. I have started to practice again my childhood gaze, special glances dedicated to the wonders of the nature, such as insects, animals, frogs, dragonflies, tritons, mole-crickets, butterflies, beetles, etc. But not only in these wild parts of the world. I began to wander across streets, the parks, the expansive avenues of cities, looking at the beauty of the trees you can find anywhere, trying to recognize their species, their age, the forms of the leaves, the proportions and geometries of the trunks, of the barks. How much incredible beauty is breathing around us in these cities while we are rushing for meetings, money, sex, career, traffic, cement.

So I visited the American open spaces, and the upright Asian metropolis, such as Singapore, touching trees with my hands and taking them in with my eyes. I visited the Italian regions in the north, centre, south and all over our two main islands, Sardinia and Sicily, looking for trees, taking notes, pictures, walking, eating, smelling and dreaming. In this way I’ve sewed together my guidebook, Homo Radix: Appunti per un cercatore di alberi, or, in English, Notes for a Tree Seeker. It’s my experiment in a form of writing new for me, a new nature-writing genre that draws on some of my favourite writers: Emerson, Thoreau, Darwin, Frost, Carlos Williams, Moore, Giono, Leopold, Murray, Prevert, Berry, and the Italians - Carlo Cassola, Dino Buzzati, Mario Rigoni Stern, Francesco Biamonti, Mauro Corona.

Roaming and seeking trees, I am frequently reminded of one particular passage from Walking, by Henry David Thoreau:

Now this future has arrived. In my travels I come across so many obstacles, everywhere you find these ‘pleasure-grounds’, private limits, gates, bans, prohibitions, no entry, no passing, no walking. So many old trees are situated in private gardens and parks. And you have to be very lucky to be able to talk with the right person who will give you permission to walk to that point in the landscape where a three hundred year old oak is living. In my country, Italy, the situation is sometimes really complicated: if a man desires to walk along the coast of a region such as Liguria, a thin, long strip of hills on the Mediterranean sea, most of it is private and it is quite impossible to go and look at the sea. Think what has happened to countryside that only half a century ago was populated mainly by peasants, fishermen and petty artisans.

These are some of the troubles you face, thanks to private property. Imagine, then, how it fills me with admiration to discover that in the UK, ten years ago, a law was passed dedicated to the free movement of persons: the Countryside and Rights of Way Act. This is the second article of the deposition:

In Italy, one cannot imagine a politician or a party proposing such a law. In a country where every sector is corrupt and private affairs dominate the daily agenda, crowned by a Prime Minister applauded for being the richest of men, a philosophy of freedom is too anarchic to be understood. Today a man, a modern Italian man, is free only to earn, to advance his career, and to make more private property his own. He is not free to respect such laws as these.

Enter any public space, such as a park, a castle, a country house, even botanic gardens and you will encounter nothing but barriers. You have to request permission to take pictures of a tree, if you propose to show these in an exhibition or put them into a book. They – directors, managers, secretaries – imagine that your sole purpose must be to earn buckets, (since everyone knows how popular books about trees are in the martketplace – don’t they just fly off the shelves in their millions?) Persons paid by the government request that you, a tax-paying regular sort of citizen, pay them for permission to evaluate and promote the beauty of nature as it is protected by that same government. A simple writer may be requested to prove his or her status. Are you really a Writer, beginning with a capital letter, or only a writer in small letters? You know, we cannot give permission to all!

I have come to the conclusion that it will be worthwhile to start a campaign to give persons who lay claim to any of the declensions of the word “tree seeker” (similar to “tree hugger”), a right to roam in private and public areas, to walk around old trees and to take pictures without any limit of use. These are treasures of humanity not to be placed in the same commodified category as a painting, say, or a statue or a personal document. Above all, if these trees have lasted for two hundred, five hundred, twelve hundred years old – we cannot let them be relegated to the sphere of private property.

Roger Deakin, the British environmentalist and writer, as he pursued his wild swimming through the lakes, and rivers of the UK in the 1990s, advocated open access to the countryside and waterways. The outcome was his book Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain. It echoes similar ideas in John Krakauer’s Into the Wild, in which the journalist describes the life of Chris McCandless, the young man from Virginia who toured that country and also Mexico for two years before ranging the Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska, where he died from starvation. (In 2007, the book became a wonderful movie directed by Sean Penn and acted by Emile Hirsh). Touring the country McCandless learns how to overcome some ridiculous laws and limits placed on his movement, such as whether you are allowed to cross or surf a river nine, ten, or twelve years after making a booking to do so. The owner of one big specimen of Cedrus libani in my own region of Italy once asked me to wait ten years before visiting it!

What is necessary is a general right. In the meanwhile, perhaps it is sufficient to extract permission for Tree Seekers to book visits to trees without this somehow depriving the owners of their rights of privacy and ownership. A Tree Seeker is not an enemy of the State, or of the status quo, even though he or she could be highly critical of many aspects of the present situation. Maybe such a thing could be organized through regional websites managed by a local administration that maintains relations with the relevant owners, institutions and the people involved.

