INGLÊS SEM FRONTEIRAS

MÓDULO IELTS

- How Language Shapes Thought

- Experiences Make People Happier Than Material Goods
- What makes us laugh
- There Is No Scientific Method
- English as a lingua franca
- Does 'Sustainability' Help the Environment or Just Agriculture's Public Image?
- Cambridge Analytica: Can targeted ads really change a voter's behaviour?
- How Transportation Impacts Public Health
- Olympics Open with Koreas Marching Together, Offering Hope for Peace
- 5 ways to talk about your accomplishments without bragging
- Brazil has a School Problem
- How Gender and Race Affect Education Today

c o g n i t i v e p Syc h o l o g y
How Language
Shapes Thought
The languages we speak affect our perceptions of the world
By Lera Boroditsky
I
am standing next to a five-year old girl in pormpuraaw, a small
Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York in
northern Australia. When I ask her to point north, she points
precisely and without hesitation. My compass says she is right.
Later, back in a lecture hall at Stanford University, I make the
same request of an audience of distinguished scholars—win-
ners of science medals and genius prizes. Some of them have
come to this very room to hear lectures for more than 40 years. I
ask them to close their eyes (so they don’t cheat) and point north.
Many refuse; they do not know the answer. Those who do point
take a while to think about it and then aim in all possible direc-
tions. I have repeated this exercise at Harvard and Princeton and
in Moscow, London and Beijing, always with the same results.
A five-year-old in one culture can do something with ease
that eminent scientists in other cultures struggle with. This is a
big difference in cognitive ability. What could explain it? The
surprising answer, it turns out, may be language.
IN BRIEF
People communicate using a multitude er different languages might impart dif-
of languages that vary considerably in ferent cognitive abilities.
the information they convey. In recent years empirical evidence for
Scholars have long wondered wheth- this causal relation has emerged, indi-
Illustration by Tom Whalen
© 2011 Scientific American
Lera Boroditsky is an assistant professor of cognitive psychology at
Stanford University and editor in chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology.
Her lab conducts research around the world, focusing on mental
representation and the effects of language on cognition.
The notion that different languages may impart different cog-
nitive skills goes back centuries. Since the 1930s it has become
associated with American linguists Edward Sapir and Benja-
min Lee Whorf, who studied how languages vary and proposed
ways that speakers of different tongues may think differently.
Although their ideas met with much excitement early on, there
was one small problem: a near complete lack of evidence to
support their claims. By the 1970s many scientists had become
disenchanted with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it was all
but abandoned as a new set of theories claiming that language
and thought are universal muscled onto the scene. But now, de-
cades later, a solid body of empirical evidence showing how lan-
guages shape thinking has finally emerged. The evidence over-
turns the long-standing dogma about universality and yields
fascinating insights into the origins of knowledge and the con-
struction of reality. The results have important implications for
law, politics and education.
cating that one’s mother tongue does The latest findings also hint that lan-
indeed mold the way one thinks about guage is part and parcel of many more
many aspects of the world, including aspects of thought than scientists had
space and time. previously realized.
February 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 63
 Speakers
Under the InflUence
around the world people communicate with
of different
one another using a dazzling array of languag- languages differ
es—7,000 or so all told—and each language re- in how well they
quires very different things from its speakers.
can remember
For example, suppose I want to tell you that I
saw Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street. In Mian, a who did
language spoken in Papua New Guinea, the verb what.
I used would reveal whether the event happened
just now, yesterday or in the distant past, whereas in
Indonesian, the verb wouldn’t even give away whether it had al-
ready happened or was still coming up. In Russian, the verb
would reveal my gender. In Mandarin, I would have to specify
whether the titular uncle is maternal or paternal and whether he
is related by blood or marriage, because there are different words
for all these different types of uncles and then some (he happens
to be a mother’s brother, as the Chinese translation clearly states).
And in Pirahã, a language spoken in the Amazon, I couldn’t say
“42nd,” because there are no words for exact numbers, just words
for “few” and “many.”
Languages differ from one another in innumerable ways, but
just because people talk differently does not necessarily mean
they think differently. How can we tell whether speakers of
Mian, Russian, Indonesian, Mandarin or Pirahã actually end up
attending to, remembering and reasoning about the world in
different ways because of the languages they speak? Research in
my lab and in many others has been uncovering how language
shapes even the most fundamental dimensions of human expe-
rience: space, time, causality and relationships to others.
Let us return to Pormpuraaw. Unlike English, the Kuuk
Thaayorre language spoken in Pormpuraaw does not use rela-
tive spatial terms such as left and right. Rather Kuuk Thaayorre
speakers talk in terms of absolute cardinal directions (north,
south, east, west, and so forth). Of course, in English we also use
cardinal direction terms but only for large spatial scales. We
would not say, for example, “They set the salad forks southeast
of the dinner forks—the philistines!” But in Kuuk Thaayorre
cardinal directions are used at all scales. This means one ends
up saying things like “the cup is southeast of the plate” or “the
boy standing to the south of Mary is my brother.” In Porm-
puraaw, one must always stay oriented, just to be able to speak
properly.
Moreover, groundbreaking work conducted by Stephen C.
Levinson of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in
Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and John B. Haviland of the Universi-
ty of California, San Diego, over the past two decades has demon-
strated that people who speak languages that rely on absolute di-
rections are remarkably good at keeping track of where they are,
even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings.
They do this better than folks who live in the same environments
but do not speak such languages and in fact better than scien-
tists thought humans ever could. The requirements of their lan-
guages enforce and train this cognitive prowess.
People who think differently about space are also likely to
think differently about time. For example, my colleague Alice
Gaby of the University of California, Berkeley, and I gave Kuuk
Thaayorre speakers sets of pictures that showed temporal prog-
ressions—a man aging, a crocodile growing, a banana being eat-
en. We then asked them to arrange the shuffled photographs on
the ground to indicate the correct temporal order.
64 Scientific American, February 2011
© 2011 Scientific American
We tested each person twice, each time fac-
ing in a different cardinal direction. English
speakers given this task will arrange the
cards so that time proceeds from left to right.
Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the
cards from right to left. This shows that writ-
ing direction in a language influences how we
organize time. The Kuuk Thaayorre, however,
did not routinely arrange the cards from left to
right or right to left. They arranged them from
east to west. That is, when they were seated facing
south, the cards went left to right. When they faced
north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced
east, the cards came toward the body, and so on. We never told
anyone which direction they were facing—the Kuuk Thaayorre
knew that already and spontaneously used this spatial orienta-
tion to construct their representations of time.
Representations of time vary in many other ways around the
world. For example, English speakers consider the future to be
“ahead” and the past “behind.” In 2010 Lynden Miles of the Uni-
versity of Aberdeen in Scotland and his colleagues discovered
that English speakers unconsciously sway their bodies forward
when thinking about the future and back when thinking about
the past. But in Aymara, a language spoken in the Andes, the
past is said to be in front and the future behind. And the Aymara
speakers’ body language matches their way of talking: in 2006
Raphael Núñez of U.C.S.D. and Eve Sweetser of U.C. Berkeley
found that Aymara gesture in front of them when talking about
the past and behind them when discussing the future.
rememberIng whodUnIt
speakers of different languages also differ in how they describe
