Monday, August 30, 2010

Emmy Awards 2010 - Best Supporting Actress

British actress wins Emmy Award


30.08.10

It was left to Archie Panjabi to fly the flag for British acting talent at this year's Emmy Awards.
The London-born actress picked up best supporting actress for her role in the The Good Wife as the US honoured stars of the small screen at a lavish LA ceremony.
But elsewhere it was disappointment for thespians hailing from this side of the pond.
Michael Sheen, Sir Ian McKellen and Dame Judi Dench were among the high profile nominees who failed to take to the stage and pick up a coveted gong.
Panjabi, who made her name in British hit films East is East and Bend It Like Beckham, won an Emmy for her role as a law firm's in-house private investigator in her hit TV show.
The 38-year-old triumphed over fellow The Good Wife actress Christine Baranski and Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss.
Sheen was nominated for best actor in a miniseries or TV movie for The Special Relationship, a film in which he reprised his role as Tony Blair.
But he lost out to acting great Al Pacino, who won a rare TV gong for You Don't Know Jack. Sir Ian also missed out to Pacino in the category.
Maggie Smith and Dame Judi were both nominated in the female equivalent section. But they lost out as Claire Danes who was given the nod for her performance in Temple Grandin.
Hugh Laurie missed out yet again on an Emmy. The comedian turned actor went home empty handed as Bryan Cranston took the title of outstanding actor in a drama for his performance in Breaking Bad.

Amjad Khan to leave Kent

27.08.10

Fast bowler Amjad Khan will leave Kent when his contract expires at the end of the season.
Leaving: Amjad Khan has so far taken 248 wickets in first-class cricket
The 29-year-old Copenhagen-born player burst onto the county scene in his first full season with Kent in 2002, claiming 63 wickets, and made his Test debut for England against West Indieslast year.
Kent chief executive Jamie Clifford said: "Amjad has been with the club for nine seasons and we are very sorry to see him leave. These are financially difficult times for the club and sadly we are not currently in a position to make Amjad a meaningful offer.
"This has been a very hard decision; however we believe that it is the right one given the financial context. I am sure the club's members and supporters will join me in thanking Amjad for all his efforts and wish him the very best as he moves on."
Khan, who has so far taken 248 wickets in first-class cricket, said: "I am sorry to be leaving having been with the club since 2002. Ideally I would have liked to have continued my career with Kent but it is not to be.
"I sympathise with Kent's off-field financial pressures and know that that the key people wanted me to stay. I look forward to new challenges with renewed vigour and believe I have what it takes to put myself back in the England frame."