Man has to be free to touch nature, to demonstrate this aspect of what a man is: part of nature, a living being, a creature. For believers this is a divine architecture: for nonbelievers, it is the natural scheme of Mother Nature.

Tiziano Fratus (www.opendemocracy.net)

Authentic journalism: weapon of the people

2010-11-20T07:35:00.000-08:00

Newspapers are downsizing and going out of business. Major broadcast, satellite and cable news organizations are outsourcing and closing international bureaus. The credibility of commercial journalism is at an all time low. And with these events comes the constant tearful drumbeat by media commentators that “the media are in crisis” and lament that this is supposedly bad for democracy.

They have it backwards: News media have lost credibility, audience and budget precisely because their editorial behavior has helped produce crisis and become a burden, not a benefit, to democracies.

In the United States, we know that the jig is up when complaints about “the media” are now so popular that an entire sub-industry of commercial cable TV media has identified the public’s discontent as its very own market niche and now rents its attention to advertisers. From the U.S., – a country whose few surviving net export products include media and entertainment – came a recent example in late October when cable channel Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert drew hundreds of thousands of citizens to “The Rally for Sanity and/or Fear” in Washington, DC, which The New York Times described as “an expensive, engrossing act of media criticism.”

There, Stewart aimed a brilliant critique at the “24-hour political pundit professional panic conflictinator;” the amalgam of cable TV “news,” newspapers (both high and lowbrow), magazines, radio and Internet commentators that drum up the daily outrage on all sides around the ever-changing scandal du jour. “The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen,” Stewart said, “or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected dangerous flaming ant epidemic.”

While the daily struggles of people and even entire nations receive passing, superficial or no attention from the mainstream media after the first days of a story’s novelty (a movement in Iran, resistance to a coup in Honduras, the aftershocks of an earthquake in Haiti and its people’s efforts to rebuild are some recent examples of the mass media’s attention deficit disorder), media organizations have been reduced to chasing ever smaller subgroups of audience share and can only hold their attention by pandering to each group’s prejudices and preconceptions. In the U.S., Fox News tells the bloodthirsty right what it wants to hear, MSNBC seeks a similar market on the unhappy left, and now Comedy Central caters to those of us who are annoyed by both political flanks and seek a little comic relief.

It is already cliché to say that “the problem of media” is now central among the challenges to democracy, freedom and justice. The bigger question and challenge is: What can we do about it?

The Internet, we were told by its pioneers, would solve all this for us, providing a shiny new world of democratized media. But no matter how much “new media” appears to displace its predecessors, the old rules still apply: Power concentrates around those who already have it, and each new run at it from below is absorbed by even newer technologies of cooptation.

Yet, there are cracks in the shifting media landscape that can be exploited and widened from below, presenting opportunities to those who have critical stories to tell and are resourceful enough to create their own media to do so.

After working as a journalist in commercial newspapers, magazines, radio and television and early Internet provider services, in the 1990’s I left behind the commercial media (a category which properly must include state-owned media, from PBS to BBC to Al Jazeera) and never looked back. For the past ten years I’ve published Narco News – www.narconews.com - reporting from Latin America, and founded its School of Authentic Journalism, which trains talented young men and women of social conscience to put journalism to use for the good of societies rather than only the good of one’s career. If we take any lesson from having survived the dot-com boom, the dot-com bust, and the encroachment by big media on the Internet over the past decade, it is that David can still fell Goliath, but not by becoming over-enamored with the latest technology available. Far from it: The new and shiny gizmos can’t save us. They’re tools we can use, but the dinosaurs use them too!

For over ten years our own laboratory in creating media from below, rejecting advertising as a funding model (instead relying on the small contributions of hundreds of readers and supporters), has come up with many ideas and innovations, too many to list in a single essay, but the most important, we conclude, are two:

1. A people’s media must take back journalism from the mass media.

The main reasons that so much “alternative journalism” and its younger cousin, “digital activism,” have failed to captivate the public’s attention and support, are that too many of these projects either deteriorated into the equivalent of predictable sloganeering and pamphleteering, or they put too much faith in technology when the real challenge is a human one. The public still wants and respects truthful investigative reporting presented coherently with good writing and decent production value. But from so many bloggers to the much decomposed Indymedia projects, their pages have become spaces for denouncing supposed evils and shouting strident opinions, much like the commercial news outlets they rail against, with very little sense of public service and of opening space for the people themselves to speak. Work that is sloppily done is more easily co-opted, too, by institutional media organizations that often repackage (and distort) the reports of citizen journalists on the justification of “fixing” them to “meet international standards.” The more coherence with which a story is told provides it better defenses against such appropriation and distortion.