events and, as a result, how well they can remember who did
what. All events, even split-second accidents, are complicated and
require us to construe and interpret what happened. Take, for ex-
ample, former vice president Dick Cheney’s quail-hunting acci-
dent, in which he accidentally shot Harry Whittington. One could
say that “Cheney shot Whittington” (wherein Cheney is the direct
cause), or “Whittington got shot by Cheney” (distancing Cheney
from the outcome), or “Whittington got peppered pretty good”
(leaving Cheney out altogether). Cheney himself said “Ultimate-
ly I’m the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit
Harry,” interposing a long chain of events between himself and
the outcome. President George Bush’s take—“he heard a bird
flush, and he turned and pulled the trigger and saw his friend get
wounded”—was an even more masterful exculpation, transform-
ing Cheney from agent to mere witness in less than a sentence.
The American public is rarely impressed with such linguistic
wiggling because nonagentive language sounds evasive in Eng-
lish, the province of guilt-shirking children and politicians. Eng-
lish speakers tend to phrase things in terms of people doing
things, preferring transitive constructions like “John broke the
vase” even for accidents. Speakers of Japanese or Spanish, in con-
trast, are less likely to mention the agent when describing an ac-
cidental event. In Spanish one might say “Se rompió el florero,”
which translates to “the vase broke” or “the vase broke itself.”
My student Caitlin M. Fausey and I have found that such lin-
guistic differences influence how people construe what hap-
pened and have consequences for eyewitness memory. In our
studies, published in 2010, speakers of English, Spanish and
Japanese watched videos of two guys popping balloons, break- vard and another by Shai Danziger and his colleagues at Ben-Gu-
ing eggs and spilling drinks either intentionally or accidentally. rion University of the Negev in Israel, looked at Arabic-French bi-
Later we gave them a surprise memory test. For each event they linguals in Morocco, Spanish-English bilinguals in the U.S. and
had witnessed, they had to say which guy did it, just like in a po- Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals in Israel, in each case testing the par-
lice line-up. Another group of English, Spanish and Japanese ticipants’ implicit biases. For example, Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals
speakers described the same events. When we looked at the were asked to quickly press buttons in response to words under
memory data, we found exactly the differences in eyewitness various conditions. In one condition if they saw a Jewish name
memory predicted by patterns in language. Speakers of all three like “Yair” or a positive trait like “good” or “strong,” they were in-
languages described intentional events agentively, saying things structed to press “M,”; if they saw an Arab name like “Ahmed” or
such as “He popped the balloon,” and all three groups remem- a negative trait like “mean” or “weak,” they were told to press
bered who did these intentional actions equally well. When it “X.” In another condition the pairing was reversed so that Jewish
came to accidents, however, interesting differences emerged. names and negative traits shared a response key, and Arab names
Spanish and Japanese speakers were less likely to describe the and positive traits shared a response key. The researchers mea-
accidents agentively than were English speakers, and they cor- sured how quickly subjects were able to respond under the two
respondingly remembered who did it less well than English conditions. This task has been widely used to measure involun-
speakers did. This was not because they had poorer memory tary or automatic biases—how naturally things such as positive
overall—they remembered the agents of intentional events (for traits and ethnic groups seem to go together in people’s minds.
which their languages would naturally mention the agent) just Surprisingly, the investigators found big shifts in these invol-
as well as English speakers did. untary automatic biases in bilinguals depending on the language
Not only do languages influence what we remember, but the in which they were tested. The Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals, for
structures of languages can make it easier or harder for us to learn their part, showed more positive implicit attitudes toward Jews
new things. For instance, because the number words in some lan- when tested in Hebrew than when tested in Arabic.
guages reveal the underlying base-10 structure more transparent- Language also appears to be involved in many more aspects
ly than do the number words in English (there are no troublesome of our mental lives than scientists had previously supposed. Peo-
teens like 11 or 13 in Mandarin, for instance), kids learning those ple rely on language even when doing simple things like distin-
languages are able to learn the base-10 insight sooner. And de- guishing patches of color, counting dots on a screen or orienting
pending on how many syllables the number words have, it will be in a small room: my colleagues and I have found that limiting
easier or harder to keep a phone number in mind or to do mental people’s ability to access their language faculties fluently—by
calculation. Language can even affect how quickly children figure giving them a competing demanding verbal task such as repeat-
out whether they are male or female. In 1983 Alexander ing a news report, for instance—impairs their ability
Guiora of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor additional to perform these tasks. This means that the catego-
resources
compared three groups of kids growing up with He- ries and distinctions that exist in particular languag-
ScientificAmerican.com/
brew, English or Finnish as their native language. He- feb2011/language es are meddling in our mental lives very broadly.
brew marks gender prolifically (even the word “you” is What researchers have been calling “thinking” this
different depending on gender), Finnish has no gender marking whole time actually appears to be a collection of both linguistic
and English is somewhere in between. Accordingly, children grow- and nonlinguistic processes. As a result, there may not be a lot
ing up in a Hebrew-speaking environment figure out their own of adult human thinking where language does not play a role.
gender about a year earlier than Finnish-speaking children; Eng- A hallmark feature of human intelligence is its adaptability,
lish-speaking kids fall in the middle. the ability to invent and rearrange conceptions of the world to
suit changing goals and environments. One consequence of this
what shapes what? flexibility is the great diversity of languages that have emerged
These are just some of the many fascinating findings of around the globe. Each provides its own cognitive toolkit and
cross-linguistic differences in cognition. But how do we know encapsulates the knowledge and worldview developed over
whether differences in language create differences in thought, thousands of years within a culture. Each contains a way of per-
or the other way around? The answer, it turns out, is both—the ceiving, categorizing and making meaning in the world, an in-
way we think influences the way we speak, but the influence valuable guidebook developed and honed by our ancestors. Re-
also goes the other way. The past decade has seen a host of in- search into how the languages we speak shape the way we think
genious demonstrations establishing that language indeed is helping scientists to unravel how we create knowledge and
plays a causal role in shaping cognition. Studies have shown construct reality and how we got to be as smart and sophisticat-
that changing how people talk changes how they think. Teach- ed as we are. And this insight, in turn, helps us understand the
ing people new color words, for instance, changes their ability very essence of what makes us human.
to discriminate colors. And teaching people a new way of talk-
ing about time gives them a new way of thinking about it. more to explore
Another way to get at this question is to study people who are Language Changes Implicit Associations between Ethnic Groups and Evaluation in Bilin-
fluent in two languages. Studies have shown that bilinguals guals. Shai Danziger and Robert Ward in Psychological Science, Vol. 21, No. 6, pages 799–800;
change how they see the world depending on which language June 2010.
they are speaking. Two sets of findings published in 2010 demon- Constructing Agency: The Role of Language. caitlin m. Fausey et al. in Frontiers in Cultural
Psychology, Vol. 1, Article 162. Published online October 15, 2010.
strate that even something as fundamental as who you like and Remembrances of Times East: Absolute Spatial Representations of Time in an Australian
do not like depends on the language in which you are asked. The Aboriginal Community. lera Boroditsky and alice Gaby in Psychological Science, Vol. 21,
studies, one by Oludamini Ogunnaike and his colleagues at Har- No. 11, pages 1635–1639; November 2010.

