Internet

What I learned about the Internet in Spanish class

Visualization of the various routes through a ...
Visualization of the structure
of a piece of the Internet. from Wikipedia

The main topic of today’s Spanish class was teleadicción – television addiction. To start it off, we had to do a little self-test that would supposedly determine how addicted we are to television. After reading the first question, I immediately had to raise my hand — I couldn’t answer the question, as I don’t have a TV set. It quickly turned out I’m not alone: of the 15 or so that were there today, only two students had a television!

For myself — and I gather that the same applies for most of my classmates — this doesn’t mean I don’t watch any television shows. It’s just that with Internet-enabled computers, you can watch all of that content without a television set.

As we went through the self-test (instead of us all taking it, each of us got to read out a question and the two lone TV owners had to answer) something interesting occurred to me. The Internet, so often blamed for distraction and even the destruction of the attention span, is actually something many of us use to better control our media consumption and the attendant distraction. I can hardly imagine it being a big deal if friends suddenly pop over while I’m watching my favorite show (one of the scenarios in the self-test) — I could just pause it. Another scenario from the self-test, leaving a show on while doing chores, makes sense with a TV; something interesting might be on. Somehow it never occurred to me to do so with the shows I choose to watch. I’d put on music, not a show that would require more attention than I can give.

So while in some ways the Internet produces a lot of distraction, for me it also replaces technologies that were even worse, dictating when I get what content. I wonder if this is a sort of generational shift going on; the Spanish textbook which so brazenly assumed everyone has a TV set is less than 5 years old. I’m sure university students aren’t a representative sample, anyhow. But the consumption of shows might just be another area where the Internet is setting us free.

Internet

Annals of the robot Internet: Michael Sappir, Hamas copywriter

I woke up this morning to a very strange and unpleasant mention on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/usamasheriff/status/30143794527608832

Of course, it’s always possible the Israeli Right is, well, right, and that like all lefties I’m an unwitting copywriter for Hamas… But it’s unlikely, so I dilligently applied Occam’s Razor and concluded it must be a typo (okay, I mean I took a guess), and followed the link to see what it’s all about. It turned out to be an auto-generated newspaper-esque page of content — powered by paper.li — collected from tweets with the #Hamas hashtag, conveniently called “The #hamas Daily” — which is this case sounds like an official Hamas publication.

Since one of my posts yesterday was about topics related to Hamas and since I apply an excessive amount of tags, which Feedburner selectively-but-automatically turns into hashtags when tweeting my posts (see tweet below), I ended up being an unwitting copywriter for Hamas, who incidentally would like to kill almost everyone I love.

http://twitter.com/msappir/status/29931993890291713

I never used to believe it when they said machines will rise up to destroy us… But now I’m starting to see it… A conspiracy of half-intelligent automatons, interacting on the wild Internet, producing their own newspapers and slanderous tweets… They are the real enemy!!

Language, Links

The Passive in English

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Wheeeee!
Image by Erika Hall via Flickr, illustrating a real live passive (can you spot it?)

There’s an excellent essay by Geoffrey K. Pullum over at Language Log, in which he explains — in a way that anyone can understand if they try — what a passive construction in English is.

Our grumbling about how these people don’t know their passive from a hole in the ground, we have received mail from many people who want a clear and simple explanation of what a passive clause is. In this post I respond to those many requests. I’ll make it as clear and simple as I can, but it will be a 2500-word essay. I can’t make it simpler than it is.

Pullum and others at the Log rightly ridicule overzealous application of the “grammar rule” that the passive should be avoided at all times. I actually find the “rule” useful, and this is not incompatible with my agreeing with Pullum’s post. The passive is often used for blurring agentivity (even as it can be used for the exact opposite) or for sounding official/smart. As long as common sense (i.e. a native speaker’s intuition) comes first, I find I can actually make my writing simpler, more direct, and a better read by eliminating passives that only snuck in because part of me thought they sound smarter or something.

Also, when writing for EUDEC, I often find myself tempted to say something like “the wug ((“wug” doesn’t mean anything, but you probably know two or more of them would be “wugs”.)) was selected because…”, in order to glaze over the fact that the ones doing the choosing were, in fact, the Council I’m writing for. (I happen to always be a bit uncomfortable with our role as elected representatives, and I wish EUDEC were more of a direct democracy.) But having written something like, and being aware of the tempting perils of the passive, I often correct it to “we chose the wug because…”, which is both more honest and, I think, easier to read.

Anyway, Pullum’s essay will surely be a long-lasting contribution to the Internet war between descriptivists and prescriptivists, and is an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to find out, in just 2500 words and without needing a linguistic background, what the passive is. It’s also a neat example of the kind of thing linguists look into. So check it out.

Israel, Links

Interesting times…

Link 3 Comments

A lot is going on on the Israel/Palestine front in the last few days… Unfortunately I’m a bit bogged down with schoolwork and work, so don’t expect long screeds from me before the end of next week (when classes are over, though not the exams)…

Just a few interesting links for the moment.

“The Gaza Flotilla Inquiry: Afloat in a sea of whitewash”

Sunday, +972 Mag

Roi Maor going over some of the failings of Turkel Commission’s “investigation” of the Gaza siege and the attack of the Mavi Marmara; even information within the report, not to mention public announcements by officials, starkly contradict the Committee’s “conclusions”.