London gears up for two-wheeled revolution

Alice Ritchie

July 30, 2010

The sprawling, congested city of London speeds towards a greener, nimbler future Friday with the launch of a new bike hire scheme aimed at kick-starting a cycling revolution ahead of the 2012 Olympics.
Commuters and tourists infuriated by heavy traffic and often overcrowded, unreliable public transport finally have a two-wheeled alternative, similar to schemes already in place in Paris, Shanghai and dozens of cities worldwide.
From Friday, they can pick up one of 6,000 bicycles from 400 docking stations in central London -- including at the British Museum and Buckingham Palace -- then pedal to their destination and drop it off, all for a small fee.
At least that's the plan. In Paris, a similar scheme is hugely popular but has also been marred by vandalism and theft, with organisers having to replace the entire bike fleet just two years after its launch.
Introduced by Mayor of London Boris Johnson, a keen cyclist himself, the project is intended to boost the number of bicycle journeys ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games in the capital.
"It's part of a programme of things that are going to change the urban landscape, what it's like to live in and move around in London," Johnson told reporters earlier this month.
"In the run-up to the Olympics, it's part of our vision of a cleaner, greener, safer city, where you have a cycling revolution."
The London 2012 organisers want 100 percent of the spectators attending the Games to arrive having taken public transport, walked or cycled, and are investing heavily in the subway network and trains to make it happen.
A congestion charge introduced in 2003 has helped ease the pressure on city roads, but International Olympic Committee official Denis Oswald warned this month that despite progress in preparations so far, "traffic is an issue".
Introduced alongside the new cycle scheme will be a spider-like network of "superhighways" to carry cyclists safely in and out of central London from the suburbs. The route that will pass the Olympic site is due to open next year.
The programme has been dubbed the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme after its main sponsor, but organisers hope the city's residents will come up with something a little more imaginative when it gets going.
More than 10,000 people had signed up for a subscription to the bike hire scheme before it went live, and the mayor's transport advisor, Kulveer Ranger, told AFP: "We think the scheme is going to be very popular."
The mayor wants to increase the percentage of journeys made by bicycle in the city from the current level of about two percent to five percent, and cycle campaigner Tom Bogdanovicz said this was easily achievable.
"There is an appetite out there, it's just the conditions need to be right," Bogdanovicz, campaigns manager at the London Cycle Campaign, told AFP.
Surveys have suggested a third of Londoners would like to try cycling, he said, adding that they just needed a push -- the new scheme was "a great step".
Customers can chose from either a daily, weekly or monthly subscription, costing one pound (1.5 US dollars, 1.1 euros), five pounds or 45 pounds respectively, and the first 30 minutes of any journey they make is free.
Thereafter they will be charged on a rapidly increasing scale, while they must leave a deposit in case they do not return the bike or they leave it damaged -- a problem that has hit the Paris scheme.
Advertising giant JCDecaux, which runs the Paris scheme along with more than 60 across the world, was forced to replace 16,000 bicycles after they were returned with twisted handlebars, torn baskets and crushed wheels.
Another 8,000 disappeared, some of them turning up in Eastern Europe.
© 2010 AFP
This story is sourced direct from an overseas news agency as an additional service to readers. Spelling follows North American usage, along with foreign currency and measurement units.

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Tea Party Movement

The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party


August 28, 2010

By FRANK RICH


ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.
Vive la révolution!
There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.
Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.
All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.
Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.
Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception.” To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”
The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.
The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article (titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals — selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and that, if anything, raise his taxes.
This is hardly true of the Kochs. When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes. He hasn’t changed. As Mayer details, Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business. While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries has been lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying another product important to its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a “known carcinogen” in humans (which it is).
Tea Partiers may share the Kochs’ detestation of taxes, big government and Obama. But there’s a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental government safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety and the subsistence of the elderly.
Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda, as articulated by current Republican members of Congress, including the putative next speaker of the House, John Boehner, and Tea Party Senate candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and the new kid on the block, Alaska’s anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin protĂ©gĂ©, Joe Miller. Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a “slush fund”; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.
The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests. And surely Murdoch is snickering at those protesting the “ground zero mosque.” Last week on “Fox and Friends,” the Bush administration flacks Dan Senor and Dana Perino attacked a supposedly terrorism-tainted Saudi prince whose foundation might contribute to the Islamic center. But as “The Daily Show” keeps pointing out, these Fox bloviators never acknowledge that the evil prince they’re bashing, Walid bin Talal, is not only the biggest non-Murdoch shareholder in Fox News’s parent company (he owns 7 percent of News Corporation) and the recipient of Murdoch mammoth investments in Saudi Arabia but also the subject of lionization elsewhere on Fox.
No less a Murdoch factotum than Neil Cavuto slobbered over bin Talal in a Fox Business Channel interview as recently as January, with nary a question about his supposed terrorist ties. Instead, bin Talal praised Obama’s stance on terrorism and even endorsed the Democrats’ goal of universal health insurance. Do any of the Fox-watching protestors at the “ground zero mosque” know that Fox’s profits are flowing to a Obama-sympathizing Saudi billionaire in bed with Murdoch? As Jon Stewart summed it up, the protestors who want “to cut off funding to the ‘terror mosque’ ” are aiding that funding by watching Fox and enhancing bin Talal’s News Corp. holdings.
When wolves of Murdoch’s ingenuity and the Kochs’ stealth have been at the door of our democracy in the past, Democrats have fought back fiercely. Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.” When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”
And Obama? So far, sadly, this question answers itself.