February 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 65

© 2011 Scientific American
Experiences Make People Happier Than Material Goods,
Says University Of Colorado Prof
sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/12/041219182811.htm

FULL STORY

When it comes to spending money in the pursuit of happiness, the "good

life" may be better lived by doing things rather than by having things,
according to a University of Colorado at Boulder researcher.

In a society that thrives on the pursuit of happiness, a question that often comes to mind,
especially around the holiday shopping season, is what really makes us happy.

"We found that people receive more enduring pleasure and satisfaction from investing in life
experiences than material possessions," said CU-Boulder assistant professor of
psychology Leaf Van Boven.

Through a series of surveys and experiments spanning several years, Van Boven found
that people from various walks of life were made happier by investing their discretionary
income in life experiences than in material goods.

In a national survey of more than 12,000 Americans conducted by Harris Interactive on

behalf of Northwestern Mutual Financial Network, respondents were asked to think of an
experiential and a material purchase they had made with the "aim of increasing your
happiness." Van Boven found that when asked which made them happier, most
respondents chose their experiential investment over their material possession.

In a follow-up laboratory experiment involving undergraduate students, Van Boven found

that the students experienced more positive feelings after thinking about an experiential
purchase than after pondering a material purchase.

He suggested three possible reasons that "experiential" purchases -- those made with the
primary intention of acquiring a life experience -- make people happier than material
purchases.

According to Van Boven, experiences bring more joy than material goods because they are
more open to positive reinterpretations, are a more meaningful part of one's identity and
contribute more to successful social relationships.

A paper on the research by Van Boven appears in the December 2003 issue of the Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology. Professor Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University also
participated in the research.

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Experiences are more open to positive reinterpretation, because they tend to be associated
more with deeper personal meanings, whereas possessions are always "out there" and
separate from who we are, according to Van Boven.

"For example, if you go on a hiking trip, and the weather is terrible, you might not view it as
a pleasurable experience in the here and now," he said. "Instead, you may view it as a
challenge, and over time remember the positive aspects of the experience more than the
negative aspects. With material things you can't do this, because they are what they are."

Van Boven said another factor is that experiences are a more meaningful part of one's
identity.

"Our culture highly values accomplishing goals and challenging oneself. We strongly value
accomplishments," Van Boven said. "Also, experiences tend to be associated more with
deeper personal meanings than possessions."

Finally, Van Boven suggests that experiences are more pleasurable to talk about and they
more effectively foster successful social relationships, which are closely associated with
happiness, he said.

"Experiences foster relationships because you tend to do things with other people, so there
is a great social aspect to it," Van Boven said.

"Furthermore, we often share stories about experiences because they're more fun to talk
about than material possessions. They are simply more entertaining."

Story Source:

Materials provided by University Of Colorado At Boulder. Note: Content may be edited

for style and length.

University Of Colorado At Boulder. "Experiences Make People Happier

Cite This Page:
Than Material Goods, Says University Of Colorado Prof." ScienceDaily.
ScienceDaily, 28 December 2004.
<www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/12/041219182811.htm>.

University Of Colorado At Boulder. (2004, December 28). Experiences Make People

Happier Than Material Goods, Says University Of Colorado Prof. ScienceDaily. Retrieved
June 2, 2018 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/12/041219182811.htm

University Of Colorado At Boulder. "Experiences Make People Happier Than Material

Goods, Says University Of Colorado Prof." ScienceDaily.
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/12/041219182811.htm (accessed June 2, 2018).

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What makes us laugh?
bbc.com/future/story/20120601-what-makes-us-laugh

A simple question with a surprisingly complex answer –

understanding laughter means understanding fundamental issues
about human nature.

By Tom Stafford

5 June 2012
Why do we laugh? Well it's funny you should ask, but this question was suggested by
reader Andrew Martin, and it is a very interesting one to investigate. For what at first seems
like a simple question turns out to require a surprisingly complex answer – one that takes us
on a journey into the very heart of trying to understand human nature.

Most people would guess that we laugh because something is funny. But if you watch when
people actually laugh, you’ll find this isn't the case. Laughter expert Robert Provine spent
hours recording real conversations at shopping malls, classrooms, offices and cocktail
parties, and he found that most laughter did not follow what looked like jokes. People
laughed at the end of normal sentences, in response to unfunny comments or questions
such as "Look, it's Andre," or "Are you sure?". Even attempts at humour that provoked
laughter didn't sound that funny. Provine reports that the lines that got the biggest laughs
were ones such as "You don't have to drink, just buy us drinks," and "Do you date within
your species?". I guess you had to be there.

Brain triggers

So if we want to understand laughter, perhaps we need to go deeper, and look at what is

going on in the brain. The areas that control laughing lie deep in the subcortex, and in
terms of evolutionary development these parts of the brain are ancient, responsible for
primal behaviours such as breathing and controlling basic reflexes. This means laughter
control mechanisms are located a long way away from brain regions that developed later
and control higher functions such as language or even memory.

Perhaps this explains why it is so hard to suppress a laugh, even if we know it is

inappropriate. Once a laugh is kindled deep within our brains these ‘higher function’ brain
regions have trouble intervening. And the reverse is true, of course, it is difficult to laugh on
demand. If you consciously make yourself laugh it will not sound like the real thing – at
least initially.

There is another fundamental aspect to laughing. All humans laugh, and laughter always
involves a similar pattern of whooping noises. Deaf people who have never heard a sound
still make laughing noises. The laughing noises produced by humans share many of the
acoustic properties of speech, further evidence laughter is hijacking the brain and body
apparatus that we use for breathing and talking.

But this does not fully answer the original question. Even if we identified the precise brain
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areas associated with laughing, even if we were able to make someone laugh by
stimulating part of their brain (which can be done), we still don’t know what makes people
laugh. Yes, we know about the effect, but what about the cause, that is, the reason why we
laugh in the first place?

Shared joke

To answer this, perhaps we need to look outwards, to look at the social factors at play
when people laugh. I've already mentioned Provine's study of laughter in its natural context.
Provine showed that laughter is used to punctuate speech, it doesn't just interrupt at
random. This suggests that it plays a communicative role – it isn't just some independent
process that happens to us while we are talking to someone. He also found that the
speaker typically laughs more than the audience, and that laughter was most common in
situations of emotional warmth and so-called 'in-groupness'. Again, all strongly suggesting
that laughter has an important social role. And it is not always used for positive reasons.
For all the good feeling that goes with laughing with someone, there is also a dark side,
when someone is laughed at to belittle or show disdain.

Perhaps the most important social feature of laughter is how contagious it is. Just listening
to someone laugh is funny. To test this, try keeping a straight face while watching this video
of a man tickling a gorilla. You can even catch laughter from yourself. Start with a forced
laugh and if you keep it up you will soon find yourself laughing for real.

What these observations show is that laughter is both fundamentally social, and rooted
deep within our brains, part and parcel of ancient brain structures. We laugh because we
feel like it, because our brains make us, and because we want to fit in socially. All these
things are true. But biologists distinguish at least four fundamental types of answer you can
give to explain behaviour: "why did it evolve?"; "how did it evolve?"; "How does it develop
across the lifespan?" and "how does it work?".

