Monday, 31 August 2020

what to do with prepositions

Students seem to really hate prepositions...
i hate the preposition

It's quite understandable when you look at a lot of the material available...

So much of what is presented is in the form of lists - although a lot of students (and most teachers?!) like them:
englishwithjames.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/dependent-preposition-patterns.pdf
englishwithjames.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/the-dependent-preposition.pdf
Grammar Reference | LearnEnglish | British Council | Verbs & Prepositions
Phrasal verbs, Prepositional verbs - English Grammar

Perhaps more helpful is trying out some exercises:
Prepositions | English with James
ESL Quizzes - Prepositions I (Vera Mello) I-TESL-J

Or some games:

But prepositions are much more than 'prepositions of place or time'.

To look at another posting:

PREPOSITIONS AND ARTICLES:

It's all about chunks:

Following the pattern that most course books take, i.e., dealing with prepositions in manageable chunks, is not a bad way to go. Teaching prepositions of time, place and movement, for instance, at different times, will enable learners to build up their knowledge of prepositions slowly and steadily. Doing so will be much more effective than, say, trying to teach every use of 'in' at the same time.
How to help learners of English understand prepositions | British Council

Sure, we can give students rules to apply, such as; use on with days of the week; in for months and years; at for specific times and holidays, but as native English speakers we do not grow up learning these rules, or even thinking about what preposition to use. Ask an English speaking child, “Where is your mother?” They will know to say at home instead of in home or on home. This is not instinctive; it has been acquired through hearing and mimicking, which is not the same way that students learn the language. Children learn languages in chunks and phrases so English learners should do the same.
Learn prepositions easily

You can also say it's all about phrases:
Prepositional phrases (video) | Khan Academy

Or collocation:
Grammar and vocabulary: teaching students collocations | Onestopenglish
Fun classroom practice of collocations - UsingEnglish.com

Jay Doubleyou: grammar workshop
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Sunday, 30 August 2020

graded english readers

Reading is one of the best ways to get your language going:

Jay Doubleyou: the importance of reading

But course books can be very boring, in whatever subject:

Textbooks: Boring Students to Death | by David Cutler | Medium

And following a coursebook in a class is even more boring:

Why we don’t like English classes | Antimoon

Reading a book, you can choose what to read and how fast to read - and here's a good guide:

How to be a better reader

If you're learning a language, 'readers' are an excellent starting point:

A graded reader is a book intended for learners at different levels of learning English. These books have complex and interesting stories, but are written in a way that’s comfortable for English language learners at every stage.
English readers have different grades: the higher the grade, the more difficult the ESL reading will be. These books are designed to use a specific number of difficult words (for example, one new vocabulary word every 500 or 600 words). This means you can understand and enjoy the book, but still learn from it.
Some graded readers use existing classic and popular modern books, and simply rewrite them to accommodate different levels. Other English readers write completely new and original stories. These kinds of books exist for kids, young adults and adults. They’re a great way to learn and to read some works that you wouldn’t have been able to understand otherwise.

Where to Find the Best English Readers: 7 Incredible Sources for Endless English Reading Practice | FluentU English

These are the biggest on the market:

Home - Penguin Readers

Pearson English Readers support English learning everywhere

Macmillan Readers – English Reading Resources

ELT | English Readers – Collins

Readers | Cambridge University Press

Oxford Graded Readers

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screencast: making a video of your screen

Would you like to be able to make a video of what's showing on your screen?

There are some very good tools out there to enable you to simply film what's on your screen.

This is the most famous:

Screen Recorder & Video Editor | Screencast-O-Matic

Screen-O-Matic: One-click Screen Capture Recording Tool

SCREENOMATIC - YouTube

And there are plenty of others:

11 Free Screencasting Tools | Practical Ecommerce

Top 10 Screen Recording Software for Windows

For schools and teachers, the recommendation is Screencast-O-Matic:

The Best Screencasting Tools for Classrooms | Common Sense Education

The best screencasting software for teachers | Douchy's Blog

7 Of The Best Screencasting Software Tools For Classrooms - Fractus Learning

Or for really free software, here are a couple more recommendations:

Screencasting is the video recording of a computer screen that is often accompanied by voice-over narration and serves for educational purposes. Live screencasting is, respectively, the live broadcasting of your screen.