Obama’s Failure in Sudan

August 28, 2010


By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

When President Obama was seeking the White House, he criticized Republicans for not doing enough on Darfur and insisted that he would make Sudan a priority.
“What we have done has not been enough,” he told me in a 2006 interview when I was guest host for a “Charlie Rose” segment on Sudan. He added that Washington needed “a sustained diplomatic effort to put pressure on Sudan.”
Yet these days, Mr. Obama is presiding over an incoherent, contradictory and apparently failing Sudan policy. There is a growing risk that Sudan will be the site of the world’s bloodiest war in 2011, and perhaps a new round of genocide as well. This isn’t America’s fault, but neither are we using all of our leverage to avert it.
Granted, Mr. Obama has a multitude of other priorities. Granted, Sudan is a mess with no perfect solutions. Nobody expects Mr. Obama to devote much time to Sudan. But the problem isn’t that the administration is too busy to devise a policy toward Sudan but that it has a half-dozen policies, mostly at cross-purposes.
As first reported by Foreign Policy, competing recommendations on Sudan are on Mr. Obama’s desk, reflecting dissent within the administration. One recommendation, from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Mr. Obama’s envoy for Sudan, Maj. Gen. Scott Gration, apparently focuses on continued carrots and engagement. The other, calling for a tougher approach, comes from the American ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, who has by far the longest experience dealing with Sudan.
Some 68 organizations have sent a joint letter to Mr. Obama, calling on him to work more energetically to prevent another round of war in Sudan. But so far he has been unengaged, and his administration has been less successful than the last Bush administration in getting Sudan to alter its behavior.
The upshot: Sudan’s on-and-off north-south civil war could resume soon. How bad could it be? Well, the last iteration of that war lasted about 20 years and killed some two million people. Mr. Obama’s former head of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, warned this year that the place facing the greatest risk of genocide or mass killing is southern Sudan.
Regular readers know I was not a fan of President George W. Bush. But one of his signal accomplishments, against all odds, was a 2005 peace agreement that ended the last round of that war. That agreement provided for a referendum next January in which southern Sudan can choose secession.
Southern Sudanese are expected to vote overwhelmingly to secede. But the region has most of the nation’s oil, and the north is determined not to lose the oil wells driving the nation’s economy.
The Obama administration has tried a carrots-rather-than-sticks approach to Sudan, and it has been right to engage Khartoum. It restored the issuance of American visas in Sudan, and at first this engagement led to some successes. For example, some aid groups that had been expelled from Darfur were allowed to return in a different form. And for a time, Darfur became calmer.
But in recent months Sudan has been hardening its positions, perhaps because it sees that it pays no price for misbehavior (and also because it sees that there are limits to the rewards it will receive for improved behavior). Sudan has cracked down on dissidents and journalists, steamrolled over an election, and for the last few weeks has restricted humanitarian access to Kalma, a huge camp of Darfuris. It has also curbed the ability of United Nations peacekeepers to protect themselves or others.
Most ominously, Sudan’s government has been stalling in preparations for the referendum in the south, and it may have been channeling weapons to disgruntled factions there. No one expects restraint from President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who is facing charges of genocide from the International Criminal Court.
For all his faults, President Bush inherited a war in Sudan and managed to turn it into peace. Mr. Obama inherited a peace that could turn into the world’s bloodiest war next year.
The Obama administration has just dispatched a talented former ambassador, Princeton Lyman, to lead a team on the ground in Sudan. That’s useful, but Washington could do much more. It could support United Nations peacekeepers, and it could work at the highest level with China, Britain, Egypt and others to avoid a new war. A useful step would be to put Vice President Joseph Biden in charge for at least the next six months.
The United Nations General Assembly also needs to take up Sudan when it meets next month. That will be the last chance for high-level involvement before the referendum.
There are plenty of bogus reasons for criticizing Mr. Obama’s foreign policy, but this is a legitimate one. And in a place like Sudan, American diplomatic malpractice could lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos videos and follow me on Twitter.

LANGUAGE and THINKING

Does Your Language Shape How You Think?