Citizen journalism, in some corners, however, has shown it can take from big media what they claim to do and do it better: Go out there and report stories, interview real people, make sure their voices are heard accurately and without distortion, investigate and produce documents and evidence of official wrongdoing (the staggering public support and donations to Wiki-Leaks, for example, indicate a significant hunger and thirst for this kind of reporting). In sum, the solution is no more complicated than embarking on a humble return to the basics of reporting a news story: the proverbial “who, what, when, where, why and how” of what happens each day in human events.

One doesn’t need a degree from a two- or four-year journalism school to grasp and implement these basics. The School of Authentic Journalism teaches the core of it in ten days, much of it in one plenary session. The gist of it can be learned, now, from a seven-minute Internet video:

In sum, journalism is no more nor less than honest storytelling. And since most people have some skill at telling stories, certainly their own if not others, it is a craft that is accessible and available for most people to learn and practice.

Journalism must be demystified and returned to the people. Most people on earth don’t get their stories told in the media, or worse, they are “told” but falsely or tendentiously, so it’s no wonder they’re tuning out from the media, or even when tuning in, disgusted with it. Through the telling of stories of the great mass of people “down below” who are mostly under the mass media radar, authentic journalists gain the attention and earn a chance at the trust of the very public that the mass media left behind. And this brings us to our second main conclusion:
2. The best teachers of those who want to save journalism are those who are already struggling to save their communities, peoples and nations.

Commercial media’s relationship with social movements, civil resistance, and other popular struggles is either one of neglect or outright hostility. People organizing for their human and economic rights, for justice, for freedom, for more democracy, are generally ignored or treated with great condescension by institutional media organizations. Much of this happens because the interests that movements and peoples struggle against – corporations and governments – are the power-holders that commercial and state-owned media have chosen to favor and indulge well before movements erupt to challenge them. Thus, media and its practitioners now find themselves in a struggle of their own for survival, but without a clue as to how to wage that fight, because they don’t understand the dynamics – strategic, tactical and moral – of political dissidence and social movements.

We conclude that simply sharing the skills and tools of communications – the “know how” of journalism – with a wider public, important as it is, offers only half a solution. The other half requires that authentic journalists walk with social movements, place ourselves closer to them, and become something more than mere reporters of their stories, but students of their strategies and tactics.

At the School of Authentic Journalism, a large part of our curriculum is to listen to people who have organized and led successful civil resistance, community organizing campaigns, and strategic nonviolent struggles, and learn something more complicated than the all important basics of journalism, too: the underlying strategic dynamics of such conflicts and movements, so they can be reported effectively.

At the 2010 School of Authentic Journalism, we heard from the Rev. Jim Lawson – the right-hand strategist of Martin Luther King, Jr. and organizer of the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins of 1960 – during multiple sessions of the school. Here’s a video, made by students and professors who were there, that shares part of what we learned from Lawson in Mexico:

It has been through reporting on the struggles of indigenous peoples, environmental and labor movements, civil resistance against coups d’etat, and corporate and government abuses, that we, as authentic journalists, began to get a clue as to how to wage our own struggle to dislodge and replace the official media that so ill serve and worsen the injustice and repression that disfigure societies on every continent. We’ve done this mainly in Latin America, where such movements have obtained many victories over the past decade. To us, reporting their stories has also provided us with ways to develop strategies and tactics to win our own struggles to bring forth a more authentic journalism in service of the people.

Our path out of today’s media miasma is thus found by starting over: Democratic society cries out for a return to the fundamentals of what old media claimed to be: the simple slingshot of real, truth-and-clarity-seeking, shoe-leather-eroding, Old School reporting and journalism; the kind that bubbles up from the streets and back roads where real people live and work and, regularly throughout history, helped citizens to reassert ourselves as captains of our own destinies. History has always been written by such struggles, and the present time is no different.

The life’s blood that gave birth to all freedoms and to all democracies throughout history has been people’s movements and struggles.

The road to a more authentic journalism is found by walking alongside, learning from, and reporting on those movements

Al Giordano, 19 November 2010

How Teaching with English Games Helps Children Learn

2010-11-04T15:22:00.000-07:00

There are many ways to teach ESL/TEFL to children but one of the most exciting and rewarding ways to do it is by using English games.

English Games not only engage the children, but also teach through play – and most of the time the children don’t even know they are learning until the time comes to show their knowledge! It truly is possible (and almost necessary) to create a classroom where the students not only learn but also truly enjoy their time there.

Incorporating English games into the classroom can build interest in the class, put language in an interesting and meaningful context, give students a break from the pressures of learning a new language while giving the break a purpose, teach real world skills and, most importantly, build the student/teacher bond.

Building Interest in the Class

While many of us might not like to admit it, many children don't necessarily like the idea of being in our classes to learn a new language. Even more, as teachers we all know that even the most attentive children can get bored and lose focus on occasion. Incorporating English games is a great way to get out of the rut of language drills, worksheets, boring repetition and individual study. If you can find ways to keep the children interested in class (i.e. through fun English games), they will also find that they are interested in the topic – and will often absorb and retain more knowledge than if they are simply studying to pass a test or complete an assignment.