For example, teachers may use screencasting to create e-learning tutorials and courses. Employers may screencast how-to videos and tutorials for new employees.

The Best Screencast Software In 2020: Full Comparison

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brexit and british values

Since the Brexit vote, attitudes have hardened - and culture has become a battleground:

Jay Doubleyou: brexit: and choosing between an american model and a european model

Jay Doubleyou: identity today in the uk

Jay Doubleyou: Brexit: "The majority of Leave voters were middle class. Most lived in the south of England."

Jay Doubleyou: brexit and: "tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis"

Jay Doubleyou: brexit and the culture wars: part two

Jay Doubleyou: brexit and the culture wars

Jay Doubleyou: middle england: the heart of brexit britain

Jay Doubleyou: brexit: and what the british think of themselves

Jay Doubleyou: what we think about the british empire - 70 years after the partition of india

Jay Doubleyou: in britain we use our history in order to comfort us: this sort of handling of history is dangerous as well as regrettable.

Jay Doubleyou: brexit and history

This is the latest example:

Jay Doubleyou: rule britannia?

With a piece from last December:

Brexitannia: The British Identity Crisis

James Melville
13 December 2019
Brexitannia: The British Identity Crisis

Brexit has become an identity conflict in Britain. It is Danny Boyle’s London Olympics Opening Ceremony versus the Last Night of the Proms. Where do we go from here?

The Great British public have decided to give the Tories five more years of power. To “get Brexit done”, millions of voters have stuck two fingers up at a window, without realising it’s a mirror. A vote for the Conservatives and to “get Brexit done” is an enormous act of self harm based on an insecure delusion of what Britain was, what Britain is, and what Britain should be.

There is a long-held Tory voting optical delusion of Britain parading around like something out of the encore section of the Last Night of the Proms. A place called Britain that should always rule the waves. This British identity framing is how the Britain’s conductor-in-chief, Boris Johnson, likes to orchestrate it...

Brexitannia: The British Identity Crisis – Byline Times

It depends on your politics - with very different views from this week:

The treatment of migrants crossing the Channel is plain wrong and against British values | The Independent | Independent

BBC ordered to scrap mandatory TV licence fee - 'It needs to fund itself!' | UK | News | Express.co.uk

Boris Johnson’s Britain During the Pandemic and Brexit Is Becoming America in All the Worst Ways

It's about 'values':

Brexit: Can we tell students 'British values' still exist? | Tes

Brexit has revealed a divide that's here to stay (opinion) - CNN

Brexit Is a Cultural Revolution - The Atlantic

Brexit Britain is more welcoming than feared | Financial Times

The success of Brexit Britain will depend on how well it can stick to its principles ǀ View | Euronews

Boris Johnson empowered the thugs that shamed British democracy

What does healing the Brexit divide mean? - BBC News

Here's a very interesting overview from earlier this month - and with lots of helpful graphics;

The Brexit parenthesis: Three ways the pandemic is changing UK politics | European Council on Foreign Relations

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Saturday, 29 August 2020

banter

What is 'banter'?

Here's a definition:

And another (with a warning about the banter!):

Peter Trudgill writes a regular column for the New European:

Probably all cultures employ banter, but it seems that some utilise it more than others. Banter is certainly very common in British and Irish society, and some commentators claim that it is more usual amongst men than amongst women. A difference between cultures might explain why misunderstandings can occur 
The late Geoffrey Leech, professor of English linguistics at Lancaster University, pointed out that one of the more interesting of these conversational principles is the ‘Banter Principle’; and he provided some important insights into the nature of this. Banter is essentially mock-impoliteness. You pretend to be rude to somebody as a way of stressing and reinforcing group solidarity. The Banter Principle is based on the following idea: “We are good friends so we don’t need to be polite to one another. If I insult you, you will understand that it’s a joke, 
which will prove what good friends we are.”


