The Construct
Discourse, Society, Language, New Media, and I
Pirated scholarship
13 Jan 2010
I feel so old in saying “How I wish we had the learning resources kids have these days.” The Internet and the availability of information has, I think, has pretty much the same effect as, say the photocopying machine or the word processor. I just can’t imagine writing a 100-page thesis
Just last night, my younger university colleague, Raymond and I were sharing a few of the ideas that are quite interesting research areas for us language scholars. Then we came to the issue of access to the latest ideas and resources. How can one do relevant research when we’re still quoting 20 year-old materials.
Wikipedia is up-to-date but still questionable for most as a “citable” resource. But who needs Wikipedia if you can get the actual ebooks and book scans online for free? Sites like Gigapedia (which has been online for more than a year now, wonder why only very few UP people know about it) have a better catalog for recent books than local libraries.
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- Tags: Downloads, Ebooks, Education, Language, Linguistics
Dispensing indiscriminate advice
In: Life
11 Jan 2010
People just love to give unsolicited advice. They’re annoying as they are but one thing that I really don’t like with people who do so is how many of them lead with “Tingnan mo ako…” (better translated as “Compare yourself to my case…”). These people just don’t factor in what can be a fundamental disconnect between their situations and others’.
For example, this one acquaintance of mine asked me why I don’t put up a business of my own just like what he’s done. “Ako nga nakaya ko, ikaw pa,” he said. (“I was able to do it, you should too.”) Fact of the matter is he had help from his upper middle class family to put up the capital and the ground work. He should know he was talking to an orphan from a lower middle class family who never had assets or wealth to be inherited.
Or this other acquaintance who dispensed advice (to do this and to do that) without even hearing the real deal behind my situation. Not like she’d be able to relate anyway. Trust fund babies just can’t. People who haven’t tasted failures (note the plural) or faced desperation and adversity really don’t have much to offer in terms of “wisdom.”
Lifehacker tips work because they’re oriented to cater to a wide audience. You can’t be too surgical with a shotgun. Not because you’ve been able to catch a mouse with cheese, means that you’d be able to bait a cat with it. Even if mice and cats are both mammals. Context counts.
And as a know-it-all who has every tendency to be the type of person I hate, I’ve decided only to give personal advice to people who ask for them.
Here’s a pretty good article from 30 Sleeps on dealing with unsolicited advice.
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- Tags: Advice, Life, People, Society
The originality of thought
10 Jan 2010It really is a hard thing to come up with something original these days. That proverbial bucket in the sea of knowledge is a constant bitching reminder that no matter how much you read and learn, you won’t be able to match the billions of Google’s indexed pages.
Makes you wonder how difficult it really is to write a dissertation these days. I consider myself pretty well-read given my age for my field locally. And yet there’s still a lot of material that I am aware of and have not read, and material that that I haven’t even thought existed despite the thousands of bibliographic entries I’ve browsed. I hate to admit it but I’ve just recently come across Steven Pinker who is, by specialization a psychologist, but anchors many of his arguments on language.
And boy, how I hate myself for only reading about him just now. Quite a lot of my interests in language studies are actually dealt by his works – game theory, pragmatics, and even physics in language. Yes, physics! (Check this video of his talk at Google where he discusses ideas from his book The Stuff of Thought.)
That had me thinking about that joke I had in our graduate class in Semantics about establishing a field on “quantum linguistics.” I argued that deixis and tense can be related to the concepts of space and time. When I was joking about it, I wondered if that was an original idea. Turns out, it isn’t. According to Pinker there’s “space in our prepositions, matter in nouns, time tenses, and causality in verbs.” Humble pie for me.
Still, this has me thinking. How much original and world-changing thought can be conjured up by an ordinary mind? Perhaps that’s the reason why God only sends a genius like Einstein once a century. Maybe the world won’t just be able to deal with such revolutionary ideas if they come plenty and quick in between. The rest of us are just plain bound for mental mediocrity.
Laptops and limited stocks
In: Technology
8 Jan 2010Being that my lappie is already two and a half years old, it’s really high time to consider retiring it. But goodness what a workhorse this ASUS A8Jr is. Left on for 16 hours a day for those two and a half years and the only hitch I ever encountered was the hinge issue (a physical issue) which ASUS covered under warranty. And because of that I’ve developed a brand loyalty to ASUS.
I’ve actually been meaning to replace it last year but I had to re-channel some of my budget for other reasons that I gave up on purchasing a laptop after that.
I was meaning to get the ASUS F81-Se (all because of the beefy ATI HD 4570 video) card but even when Risha tried to buy one last year, she ended up with the K40IN thanks to limited stocks. The ASUS sit still lists the F81-Se as part of their product line, but alas, can’t seem to find one locally.
Because of that experience, I’ve been constantly looking at the product offerings to check if ASUS is coming out with a new model.
If I were to buy one now, I’d probably buy the same one but I’m trying to hold out just in case ASUS decides to come out with one that has better specs. The K50AB – a larger 15″ screen and the coveted ATI HD 4570 video card – looks promising but it seems that it isn’t offered locally as well.
More idiot than savant
In: Education
7 Jan 2010Part of the tasks of descriptive linguistics is to seek out patterns which shouldn’t be that much of an effort since humans are said to be innately equipped with capacities to seek out patterns. And the task seems to be easier with analytic languages like English where logic is tied to word order.
Some people are more equal than others in this regard though. Remember those scenes in A Beautiful Mind where numbers just pop out of all the chaos for John Nash? That’s just a visual depiction of everyone else’s inadequacies. And “everyone else” includes me.
I have to go through hundreds of sentences of GMA’s SONAs in an effort to extract patterns. I’ve already observed some but recently, ever since January struck, I just seem to be at a loss of what to make sense of all of these sentences.
Well, the biased social commentator in me would probably go medieval and say, “I see patterns! Lies! Lies and slander! And dead people!”
Maybe I should stop looking at it for a while. Yup. Maybe that would work. Just like those magic 3D images where it does help to relax your eyes. Only if I don’t have a deadline for my first draft at the end of the month.
About this blog
Hi! I'm Alex, a 20-something blogger writing about the discourses of social media. Once in a while I still let slip posts about the mundane, the asinine, and the trivial. Feel free to contact me.
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