This column has given some answers to the first question (laughter evolved for social
interaction) and the last question (laughter is controlled by evolutionary ancient brain
centres that control breathing and speech), but even with the beginnings of answers to
these two questions, the other two are far from being answered. Each time we get closer to
an answer for a fundamental question, it deepens our appreciation of the challenge
remaining to answer the others.

Thank you to Andrew Martin for suggesting the topic. If you have your own suggestions
please send them to tom@mindhacks.com

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on Future, head
over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

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There Is No Scientific Method
nytimes.com/2016/07/04/opinion/there-is-no-scientific-method.html

By James Blachowicz July 4, 2016

In 1970, I had the chance to attend a lecture by Stephen Spender. He described in some
detail the stages through which he would pass in crafting a poem. He jotted on a
blackboard some lines of verse from successive drafts of one of his poems, asking whether
these lines (a) expressed what he wanted to express and (b) did so in the desired form. He
then amended the lines to bring them closer either to the meaning he wanted to
communicate or to the poetic form of that communication.

I was immediately struck by the similarities between his editing process and those
associated with scientific investigation and began to wonder whether there was such a
thing as a scientific method. Maybe the method on which science relies exists wherever we
find systematic investigation. In saying there is no scientific method, what I mean, more
precisely, is that there is no distinctly scientific method.

There is meaning, which we can grasp and anchor in a short phrase, and then there is the
expression of that meaning that accounts for it, whether in a literal explanation or in poetry
or in some other way. Our knowledge separates into layers: Experience provides a base for
a higher layer of more conceptual understanding. This is as true for poetry as for science.

Let’s look at an example that is a little less complex than poetry. Consider how Socrates
guided his students to a definition – of justice or knowledge or courage.

When Socrates asked “What is justice?” there was never any doubt that his listeners knew
what the word “justice” meant. This is confirmed by the fact that Socrates and his listeners
could agree on examples of justice. Defining justice, on the other hand — that is, being able
to explain what it was conceptually that all these examples had in common — was
something else altogether.

Suppose you and I try to define courage. We would begin with the meaning that is familiar
to both of us. This shared meaning will be used to check proposed definitions and provide
typical examples of it. Commonly, we may not be able to explain what something is, but we
know it when we see it.

So what do we mean by courage? Let’s try, “Courage is the ability to act in the face of great
fear.” This is an attempt to articulate (define) what we mean by courage. What we do next
is to compare the actual meaning of courage we both possess with the literal meaning of
the expression “the ability to act in the face of great fear.”

In comparing this literal meaning with the actual meaning of courage in our minds, we come
to realize that the literal meaning of our working definition won’t work because, for example,
“to act in the face of great fear” could include tying one’s shoelace, yelling profanities, even
running away.

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So we must alter our definition to exclude these typically non-courageous actions. One way
of doing this is to produce a definition such as, “Courage is the ability to act in the face of
great fear, except for tying one’s shoelace, yelling profanities and running away.” This does
produce a literal meaning closer to the actual meaning we want to express or define.

Yet we wouldn’t accept such a definition even if it itemized every possible exception. Why?
Because, from a different point of view, this definition is inadequate: not because it fails to
bring the meaning of the definition closer to the actual meaning of courage, but because all
it does is try to save the original definition by tacking on ad hoc exceptions. That is, we
reject it because it fails to be a good, well-formed definition. A good definition is simple and
provides a principle that would exclude all possible exceptions without having to enumerate
them one by one.

What do we do? We come up with a new definition that once again is simple (without
adding exceptions). We could try, “Courage is the ability to act while confronting a great
fear.” Adding “confronting” would seem to disqualify tying one’s shoelaces and even
shouting profanities since one could shout profanities while running away.

Yet adding an ad hoc exception may sometimes be just what is called for. Suppose I define
courage as “the ability to act while confronting a danger to oneself.” “Confronting” is
retained, so this would (normally) exclude running away. Yet one could also act out of
anger, so that courage may not be the principal trait exhibited. We could add the ad hoc
hypothesis “except when motivated principally by anger.” This would be desirable in this
case, for the phenomenon turned out to be composite — actions that may arise from
separate causes (courage and anger).

It’s important to see that this process — like that whereby a poem is written — rests on two
requirements that have to be met. A good definition or poem must be one (a) whose
expressed meaning matches the actual meaning that was grasped in a pre-articulated way
and (b) which satisfies some criterion of form (embodies an explanatory principle or
satisfies poetic form).

Now compare this with a scientific example: Johannes Kepler’s discovery that the orbit of
Mars is an ellipse.

In this case, the actual meaning of courage (what a definition is designed to define)
corresponds with the actual observations that Kepler sought to explain — that is, the data
regarding the orbit of Mars. In the case of definition, we compare the literal meaning of a
proposed definition with the actual meaning we want to define. In Kepler’s case, he needed
to compare the predicted observations from a proposed explanatory hypothesis with the
actual observations he wanted to explain.

Early on, Kepler determined that the orbit of Mars was not a circle (the default perfect
shape of the planetary spheres, an idea inherited from the Greeks). There is a very simple
equation for a circle, but the first noncircular shape Kepler entertained as a replacement
was an oval. Despite our use of the word “oval” as sometimes synonymous with ellipse,
Kepler understood it as egg-shaped (in the asymmetrical chicken-egg way). Maybe he
thought the orbit had to be lopsided (rather than symmetrical) because he knew the Sun
was not at the center of the oval. Unfortunately, there is no simple equation for such an
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oval (although there is one for an ellipse).

When a scientist tests a hypothesis and finds that its predictions do not quite match
available observations, there is always the option of forcing the hypothesis to fit the data.
One can resort to curve-fitting, in which a hypothesis is patched together from different
independent pieces, each piece more or less fitting a different part of the data. A tailor for
whom fit is everything and style is nothing can make me a suit that will fit like a glove — but
as a patchwork with odd random seams everywhere, it will also not look very much like a
suit.

The lesson is that it is not just the observed facts that drive a scientist’s theorizing. A
scientist would, presumably, no more be caught in a patchwork hypothesis than in a
patchwork suit. Science education, however, has persistently relied more on empirical fit as
its trump card, perhaps partly to separate science from those dangerous seat-of-the-pants
theorizings (including philosophy) that pretend to find their way apart from such evidence.

Kepler could have hammered out a patchwork equation that would have represented the
oval orbit of Mars. It would have fit the facts better than the earlier circle hypothesis. But it
would have failed to meet the second criterion that all such explanation requires: that it be
simple, with a single explanatory principle devoid of tacked-on ad hoc exceptions,
analogous to the case of courage as acting in the face of great fear, except for running
away, tying one’s shoelace and yelling profanities.

Yet in science, just as in defining a concept like courage, ad hoc exceptions are sometimes
exactly what are needed. While Galileo’s law prescribes that the trajectory of a projectile
like a cannonball follows a parabolic path, the true path deviates from a parabola, mostly
because of air resistance. That is, a second, separate causal element must be accounted
for. And so we add the ad hoc exception “except when resisted by air.”

This is enough. There is much more to a theory of inquiry, of course, that could cover forms
as disparate as poetry and science.

An obvious question at this point is this:

If scientific method is only one form of a general method employed in all human inquiry,
how is it that the results of science are more reliable than what is provided by these other
forms? I think the answer is that science deals with highly quantified variables and that it is
the precision of its results that supplies this reliability. But make no mistake: Quantified
precision is not to be confused with a superior method of thinking.

