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Someone was working hard. National Geographic News is featuring an “artist’s conception” of an invisibility cloak, and it’s white on white. The actual story attached to this illustration is a little more mundane. Scientists have been talking about using refracting substances for years; now they just need to engineer it somehow.
Those spinning 76 “meatballs” are coming down by the week. Sad. At least there’s a desperate petition to save it. The ball’s designer, Ray Pedersen, is supporting the effort. I don’t think there were any spinning 76 balls in Cincinnati by the time I came to the city, but I do remember a spinning Shell sign in Kenwood. They rarely turned it on, though.
Besides the Daily, Stanford is home to a number of minor student newspapers, but by far the most notorious of them is The Stanford Review, the news-with-an-agenda publication that would praise itself as “America’s Finest News Source”, had parody paper The Onion not used the tagline first. If I had some fun criticising criticisms of The Blueprint in high school, I’ll have a ball with this paper.
When the Blueprint was censored by the St. X administration a year ago, I had no qualms about defending their right to free speech. But despite the Review’s sometimes overly harsh treatment by the Stanford student body, I could never defend what I seem to always find in this publication. Case in point: this week’s front page story, purportedly gauging the Stanford student body’s liberalness.
Before we begin, a disclaimer: I’m no statistics expert. But I know faulty statistics when I see them.
Let’s start with the headline: “Exactly How Liberal is Stanford University?” It’s no secret that the San Francisco area (and thus Stanford) is more left-leaning then, say, Cincinnati. But how is a respectable newspaper supposed to lead into a survey by assuming its intended outcome as indisputable fact, and then asking “to what extent?” In high school I was taught to view statistics with a good deal of skepticism, and I now know why. During the last presidential elections we all heard the term “margin of error” more than we cared to, the reason being that various polling practices may contribute to higher inaccuracy in the poll numbers. This survey provided no such information, only that “3,767 data points” were examined. I suppose it wouldn’t be too hard for an inquisitive student to figure it out, but you have to be suspicious of a survey that isn’t too forthcoming with its inner workings.
There’s also the issue that they didn’t go out and randomly poll people. Like any student hoping to casually learn more about their peers, they hopped over to the Facebook. After all, all of Stanford is on the Facebook, and people generally present their true identity on that site, no? Wrong on both counts. I could probably run a “study” of my own to find “Exactly How Common is Marriage at Stanford University?” Based on how many notifications I get from people jokingly trying to state themselves as “married” on the site, the results would be shocking to any family-values conservative. And many, believe it or not, refrain from opening up their identities for the school-age public to gawk at. So no: not everyone is on there, and it’s entirely possible that conservatives with a disdain for the “liberal” status quo here might keep themselves off the site.
But I can almost understand the Review’s reliance on a hardly-reliable site as a source. They don’t have nearly as many staff members as the Daily, for example. What I cannot accept is the analysis that follows below the fold. Among the findings is the observation that “the co-ops at Stanford are among the most liberal places to live on-campus.” They promptly continue to note that “Residents in co-ops must subscribe to a certain degree of communitarism [sic].” I’m not sure if they simply misspelled the word “communitarianism” or meant “communism” instead, because communitarianism doesn’t really fit into the left-versus-right ideology in which the Review is trying to frame this issue, and they seem to be criticising the trademark communal lifestyle at these residences as some form of communism. (They probably subscribe to the notion that both small-scale communism and full-scale Marxism-Leninism are synonymous, for that matter.)
And in presenting political affiliations as a left-versus-right affair, the Review is horribly oversimplifying the situation. Although it includes libertarianism – a camp that is usually relegated to its own axis, opposite the umbrella of totalitarianist ideologies – the Review chose to keep the large bar graph simple, sticking libertarianism to the right of “Very Conservative”. They’re a new kind of neocon, I suppose. The problem is that libertarianism is not exclusive of other ideologies. How, for example, would you categorize the Green Movement? These issues suggest a flaw in the assumptions that the reporters made when conducting this study. The Facebook’s “Political Views” categorization scheme is only a casual one, intended to be usable even by those who hardly care to understand political reality. Such a scheme is not appropriate for use by a newspaper, and I don’t think Mr. Zuckerberg has ever claimed it did.
