anghyflawn

It really does depend on your standard of comparison. Cosmology? Yeah, I guess you're right. Philosophy (or for that matter any humanities department)? Guess who gets more "serves them right" jeers if a a university decides to close down the department

>Of course science costs time and money.

One problem is that peer review is essentially free for the journals, and people have to take time for it out of the other things they have to do (like teaching, or scrambling to get Yet Another Publication before the tenure review comes up, or doing the reporting to 550 external agencies). People are expected to uphold the highest standard of rigour essentially in their free time. In that sense, the current peer review leads to waste, by decreasing the efficiency of the investments originally made into other things.

I agree. I've had two articles reviewed by now (not in a science field, but still), and only one reviewer was relatively unhelpful (they thought the paper was too dense and insufficiently well presented to do a detailed review); all the others, even whey they could not recommend acceptance, went out of their way to suggest various ways of making the paper(s) better.

People are in general much more likely to bother giving negative feedback than to give positive feedback, much less defend other people's efforts. I'm afraid such a system would be no different: would a ton of "likes" offset the negativity of a couple of arseholes wreaking havoc in the comments to make it worth it?

What do you think is the population density of Sweden, Norway, or Finland? There is still very decent broadband to be had up here at 70 degrees northern latitude.

Europe is going to a model where the infrastructure is owned by some arm of the government (quangos like Railtrack in the UK or national rail administrations), because the initial outlay on infrastructure is too big to make private investment or even private-public partnerships profitable for the private actors everywhere except the most densely populated areas. It seems to me that the scheme is somewhat similar here? I don't know whether it would work in the US though.

It's all here: http://www.ukvisas.gov.uk/en/howtoapply/infs/inf20transit.

Tl;dr: there is a whitelist for transit visa waivers, so citizens of some countries need to apply for a transit visa in advance. However, you can apply from a waiver if you normally need a transit visa but you are going to/from the US, Canada, Australia or New Zealand. You can also get a waiver if you are resident in the US, Canada or EU/EEA, irrespective of your citizenship.

The UK has a visa waiver for transit passengers (they're not that idiotic, they want Heathrow to keep being the big hub that it is; you do get to talk to an officer, but you generally don't need to apply in advance). Generally UK immigration is bad (like having to turn up and give your fingerprints every time you apply for a visa, so no application by post; in my case, that means a flight of 1,100 km and back every 6 months). Here's a blog post according to which being on a dissertation defense committee also requires a work permit (according to possibly overzealous HR): http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/10/world-class...

Most Schengen countries are more or less straightforward per se, though I'm not sure how his case would pan out (here in Norway, according to the immigration authority's webpage, "researchers and lecturers" are exempt from the work permit requirement, though I'm not sure how broad that category is).

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what modern generative linguistics is all about (to be fair, it is extremely widespread). The aim of this branch of science is expressly not to "learn to produce and interpret varied utterances" (called E-language in the jargon), but to understand the cognitive processes behind the production and interpretation of utterances (called I-language). Now you may agree or disagree with the methods and assumptions used in the pursuit of this goal, but it is patently unfair to accuse the field of failing to do something it never set out to do.

I feel there is excessive emphasis on "what Chomsky said" and "what Chomsky did". Norvig chooses to point out that the principles and parameters framework is, let's say, imperfect, but, well, Chomsky would agree. Moreover, if you zoom out and stop obsessing about quotes from "Syntactic Structures", you will realize that a lot of the work that's being done in theoretical linguistics is not quite as barren. Yes, statistical methods for (say) anaphora resolution can be extremely efficient, but basically very few people had thought about anaphoric relations in any systematic way before generative linguistics came around.

Moreover, rule-based NLP approaches also have their place, and they are often the direct result of theoretical advances. A case in point is the modelling of morphophonology (which is necessary for spell checking, dictionaries and text generation for morphologically complex languages): many successful approaches are those based on finite-state machines, which could not have happened without Johnson and later Koskenniemi using them to formalize the rule-based approach pioneered by Halle and (yes) Chomsky (well, not quite, but this is still the point of reference for rule-based phonology).

(I am a theoretical phonologist, but my colleagues who do actual NLP work of this type tell me that statistical methods aren't that great for the sort of work they do.)

I don't think you can do it. Technically, the lists are available (for a short time if I am not mistaken) for perusal at a tax office; in practice, they are released to the media (e.g. major news outlets), who give you access to search by name plus league tables and aggregated statistics by year of birth, postcode etc.

Yes. Actually, the public information is not the income or value of property, but the amount of tax paid on these, which means that the numbers splashed all over the internet are estimates (for instance, people with zero-income dependants are taxed at a lower rate).

Wealth and literacy are quite relevant, because most translations are not done by the original publisher, but by local actors who have to live with the local market. If there are are sufficiently many Danes who are ready to spend money on (say) books, the local publishers will do it.

In my experience as a foreigner in Scandinavia, Swedes are way way faster to switch to English, many do it almost as soon as I make a small mistake, whereas Norwegians are much more tolerant and will keep up unless I switch myself.

>the languages of the top 5 countries have a ridiculously small speaking population

Dutch has over twenty million native speakers, Swedish has ten million. That is not ridiculously small. Even Norwegian's four and a half million is, on a global scale, very respectable. To say nothing of the fact that the number of "translated sources" is not a function of the number of speakers, but of the wealth of the country and the spread of written culture (which is very high in all of these cases).

>There was a failure of communication.