A kick in the Israeli Left’s collective behind [Hebrew]

Monday night, Friends of George

Itamar Sha’altiel is rightly pissed off at the Left’s decidedly lame reaction to the Palestine Papers, their decidedly lame reaction to everything else going on, and their decidedly lame habit of lamely reacting to everything — not to mention their preoccupation with stealing votes from one another rather than focussing on winning the public back from the Right. The Right, he points out, has mastered the steering of public discussion to the point that even their legislation of late seems mainly part of that manipulation. Meanwhile, the Left shows off its socially progressive legislative record, instead of asking the pointed questions that beg to be asked of those in power.

A truly inspiring rant of rage.

“The leaders got it all wrong: Palestinian view on Palestine Papers”

Today (Tuesday), +972 blog (guest post)

Maath Musleh discusses some of failings of the West Bank leadership (perhaps “ruling elite” would be a better word?), as well as Hamas, surrounding the Palestine Papers. The piece also points out that mere peace is not the end-goal:

What Abbas and his peers don’t understand is that peace is not the target. If peace was the target, then the Palestinians could have just left and handed over their land to the Israelis. There you go – no more war.

But this is not about peace. It is about rights and dignity. Of course everyone wants peace. But peace is not just an absence of war. Peace is a state of being, in which people have their rights and dignity. It’s a state of being whereby no one infringes on anyone’s rights. For the Palestinians, the state of peace is what will be when the occupation ends and the refugees have their rights and dignity.

I’ll leave you with that for now, and turn to doing the work I’m paid to do. (Case in point: putting together bibliography databases for the Baure Documentation Project.)

Education, Links

[Video] The Democratic School in Roskilde, Denmark

Video 1 Comment

Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle has made a nice little video about Den Demokratiske Skole in Roskilde, Denmark:

I’ve had the pleasure to know the founders/staff and the fortune of spending some time in the school (it was pretty funny seeing Christina and Niels with an English voice-over rather than just talking English!)

I could quibble about some details of how the school was presented but it was mainly just nice to see positive media coverage of a Sudbury school.

Education, Israel, Language

Extra-curricular activities…

3 Comments

Me and Sabine have both been itching to travel, and so we’ve been kicking around ideas for where we want to go after we finish our degrees. This morning we came up with a really exciting idea: a world tour of learning.

Basically, each station on our way around the world would be a place where we want to learn something. We were already discussing getting a driver’s license in Massachusetts, USA (because I have family there and it’s much easier than it is here or in Israel), and we have also been thinking of spending some time in Israel in which I could learn Arabic and Sabine could learn Hebrew. We might also, for example, go to learn how to cook a proper curry somewhere in India, learn to tango in Argentina… Who knows what else we might come up with.

Of course, we’ll also have to work somehow at most stations on the way, to fund the next leg of the trip… But every job would be a learning opportunity.

We’re thinking of what we can make out of this idea… It might also be something we want to blog about and publicize, to attract attention to all the non-traditional ways a person can learn in today’s world. It’ll be a while before we can start (we each have at least a year left for our degree) but I imagine I’ll be posting more as our plans develop.

Internet, Links

Sharing links

Aside 1 Comment

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how, where, and with whom I share interesting links I find. I first realized that sharing mainly on Facebook doesn’t make so much sense, since things I share there only reach my relatively list of friends, and only some of them are interested in each of the different topics that interest me. I’ve also started realizing that sharing links on Google Reader (which I do a lot) has basically the same problem (except worse, since I have 40 instead of 400 followers.)

Many of the things I want to share I want to share because I want to help make them public and spread. Since I’ve started using Twitter a lot lately, I guess Twitter is a good venue for this; links reach more people and can spread through Twitter’s huge, globe-spanning network. Of course, like all things Twitter, they easily get drowned out in the never-ending feed.

Of course there’s this blog of mine right here, but it’s too much work to blog all those links. I have to explain what it is I’m posting and why, and I read more than I could do that for.

But I might set up a separate feed for links, using Tumblr or something. Would anyone reading this be interested in that? Would anyone follow it?

Any other ideas?

Israel, Links

…and five hundred reasons for pessimism

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For those allergic to optimism, there’s also the Slippery Slope blog (Heb / Eng), where bad news about Israeli government and society is dilligently aggregated day after day. It’s not much for cheer, but it keeps you well-informed. (There are exactly 500 posts in the English version so far, and more in the original Hebrew.)

I will be occasionally translating for the Slippery Slope.

Israel

Do unto others

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The English-language memorial in Auschwitz-Bir...
Image via Wikipedia

Udi Aloni, writing on Ynet (Hebrew here, no English available so far English on Mondoweiss) opines about a new racist rabbinical text from the makers of the letter against renting to Arabs. This time, the scoundrels are actually complaining that most rabbis aren’t hardcore enough to participate in the end-goal of setting up death camps and exterminating “Amalek“.

I’ll let that sink in for a second.

This is an open call to commit genocide against the Palestinians. A call to gather millions of people into camps and murder every last one of them. This call could be more transparent, for sure, but it was written for the religious nationalist right, and to them it is clear who “Amalek” is.

There’s a caveat: the article provides no source for this claim. Hopefully, it’s a lie with no grain of truth to it. Unfortunately, I doubt Ynet would publish the piece without minimal fact-checking.

I can’t say this surprises me. But with the current way the wind is blowing, this should be a cause for serious worry.

UPDATE (Jan 13): The Slippery Slope folks have posted this PDF link to the publication. The relevant text is an unsigned op-ed. This is no hoax. However, seeing the original text now I can imagine the relevant passage possibly being intended in a less-than-concrete sense. Which of course doesn’t mean that nobody will think it’s a call to genocide. Many will.

UPDATE (Jan 14): Udi Aloni’s piece is now up in English on Mondoweiss.

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