With a little more here - and some advice:

Here's some advice for young people:

And here's a look at the current dangers:

With a couple of helpful videos here:

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banksy as art gallery artist

Banksy started life a street artist and has become incredibly popular:

And, yes, he's very provocative:

The authorities are not sure about him:

He is fundamentally a satirist:

He has satirized Disneyland:
Jay Doubleyou: dismaland from banksy

He has satirized the monarchy:
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america and class

Race is what is supposed to divide the United States:

Whereas class is what divides the UK:

But class is also a dividing issue in the States - something which Americans would perhaps rather avoid talking about:
Jay Doubleyou: education levels and voting trump
Jay Doubleyou: brexit, trump and dumbing down

But class and racial divisions were very apparent four years ago:

Here's a look at the lazy thinking around class and race from the last presidential election:

THIS ELECTION CYCLE has been rife with punditry on the anger of the white working class, supposedly fueling Donald Trump’s rise to prominence. But like many of the overblown narratives rounding out the cable news cycle in this bizarre election, it’s not quite true.

In White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America (2016), Nancy Isenberg attacks the myth of America as a nation without class, carefully reviving the history of America’s “waste people”—the white working poor—from the earliest period of colonization to contemporary politics... 


Here's another analysis from November 2016:

For months, the only thing that’s surprised me about Donald Trump is my friends’ astonishment at his success. What’s driving it is the class culture gap.

One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad “could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters…and professors were without exception phonies.” Annette Lareau found tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.

Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. “[I] can’t knock anyone for succeeding,” a laborer told her. “There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic.

Trump’s blunt talk taps into another blue-collar value: straight talk. “Directness is a working-class norm,” notes Lubrano. As one blue-collar guy told him, “If you have a problem with me, come talk to me. If you have a way you want something done, come talk to me. I don’t like people who play these two-faced games.” Straight talk is seen as requiring manly courage, not being “a total wuss and a wimp,” an electronics technician told Lamont. Of course Trump appeals. Clinton’s clunky admission that she talks one way in public and another in private? Further proof she’s a two-faced phony...

What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class

Since the election of 2016, there's been a lot of commentary around class:
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Friday, 28 August 2020

is e-learning a good thing?

With lockdown, many of us have had to go online to learn

How coronavirus crisis reinvented online learning as a necessity

There are lots of offers out there:

Why is online learning so important during coronavirus? | English Live Blog

Of course, it's been around a lot longer:

The Era of Online Learning | Niema Moshiri | TEDxUCSD - YouTube

Not everyone is a fan:

Parents seeking alternative to e-learning - Evanston Now

The problem is that a lot of e-learning is simply a teacher giving a lecture in front of a board, or click-and-quiz learning: stories and scenarios are better:

Why e-learning is killing education | Aaron Barth | TEDxKitchenerED - YouTube

Why Technology Can't Fix Education | Mary Jo Madda | TEDxChicago - YouTube

Content, not technology, will save education | Sofia Fenichell | TEDxLSE - YouTube

It doesn't have to be an an LMS:

Jay Doubleyou: how to set up a learning management system

Instead, you can use very simple platforms like Zoom to create interactive sessions:

Enabling breakout rooms – Zoom Help Center

Video Breakout Rooms - YouTube

Set up #ZOOM BREAKOUT ROOMS (ideal for small groups) - YouTube

And English language schools are trying this out:

Trinity CertTESOL during Covid-19. - YouTube

Trinity College London Online CertTESOL course review by Greety Gijo, Angamaly, Kerala - YouTube

CertTESOL | Trinity College London

But you can 'blend' learning - and 'flip' the classroom:

Jay Doubleyou: blended learning and the flipped classroom

Click here-- blended learning and the future of education: Monique Markoff at TEDxIthacaCollege - YouTube

And tech can make students more independent:

Jay Doubleyou: can children teach themselves - using technology?

The Future of Learning | Sugata Mitra | TEDxNewcastle - YouTube

New experiments in self-teaching | Sugata Mitra - YouTube

Sugata Mitra: Can kids teach themselves? - YouTube

Finally, this is the future - but we can chose which technologies we want to work with:

Jay Doubleyou: digital learning solutions

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how to set up a learning management system

There are some good systems for schools and universities to organise their virtual learning:

We call these LMSs:

The most famous is Moodle:

And here are some reviews:

But there are other, free systems:

Here are a couple of reviews:


And here's a look at of two of them:

And another look:

Google Classroom vs. Edmodo: Key Features and Services Comparison

Both Google Classroom and Edmodo are designed to help teachers supplement their classroom lessons. With both platforms, teachers can organize their course content, track assignment status and communicate with students.
We’ve reviewed both Google Classroom and Edmodo and compared them to other LMS solutions in our comprehensive LMS Comparison Guide. In this post, we’ll discuss both solutions in more detail to help schools make the right purchasing decision.