I am not a practicing scientist. So who am I to criticize scientists’ understanding of their

method?

I would turn this question around. Scientific method is not itself an object of study for
scientists, but it is an object of study for philosophers of science. It is not scientists who are
trained specifically to provide analyses of scientific method.

3/3
key concepts in elt

English as a lingua franca

Barbara Seidlhofer

In recent years, the term ‘English as a lingua franca’ (ELF) has emerged
as a way of referring to communication in English between speakers with
different first languages. Since roughly only one out of every four users of
English in the world is a native speaker of the language (Crystal 2003),
most ELF interactions take place among ‘non-native’ speakers of English.
Although this does not preclude the participation of English native
speakers in ELF interaction, what is distinctive about ELF is that, in most
cases, it is ‘a ‘contact language’ between persons who share neither a
common native tongue nor a common (national) culture, and for whom
English is the chosen foreign language of communication’ (Firth 1996:
240).
Defined in this way, ELF is part of the more general phenomenon of
‘English as an international language’ (EIL) or ‘World Englishes’. (For
comprehensive overviews, see Jenkins 2003; McArthur 1998; Melchers
and Shaw 2003.) EIL, along with ‘English as a global language’ (e.g.
Crystal 2003; Gnutzmann 1999), ‘English as a world language’ (e.g. Mair
2003) and ‘World English’ (Brutt-Griffler 2002) have for some time been
used as general cover terms for uses of English spanning Inner Circle,
Outer Circle, and Expanding Circle contexts (Kachru 1992). The
traditional meaning of EIL thus comprises uses of English within and
across Kachru’s ‘Circles’, for intranational as well as international
communication. However, when English is chosen as the means of
communication among people from different first language backgrounds,
across linguacultural boundaries, the preferred term is ‘English as a
lingua franca’ (House 1999; Seidlhofer 2001), although the terms
‘English as a medium of intercultural communication’ (Meierkord
1996), and, in this more specific and more recent meaning, ‘English as
an international language ’ (Jenkins 2000), are also used.
Despite being welcomed by some and deplored by others, it cannot be
denied that English functions as a global lingua franca. However, what
has so far tended to be denied is that, as a consequence of its
international use, English is being shaped at least as much by its non-
native speakers as by its native speakers. This has led to a somewhat
paradoxical situation: on the one hand, for the majority of its users,
English is a foreign language, and the vast majority of verbal exchanges
in English do not involve any native speakers of the language at all. On
the other hand, there is still a tendency for native speakers to be regarded
as custodians over what is acceptable usage. Thus, in order for the

ELT Journal Volume 59/4 October 2005; doi:10.1093/elt/cci064 339

q The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
 concept of ELF to gain acceptance alongside English as native language,
there have been calls for the systematic study of the nature of ELF—what
it looks and sounds like and how people actually use it and make it
work—and a consideration of the implications for the teaching and
learning of the language.
Empirical work on the linguistic description of ELF at a number of levels
has in fact been under way for several years now. Research has been
carried out at the level of phonology (Jenkins 2000), pragmatics
(Meierkord 1996), and lexicogrammar (Seidlhofer 2004, which also
offers an overview of descriptive work to date). ELF corpora are now also
being compiled and analysed, such as the English as a lingua franca in
Academic settings (ELFA) corpus (Mauranen 2003) and the general
Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) (Seidlhofer
2004). While space prevents summarizing the findings of this research
here, two illustrative examples can be mentioned. Thus, Jenkins (2000)
found that being able to pronounce some sounds that are often regarded
as ‘particularly English’ but also particularly difficult, namely the ‘th’
sounds /u/ and /D/ and the ‘dark l’ allophone [ł], is not necessary for
international intelligibility through ELF. Similarly, analyses of ELF
interactions captured in the VOICE corpus clearly show that although
ELF speakers often do not use the third person singular present tense ‘-s’
marking in their verbs, this does not lead to any misunderstandings or
communication problems.
This gradually accumulating body of work is leading to a better
understanding of the nature of ELF, which in turn is a prerequisite for
taking informed decisions, especially in language policy and language
teaching (McKay 2002). Thus, the features of English which tend to be
crucial for international intelligibility and therefore need to be taught for
production and reception are being distinguished from the (‘non-native’)
features that tend not to cause misunderstandings and thus do not need
to constitute a focus for production teaching for those learners who
intend to use English mainly in international settings. Acting on these
insights can free up valuable teaching time for more general language
awareness and communication strategies; these may have more
‘mileage’ for learners than striving for mastery of fine nuances of native-
speaker language use that are communicatively redundant or even
counter-productive in lingua franca settings, and which may anyway not
be teachable in advance, but only learnable by subsequent experience of
the language. It should be stressed, however, that linguistic descriptions
alone cannot, of course, determine what needs to be taught and learnt for
particular purposes and in particular settings—they provide necessary
but not sufficient guidance for what will always be pedagogical decisions
(Widdowson 2003).

References Crystal, D. 2003. English as a Global Language

Brutt-Griffler, J. 2002. World English. Clevedon: (Second edition). Cambridge: Cambridge
Multilingual Matters. University Press.

340 Barbara Seidlhofer

Firth, A. 1996. ‘The discursive accomplishment of
normality. On “lingua franca” English and
conversation analysis’. Journal of Pragmatics 26:
237–59.
Gnutzmann, C. (ed.). 1999. Teaching and Learning
English as a Global Language. Tübingen:
Stauffenburg.
House, J. 1999. ‘Misunderstanding in
intercultural communication: interactions in
English as a lingua franca and the myth of mutual
intelligibility’ in C. Gnutzmann (ed.). pp. 73 –89.
Jenkins, J. 2000. The Phonology of English as an
International Language. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Jenkins, J. 2003. World Englishes. London:
Routledge.
Kachru, B. (ed.). 1992. The Other Tongue (Second
edition). Urbana and Chicago: University of
Illinois Press.
McArthur, T. 1998. The English Languages.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McKay, S. 2002. Teaching English as an
International Language. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Mair, C. (ed.). 2003. The Politics of English as a
World Language. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Mauranen, A. 2003. ‘Academic English as lingua
franca—a corpus approach’. TESOL Quarterly 37:
513–27.
Key concepts: English as a lingua franca
Meierkord, C. 1996. Englisch als Medium der
interkulturellen Kommunikation. Untersuchungen
zum non-native-/non-native speaker—Diskurs.
Frankfurt/Main: Lang.
Melchers, G. and P. Shaw. 2003. World Englishes.
London: Arnold.
Seidlhofer, B. 2001. ‘Closing a conceptual gap: the
case for a description of English as a lingua franca’.
International Journal of Applied Linguistics 11:
133 –58.
Seidlhofer, B. 2004. Annual Review of Applied
Linguistics, 24, pp. 209–39. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Widdowson, H. G. 2003. Defining Issues in English
Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
The author
Barbara Seidlhofer is Professor of English and
Applied Linguistics at the University of Vienna.
She is the Director of the Vienna-Oxford
International Corpus of English (VOICE) project,
which aims to provide a basis for the linguistic
description of ELF. Her most recent book is
Controversies in Applied Linguistics (Oxford
University Press).
341
Does 'Sustainability' Help The Environment Or Just
Agriculture's Public Image?
npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/08/22/545022259/does-sustainability-help-the-environment-or-just-agricultures-public-
image

Does 'Sustainability' Help The Environment Or Just Agriculture's Public Image? :

The Salt Big food companies like Walmart want farmers to reduce greenhouse
emissions from nitrogen fertilizer. But the best-known program to accomplish this
may not be having much effect.