By GUY DEUTSCHER
Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. 
At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.
In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”). For decades, Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.
Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.
Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to assume that our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts. The general structure of his arguments was to claim that if a language has no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand this concept. If a language has no future tense, for instance, its speakers would simply not be able to grasp our notion of future time. It seems barely comprehensible that this line of argument could ever have achieved such success, given that so much contrary evidence confronts you wherever you look. When you ask, in perfectly normal English, and in the present tense, “Are you coming tomorrow?” do you feel your grip on the notion of futurity slipping away? Do English speakers who have never heard the German word Schadenfreude find it difficult to understand the concept of relishing someone else’s misfortune? Or think about it this way: If the inventory of ready-made words in your language determined which concepts you were able to understand, how would you ever learn anything new?
SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers to think anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they mustconvey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.
Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose betweenvoisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so.
On the other hand, English does oblige you to specify certain types of information that can be left to the context in other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to mention the neighbor’s sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions. Again, this does not mean that the Chinese are unable to understand the concept of time. But it does mean they are not obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action.
When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.
BUT IS THERE any evidence for this happening in practice?
Let’s take genders again. Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her? Mark Twain famously lamented such erratic genders as female turnips and neuter maidens in his rant “The Awful German Language.” But whereas he claimed that there was something particularly perverse about the German gender system, it is in fact English that is unusual, at least among European languages, in not treating turnips and tea cups as masculine or feminine. Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman. And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell you, once the habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I speak English, I may say about a bed that “it” is too soft, but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel “she” is too soft. “She” stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the tongue.
In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die BrĂĽcke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed.
In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory.
Of course, all this does not mean that speakers of Spanish or French or German fail to understand that inanimate objects do not really have biological sex — a German woman rarely mistakes her husband for a hat, and Spanish men are not known to confuse a bed with what might be lying in it. Nonetheless, once gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English speakers — stuck in their monochrome desert of “its” — are entirely oblivious to. Did the opposite genders of “bridge” in German and Spanish, for example, have an effect on the design of bridges in Spain and Germany? Do the emotional maps imposed by a gender system have higher-level behavioral consequences for our everyday life? Do they shape tastes, fashions, habits and preferences in the societies concerned? At the current state of our knowledge about the brain, this is not something that can be easily measured in a psychology lab. But it would be surprising if they didn’t.
The area where the most striking evidence for the influence of language on thought has come to light is the language of space — how we describe the orientation of the world around us. Suppose you want to give someone directions for getting to your house. You might say: “After the traffic lights, take the first left, then the second right, and then you’ll see a white house in front of you. Our door is on the right.” But in theory, you could also say: “After the traffic lights, drive north, and then on the second crossing drive east, and you’ll see a white house directly to the east. Ours is the southern door.” These two sets of directions may describe the same route, but they rely on different systems of coordinates. The first uses egocentric coordinates, which depend on our own bodies: a left-right axis and a front-back axis orthogonal to it. The second system uses fixed geographic directions, which do not rotate with us wherever we turn.
We find it useful to use geographic directions when hiking in the open countryside, for example, but the egocentric coordinates completely dominate our speech when we describe small-scale spaces. We don’t say: “When you get out of the elevator, walk south, and then take the second door to the east.” The reason the egocentric system is so dominant in our language is that it feels so much easier and more natural. After all, we always know where “behind” or “in front of” us is. We don’t need a map or a compass to work it out, we just feel it, because the egocentric coordinates are based directly on our own bodies and our immediate visual fields.
