Category: Uncategorized

Inertia. Census questions are a slow moving beast, and getting them updated is extremely difficult. The question on volunteerism in this year’s census was a request from Peter Costello, three censuses ago. The Australian Bureau of Statistics could not afford to spend the money to get rid of it.

There is plenty of cowboy stuff to blame the ABS for, but if they hadn’t been defunded and rudderless, they wouldn’t have gone cowboy to begin with.

That inertia is in play widely. People noted with dismay the lack of an intersex option on the census. State governments have been more proactive: in the ACT it is in fact mandated to offer intersex as an option in any government survey; and the data standard I help manage in the Australian school sector has been updated to include it.

But the federal bodies in education have not updated their data collection manual yet. And in fact the parenting role question has been a bone of contention between the state and federal bodies in education, for the same reason. Federal bodies are interested in establishing mothers’ role in encouraging education. State bodies have little interest anymore in differentiating fathers from mothers in their data collecting.

So it’s not really that they’ve chosen to exclude, it’s that they haven’t gotten around to updating.

Putting this up not because something has happened to trigger it, but because I just came across it again, and I’ve been meaning to pin it here.

What do Quora users think of Quora Product Management?

https://www.quora.com/What-do-Qu…

If they can always get more writers where we came from, and there is no need for Quora Inc to make its writers stakeholders (outside the secret Facebook group), then we are commoditized, and we are just product.

My own impotent response is:

• I will not thank them for it
• I will not help them in it
• I will not show them the respect they don’t show me

My loyalty is to my fellow Quorans. I do not consider Adam DiCaprio my fellow Quoran.

Kat Rectenwald disagreed with my retaliatory ethics, and I respect that. But that’s where I stand.

The reason why we in Australia built Canberra in a middle of nowhere sheep paddock was precisely that the two main cities, Melbourne and Sydney, hated each other. NSW and Victoria were quite independent colonies before Federation; and Australia is a federation, as in decentralised state, precisely because of that independence.

(As with other federations, authority has gradually centralised to makes things practical.)

Sydneysiders and Melburnians don’t exactly hate each other, but there is a fair bit of parochialism and contempt on both sides about their respective quirks.

Buses here in Melbourne will proudly boast of TV shows that are shot in Melbourne; you have to pay attention here to notice how much of Australian TV is Sydney. Melbourne prides itself on how intellectual it is by comparison with the superficial Harbour City; how Melbourne is the home of comedy and the best comedy Sydney could come up with was the sitcom Hey Dad!; how we are the Most Liveable City in the world according to whichever survey we’ve bribed this week, etc etc etc. And I have no doubt Sydneysiders have plenty of stuff to come back at us with.

Canberra? We can’t summon up that much passion against it. We mostly just laugh at it. A jumped up country town full of civil servants, with nightlife to match. (Yes, it’s getting better. It started from a very low baseline.)

Frederick Douglass.

I mean, I’m white Australian, and I’m flabbergasted that Hollywood has still not gotten there.

Maybe it’s because I’m white Australian.

Epic Rap Battles of History is… a start, but he deserves a lot more:

Probably, but not necessarily. As the astute Joachim Pense put it (answering this question, rather than the OP’s question):

Joachim Pense’s answer to Linguists believe Proto indo European is the root of all those European languages. Does this mean that at one time everyone spoke the same language?

No. Proto-Indo-European is a reconstruction that has a scope of many centuries and a large area. The reconstruction is not able to get to a finer resolution.

In fact, the idea has been put out there (by Trubetzkoy) that Indo-European may not have been a single language at all, but a Sprachbund of languages. The reconstruction assumes that it was a single language, but the reconstruction does that for methodological reasons: it’s not like we actually know.

Even if Indo-European was a single people, languages are not genetically transmitted. There’s a lot of genetic diversity in people who speak Indo-European languages now; there may have been some diversity back then too—especially if Indo-European was always a language that spread from place to place, whether culturally or militarily.

I echo other respondents in expressing frustration at the vagueness of the question.

In English, there are two diacritics that can be applied to <e> to change its pronunciation.

<è> is occasionally used to ensure that the <e> is pronounced and not silent.

Grave accent

The grave accent, though rare in English words, sometimes appears in poetry and song lyrics to indicate that a usually-silent vowel is pronounced to fit the rhythm or meter. Most often, it is applied to a word that ends with –ed. For instance, the word looked is usually pronounced /ˈlʊkt/ as a single syllable, with the e silent; when written as lookèd, the e is pronounced: /ˈlʊkᵻd/ look-ed). In this capacity, it can also distinguish certain pairs of identically spelled words like the past tense of learn, learned /ˈlɜːrnd/, from the adjective learnèd /ˈlɜːrnᵻd/ (for example, “a very learnèd man”).

I make a point of writing learnèd. Very very few people do.

<ë> properly is used to split up a digraph, so the preceding vowel and the <e> are pronounced separately; e.g. Zoë /zoʊi/. However, <ë> was occasionally used for the same reason as <è> was. So (Brontë family) Brontë was a much more posh-looking rendering of the Irish surname Ó Pronntaigh, than the normal anglicisation Prunty or Brunty. Tolkien picked up that function of <ë> in his renderings of Elvish languages.

Should they? No, because they don’t pass the threshold of Insincere or Trolling. And Quora has enough ease already in hammering down contributions to Quora.

However, such questions are indeed fingernails on a chalkboard to anyone living outside the US. A renowned Quoran of the Hellenic persuasion has once described such questions to me as αμερικανιές /amerikanˈjes/.

The colloquial modern Greek suffix –ja, plural –jes, < Mediaeval Greek –éa, is a flexible and expressive morpheme. It is not, however, complimentary.

Downvote the questions. They won’t go away, and they seem if anything to have been templated, which would mean that Quora was complicit in putting them up: Question patterns by Jay Wacker on The Quora Blog; Question Patterns (Quora feature)

Oh, you didn’t know about templated questions? Well, now you do.

Because such “commercials” are not inconsistent with Quora’s missions:

• publicly: to increase the world’s knowledge
• publicly, when the Founders let their mind wander: to serve as a cache/substitute for Google
• speculatively: to serve as a testbed for from sweet, sweet AI

They’re not very sociable, I admit. Even though I’ve done it myself, and recently at that. But, after all—all together now:

Quora is a Q&A site, not a social site.

To my amusement, when I googled for this in Australia, I found that I know the researchers that came up with the latest research on this. The latest research I found was 10 years ago, though (which is why I know them); and I don’t think the numbers will have stayed the same.

http://research.acer.edu.au/cgi/…

As of 10 years ago:

1. Japanese: 333k
2. Italian: 322k
3. Indonesian: 210k
4. French: 207k
5. German: 127k
6. Chinese: 81k

French and German are the inherited elite education languages (they’re what I did). The newspapers have been bemoaning the fall in Asian language enrolments; so Japanese and Indonesian will have dropped; Chinese as a community language will have risen and Italian fallen.

From Languages in Victorian schools, the most popular taught languages in Australia now are French, German, Indonesian and Japanese. That means Italian has collapsed as a community language taught in schools, and Chinese hasn’t broken through yet (which surprises me).

Eh…

I looked through Compositions for the pieces I composed and put into music software in 2000. (I composed as a teenager, but didn’t quite know what I was doing; 2000 was when I had enough free time to try and polish things.)

(Not that I quite knew what I was doing in 2000 either.)

It’s a tie between a Scherzo I wrote,

and a Cretan folksong setting: