Archive for February, 2009

Simplified spelling — don’t go there

Monday, February 16th, 2009

Over at Kitchen Table Math, Catherine Johnson has recently written in favor of simplifying English spelling. She asks:

Suppose you simplified spelling so that written English became a perfectly transparent writing system like Spanish. It would be obvious to one and all that written English is a code, that spelling means encoding the sounds of the English language, and that reading means decoding the sounds of the English language.

Would schools use phonics to teach children how to read?

To which the obvious answer is “No.” People so determinedly wrong-headed as those in ed schools would just find some other excuse to miseducate prospective teachers. Math is, after all, perfectly transparent, and they’ve got that entirely wrong.

Anyway, I disagreed, and in the comments I said:

“Simplified spelling” is a false hope. There are reasons why linguists (that is, people with actual credentials in the study of language — I was a grad student in linguistics) are generally unconvinced it’s a good idea.

First: You have to decide whose spoken English is encoded into this mythical “perfectly transparent” writing system. London? Boston? New Orleans? For that matter, why not Calcutta or Shanghai?

Which is more transparent, Burma or Myanmar? Cambodia or Kampuchea?

We actually do have a perfectly transparent way of transcribing spoken language, called the International Phonetic Alphabet. Do people use that to teach reading? (I understand the answer in China is sometimes “yes.”)

Second, “simplified spelling” erases the historical and logical relations between words whose pronunciation has shifted over centuries, making it harder to learn new vocabulary beyond the words children know.

An example: English plurals are spelled with “s.” Most English speakers are blithely unaware that the “s” is pronounced like the phoneme /s/ after unvoiced consonants, e.g. /t/, and like /z/ after voiced consonants and vowels.

Or at least they were until “Boyz” hit their consciousness. And now we have “Bratz.”

Thus perfectly illustrating the problem; “Bratz” is wrong. That’s an /s/, but nobody noticed.

Would it be easier to learn English plurals, or possessives, or third-person singular verbs, if children had to distinguish cats from dogz?

Third, we’d lose most of written literature. If you grew up with a simplified-spelling version of English, Shakespeare would be as remote as Chaucer, and only the relative handful of books that were translated from historical originals would be accessible to you.

The People’s Republic of China adopted simplified spelling, in the form of simplified characters, in the name of improved literacy, but the political purpose was to obliterate access to written history that did not conform to the party’s vision.

And as long as I’ve mentioned Chinese, character languages are a lot further from phonetically transparent than any alphabetic language, yet Japan, Korea and Taiwan have literacy rates that NAEP should envy. Spelling is not the problem.

Posted in Education, Linguistics | 2 Comments »

Galloping human evolution II

Monday, February 9th, 2009

Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending have a new book out, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. It expands on a paper they and others published last year, which I wrote about then.

The book’s website has a wealth of material, so I won’t belabor the point, but in brief their argument is that over the last 10,000 years, roughly since the beginning of agriculture — both the domestication of animals and the planting and harvesting of crops — human evolution has been happening faster than it ever did earlier in the history of the species. Faster, as in 100 times faster.

There are two principal, interacting, reasons. First, agriculture allowed people to live in larger and more densely settled groups, which altered the selective pressures influencing reproductive success. Different foods, different diseases, different social expectations — all changed which people were more likely to have children who themselves lived long enough to successfully raise children of their own. Not much more likely, usually, but a very small percentage advantage is powerful enough to sweep a whole population in a lot less than 10,000 years.

Second, agriculture supported a much larger total population, meaning more mutations, more bodies testing whether this version of a gene or that offered better odds in the lottery that pays off in more descendants. And there’s no rule that limits players in the lottery to buying just one ticket. Many different genetic changes may be happening simultaneously in a population.

There’s been plenty of discussion on blogs for you to explore, but you could start with 2blowhards, which did a weeklong series of interviews with Greg Cochran. Check the archives for the week of Jan. 25.

And Steve Sailer has a great review he wrote for VDare. Michael Blowhard calls it “rowdy.” I think I’d go for “rollicking” myself. Sailer writes, “Perhaps my gravestone will read, ‘He introduced Cochran to Harpending.’ ”

Posted in Science and technology | 1 Comment »

Fun with Click and Jane

Monday, February 9th, 2009

Virginia Heffernan writes a media column for The New York Times, and last week’s, titled “Click and Jane,” asks “What are kids learning to read when they learn to read online?”

The question was prompted, she tells us, by her 3-year-old son, who objected that something he’d been watching on his laptop wasn’t a book, as the computer had described it. “It’s more like a movie or a video,” he said.

Well, yeah, though I think she may be making a bit too much of this. If the child masters the reading code, I’m not sure whether it makes much difference where or how he learns. Yes, college professors complain that their students no longer have the attention capacity to slog through long or difficult texts. But I suspect college professors were saying that long before their students grew up with TV or laptops.

I’d like to draw your attention, however, to a point she made in passing:

In their book “Freakonomics,” Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt write that kids who grow up in houses packed with books fare better on school tests than those who grow up with fewer books. But they also contend that reading aloud to children and limiting their TV time has no correlation with success on tests. If both of these observations hold, it’s worth determining what books really are, the better to decisively decorate with them. The widespread digitization of text has complicated the matter. Will Ben benefit if I load my Kindle with hundreds of books that he can’t see? Or does he need the spectacle of hard- and softcover dust magnets eliminating floor space in our small apartment to get the full “Freakonomics” effect? I sadly suspect he needs the shelves and dust.