But then a remote Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from north Queensland, turned up, and with it came the astounding realization that not all languages conform to what we have always taken as simply “natural.” In fact, Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t make any use of egocentric coordinates at all. The anthropologist John Haviland and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have shown that Guugu Yimithirr does not use words like “left” or “right,” “in front of” or “behind,” to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was “coming northward.”
When these peculiarities of Guugu Yimithirr were uncovered, they inspired a large-scale research project into the language of space. And as it happens, Guugu Yimithirr is not a freak occurrence; languages that rely primarily on geographical coordinates are scattered around the world, from Polynesia to Mexico, from Namibia to Bali. For us, it might seem the height of absurdity for a dance teacher to say, “Now raise your north hand and move your south leg eastward.” But the joke would be lost on some: the Canadian-American musicologist Colin McPhee, who spent several years on Bali in the 1930s, recalls a young boy who showed great talent for dancing. As there was no instructor in the child’s village, McPhee arranged for him to stay with a teacher in a different village. But when he came to check on the boy’s progress after a few days, he found the boy dejected and the teacher exasperated. It was impossible to teach the boy anything, because he simply did not understand any of the instructions. When told to take “three steps east” or “bend southwest,” he didn’t know what to do. The boy would not have had the least trouble with these directions in his own village, but because the landscape in the new village was entirely unfamiliar, he became disoriented and confused. Why didn’t the teacher use different instructions? He would probably have replied that saying “take three steps forward” or “bend backward” would be the height of absurdity.
So different languages certainly make us speak about space in very different ways. But does this necessarily mean that we have to thinkabout space differently? By now red lights should be flashing, because even if a language doesn’t have a word for “behind,” this doesn’t necessarily mean that its speakers wouldn’t be able to understand this concept. Instead, we should look for the possible consequences of what geographic languages oblige their speakers to convey. In particular, we should be on the lookout for what habits of mind might develop because of the necessity of specifying geographic directions all the time.
In order to speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to have a compass in your mind that operates all the time, day and night, without lunch breaks or weekends off, since otherwise you would not be able to impart the most basic information or understand what people around you are saying. Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation. Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sense of direction. They don’t look at the sun and pause for a moment of calculation before they say, “There’s an ant just north of your foot.” They simply feel where north, south, west and east are, just as people with perfect pitch feel what each note is without having to calculate intervals. There is a wealth of stories about what to us may seem like incredible feats of orientation but for speakers of geographic languages are just a matter of course. One report relates how a speaker of Tzeltal from southern Mexico was blindfolded and spun around more than 20 times in a darkened house. Still blindfolded and dizzy, he pointed without hesitation at the geographic directions.
How does this work? The convention of communicating with geographic coordinates compels speakers from the youngest age to pay attention to the clues from the physical environment (the position of the sun, wind and so on) every second of their lives, and to develop an accurate memory of their own changing orientations at any given moment. So everyday communication in a geographic language provides the most intense imaginable drilling in geographic orientation (it has been estimated that as much as 1 word in 10 in a normal Guugu Yimithirr conversation is “north,” “south,” “west” or “east,” often accompanied by precise hand gestures). This habit of constant awareness to the geographic direction is inculcated almost from infancy: studies have shown that children in such societies start using geographic directions as early as age 2 and fully master the system by 7 or 8. With such an early and intense drilling, the habit soon becomes second nature, effortless and unconscious. When Guugu Yimithirr speakers were asked how they knew where north is, they couldn’t explain it any more than you can explain how you know where “behind” is.