Comparing Products

Here are excerpts from our Google Classroom and Edmodo reviews that summarize each solution:

Google Classroom: Google Classroom is part of the G Suite for Education (Google for Education) package that includes Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar and other apps. It’s targeted to teachers and students in both K-12 and higher education markets. Google Classroom is a free service for teachers and students and, like other Google products, takes only a few minutes to set up. However, they can’t register until their school signs up for the Google for Education package.

The main benefit of Google Classroom is that it’s simple to use and encourages collaboration between students and teachers. Teachers can create a class and list assignments in a few clicks. They can add students by name or send them a code to join. Students then can see what assignments are due, participate in discussion forums or message the teacher (either in private or via group chat).

Edmodo: Edmodo is a learning management platform that augments classroom learning with social learning for students and teachers in kindergarten to 12th grades. It has “freemium” pricing – meaning parents, teachers, students and even school districts can create their own accounts for free. Edmodo is set up like a social networking feed, similar to Facebook. Students, teachers and parents can communicate with posts, and other users can like or comment on them. Announcements, questions, tests and assignments are posted in the Edmodo feed.



Here's a good overview of six LMSs:

And another:



Maybe you can deliver e-learning without an LMS:

Finallly, there's the question of whether on-line learning is a good thing or not:
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how languages emerge, change, convey meaning and influence how we think

Boris Johnson has accused the BBC of 'wetness' over not wanting to have singing at its biggest classical music festival:

Jay Doubleyou: rule britannia?

A linguist looks at the origin of the term:

‘Stop this wetness!’: the roots of Boris Johnson’s watery contempt | Language | The Guardian

And he's just written a book - reviewed in the Guardian:

Don’t Believe a Word by David Shariatmadari review – the truth about language

A myth-busting account of how languages emerge, change, and influence the way we think

As a boy, David Shariatmadari would sit in the hallway and listen to his Iranian father speaking Farsi on the phone to his family in Tehran. It was an early introduction to the estranging beauty of unfamiliar language. So began an interest in linguistics that has given birth to this book, a skilful summation of the latest research on how languages emerge, change, convey meaning and influence how we think.

Each chapter explodes a common myth about language. Shariatmadari begins with the most common myth: that standards of English are declining. This is a centuries-old lament for which, he points out, there has never been any evidence. Older people buy into the myth because young people, who are more mobile and have wider social networks, are innovators in language as in other walks of life. Their habit of saying “aks” instead of “ask”, for instance, is a perfectly respectable example of metathesis, a natural linguistic process where the sounds in words swap round. (The word “wasp” used to be “waps” and “horse” used to be “hros”.) Youth is the driver of linguistic change. This means that older people feel linguistic alienation even as they control the institutions – universities, publishers, newspapers, broadcasters – that define standard English.

Another myth Shariatmadari dismantles is that foreign languages are full of untranslatable words. This misconception serves to exoticise other nationalities and cultures, making them sound quaint or bizarre. It amuses us to think that there are 27 words for eyebrow in Albanian. But we only really think this because of our grammar-blindness about Albanian, which can easily form adjectival compounds by joining two words together.

Languages do shape how we think and act, but this usually happens not at the level of vocabulary but of linguistic structure. The psycholinguist John Lucy has given language as one explanation for the starkly different rates of workplace accidents in Sweden and Finland. In Swedish, prepositions allow for the nuanced account of actions over time; in Finnish, case endings stress static relationships. This may make Finns less alert to the temporal arrangement of a process, leading to more interruptions and accidents at work.

Shariatmadari borrows from Iris Murdoch’s idea of language as a net cast over the mind, constraining our thoughts according to how its knots and threads land – wrinkled in some places, straight in others. Every language is a different throw of the net. Language sieves and strains reality but never imprisons it. There are always holes for the real world to escape.