5:20
5:20
Dan Charles/NPR
Brent Deppe is taking me on a tour of the farm supply business, called Key
Cooperative, that he helps to manage in Grinnell, Iowa. We step though the
back door of one warehouse, and our view of the sky is blocked by a
gigantic round storage tank, painted white.

"This is the liquid nitrogen tank," Deppe explains. "It's a million-and-a-half gallon tank."

Nitrogen is the essential ingredient for growing corn and most other crops. Farmers around
here spread it on their fields by the truckload.

"How much nitrogen goes out of here in a year?" I ask.

Deppe pauses, reluctant to share trade secrets. "Not enough," he eventually says with a
smile. "Because I'm in sales."

For the environment, though, the answer is: Way too much.

The problems with nitrogen fertilizer start at its creation, which involves burning lots of fossil
fuels. Then, when farmers spread it on their fields, it tends not to stay where it belongs.
Rainfall washes some of it into streams and lakes, and bacteria in the soil feed on what's
left, releasing a powerful greenhouse gas called nitrous oxide.

There have been lots of attempts to control renegade nitrogen. Most have focused on
threats to water and wildlife. Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania, for instance, have spent
billions of dollars keeping nitrogen (and other forms of fertilizer runoff) out of the
Chesapeake Bay.

Reducing nitrogen's contribution to global warming, though, is even more difficult. Philip
Robertson, a researcher at Michigan State University who's studied those greenhouse
emissions, says that "ultimately, the best predictor of the amount of nitrous oxide emitted to
the atmosphere is the rate at which we apply nitrogen." Essentially, the only proven way to
cut heat-trapping emissions from nitrogen fertilizer is to use less of it. Most farmers haven't
been willing to do this, because it could cut into their profits.

1/3
Enter the SUSTAIN program, which some food companies, including Walmart, are touting
as a step toward the breaking this stalemate, allowing farmers to reduce their greenhouse
gas emissions without reducing their profits. Land O'Lakes, one of the largest agricultural
businesses in the country, runs SUSTAIN. It has made a pledge to Walmart to enrolls 20
million acres of farmland in the program, as part of Walmart's plan to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions. "Land O'Lakes is a company that goes from farmer to consumer," says Matt
Carstens, the executive in charge of it. "We have an obligation and an opportunity to do
what's right."

I came to Key Cooperative to see what SUSTAIN looks like in practice.

I met Ben Lauden, a farmer who enrolled his acres of corn and soybeans in the program.
Since signing up, Lauden has been doing a few things differently. He's applying nitrogen
fertilizer several times during the growing season, instead of all at once. That's so the
fertilizer arrives when the growing corn plants need it, and less is wasted. He buys
"stabilizers" — chemicals that are mixed with nitrogen and keep it from washing away so
quickly. Also, data on his fertilizer use goes into a computer program that monitors the
weather and predicts how much nitrogen will remain in the soil.

It's all intended to let him use nitrogen more efficiently. But is he actually using less of it?
Lauden pauses. "I think you would use less, but I don't — I can't quantify it, I guess," he
says.

That's more or less what Michigan State researcher Philip Robertson has observed. The
technologies that Key Cooperative is selling to Lauden, "if used properly, should allow the
farmer to use less nitrogen fertilizer," Robertson says. But he adds, "whether that actually
happens is the $64,000 question, because there are lots of cases where farmers have been
sold stabilizers without necessarily recommending a reduction in the rate of fertilizer
application."

Even Matt Carstens, who created SUSTAIN and promoted it to food companies and
environmental groups, isn't promising that it will reduce the amount of nitrogen released
into the environment. He does believe that it will help farmers use it more efficiently,
allowing them to grow more corn without using more fertilizer. "There's definitely a trend in
the direction of using [nitrogen] more wisely," he says. "But to say that every year we can
count on a reduction, that's just not possible."

In fact, there's even some confusion about what SUSTAIN is supposed to accomplish.
Brent Deppe, the manager at Key Cooperative, says that the program was introduced to
him and to farmers as a way to tell consumers about the steps farmers are taking to protect
the environment. "The message wasn't being told," Deppe says. "We're doing a lot of the
right things. We just aren't advertising it."

SUSTAIN does not advise farmers to do anything as dramatic as growing different crops.
And according to some environmentalists, that's exactly the problem. Careful management
of fertilizer "is a good thing to do, but it's not enough," says Matt Liebman, a professor at
Iowa State University.

2/3
Sarah Carlson, who works for an environmentally minded group called Practical Farmers of
Iowa, has confronted Walmart executives about SUSTAIN and its limited goals. "I was like,
'Why are you only focused on nitrogen fertilizer management?" Carlson says. "That makes
such little impact on water quality, and such little impact on greenhouse gas reduction."

Carlson has a counter-proposal. It sounds simple: Companies could give farmers a

financial incentive to move away from simply growing corn and soybeans, instead adding
"small grains" like oats (or rye) to their mix of crops.

That simple move could cut greenhouse gas emissions by a third, much more than anything
SUSTAIN is doing, she says. Oats, unlike corn or soybeans, can easily be grown together
with a "cover crop" of clover. That clover has an important benefit: It adds nitrogen to the
soil the organic way, replacing the need for synthetic nitrogen that's manufactured in
energy-intensive factories. (Nitrogen from clover still gets converted into nitrous oxide by
soil bacteria, however.) In addition, cover crops add carbon to the soil, which also helps
fight climate change.

Many farmers would be happy to do this, Carlson says. They understand the environmental
benefits. But right now, those farmers don't have a market for those oats.

"You know, Walmart, you should suggest to your commodity buyers that they buy more
small grains [like oats] for feed rations" for animals like pigs," Carlson says. "We have all
these pigs in the state; 5 percent of their diet could be oats. We can just sprinkle it in there.
It wouldn't be that hard."

There is, however, one crucial obstacle: Relying on oats for your bacon would cost a little
more money, and somebody would have to pick up that tab. It could be Walmart — and, in
turn, American consumers.

Correction Aug. 24, 2017

In the audio of this story, we state that most nitrogen fertilizer that farmers add to their fields
is lost to the surrounding water and air. In fact, only some of the fertilizer is lost, and most
is used by the growing crop.

NPR thanks our sponsors

Become an NPR sponsor

3/3
Cambridge Analytica: Can targeted online ads really
change a voter's behaviour?
bbc.com/news/technology-43489408

Technology
By Jane Wakefield Technology reporter

Prof David Carroll campaigned for Barack Obama during his presidential bid but did not do
the same for Hillary Clinton.

Now he asks himself whether so-called dark ads - individually targeted online messages -
were to blame.

"I am open to the possibility," he told the BBC.

"I am concerned I got ads or stories with falsified information about Clinton that may have
discouraged me from volunteering for her campaign. I volunteered for Obama so why did I
not do it again?"