But there is more to the effects of a geographic language, for the sense of orientation has to extend further in time than the immediate present. If you speak a Guugu Yimithirr-style language, your memories of anything that you might ever want to report will have to be stored with cardinal directions as part of the picture. One Guugu Yimithirr speaker was filmed telling his friends the story of how in his youth, he capsized in shark-infested waters. He and an older person were caught in a storm, and their boat tipped over. They both jumped into the water and managed to swim nearly three miles to the shore, only to discover that the missionary for whom they worked was far more concerned at the loss of the boat than relieved at their miraculous escape. Apart from the dramatic content, the remarkable thing about the story was that it was remembered throughout in cardinal directions: the speaker jumped into the water on the western side of the boat, his companion to the east of the boat, they saw a giant shark swimming north and so on. Perhaps the cardinal directions were just made up for the occasion? Well, quite by chance, the same person was filmed some years later telling the same story. The cardinal directions matched exactly in the two tellings. Even more remarkable were the spontaneous hand gestures that accompanied the story. For instance, the direction in which the boat rolled over was gestured in the correct geographic orientation, regardless of the direction the speaker was facing in the two films.
Psychological experiments have also shown that under certain circumstances, speakers of Guugu Yimithirr-style languages even remember “the same reality” differently from us. There has been heated debate about the interpretation of some of these experiments, but one conclusion that seems compelling is that while we are trained to ignore directional rotations when we commit information to memory, speakers of geographic languages are trained not to do so. One way of understanding this is to imagine that you are traveling with a speaker of such a language and staying in a large chain-style hotel, with corridor upon corridor of identical-looking doors. Your friend is staying in the room opposite yours, and when you go into his room, you’ll see an exact replica of yours: the same bathroom door on the left, the same mirrored wardrobe on the right, the same main room with the same bed on the left, the same curtains drawn behind it, the same desk next to the wall on the right, the same television set on the left corner of the desk and the same telephone on the right. In short, you have seen the same room twice. But when your friend comes into your room, he will see something quite different from this, because everything is reversed north-side-south. In his room the bed was in the north, while in yours it is in the south; the telephone that in his room was in the west is now in the east, and so on. So while you will see and remember the same room twice, a speaker of a geographic language will see and remember two different rooms.
It is not easy for us to conceive how Guugu Yimithirr speakers experience the world, with a crisscrossing of cardinal directions imposed on any mental picture and any piece of graphic memory. Nor is it easy to speculate about how geographic languages affect areas of experience other than spatial orientation — whether they influence the speaker’s sense of identity, for instance, or bring about a less-egocentric outlook on life. But one piece of evidence is telling: if you saw a Guugu Yimithirr speaker pointing at himself, you would naturally assume he meant to draw attention to himself. In fact, he is pointing at a cardinal direction that happens to be behind his back. While we are always at the center of the world, and it would never occur to us that pointing in the direction of our chest could mean anything other than to draw attention to ourselves, a Guugu Yimithirr speaker points through himself, as if he were thin air and his own existence were irrelevant.
IN WHAT OTHER WAYS might the language we speak influence our experience of the world? Recently, it has been demonstrated in a series of ingenious experiments that we even perceive colors through the lens of our mother tongue. There are radical variations in the way languages carve up the spectrum of visible light; for example, green and blue are distinct colors in English but are considered shades of the same color in many languages. And it turns out that the colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language. As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue.
In coming years, researchers may also be able to shed light on the impact of language on more subtle areas of perception. For instance, some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, he would have to answer in the past tense and would say something like “There were two last time I checked.” After all, given that the wives are not present, he cannot be absolutely certain that one of them hasn’t died or run off with another man since he last saw them, even if this was only five minutes ago. So he cannot report it as a certain fact in the present tense. Does the need to think constantly about epistemology in such a careful and sophisticated manner inform the speakers’ outlook on life or their sense of truth and causation? When our experimental tools are less blunt, such questions will be amenable to empirical study.
For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of deductive logic compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse or practical skills? The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.
Guy Deutscher is an honorary research fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester. His new book, from which this article is adapted, is “Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages,” to be published this month by Metropolitan Books.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Wikipedia Editing for Zionists