Shariatmadari’s general approach to language is pro-diversity and anti-pedantry. No linguist would disagree with his argument that a word’s meaning depends not on its etymology but on how it is used. (Adam Gopnik once wrote that prescriptivism was “as bogus a concept in linguistics as green cheese is in astronomy”.) But he fleshes out this argument usefully, offering ammunition against the tiresome hairsplitter who, for example, insists that “decimate” comes from the Roman practice of executing every tenth soldier as a collective punishment. (It doesn’t.)

He also rescues nonstandard forms, such as African American Vernacular English (AAVE), from the routine condescension meted out to them. AAVE misses out the linking “to be” verb (“you late”) but then so do many other languages. The AAVE construction “he be singing” does not mean “he is singing” but “he sings [as a hobby, professionally]”. It is an efficient means of marking the habitual aspect. “Imma” for “I’m going to” is another standard linguistic move: cutting a word or phrase that is just a grammatical marker. “Imma” doesn’t work with the more literal sense of “going to”, which is why you can say “Imma let you finish” (I’m going to let you finish) but not “Imma the shops” (I’m going to the shops).

All languages move naturally towards abbreviation and compression, guided by what the linguist Rudi Keller calls “the invisible hand in language change”. Shariatmadari compares it to the desire path that forms on the lawn of a university campus after thousands of students have taken a short cut across it.

He is sceptical of Noam Chomsky’s notion of a universal grammar, the idea that human beings have a sort of syntax-generating implant in the brain. Language for Shariatmadari is not a piece of brain software but something that emerges when we interact with others. It is “a medium that is formed as it is used … a road that is paved at the same time as we walk it”.

This is quite a scholarly and serious book. I admired its refusal to lighten its denser arguments with that jokey “here comes the science bit” flippancy that so often grates in non-fiction books on complex topics. Shariatmadari’s style is never less than clear, but there isn’t too much handholding. His account requires a little patience, but then so does linguistics.

Stick with it and it is a meaty, rewarding and even necessary read. Shariatmadari begins by pointing to “an almost insatiable appetite for linguistic debate” in our culture. But as he then shows, most of the focus is trivial – “how to speak like a millennial” – or myth-ridden. Our wider culture seems profoundly uninterested in the dynamic, makeshift nature of language, the way that it gives birth to thought as much as articulates it.

Politicians, caught out saying something that they actually believe, instantly apologise for their “poor choice of words”. It is as if words were just a light dusting of salt on the meal of meaning, and not that important. But words, as Shariatmadari reveals, aren’t a condiment you sprinkle on top of reality; they are the marinade that alters the taste of everything.

This book makes a good case for seeing linguistics as “the universal social science”, one that teaches us not just about language but about how we live and make sense of the world. When we learn how the world is made through words, we also learn to be sceptical of our current iteration of reality and more tolerant of other perspectives. If life can be differently worded, it can be differently lived.

• Don’t Believe a Word is published by W&N (RRP £16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846.


Don’t Believe a Word by David Shariatmadari review – the truth about language | Books | The Guardian

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rule britannia?

What does it mean to accuse someone of being 'wet'?

This is what the UK Prime Minister accused the BBC of, when it decided not to have people singing lyrics to a patriotic song at the 'Last Night of the Proms':

I think it’s time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history, about our traditions and about our culture, and we stopped this general bout of self-recrimination and wetness,” Boris Johnson said on Tuesday.

‘Stop this wetness!’: the roots of Boris Johnson’s watery contempt | Language | The Guardian

At the other end of the political spectrum to the Guardian, the Telegraph was as horrified as the Prime Minister:

More than half of Britons say BBC is wrong to silence Rule, Britannia!

'Are the BBC trying to erase history?' - Telegraph readers on Rule, Britannia!

However, if you look at most renditions of this song at the Proms, you can see that both performers and audience have never taken it seriously - and with it being sung by... foreigners!

Rule Britannia - Last Night of the Proms 2009 - YouTube

Rule, Britannia! - BBC Last Night of the Proms 2012 - YouTube

"Rule, Britannia" (Bryn Terfel) Last night of the Proms 1994 - YouTube

Renée Fleming sings Rule Britannia - Last Night of the Proms 2010 - YouTube

Rule Britannia - Last Night of The Proms 2015 - YouTube

Rule, Britannia! - Jonas Kaufmann | Last Night of the Proms 2015 - YouTube

But after Brexit, this song and the evening it is sung on had already become part of the 'culture wars', when everyone takes it very seriously.