He is one of the 240 million Americans which controversial political campaigning firm
Cambridge Analytica claims to have built a detailed profile on. Such profiles are said to
include what car a person owns, their health concerns and what media they consume.

That information when combined with pyschographics - micro-targeting personality types

with messaging that plays on their fears or concerns - could be a powerful tool in
persuading people which way to vote.

The firm, which was employed by President Trump's election campaign, is currently mired
in controversy over how it acquired and used the Facebook data of 50 million Americans.

At the start of the year, Prof Carroll requested that Cambridge Analytica provide details on
the personal information it had collected on him.

What he received was both worrying and intriguing.

It included rankings on 10 issues - giving him a three out of 10 on gun rights, and seven out
of 10 on national security importance, alongside the suggestion that he was unlikely to vote
Republican.

"It seemed so invasive. This was about predicting my behaviour without my knowledge or
consent," he told the BBC.

But it was also confusing. The data was unclear - was the three out of 10 a good or bad
thing? Did gun rights mean more or less gun control? And it also seemed rather brief.

"The chief executive of Cambridge Analytica had boasted that the firm had 4,000 to 5,000
data points on most US voters but what they gave me was a dozen at most," he said.

He felt that the company was withholding information, which gave him grounds to mount a
1/3
legal challenge in London's High Court.

Cambridge Analytica has until April 5 to respond. So far, it has not done so but does claim
to have deleted all data gathered from Facebook as soon as it was made aware by the
social network that using the information violated its policies.

It has also said that none of the information was used in its work for the Trump campaign.

Data science
Prof Carroll's legal action was filed last week, several hours before Facebook announced
that it had banned Cambridge Analytica from its platform.

He does not take credit for the storm that has since ensued but he does hope that the legal
challenge will provide the first complete dossier of evidence showing the extent and nature
of the profiles Cambridge Analytica claims to have made on the majority of American
voters.

The investigation into Cambridge

Analytica and Facebook may have
profound effects not only on how data
is collected in future but also on the
very fabric of democracy.

Political strategists are increasingly

using social media as a platform for
influencing voters and turning to data
scientists to crunch information to find
innovative ways to target people.

The Conservative Party reportedly spent £1.2m on digital advertising during the 2015
general election, according to the Electoral Commission. Labour spent £160,000 and the
Liberal Democrats £22,245. Virtually all of this money went into advertising on Facebook.

The Trump campaign is believed to have spent tens of millions of dollars on digital
advertising tailored to individuals.

Building psychographic profiles of individual voters based on their lifestyles and

preferences could be hugely powerful, thinks Chris Sumner, research director at the Online
Privacy Foundation.

"It is a huge problem," he told the BBC.

"The power of emotional advertising is well-known and drives a lot of decisions but right
now there is less regulation on online political campaigns than on a marketing campaign for
toothpaste."

His group replicated the methods of psychographic profiling over two years, firstly
examining differences in personality traits, thinking styles and cognitive biases between
voters in the UK's 2016 EU referendum and then devising their own campaign to test
2/3
whether it might be possible to identify, target and influence voters.

It targeted certain messages at specific

personalities - for instance, using the
language of fear to target neurotic
personalities and a more ebullient
message from those identified as
motivated by anger.

"We found that people behaved as we

predicted they would. If you get the
messages right they can be very
powerful indeed.

"Messaging works and is really effective - and can nudge people one way or the other."

Seth Alexander Thevoz, a political historian from Oxford University, is not convinced that
the UK's political parties are currently using such sophisticated methods.

He created a tool dubbed Who Targets Me that allowed users to track online political
advertising sent to them during the 2017 general election.

The Chrome browser plug-in was downloaded by around 8,000 UK citizens.

Since the tool became available, Facebook has altered its rules, forcing political
campaigners to explain their affiliation and Mr Thevoz thinks further changes are bound to
follow.

"There will be far more rules and greater regulation - that is the shape that things will take."

But the data collected from the project suggested that the online campaign was far from
polished.

"We found that political ads aren't that accurate," he told the BBC.

He explained that ads intended to target people in specific geographical areas were sent to
people living in a completely different part of the country.

"The things that Cambridge Analytica claims to be able to do, we haven't seen that slick an
operation in the UK. At least not yet." he said.

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








Olympics Open With Koreas Marching Together,
Offering Hope for Peace
nytimes.com/2018/02/09/world/asia/olympics-opening-ceremony-north-korea.html

By Motoko Rich February 9, 2018

PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — The opening ceremony of the 23rd Winter Olympics
unfurled in frigid temperatures and high spirits on Friday, as athletes from the two Koreas
marched into the stadium together less than 50 miles from the heavily fortified border
between their nations, offering hope of a breakthrough in a tense, geopolitical standoff that
has stirred fears of nuclear conflict.

The festivities started what organizers say is the largest Winter Olympics yet, with 92
countries participating. The North and South Korean delegations, marching under one flag,
embodied the hopes of a peninsula divided by history and ideology.

Whereas recent Olympic Games have sought to set politics aside, the strategic subtext of
the event in Pyeongchang has been unavoidable.

Kim Yo-jong, the younger sister of Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, was sitting at the
opening ceremony closely behind Vice President Mike Pence, who led the American
delegation. Also present was the father of Otto Warmbier, the American student who was
jailed in North Korea last year, returned home in a coma and died shortly afterward.

This week, the United States warned against a North Korean charm offensive and
announced plans to impose its toughest sanctions yet against Pyongyang, which staged a
military parade featuring ICBMs just a day before the Games opened.

The mounting political drama loomed over other Olympic story lines, including the
participation of Russian athletes despite a ban after a doping scandal, and the appearance
of the first Nigerian contingent in the Winter Games with a women’s bobsled team. And then
there are the gold medal hopefuls, like Nathan Chen, the American ice skating prodigy who
may seek to land five quad jumps in competition, and Chloe Kim, the teenage Korean-
American snowboarding phenom.

And as if there were not enough distractions already, a worsening outbreak of the highly
contagious norovirus has been spreading from security personnel to other Olympic
workers.

In the prelude to the opening ceremony, North Korea dominated the news cycle. For the
month since North Korea agreed to send 22 athletes and an entourage of artistic
performers and dignitaries to the Games, the news media has been riveted by an advance
visit by one of North Korea’s most celebrated pop stars, the arrival of North Korean
cheerleaders in matching red wool coats, and controversies over whether the North’s
participation in the Olympics would violate international sanctions punishing North Korea for
its nuclear weapons development.

And Mr. Pence’s visit — which included a meeting Friday with North Korean defectors —
1/3
exposed deepening strains in ties between the longtime allies, as he suggested that South
Korea curtail ties to the North after the Olympics end. Mr. Pence also did not attend a state
dinner near the Olympics site, which meant he avoided spending time with the North
Korean delegation.

But South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, seems to see the Games as central to his effort
to proactively engage North Korea and persuade the reclusive country to enter into
negotiations to scale back its nuclear and ballistic missile program.

“Many considered it an impossible dream to have an Olympics of peace, in which North

Korea would participate and the two Koreas would form a joint team,” Mr. Moon said in an
address to the International Olympic Committee this week.

Friday’s opening ceremony, directed by Song Seung-whan, a South Korean actor and
popular theatrical creator, sought to project a vision of unification and peace on the long-
divided peninsula.