I haven’t read Freakonomics, though I do like the blog, so I can’t say whether Heffernan has correctly reported what the authors say. And I don’t doubt the first claim, that children who grow up surrounded by books do better on school tests than those who don’t (though I’m not so sure about the next part). What seems odd to me is that she seems to imply the books are the causal factor, to the extent of speculating whether having them in pixels rather than on paper will lessen their influence.

Doesn’t the chief causal argument run like this?

  • Smart people on average do better on school tests
  • Smart people on average have more books around the house
  • Smart people on average have smarter children

    • Oh, we all know exceptions to these correlations, but the significant point is that the causal relation doesn’t run backwards. Doing better on school tests won’t make you smarter than you would be if you never took them, though it has other benefits that can amplify the effects of being smarter, in line with Malcolm Gladwell’s example of children who are among the oldest in their cohort when they begin playing hockey. Filling your house with books won’t make you smarter, though reading voraciously may make you more successful than others who start with similar smarts. Having smart children doesn’t retroactively make you smarter, though it might cause people who know you to wonder whether they may have underestimated you.

    When I read things like this, I always wonder whether the writer is truly oblivious to what’s in front of her eyes, or whether she just feels it is obligatory to pretend she doesn’t see.

    Posted in Education, Science and technology | No Comments »

    She’s Geeky

    Sunday, February 1st, 2009

    That’s the name of a series of conferences,  the most recent of which just concluded in Mountain View, Calif.

    The site describes the intended audience:

    She’s Geeky events are neutral, face-to-face gathering spaces for women who like to geek out. Attendees include women involved in all aspects of technology, including those who like to use geeky tools, not just coders, programmers and engineers. You don’t even have to be from the computer industry. You just have to be a woman who identifies as a geek.

    I read about this event in a post by Amy Gahran, who blogs for the Poynter Institute. She was planning to attend, and she cited it as an example of the kind of activity that journalists should be participating in more often, as a way of breaking out of their “insular, self-referential” culture.

    Not a bad idea, although many newsroom managers are quite allergic to the idea of their reporters and editors getting deeply involved with community affairs. However, what struck me about her description of the desirable aspects of this particular convention was this, under the heading “Female culture” (emphasis mine):

    Most tech conferences are a heavily male playground. This affects not only the topics covered and event structure, but the tone of interaction. In my experience, conferences that are primarily oriented toward women in a given field tend to be more welcoming and less cliquish or hierarchical than at events where male culture predominates. This means that even male journalists who are newcomers to tech culture might get more out of an event like She’s Geeky than an uber-geekboy rave like Gnomedex (which is fun, but maybe not for your first stop).

    Perhaps her experience with conferences for women is more extensive than mine, because I do not join separatist organizations or routinely attend separatist events (”You just have to be a woman . . .”). But I did attend one once, and a less welcoming and more cliquish environment is hard to imagine.

    In 1996, I was invited to join a panel discussion on the California Civil Rights Initiative, then on the ballot in that state, which was part of the program at the fall conference of the Journalism and Women Symposium held that year in Napa, Calif.

    “Come for the weekend,” they said, so I did.

    I didn’t belong there. At the mix-and-mingle introductory wine tasting, in the interims between talks, it was clear that one was expected to establish her right to be there by bashing (the absent) males.  So wonderful, I’d hear, to be free of masculine domination and hierarchy. And who are you?

    Well. in the belief that every good garden party  deserves a skunk, I started telling them how discomforting I found it to be among people who despised half of humanity, or, at least were willing to say they did in order to establish their credentials with the other half.

    Actually I thought it was like being at a Klan rally, but I think I didn’t go quite so far as to say so.

    The panel discussion was an Experience. The two of us who had been invited to support the initiative, which bans racial (and gender) preferences in government policy were hissed from the audience. That’s female solidarity, yes. Some woman (an affirmative action token professor at Berkeley) spoke at length from the audience about Cal’s admission policies, but didn’t know what they were. One of the two pro-discrimination panelists snidely implied that I and anyone else who supported CCRI were allies of David Duke. I pointed out that it was her side who had paid David Duke to come to California to speak in favor of CCRI (a good idea may be supported for bad reasons). She miffed that she didn’t deserve to suffer personal attacks.

    Hey lady, you started it.

    In contrast,  my experience with largely male professional events has been just as largely positive. Leave aside the fact that I was a college math professor for a while, and ran a small printing company, and then worked as an editorial writer (all male-dominated jobs), and just look at BlogNashville, 2005.

    I signed up, because it sounded like fun and I’d get to meet lots of people I knew only online. Bill Hobbs, who organized it, invited me to be on a panel, and that was a hoot. True, the attendees skewed white, male and young. But they didn’t care.

    Mark Tapscott, then at the Heritage Foundation, had a car and generously offered to ferry me and my walker around.  We were joined by Robin Burk — ooh. She is a touch-the-hem-of-her-garment someone. She helped build Darpanet. She knew Adm. Grace Murray Hopper. You know, computer bug.

    Anyway, Mark’s car was later joined by La Shawn Barber. When we all got out together, three females, two old, one black, we were trampling stereotypes underfoot with every step we took. And everybody thought it was cool, if they noticed at all.

    Not noticing at all seems to me to be the ideal we should aim at.

    Posted in Journalism and media | No Comments »