Story: “Rule, Britannia!” and “Land of Hope and Glory” were performed orchestrally at BBC’s Last Night of the Proms. The decision was in compliance with government guidelines to stop the spread of Covid-19, which clearly state that “people should avoid singing, shouting and raising voices.” 

This week, and probably for the first time in modern history, everyone was talking about Last Night of the Proms. Conductor Dalia Stasevska found herself in the crossfires of the culture wars after the BBC’s decision for “Rule Britannia” and “Land of Hope and Glory” to be performed orchestrally – in line with government guidelines to stop the spread of COVID-19 – was reported as a “politically motivated” decision.

Worst Opinion of the Week: The 'Woke Left' Are Banning 'Rule Britannia!'

Britons never, never, never shall be free of the culture wars - An inconsequential but convenient fight for the government : ukpolitics (from today)

The surprising history of “Rule, Britannia!” and Last Night of the Proms | Prospect Magazine (a history of the song being sung at the Proms)

Rule Britannia Row Is Nonsense Designed To Keep The Nation Polarised | HuffPost UK (a liberal take)

Last fight of the Proms - Britons never, never, never shall be free of the culture wars | Britain | The Economist (a neo-liberal take)

Video: Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia are 'racist propaganda' | Daily Mail Online (a different take in a conservative newspaper)

Culture wars: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson urges Rule Britannia rethink (from Australia)

The Brexit vote may be the first shot fired in a British culture war (from the Telegraph, 2018)

Culture wars: even the arts are a Brexit battleground (from Ireland, 2018)

See also:

Jay Doubleyou: Brexit: "The majority of Leave voters were middle class. Most lived in the south of England."

Jay Doubleyou: inglorious empire - what the british did to india

Jay Doubleyou: music from the uk

Jay Doubleyou: bbc proms 2014

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Thursday, 27 August 2020

'four ears' or 'four years'?

The 'four ears' model says that a single message contains fact, self-revealing, relationship, and appeal:

Four-sides model - Wikipedia

The Art of Misunderstanding – The 4 Sides Model of Communication – CaseWORK

But that sounds exactly the same as 'four years'. Why?

We call this 'linking':

Linking Vowel to Vowel | Pronunciation | EnglishClub

And it's very important:

At its simplest, linking is the merging of multiple words together until they sound as if they are only one word. Native speakers of English all do this naturally. Linking is an advanced topic for non-native speakers, but learning to correctly link words can result in significantly more fluid and fluent sounding English speech. Failing to link words naturally results in spoken English which may have awkward pauses, extra, unnecessary sounds, and which will sound very foreign to native speakers.

Learn How to Link Words (Create Laisons) in English — Pronuncian: American English Pronunciation

It is important!

5 Connected Speech Secrets for Fast Native English Pronunciation

Connected speech 2 | TeachingEnglish | British Council | BBC

In the case of adding a 'y' between words, it's called 'intrusion' - with other examples;

Linking and intrusive R - Wikipedia

Pronunciation: Linking /w/ - YouTube

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Wednesday, 26 August 2020

environmental economics

The 'World and Press' newspaper is put together for German speakers wanting to look at English language news:

A couple of years ago, it ran a story:
World and Press - September 1 2017 - World and Press Archiv - Englisch

Which looked at 'putting a value' on nature:
The Guardian view on pricing the Great Barrier Reef: a dangerous absurdity | Great Barrier Reef | The Guardian

Here's a definition of this which shows that it doesn't have to be feared:

And today it's quite a thing:

It's very much in the news - and everywhere:

And it's having quite an impact on current debates around the economy:

For example:

But what if setting growth free from CO2 emissions will just take more time, and more technology — bigger batteries, for example, and cheaper solar panels? Cameron Hepburn, a professor of environmental economics at the University of Oxford, points out that there have been many instances in history where society has replaced a heavily polluting technology with a more efficient, cleaner technology — shifting from, say, kerosene lamps to incandescent lights to LED bulbs — without sacrificing growth. Why should the quest for fossil fuel-free energy be any different? “The thing I object to most is the idea that, just because it hasn’t been done yet, it can’t be done,” Hepburn said. He points out that degrowth hasn’t been tried, either — and so the hypothetical choice for governments is between two relatively unproven pathways.
Post-COVID, should countries rethink their obsession with economic growth? | Grist