This sentence is not in the passive voice.

I agree. I grew up in Moscow, have lived in Norway for some time now and (I think) picked up the friendlier attitude - but I've never experienced that others are somehow uncomfortable with me smiling or whatever when I'm back. (I think this is important because a lot of the stereotypes come down not to the smile per se, but to the fact that people maybe be more self-conscious about talking to a foreigner or similar.)

Certainly. Everything that applies to second-rank universities in this respect applies to even less advantaged institutions and scholars, magnified.

Not quite, and there has been some interesting experimental work lately... but no, not really. Here is a relevant link from Language Log, and there are many more where this comes from: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2592

(edit for typo)

OK, I'll bite. Assuming an average figure of $4,000 per journal per year, how much does will a university like Cornell spend per year on all journals? I work at a smallish European university, and even in my smallish field of the humanities we have access to about a hundred journals (give or take); I dread to think how many journals the university library subscribes to in total, plus dissertation databases such as ProQuest, non-academic periodicals archives, yadda yadda. For something like Cornell, I suspect the figure has to be much higher (more journals, more subscribers).

Plus, it's fine to think that Cornell can afford it; but can a second-rank public university? It probably doesn't, it has neither the money nor the bargaining power. Which means that its academics have limited access to advances in their fields. How can that be fine?

It is actually extremely murky, because there is no single document which states what the constitutional status is, there is a patchwork of legislation which refers to England and Wales, then there are the Wales-specific acts such as the Welsh Language Acts, and then there's the devolution and the devolved legislation (which establishes that Wales is to some degree independent within the UK). The constitutional problem, in a nutshell, is that Henry VIII introduced the Laws in Wales Acts to create the legal entity "England and Wales", but there had been no legal entity "Wales" before he did.

Also, if Wales is already a country, why is independence the stated aim of Plaid Cymru :)?

Um, actually the constitutional status of Wales is a murky topic, and even if that were to be cleared up unambiguously, how do you compare statuses across constitutions?

I think you misunderstand me :). I don't think .cym is a bad idea at all, but I can understand those who might think it is not. Wales is not a country in the way that Russia, Tuvalu, Kenya or even Jersey are (and even in the latter sense there are fringe cases such as Western Sahara, Kosovo and South Ossetia). If Catalonia and Wales are OK, is Sápmi? What about culturally distinct minorities with no political recognition such as the Roma? It's just too messy.

"People say this" is the definition of "this makes linguistic sense"

I'm all for .cat, but I can see the arguments against. People are already campaigning for .cym for Wales, so where do we stop? Do all the regional communities on Spain get one (Basque country, Asturias, Galicia, the list goes on). Do the Saami in Scandinavia get one? (They have their own parliaments, so why not TLDs?) What about Native Americans / First Nations? At least being a country is a criterion that works 95+ percent of the time

Yes, which is why regulations regarding non-discriminatory network access are beneficiary to consumers.

So true. Giving OK presentations is a technical skill that can be acquired with a bit of training (and a sympathetic audience to bounce off for your unsuccessful shows). Most people who are brilliant public speakers are extroverts, but many extroverts are only passable or downright terrible at public speaking, because they never have acquired the skill, while an introvert can train themselves to be quite interesting and engaging.

These are unscientific observations on the basis of a bunch of academic conferences (which give you the opportunity of observing the same person in a public-speaking context and informally). YMMV.

The first point is not too much of a downer, actually: it's not much harder to learn the IO monad as pure syntactic sugar than to learn printf and its ilk.

I use LaTeX in an academic setting (theoretical linguistics) which only occasionally requires a lot of math, but I'm still saving tons of man-hours by using the LaTeX + Emacs + AUCTeX combo. Here are some frequent use cases where LaTeX blows a text processor out of the water.

* Bibliography. The median article length in our field is 30+ pages, with reference lists of 60+ not uncommon. Maintaining these in Word/OO is a nightmare, even with (non-free) bibliography software. RefTeX allows me to find and insert citations in a matter of three keystrokes, and whenever I reshuffle the reference list I'm 100% sure it's in order (i.e. everything I cite in the text is in the references and there are no uncited references)

* We don't use math, but we do use a lot of tree-like diagrams. Drawing these by hand is a chore; using logical markup to get trees which need zero to very little tuning saves enormous amounts of time and frustration.

* Floats and numbered examples. TeX floats are notoriously unreliable, but seriously, are Word's any better? And it gets worse with numbered examples (and pictures in numbered examples). For instance, a frequent feature of linguistics papers is an interlinear gloss: two or three lines of elements that have to line up with each other. These involve tables or tab stops in a word processor, and are notoriously fragile (e. g. if your sentence doesn't fit on one line, you get horrible issues with breaking lines).

All this is in addition to the common advantages like keeping track of numbering. These are all things that can be done with a word processor, but usually require significant amounts of time and self-discipline.

A lot of people in our department use LaTeX; most are not of the "programming" type, and are not deeply "into" LaTeX, interacting with the very basics and using some googling and copy-pasting. They still get much more satisfactory results in a shorter amount of time than the Word people.

This is all true, but, in any case, whatever happened to MVC? After all, you can (and arguably should) have your business logic happen in functional and reduce the GUI or whatever (which might or might not be OO) to more or less a thin layer of piping which ships data between the user and the pure parts of the program.

Quite possibly. At conferences in my (non-"techie") field, the single biggest source of delays is people getting their Macs to talk to the projector.