The fact that the Review continually publishes material of this caliber seriously undermines the paper’s goals of getting door-to-door distribution. It’s a shame that a newspaper that wants to be viewed as the unjustly-treated underdog refuses to rise above the level of amateur journalism, and it’s sad that the Review staunchly hangs on to the outmoded genre of partisan journalism.
Newspaper of record The Onion documents how outsourcing may have contributed to a reversal of history:
As dozens of major American corporations continue to move their manufacturing operations to Mexico, waves of job-seeking Mexican immigrants to the United States have begun making the deadly journey back across the border in search of better-paying Mexican-based American jobs.
Wonder what the Minutemen will think of these repatriados…
Thanks to Nathan Aleman for the scoop.
I’m currently taking an introductory course in phonetics at Stanford, just out of interest. Our textbook, A Course in Phonetics by the late Peter Ladefoged, includes on the accompanying CD a catalog of sample sounds in different languages. I was quite surprised at the sounds that Ladefoged had recorded to represent the Vietnamese language, because he apparently chose a southern speaker with a thick accent.
I’ve often heard from my parents and others that Northern Vietnam has traditionally been regarded as the educated end of the country, just as those from the Eastern Seaboard are generally regarded as more sophisticated than Midwesterners. So it was amusing to hear the distinctive Southern dialect as if it were the dialect of Vietnamese – after all, this is a phonetics book.
Differences between dialects of Vietnamese are much more pronounced than differences between varieties of English, to the extent that speakers of some central dialects are often unintelligible to speakers of other dialects. Differences I noted in Ladefoged’s examples included (in IPA):
Because of these differences, anh (the masculine informal “you”) in the southern dialect is rendered identical to the northern ăn (to eat). So if a person told me “anh Minh” without context, I might not be sure if they’re just calling for me or telling me to eat myself! Well, fortunately, the latter scenario is unlikely enough that I wouldn’t end up hurting myself. :^P
Beyond the phonological differences, there are also wholly different vocabularies – for example, a word as basic as “yes” can be said vâng in the North but dạ in the South.
But the funniest thing about Ladefoged’s Vietnamese samples is that one of the words, tu is noted as meaning “to drink”. It actually means to enter a seminary. So I could just imagine a naïve phonetician, having studied Ladefoged’s materials, travelling to Saigon and telling a Vietnamese friend, “Hãy đi tu!” He’d think he’s telling his friend “Let’s go for a drink!”, but his friend might think he wants to become a priest. Oh well, there’s always church wine.
While I’m not surprised at the backlash that has accompanied the debut of “Nuestro Himno”, I’m taken aback that most of the criticisms are that they’ve taken our national anthem and sung it in Spanish, Heaven forbid. The Wikipedia article on the song notes that the anthem has been adapted into at least four other languages, and that the State Department has been providing a Spanish-language rendition of it anyways. It’s not as if anyone’s being “unamerican” by singing it.
Why didn’t these naysayers make such a fuss when our flag was notoriously, shall we say, adapted:
No one has forgotten the gloating, undignified celebrations of the US sprint relay team when they won gold in Sydney four years ago. On that occasion, Maurice Greene, Bernard Williams, Brian Lewis and Jon Drummond performed a lap of honour in which they stripped off their tops, arranged themselves in ludicrous flexed-muscle poses and adorned themselves in their national flag as if they were a team of male models. The absence of humility back then clearly still rankles today.
And how’s ’bout the same people who criticize “Nuestro Himno” form a boycott of all the people who misuse the flag on a daily basis. Ever seen a pair of American flag flip-flops? Ever brushed your teeth on our flag? Ever get the feeling that our star-spangled banner is being used solely to gain your patronage?
There’s probably something to be said about uniting under one song as our anthem, but “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, right? Which would you prefer: a new generation of Americans embracing a national symbol as their own, or a new generation of marketers embracing one as a commercial gimmick?