Friendly competition is also great to keep children interested – it often is the one encourager that they need to actively participate in any classroom activity. The outcome of the game (even if it is simply knowing the score at the end of the game) gives them a concrete and immediate incentive to use the language as dictated by the game.

Putting Language in Useful and Meaningful Context

Repetition is necessary for fluency, yet there is nothing more meaningless than repetition in a void. If you ask your class to keep repeating words back at you they’ll start to feel like parrots.

Also, if you want the children to practice conversation you have a few options. The problem with most options is that the class is either practicing this real life usage in small groups that don't have you there to observe and offer assistance or much of the class is left to work on their own while you have a conversation with one or two pupils at a time.

English Games solve this because they allow you to engage the entire class in activities that require practical use. When children learning ESL get this meaningful and contextual practice, the language becomes more vivid in their minds and they are better able to remember what they've learned and used.

Furthermore, English games often encourage pupils to use language spontaneously and to think for themselves and they give children the confidence they need to go out and use the language in real-world settings.

Giving Students a Break

Learning a new language is intense and even sometimes stressful. English Games allow ESL pupils to have a break from the rigor of learning a new language. If you find the right kinds of games this break can have purpose and make useful the time spent on the break because they are still practicing their skills. In addition, the students will be totally immersed in the focus of the game and they’ll be learning before they even realize what's happening.

Teaching Real World Skills

Teachers who successfully use English games in their classrooms will tell you there are more benefits than those just related to learning the language. English Games give opportunities for shy students to express themselves in a non-threatening environment. The class will learn to work together as a whole or as small groups. English Games can also promote competition in a healthy, fair manner, if you chose to use them that way.

Creating a Student/Teacher Bond

Finally, as a teacher I’m sure you want to build a bond with your pupils. Playing English games does this in so many ways. You’ll be able to show yourself as a person, not just a teacher, as you encourage your students to do well in the game, or join in with them. Playing games also creates a positive learning environment that allows children to relax and enjoy themselves and those around them.

While some people still look at games as "time fillers" in a classroom, when used correctly they can actually replace "traditional" teahttp://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=3651650886467060685ching time with activities that give the students (and teachers) so many more benefits than lectures, worksheets and boring repetition.

Shelley Vernon has inspired thousands of esl teachers with her games. Get her free games now to make your teaching fun and improve the effectiveness of your lessons by up to 80%. Receive the free games now! Teaching English Games website.

By Shelley Vernon

Review

2010-10-24T07:46:00.001-07:00

NonMiPiaceIlCirco! ‘Just a Bunch of Unresolved Cases’

(Movimente Flaneur/Believe 2010)

Più che, citando il nome dell’album, casi irrisolti, siamo di fronte a bozzetti musicali dalle origini più disparate. I NonMiPiaceIlCirco! (sì, da scrivere tutto attaccato) sono un duo basso/batteria più gingilli elettronici vari che parte da una radice blues per esplorare i meandri dell’oscurità dell’animo umano sotto varie luci. Ambient, electro-pop, industrial e teatralismo waitsiano sono solo forme che modellano l’esplorazione surreale del duo, che monta un lavoro indefinito ed indefinibile, sfilacciato ma volutamente tale.

Un puzzle sconclusionato che mescola continuamente le sue tessere e si rende incompleto perché non completabile. E pensare che il dolce pop pianistico di Archimedes che apre il disco farebbe pensare a 45 minuti di atmosfere mielose ai limiti della musica classica. Niente di più sbagliato. Con Mind/Body Connection inizia l’ispessimento della trama musicale: chitarre e drum machine, pur restando dalle parti di un pop tra le cui pieghe fa capolino l’elettronica, inizia a mostrare le prime tracce di uno spostamento verso la destrutturazione. Destrutturazione che diventa evidente nel ronzio elettroacustico da messa nera di V?, una sorta di rito oscuro che ci fa sprofondare in un oceano di dolore. Dopo essere affogati nell’oscurità, ci rendiamo conto che non è poi così male crogiolarcisi. Ed ecco allora il sound meccanico-industriale (memore delle “prove tecniche di trasmissione” dei Piano Magic di “Popular Mechanics”) della coppia Taos Buzz/Extrasensorial Perception. Si arriva così a Step By Step, Side By Side, un teatro dell’assurdo tra gorgoglii pattoniani e suoni da strumenti giocattolo. Ghosts torna in territori a noi più noti con un accorato grido di dolore voce/batteria sostenuto da un docile flauto. D’improvviso il male sparisce come un brutto sogno ed eccoci nel blues-pop di Missing People. È tornata la luce? Ma neanche per sogno. Con Like Dying il blues-jazz di Tom Waits incontra il meccanicismo nevrotico della parte centrale dell’album creando un calderone inestricabile che forse riflette il malessere interiore del duo. Torna per un attimo la calma, con la tenue Lullaby, ma il finale è da incubo. Sky Theory guarda al cosmo, tra field recordings e suoni ancestrali orrorifici.
“Just a Bunch of Unresolved Cases” è tutto e il suo contrario. Ma sembra più un esperimento, una prova generale per la definizione del proprio sound più che un lavoro unitario, ponderato e definitivo. Molti gli spunti interessanti, ovviamente concentrati nelle tracce più “spinte”, ma i nostri devono ancora trovare la strada.