And 'environmental economists' are everywhere:
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gamification in learning

Duolingo is a pretty good way to learn a language:
Jay Doubleyou: duolingo: free language-learning app
Jay Doubleyou: apps to learn english
Jay Doubleyou: how to learn a completely new language

And it works largely because it makes a game out of learning:

Duolingo has an appealing, playful design and a smooth Onboarding experience. Choose the language you want to learn, set a daily goal and immediately start completing guided exercises.
The exercises are short, only 10 questions long at first, and shouldn’t take more than 2-3 minutes to complete. Several embedded game mechanics add motivational boosts to make sure that new users reach their first win-states quickly:
A progress bar shows how close you are to completing the exercise. Each correct answer is rewarded with an encouraging sound effect. In between questions, Duo, the mascot owl, will comment on how great you are doing.

The company thinks its great:

“Motivating yourself to learn is very hard and learning a language is even harder, especially when you are doing that online on your own, so we realized early on that we needed to try to encourage people to form a daily learning habit. We found that the most effective techniques for this come from the gaming world,” explains associate product manager Zan Gilani.

Although not everyone's impressed:

Unfortunately, all Duolingo had borrowed from the contemporary gaming culture are some ubiquitous tropes like in-game currency, experience points, daily streaks, badges and leaderboards. These are the things that are not making Duolingo more game-like, but the things that are making the gaming experience more bureaucracy-like and ruining it. There is no intrinsic value in being compelled to log in every day and beat others to the top spot in some arbitrary group. I ignore all of that because I'm here to learn a language, not to beat others to it.
The future of gamification of Duolingo - Duolingo

It's used a lot, then, in learning:

But it's also of interest to the world of business:
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does technology make us more un/equal?

There is the idea that today it's 'washing machines for everyone':

The magic washing machine | Hans Rosling - YouTube

How Capitalism is Setting Washerwomen Free - Foundation for Economic Education

How Free Trade Liberated Women from Housework - Foundation for Economic Education

Stop "Protecting" Us from Affordable Washing Machines - Foundation for Economic Education


You can see all this 'technology for all' as the result of our current system: 

In 1919, the Frigidaire was the first self-contained refrigerator. It cost $775 (over $11,000 in today’s money). As the average hourly wage in 1919 was just $0.43, it took the average American 1,802 hours of work to afford this luxury appliance. 

Today, the standard Whirlpool French door refrigerator holds 25 cubic feet’s worth of food and drink. It has “fingerprint resistant stainless steel” and costs just $1,529. According to the latest BLS statistics, it would take the average American just 57.5 hours of work to be able to afford this – now common – appliance. (The average wage today is $26.55 per hour.) 

As Marian L. Tupy of the Cato Institute previously pointed out, “an ordinary person today lives better than most kings of yesteryear,” thanks to innovation, capitalism and mass production. As we wait for the warm weather to return, we should be thankful that virtually all Americans have access to refrigeration and, thus, the ability to store food all year round.

Thanks Capitalism, Refrigerators Are Awesome! - Foundation for Economic Education


But maybe you can have your washing machines and refrigerators under a very different system:

Aaron Bastani | On Fully Automated Luxury Communism, climate change, and more - YouTube

What Is Fully Automated Luxury Communism? - The Atlantic

Opinion | The World Is a Mess. We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism. - The New York Times

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani – a manifesto for the future | Books | The Guardian


However, it is not necessarily 'technology for all'.


New gadgets or machines or industries effect us differently. 

The World Economic Forum warns that 'the rise of technology' isn't in itself a good thing:

Is technology making inequality worse? | World Economic Forum


And the Guardian looks at how 'technology' can have very different uses:

Technology is making the world more unequal. Only technology can fix this
Here’s the bad news: technology – specifically, surveillance technology – makes it easier to police disaffected populations, and that gives badly run, corrupt states enough stability to get themselves into real trouble.
Here’s the good news: technology – specifically, networked technology – makes it easier for opposition movements to form and mobilise, even under conditions of surveillance, and to topple badly run, corrupt states.
Inequality creates instability, and not just because of the resentments the increasingly poor majority harbours against the increasingly rich minority. Everyone has a mix of good ideas and terrible ones, but for most of us, the harm from our terrible ideas is capped by our lack of political power and the checks that others – including the state – impose on us.

