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Tuesday, October 21, 2003 |
Language Savant
I attended the BloggerCon kickoff party a few Fridays back, and was talking to Carl Robert Blesius, a Heidelberg medical student doing an MGH clerkship and fellow openacs/.LRN enthusiast. languages, and I mentioned that my wife and I had studied German for about a year and a half after visiting some friends in Munich.
We were taking lessons from a Harvard Square linguist named Lee Reithmeuller, at the Intercontinental Foreign Language Program. Lee has a very unique approach to foreign language instruction in several respects. He believes that you learn languages faster and with better recall if you study multiple languages concurrently. He never really said why, but my oversimplified explanation is that this is similar to the better recall/comprehension claims of speed reading. There are other reasons why this makes sense from a mnemonics perspective, and it has the added benefit of being very appealing from a student perspective (learn more in less time).
In addition to teaching multiple languages (Lee teaches about 20), he also eschews the standard grammar-based approach. Instead, he writes interactive question and answer type scripts that resemble beat poetry -- quite absurb. You don't do 'going to the movies' or 'in the kitchen' vocabulary fests. Instead, you converse with mushrooms, cheese-boys, italian bees and strawberry girls, and each verb tense you memorize is associated with a flavor of ice cream. It's a lot more like beat poetry, and less like what you were fed in school. Occasionally the scripts will overlap with some 60s pop song, and Lee will break into song.
The lessons are quite entertaining, and while you can't necessarily recall how to say arbitrary sentences, the ones you know come quite easily. You are encouraged to study the scripts, but Lee is a realist about how much time working folks hav to devote to language study so you never get discouraged.
Anyway, Carl was enthused by my description, and just let me know he contacted Lee about learning Chinese, French and Spanish.
3:22:41 PM
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Insightful XSLT Comments from Paul Ford
http://lambda.weblogs.com/discuss/msgReader$8805#8845
I think XSLT suffers in particular from the lack of a community support base. Perl, Python, and Ruby have passionate advocates who have pushed back on the language and built a culture around it, expanding it in dozens of new directions. But XSLT is just so weird: XML syntax, functional roots--it doesn't encourage the sort level of wiki-building, archive-creating, best-practice-establishing enthusiasm of those other tools.
I never thought of it that way -- XSLT knowledge/expertise crosses too many domains to lend itself to community building. A bit like LDAP, with its seldom overlapping constituencies of network architects and application developers.
3:20:03 PM
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Database Stuff
Lots of news in the database world. IBM and Oracle, both taking a lot of heat from OS databases, have dropped their prices on their low-end RDBMS's.
MySQL, the primary factor in the prior story, has purchased a vendor of clustering software. This, combined with their earlier aquisition/licensing of SAP-DB means their product roadmap has become completely opaque to me. What will MySQL customers be running in two years time? Something cheaper than MS, IBM, and ORCL customers is about all you can be sure of. Which code base they'll crib from to implement transaction support, fault tolerance, a procedural language and replication seems to be anyone's guess.
And Mondrian, pretty much the only open source OLAP project out there, hit their 1.0 milestone last month (thanks Talli). I hope I get a chance to try it out some time, to take advantage of my hard-won (and slightly mind warping) MDX knowledge.
3:19:27 PM
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Blindingly obvious phone UI
I was on the phone with a busy online retailer the other day, settling
in for a potentially long wait, and I was shocked to hear this from the
phone system:
'The wait time is about 20 minutes. Would you like to leave a number
and have us call you back?". This floored me - what a tremendous
improvement on the synchronous experience of waiting on hold. I wish I
thought of it. Although when on hold I would have just continued
working at the computer, it was great not to have to worry about when
the other person would pick up. I didn't have to rack up the long
distance phone minutes on my cell phone (nor did they on their toll free
number) or worry about switching over when call waiting clicked in. But, the most
amazing thing is it's *so* darn obvious.
I'd think the ROI on decreased phone charges would be pretty quick --
why doesn't everyone do this? Can it cost that much to merge inbound
call center with outbound telemarketer functionality?
10:43:02 AM
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© Copyright 2005 John Sequeira.
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