Aggiunto: October 10th 2010
Recensore: Marco Pagliariccio
Voto:

IDontLikeDaMovie

2010-09-11T07:54:00.001-07:00

Cari/e, (in English, bottom)

il tour canadese dei NonMiPiaceIlCirco! è giunto al termine:

da Vancouver, passando per Edmonton, fino a Calgary, per 8 date. il risultato è IDontLikeDaMovie, un video amatoriale al massimo, senza effetti speciali, il quale include alcuni estratti live, intervallati da vedute e impressioni delle varie città. Sarà trasmesso durante il mese di ottobre su alcune webTv.

eccovi di seguito il link alla prima parte:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-09GqBmOgY

inoltre, sul canale youtube : movimentoflaneurarts, potrete trovare i brani per ogni singolo brano del tour.

Grazie per il sostegno!
MF
________---------------____________________

Dear friends,

NonMiPiaceIlCirco! Canada Tour is over.
From Vancouver, through Calgary, till Edmonton, the duo played 8 gigs. The result is IDontLikeDaMovie, an amateur movie (it's not a porn, sorry:)), which included live excerpts and some shots about impressions and views of that amazing places.

Here is the link (PART 1):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-09GqBmOgY

Thank you!

MF

Il Polo Nord? Io ci sono stato

2010-09-01T14:26:00.000-07:00

http://www.ontheroadnews.eu/indexa-id-2120_0-154-2007.html

Meraviglie artiche. Ci sono pochi spettacoli affascinanti come essere sulla vetta del mondo. Anche se non lo si può sempre raggiungere come se niente fosse. Quello che rimane bene impresso nella mente è l’immagine del Grande Bianco che gioca con le acque gelate. Il Circolo Polare Artico, punto di incontro tra la Scandinavia e la Russia, offre al visitatore differenti panorami cromatici: dal verde delle foreste più estreme fino al bianco delle misteriose Svalbard, passando per il blu dei laghi sparsi tra le piccole montagne. Il Polo Nord non è una invenzione fantastica e la possibilità di poter raggiungere il silenzio avvolgente del pack esiste davvero.
Abisso. Il parco offre diversi luoghi interessanti, il più spettacolare è l’ Abisko Canyon. In questo punto, il fiume omonimo si tuffa formando una parete di venti metri d’altezza. L’area è ben nota dagli amanti della flora montana la quale include delle orchidee rare. Il monte Nuolja si distende sul lato ovest del parco, terra dei Saami svedesi, il primo popolo ad abitare queste terre remote. La sua ubicazione non è difficile da raggiungere, grazie alla funivia Sky Aurora che porta fino alla sua cima, d’inverno e d’estate. Da lì si può ammirare il sole di mezzanotte, da maggio a luglio. Il panorama offre i laghi ghiacciati di Torneträsk e Njakajaure, con le montagne intorno e la porta per la Lapponia (Lapporten). A sud-est del massiccio, nella vallata, vi è l’Abisko Naturum, il quale fornisce al visitatore dei cenni sulla geologia, la flora e la fauna dell’area. Grazie agli elicotteri della Artic Elements si può sorvolare l’intera area e pernottare liberamente in piccoli rifugi.
Lofoten. Una serie infinita di architteture sorprendenti appare nella bellezza naturale della Norvegia. Se non ci fosse questa struttura, è arduo scovare il fiume di un blu intenso, incorniciato da montagne innevate alle sue spalle. Dalla strada, la piattaforma metallica Gudbrandsjuvet, parte di un progetto di restyling di ben diciotto percorsi autostradali, appare come un immenso serpente che fa zigzag tra gli alberi. Ci sono più di quarantacinque progetti in corso per fornire aree picnic, di sosta e installazioni d’arte contemporanea. Una passeggiata in legno con angoli accortocciati, come fossero fogli di carta, porta nelle varie isole. Vi è anche una Rest House per ciclisti d’un giallo sgargiante. Anche la Snøhetta’s Eggum, una “banale” area di servizio, sembra qualcosa di imperdibile lassù. La struttura più ambiziosa e impressionante è lo Stegastein, l’osservatorio in legno nell’ Aurland fjord.
Calotta Polare Artica. Dalle isole Svalbard, porta d’ingresso principale per il Polo e terra dei primi cercatori di fortuna russi, si può salire a bordo di jet privati per atterrare più vicino possibile al punto più settentrionale, oppure, tramite elicotteri, sorvolare vicino all’area. Un paesaggio spoglio e duro. La calotta polare artica. L’unico posto in cui si può soggiornare è la Base Barneo. L’ oceano irrompe fra ghiacciai e iceberg, severo e inesorabile. I racconti delle spedizioni delle guide e degli scienziati avvenute negli anni in questo luogo estremo, non solo per le temperature, allietano il tragitto. “Sono in cima a tutto e tutti” diceva Hudson, il primo esploratore inglese a metterci piede. La vita scorre molto lentamente, tra ricerche e i rari turisti interessati a provare qualcosa di certamente indimenticabile. Facendo un giro panoramico in elicottero è anche possibile avvistare gli orsi polari a caccia di foche e, a seconda delle più o meno buone condizioni meteorologiche, raggiungere i 90 gradi di latitudine.