Readers Discuss Wikipedia Editing Course That Aims for ‘Balanced and Zionist’ Entries

Since it touched on two subjects of great interest to readers of The Lede, Wikipedia and Israel, it is not surprising that Friday’s post, “Wikipedia Editing for Zionists” — about an initiative to edit entries in the online encyclopedia to make them “balanced and Zionist in nature” — has generated an impassioned debatein one of our comment threads.
While several Israeli readers argued that the initiative was necessary in a part of the world where even the term “facts on the ground” is used as a euphemism — for the dispute over Israeli settlements built on occupied Palestinian land — some readers who take part in the editing of Wikipedia entries objected to the effort to make the encyclopedia conform to an ideological point of view.
Miriam Schwab, a Canadian-Israeli blogger who participated in a seminar last week in Jerusalem teaching supporters of Israel to edit Wikipedia, wrote on Twitter on Monday that the Lede post on the initiative, which included a video interview she had given to an Israeli broadcaster, was “a horrible report” that made the editing course “look like some Zionist conspiracy to take over Wikipedia.”
In a comment posted on The Lede, Ms. Schwab defended the course as an attempt to balance opinions about contested issues in entries in the online encyclopedia. In Ms. Schwab’s words:
[T]he goal of this workshop was to train a number of pro-Israelis how to edit Wikipedia so that more people could present the Israeli side of things, and thus the content would be more balanced.
I personally believe that in many, if not most cases, regarding the Israel-Palestinian issue, Israel is in the right. Pro-Palestinians think the same about themselves, and that’s fine by me. We both have the right to express our opinions online, and in Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is meant to be a fair and balanced source, and it is that way by having people from all across the spectrum contributing to the content.
That view contrasts sharply with the comments of a reader using the name Anonymous Wikiperson, who wrote:
Of course there are small, loosely defined groups of individuals who edit Wikipedia in a manner congruent with their own ideological predispositions; no one who has spent any amount of time on Wikipedia can deny that. However, these editorial cliques don’t openly recruit or hold seminars on how they can make Wikipedia conform more closely to their perspective, which is precisely what this article draws to our attention. In my opinion, that is what makes this case newsworthy and, indeed, unsettling. [...]
This belies a larger difficulty in contemporary media, one hinted at by [the] phrase “balanced and Zionist in nature.” There is an assumption that any ’story’ can be approached from two perspectives and that the goal of the media is represent a ‘balance’ between the two, as opposed to attempting to get at the truth. Liberal/conservative, Israeli/Palestinian, science/religion: you’re either with us or against us. According to this binary logic, a story or article that does not reflect one perspective is taken to be sympathetic to the other, which therefore calls for the intervention of the ‘wronged’ party. This is the rationale that has splintered contemporary media into hostile, mutually exclusive camps catering to niche audiences who want their own ideas parroted back at them as news.
This is, of course, completely antithetical to the mission of Wikipedia, which is to provide accessible and accurate information that anyone and everyone can meaningfully contribute to. Indeed, one might even argue that efforts such as the one discussed in this post actively subvert and devalue Wikipedia, as edit wars push articles further and further into conflict between interest groups and away from a consensus-based, democratic approach. [...]
If individual Zionists wish to edit Wikipedia, more power to them. They are welcome to contribute and I’m sure they have interesting information and perspectives to offer. However, to recruit blocs of new editors based on their ideological positions instead of their expertise or commitment to the ideals embodied by Wikipedia is to subvert the site’s very project and ought to be viewed as what it is: an assault on those of us who want to build the most coherent, consensus based approach to information sharing by partisans convinced solely of their own opinions.
Another reader, Mike, wrote that a contest over the facts in a contested part of the world is “unremarkable,” since:
Wikipedia seeks to write from a neutral point of view, but on many issues there is no neutral point of view. We should expect the true story to be contested, because reality itself is contested. We should expect the writing of the story to mirror the reality on the ground that the story attempts to report.
I can’t judge whether someone is being underhanded about the issues, but any time people are fighting for their lives they are going to have subjective views of the situation. You’ll know there is peace when it is possible to write an uncontested neutral story.
Shalom Freedman, a reader in Jerusalem who agrees with the effort to correct what he called “the many distortions presented in Wikipedia entries,” argued:
[T]he first principle of this effort should be to stick to factually accurate information. In other words there should be first and above all a respect for Truth. I believe if that is the case in the struggle between Israeli supporters and their enemies the balance will be in strong favor of the pro-Israeli group.
Incidentally, Ms. Schwab, the Israeli blogger who is taking part in the editing initiative, is new to Wikipedia but not to online battles over perceived bias against Israel. In addition to writing a blog, she is the chief executive of illuminea, a social media marketing company in Jerusalem. Her profile on that company’s Web site notes that she “was selected out of 900 applicants to participate in the U.S. State Department’s Middle East Entrepreneur Training (MEET) Business Executive Program at the Rady School of Business, University of California in San Diego in 2009.”
It turns out that her involvement in that program was itself part of the struggle against what some Israelis see as bias against them by parts of the American government.
As she explained on her blog, in September, 2007, Ms. Schwab wrote:
I discovered “The Middle East Entrepreneur Training (MEET),” a U.S. State Department-backed program geared towards strengthening leadership and entrepreneurial skills among residents of the Middle East… except Israeli Jews!
I quickly contacted as many people as I could about this blatant discrimination, including reporting this on a mailing list for journalists and writers. This happened last Thursday, Sept. 21, and by Friday morning all of the related web pages had been taken down, and were changed to include Israeli Jews.
After Ms. Schwab’s case was taken up by Michelle Malkin, a conservative American blogger, the State Department accepted her into the program.
AUGUST 23, 2010