Technology is making the world more unequal. Only technology can fix this | Inequality | The Guardian


One particular idea running through much of this is that of 'technological discontinuity' - and even those who use the term are not clear exactly what they mean by it:

On the definition and measurement of technological discontinuities - ScienceDirect


Science fiction is a good way to look at these things.

In this video, at 10:30, the critic Will Self looks at the difference between movies of the 1950s which gave us futures with jet packs and eating pills; but the 1982 film Blade Runner gives us a dirty and messy future. 

And what we find is a future of 'discontinuous technologies' where one technology which you would think is obsolete exists alongside the shiny new technology.

He calls this 'steam punk' - and every age is this 'steam punk' age, because we are always surprised that we don't all get the same new tech at the same time.

The future is not going to be 'all wipe-able surfaces'.

The film Solaris is very different to the other film of the same time, 2001:

Sculpting Time - Introduction to Tarkovsky's Solaris by Will Self - YouTube


Will Self also challenges the idea given in the first link above to the TED Talk by Hans Rosling.

The end of the Apollo missions into space ended a vision of a shiny, metallic future. And in place of optimistic and  Promethean space operas such as Stanley Kubric's 2001, science fiction began to mutate into 'steam punk', which saw technological development as 'asynchronous'.

And without a vaccine for covid, we won't be able to rely on medical technologies which have made it possible for humans to live in high densities while travelling frequently and en masse.

In other words, we are not 'all in this together', with some enjoying access to hi-tech medicine to fight the coronavirus pandemic, and others not.

BBC Radio 4 - A Point of View, The End of Progress?



File: Times Square looking more and more like Blade Runner... (8735774078).jpg - Wikimedia Commons


To finish, here are some more pointers from Blade Runner:

Are we living in a Blade Runner world? - BBC Culture

Blade Runner Insight - How Science Became God in Blade Runner

Blade Runner 2049’s politics resonate because they are so perilously close to our own


And here we look at whether technology makes us more un/equal:

The Computer Did It? Technology and Inequality | Dissent Magazine

Can digital technologies really be used to reduce inequalities? | Development Matters

Reamer_The_Impacts_of_Invention_on_Economic_Growth_02-28-14.pdf

 

Finally:

We’re on the Brink of Cyberpunk
It’s not just the technology, surveillance, and dystopian vibes—it’s the culmination of decades of deliberate governmental erosion.
By KELSEY D. ATHERTON APRIL 08, 20209:00 AM

Where is the president in Blade Runner?
Beneath the 1982 neo-noir’s trappings of genetically engineered human automatons is a story about corporate power over and indifference to life, alienation in the face of wealthy indifference to the plight of workers. Replace the Tyrell Corporation with Amazon and reframe the replicants as “essential services,” and suddenly you have a world of workers terrified that their jobs are inherently a death sentence—moving straight from fiction to reality.
But while Blade Runner’s once-distant future of November 2019 feels resonant in so many ways—vast corporate power, persistent surveillance, life in a time of constant crisis—it misses the actual 2019’s most salient feature: an inescapable, painful awareness of politics and of the presence or deliberate absence of government in daily life.
Government, as experienced for much of the 20th century, is largely absent from the lives of characters in cyberpunk stories. Police are a durable feature, but government services and functions beyond the security state are absent.
Yet for all the aggressive visibility of politics in our daily lives, we’re not that far off from the powerlessness of a cyberpunk future. Cyberpunk speaks to the present because the conditions that inspired cyberpunk remain largely unchanged.
As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps through the world, it collides with governments in the West that have spent decades deliberately shedding power, capability, and responsibility, reducing themselves to little more than vestigial organs that coordinate public-private partnerships of civic responsibility. This hollowing of the state began in earnest in the 1980s, and the science fiction of that time—the earliest texts of cyberpunk—imagines what happens when that process is complete. Cyberpunk is a genre of vast corporate power and acute personal deprivation. The technologies at the center of it are all means of control, control bought by the wealthy or broken by criminals. Where recourse is available, in whatever small way, it’s through direct action.

The coronavirus crisis shows that the cyberpunk future is about to come true.

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