Matteo Preabianca

searchin mistakes

2010-08-27T08:48:00.000-07:00

Here is "THE MORAL MATTER MOVES FROM PARTIES TO PUBLISHING COMPANIES" by Roberto Cirillo. It is an exercise in order to improve your writing, correcting the mistakes:

Ethical crisis in Mondadori publishing company, after ( La Repubblica, 19th August) Massimo Giannini’s investigation: a law, recently approved by Italian parliament, would give the chance to Mondadori to close a dispute with the Agency of taxation with a great “discount” (8, 6 euro millions instead of a total of 350). Vito Mancuso, theologian and author in Mondadori, can’t hold back his painful disappointment: “How can I make ethics the north star of my theology, and then publish my books by a company that would show, not only about ethics but even about law, a peculiar conception?”. The “discount” has the appearence of a favour by the President Berlusconi, owner of the company. “This time as an author I can’t tell myself that the company itself has nothing to do with its owner’s political and law affairs” Mancuso writes on La Repubblica, august 21st. He’s now evalueating his next (already under contract) publication by Mondadori, and extends his conscience doubts to other authors writing for the publishing company, such as Piergiorgio Odifreddi, Asor Rosa, Gustavo Zagrebelsky and Roberto Saviano.
Mondadori replies they have nothing to regret, because they just followed two virdicts that wanted them winners. So no “ad aziendam” laws (custom-made laws). But at the same time answers to Mancuso’s conscience call are coming from various authors. “I’m in doubt if to stay or not” says Zagrebelsky, author in Einaudi, in corporation with Mondadori. “Actually Mondadori made the most of a law regarding all of the companies. But that law comes straightly from the man who is at the same time owner of the company and the Prime Minister: that’s the point. Everything’s reported to Berlusconi’s conflict of interests”. Asor Rosa, great italianist and strong opposer of Berlusconi, answers: “I wrote only once by Mondadori, and it was before the actual ownership. I have built trustful relationships with editors and the editorial office. We’re not in a regime […] Here I never heard the ownership has ever touched anything, or asked Einaudi to chase away unappreciated authors”. On the same line of thought, Odifreddi (also author in Mondadori) goes further and sinks a blow in Mancuso’s case of conscience: “His reasonment is very catholic. But why this wonder? Politics has always lavished favours to companies, and not only to them. As a mathematician, I calculate that Catholic Church receivs from the State about 1 billion through the “8 per mille” (the law through which the State funds the different religions, ndr). Excluding the taxes that the Church doesn’t pay to the italian State on the real estate buying and selling. Benefits much bigger than the ones Berlusconi enjoys. Maybe Mancuso should consider his belonging to the Catholic Church too. In the end, Marcello Veneziani, writer on Il Giornale (Berlusconi’s nrewpaper) concentrates on the each one’s case of conscience. “An author has the only responsibility for his/her own books, not for his/her publishing company’s account books. Many italian entrepreneurs have received tax favours, and all publishing companies take advantage from this law. But then: attack the law on a political level! Shouldn’t we buy books any more to become coscientious objectors (or militant fools)? And what mass exodous to the nothing would happen if all of the authors should decide to object (causing an editorial emptiness)? There is a field where a writer can be judged: his/her work. A field where a company can be judged: the penal and civil code. And a field where a government and its laws must be judged: and it’s the political level”.

Back to School in Style

2010-08-19T18:06:00.000-07:00

Whether it’s a move to a residence or a small off-campus apartment, space is often limited when you’re on a student budget, not to mention the difficulty of creating a decor style of your own. Here's a few ideas to create a budget-friendly oasis that will look and function like a million bucks:

Storage: Over the door hooks can keep laundry, backpacks, purses and bathing totes off the floor and in plain view at all times. An under-bed drawer is a great place to keep extra bedding or out of season clothing. A freestanding, over the bed bookshelf is a great vertical storage addition for alarm clock, books, photo albums, etc.

