Interesting Links for 01-05-2014

[andrewducker]

• Scotland's secret tunnel under the Forth, 50 years old and forgotten
  (tags: scotland tunnels Edinburgh mining )
• Dragon Age Goes Gender-Neutral!
  (tags: games gender fantasy )
• Want a young child to 'help' or 'be a helper'? Choice of words matters
  (tags: children language psychology )
• Why UKIP matters in the Scottish independence referendum
  (tags:

Comments

[andrewducker]

The court case link is _massive_. Basically, legal aid cuts mean that there are no lawyers available to defend these people, and no prospect of there being so at any point in the reasonably close future

[gonzo21]

"The Crown accepts that involuntary lack of representation would be
inconsistent with the European Convention on Human Rights"

That part, to me, absolutely indicates why the Tories are running so hard on taking us out of Europe. I'm convinced it's because they want the UK removed from the protections we enjoy under the ECHR.

The ConDem future offered to us is one where the poor are forced to represent themselves in a court of a law, be found inevitably guilty, and locked up. Heck, they'll probably try and pass legislation that lets them find people without a lawyer de-facto guilty.

[a_pawson]

Except that the EHCR is nothing whatsoever to do with the EU.

[gonzo21]

So where does it draw it's legitimacy from if it's not part of the structure of the EU? Why has the UK agreed to be governed under it's auspices?

[momentsmusicaux]

Well that's French kids screwed then. You can't just nounify (or indeed verbify) things in French. So you can't make a noun like 'helper' out of 'to help'.

[drdoug]

Can't you? You can say 'un aide' to correspond to 'aider', but admittedly it doesn't have the same connotations. Erm ... penseur/penser works well for thinker/to think, as does promeneur/promener for walker/to walk. I'm pretty sure you can't always nounify things in English without confusion either, although it is more often done and thus you can be more inventive with it and expect people to understand what you mean. (As a counterexample to my own point, I don't think compreneur would work for comprener, at least not as idiomatic - but I'd guess most French speakers would guess what you meant.)

[momentsmusicaux]

penseur and promeneur are good examples, but they're already existing words. It doesn't feel to me like you can make new ones. And indeed there are -eur words that don't have a corresponding verb, like 'spectateur'.

[drdoug]

Yes, Ok, I think you're right - it doesn't feel to me like you can just make new words like that in French the way you can in English. Put another way, I do not get the feel you can wordify in French so ready.

[alitheapipkin]

Depressingly enough that study about replies from professors doesn't surprise me in the least. I was only commenting to a colleague this morning that senior male academics frequently think they can be rude to everyone after we got a very rude email from one yesterday evening bitching about us using the departmental mailing list.

I'd be interested to see data on whether male and female professors differed in their response rate.

[andrewducker]

FTA:
"There's absolutely no benefit seen when women reach out to female faculty, nor do we see benefits from black students reaching out to black faculty or Hispanic students reaching out to Hispanic faculty,"

[alitheapipkin]

Yeah, I read it, I just don't understand quite what they mean by that. Probably it makes sense in terms of the whole article, but as a snippet, it isn't clear what 'no benefit' means.

[andrewducker]

Aaah. I can't think of any explanation other than "No improvement in the response rate for those people."

[danieldwilliam]

The Shakespear (or Shaxper) stats are interesting.

I’m with many of the commentators that the number of interactions between characters isn’t a perfect measure of the intensity of the relationship and that Romeo and Juliet, in particular, is perhaps better understood as the story of two daft kids who think they have ideal love rather than a tale of actual ideal love.