Double-duty furnishings: A desk chair should be comfy enough to do homework, but then act as an occasional chair when a friend visits; a storage ottoman allows you to put your feet up, acts as an additional perch for friends to sit and of course can be used to hide dirty clothes until laundry day

Whether it’s a move to a residence or a small off-campus apartment, space is often limited when you’re on a student budget, not to mention the difficulty of creating a decor style of your own. Here's a few ideas to create a budget-friendly oasis that will look and function like a million bucks:

Storage: Over the door hooks can keep laundry, backpacks, purses and bathing totes off the floor and in plain view at all times. An under-bed drawer is a great place to keep extra bedding or out of season clothing. A freestanding, over the bed bookshelf is a great vertical storage addition for alarm clock, books, photo albums, etc.

Double-duty furnishings: A desk chair should be comfy enough to do homework, but then act as an occasional chair when a friend visits; a storage ottoman allows you to put your feet up, acts as an additional perch for friends to sit and of course can be used to hide dirty clothes until laundry day

Make the 2010 school year your most colourful yet
. Just five ingredients make for easy student grub
. Host an outdoor party on a budget
. Your decor should match your style

Make the 2010 school year your most colourful yet
. Just five ingredients make for easy student grub
. Host an outdoor party on a budget
. Your decor should match your style

KARL LOHNES
FOR METRO CANADA
Published: August 19, 2010 10:53 a.m

2010-08-12T11:54:00.000-07:00

VideoBlog (from 14th August): Italians Do It Better ... our tour, our feeling, your smile:)

Stay tuned!

The Chinese Phonetic Alphabet

2010-07-26T11:48:00.000-07:00

There have been many different systems of transcription used for learning to pronounce Chinese. Today the official transcription accepted on an international basis is the Pinyin alphabet, developed in China at the end of the 1950's.

A syllable in Chinese is composed of an initial, which is a consonant that begins the syllable, and a final, wich covers the rest of the syllable.

b p m f
d t n l
g k h
j q x
z c s
zh ch sh r

* m, f, n, l, h and sh are pronounced as in English.
* d like "d" in "bed" (unaspirated)
j like "g" in "genius" (unaspirated)
z like "ds" in "beds"
zh like "j" in "job"
b like "p" in "spin" (unaspirated)
g a soft unaspirated "k" sound
x like "sh" in "sheep" but with the corners of the lips drawn back
r somewhat like "r" in "rain"
* Particular attention should be paid to the pronunciation of the so-called "aspirated" consonants. It is necessary to breath heavily after the consonant is pronounced.
p like "p" in "pope"
t like "t" in "tap"
k like "k" in "kangaroo"
q harder than "ch" in "cheap"
c like "ts" in "cats"
ch (tongue curled back, aspirated)
* Distinction between certain initials:
b / p d / t g / k j / q z / c zh / ch

In modern Chinese, there are 38 finals besides the above-represented 21 initials.

i u ü
a ia ua
o uo üe
e ie
er
ai uai
ei uei (ui)
ao iao
ou iou (iu)
an ian uan üan
en in uen (un) üen
ang iang uang
eng ieng ueng
ong iong

* ie like "ye" in "yes"
* e like "e" in "her"
* er like "er" in "sister" (american pronounciation)
* ai like "y" in "by" (light)
* ei like "ay" in "bay"
* ou like "o" in "go"
* an like "an" in "can" (without stressing the "n")
* -ng (final) a nasalized soung like the "ng" in "bang" without pronouncing the "g"
* uei, uen and iou when preceded by an initial, are written as ui, un and iu respectivly.

Tones
Mandarin Chinese has four pitched tones and a "toneless" tone.

Tone Mark Description
1st dā High and level
2nd dá Starts medium in tone, then rises to the top
3rd dǎ Starts low, dips to the bottom, then rises toward the top
4th dà Starts at the top, then falls sharp and strong to the bottom
Neutral da Flat, with no emphasis

Tones Changes
A 3rd tone, when immediatlely followed by another 3rd tone, should pe pronounced in the 2nd tone.

Nǐ hǎo = Ní hǎo

Qualities of a Good Special Education Teacher

2010-07-20T05:35:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered what makes a great special education teacher? What separates a mediocre teacher from a terrific teacher? It's not easy to define, however, here's a list of qualities listed by parents, principals, educators and students.

Are you a Top Special Education Teacher?

1. You love your role, you love being with your students and you couldn't imagine doing anything else. You were meant to teach special needs children, you know this in your heart.

2. You have a great deal of patience and know that little steps in learning go a long way.

3. You know your students well and they are comfortable and at ease with you, they enjoy having you as their teacher and look forward to going school each day.

4. You provide a non-threatening, welcoming environment that nurtures each of the students you work with.

5. You understand your students, you know what motivates them and you know how to scaffold activities to ensure that maximum learning occurs.

6. You take each student from where they are and provide experiences that will maximize success. You're always discovering new things about your students.

7. You are very comfortable working with exceptional learners and learners with diverse needs.

8. You thrive on challenge, can easily build relationships with your students and your student's parents.

9. You are a life-long learner and committed to the profession.

10. You have a never ending willingness to ensure that all students reach their maximum potential. You constantly strive to 'reach and teach' every student under your care.

(http://specialed.about.com)

Buzzwords in Marketing

2010-07-14T09:06:00.000-07:00

Buzzwords in Marketing

“Marketing is fertile territory for buzzwords because it is closely related to being modern and fashionable”.

Marketeers will tell you that marketing is the most important function in a company. People from other departments will probably tell you that marketing is the most self important department in the company. Either way, marketing is in fashion and has a lot of related jargon.

Marketing is not just about selling but about establishing a presence in the market for the company´s products and services through the marketing-mix. To do this the department must understand the customers perfectly and fit in with their lifestyle. An important element in this process is to have a data warehouse so that marketeers are well-informed about their customers.
A small company is probably looking for a large share of a niche market rather than a small share of a large market.

Relationship Marketing
One of the most fashionable ideas in this area is “relationship marketing”. This concept implies that the company becomes the customer´s “friend”, treating him or her as an individual with specific needs and tastes. The company thus builds up a long-term relationship with the customer by responding to these requirements. One way of doing this is by creating a help desk. Another is to offer affinity cards or loyalty cards which reward the customer for continuing the relationship. An example would be the VIPS card in Spain. Other examples are the air miles offered by certain airlines and the well-known cards that accumulate credit points while purchasing certain products. Everyday people see new offers and ideas coming to the surface and it takes some time to get used to them. They sometimes do not know exactly what to choose because of the huge amount of offers and they find themselves immerse in a world full of adds, credit points, rewards, discounts, free services, publicity and more. Some people may see this as smoke and mirrors or gimmicks. Either way marketing is here to stay, so we had better get used to all those new “friends” we have unwittingly acquired.

Here are some useful terms I have chosen from the text above:

Marketeers: specialists in marketing
Self-important: having an excessively-high opinion of your own importance
Jargon: vocabulary specific to a profession
Presence: significant market-share and influence in a sector, public awareness (people have heard of your company)
Marketing-mix: combination of activities of advertising, selling and the promotion of concepts
Data warehouse: a collection of useful information
Share: (market share) part of a market controlled by one company
Niche: a small, profitable segment of market
To build up: (in this context) create over a long period of time
Help desk: a hot line, a telephone, fax or e-mail service which solves customers´ problems
Affinity/loyalty cards: identity cards which records each transaction to accumulate credit points for future discounts or benefits
Smoke and mirrors: insubstantial effects to get people´s attention. Originally referring to magic performances
Gimmicks: something designed to attract extra attention, interest or publicity

by anicasi (http://www.proz.com/profile/1029649)

How To Give a Powerful Introduction in a Speech

2010-07-08T02:33:00.000-07:00

Giving a speech could be a frightening experience. The key is how you get the ball rolling. Aside from early preparation that is an advantage to a successful speech, it can be a memorable one if you will have a powerful introduction. How you start your speech makes a difference in building your authority and trustworthiness with your audience.

Here are some tips to help you give your speech a powerful introduction.

Prepare ahead of time. Make a list or an outline of the things that you want to say. Think of your audience and where they come from. If they are kids, you can start your speech by coming up with something that you just discovered or ask them a question about the stars or the planets. If your speaking in front of professionals, come up with a question about their profession that will make them hang on to your speech to find out the answer.

There are several ways to start your speech. A powerful introduction maybe any of the following techniques and it all depends on which of these you think suits your style and your personality.

A story catches your listener's attention and leads to your speech proper.
Cracking a joke is one of the most effective ways, but keep in mind that this is a very delicate approach.
A drama is something like, "What I am about to say in a few seconds will definitely change the way you think about things." Your line should be very catching to get your audience's attention.
Asking a question could be fascinating, absorbing, intriguing. Ask a question that will focus them to your speech.

Use an index card in writing key words for your introduction. Do not write long sentences. You will only refer to your index card to remind you of what you're going to say. Index cards are not there for you to read your speech. Reading parts of your speech might only get you distracted and eventually go out of the topic, losing your opportunity for a powerful introduction.

Know your speech by heart, especially the introduction. Once you memorize, it won't be hard for you to recall every part just by looking at the keywords written on your index card. You can memorize your speech by practicing it everyday.

Practice your speech in front of the mirror, taking note of your mannerisms and gestures. Your body language can make a great impact on your listeners. Recording your speech on video will give you a chance to review your pronunciations, clarity and voice modulation. Correct pronunciations will give integrity, voice modulation radiates professionalism. You don't want to sound like an eight year old in front of stockholders, for example. Stress out points by raising the tone of your voice and you can generate curiosity and intrigue by toning it down. One good exercise is to ask some of your friends to listen to your speech, asking them for points that you can keep and those that need to be changed.

Walk to the podium with confidence when you are finally introduced. The walk from your seat to the lectern might be short but how you will do it will tell if you have something worthwhile to say.

By Yael Woods

Ciao!

2010-07-07T05:29:00.001-07:00

WELCOME TO MY BLOG!