“As a starting point, Korea is the only divided country in the world,” Mr. Song said in an
interview hours before the ceremony began. He said that even though North Korea was not
expected to attend when he began planning the ceremony’s themes, “we started with
peace in mind.”

“Of course it was a surprise,” he said of the North’s decision to join the Games. “It will be
an opportunity for the peace we were thinking of to be shown to the world in a more deep
way.”

Although athletes from the two Koreas marched under a unified flag, a group of traditionally
dressed dancers and drummers formed the shape of the Taegeuk, the pattern that appears
on the South Korean flag. And a paean to technological developments in artificial
intelligence highlighted South Korean achievements.

A backlash against the last-minute participation of North Korea, particularly the addition of a
dozen North Korean women’s ice hockey players onto the roster of the South Korean team,
cast a shadow over a moment that was meant to exemplify unity.

“Instead of paying attention to all of the excellent athletes who are coming from all over the
world, we are paying all our attention to the inter-Korean women’s hockey team,” Elisa Lee,
a former table tennis champion and coach for South Korea and a former member of the
National Assembly, said in an interview this week in Seoul. “I think it’s a little bit
unfortunate.”

Critics also feared that in seeking better ties with North Korea, Mr. Moon had compromised
too much.

“Bending to a dictator like Kim Jong-un is in conflict with the dignity” of South Koreans,
wrote Yoon Pyung-joong, a professor of political philosophy at Hanshin University, in an
editorial this month in Chosun Ilbo, a South Korean daily. “The crisis on the Korean
Peninsula does not get resolved with a one-off event like sports games or an inter-Korean
summit meeting.”

2/3
But the emotion of watching the Koreas march under the same flag moved some
spectators. More than 100 South Koreans watching on a live stream on a screen in central
Seoul applauded and cheered while watching that moment.

Kim Tae-yoon, 21, a media studies student from Cheonan, said that he had been dubious
about the North Koreans participating in the Games.

“I wondered whether any of our efforts would be a step towards unification when we could
very well just be used for North Korean propaganda,” Mr. Kim said. “But the two Koreas
marching together looked good. I hope that the Pyeongchang Olympics will be
remembered as one where we showed the world that we communicated well with North
Korea.”

Perhaps the most stirring moment of the evening came when the penultimate torch bearers
were revealed as Chung Su-hyon, a North Korean player for the unified Korean hockey
team, and Park Jong-ah, a South Korean player. The pair carried the torch up the final flight
of steps and handed it off to Yuna Kim, the profoundly popular South Korean figure skater
who won the gold medal in 2010 and the silver in 2014.

This event was not the first time that athletes from North and South Korea have marched
together under one flag. They did so in 2000 at the Sydney Olympics in Australia, in 2004 in
Athens, and in 2006 in Torino, Italy.

But by doing so in South Korea — and in Gangwon Province, where North Korea is visible
from the peaks of the ski slopes — the symbolism this time was particularly striking. It also
provided a stark contrast to the 1988 Summer Olympic Games in Seoul, where the North
Koreans did not compete after organizing a terrorist attack in which spies blew up a South
Korean airliner 10 months before the Games, killing everyone on board.

The Seoul Olympics ended up being a turning point for South Korea as it pulled away from
North Korea economically, politically and culturally.

It was also, as it turned out, a turning point for the world. After two previous summer games
roiled by political boycotts in Moscow and Los Angeles, the countries that had sat out those
games all sent athletes to Seoul, making it the host of the largest number of participating
nations during the Cold War era.

A year later, the Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union collapsed not long after that.

“In a sense, the Cold War symbolically ended with the Seoul Olympics,” said Lee O. Young,
creative director of the 1988 opening ceremony, in an interview in his library in Seoul this
week.

Mr. Lee, whose slogan for those ceremonies was “beyond the wall,” said that he believed in
the power of imagination to drive change.

“The Pyeongchang Olympics, in very surprising ways, could be another turning point in the
way the Seoul Olympics was,” Mr. Lee said. “After the Seoul Olympics, we have been
experiencing a new Cold War, and the Pyeongchang Olympics might set another
milestone.”
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5 Ways to Talk About Your Accomplishments Without
Bragging
levo.com/posts/talk-about-accomplishments-without-bragging

May 24, 2013

FEATURED CONTRIBUTOR

Viewing on Levo:
Only you can see this list

Perhaps more so than our male counterparts, women—whether in the workplace or in our
personal lives—have a tendency to downplay our achievements. Rather than talking up our
accomplishments, we try to appear as though we’re not bragging. Articles recently
published in The Huffington Post and The Chicago Tribune have both explored the
importance of self-promotion in the workplace. If the issue has been featured so
prominently in the media, why then do so many women still feel the need for such
modesty?

As a soon-to-be college graduate of the University of Michigan, I am also guilty of the

tendency to downplay my academic achievements. I recently completed a 100-page senior
honors thesis, a project that I spent the better part of a year working on and which I
consider the culmination of my college experiences. And yet, in a recent job interview, I had
trouble finding a way to discuss this major accomplishment without feeling as though I was
gloating.

This trend is ironically most prominent among the women most in need of self-
promotion. Recent high school and college graduates in particular struggle with promoting
themselves in a professional setting. Some schools are changing their approach to female
students in an attempt to help overcome this tendency towards academic and professional
modesty. The Young Woman’s Leadership School of East Harlem, a school that supports
young women in their academic and social goals, hosts an annual “Brag Party.” Once a
year, members of the philanthropic group, the High Water Women, come together with high
schoolers to teach girls in East Harlem how to tactfully but effectively promote themselves
and their achievements.

What women everywhere—from East Harlem to Ann Arbor—need to understand is that if

we are actively worrying about seeming arrogant or pompous, we probably aren’t being
perceived this way.

Still need convincing? Here are five ways to insure you won’t come off pompous in your
next job interview:

1. DO discuss the accomplishment in terms of the skills you acquired. If you spent
months planning a charity event for a club at your college or university, discuss the time
management and leadership skills you acquired. Did you recently run a marathon?
Emphasize the stamina and dedication it required to reach your fitness goal.
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2. DON’T define your success in terms of chance or assistance from others.
According to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, “Men attribute their success to innate
qualities and skills. Women attribute their success to luck and help from others.” While it’s
nice to show you have the ability to work with others, make it very clear to your potential
employer that you are the reason for your own academic and/or career success.

3. DO have a former colleague, boss, or professor speak as a testament to your

accomplishments. This will provide credibility to your words and strengthen your
interviewer’s impression of you. Even if the interviewer doesn’t ask for a recommendation,
it’s always a good idea to have references on hand that speak to your major
accomplishments.

4. DON’T forget to dress the part. You’ve just successfully completed a huge project;
make sure your appearance doesn’t detract from this accomplishment. For job interviews,
it’s always better to be overdressed than underdressed.

5. Still feeling uneasy? Practice discussing your accomplishments in front of friends

and/or family members whose opinions you value. Hearing their feedback will put you at
ease.

Now crush that interview!

What are your tips for sharing your accomplishments without appearing arrogant?
Tell us in the comments!

Ask Michael Skolnik, Political Director to Russell Simmons and President of

GlobalGrind.com, about how he talks about his achievements!

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Brazil Has a School Problem
bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-02/brazil-has-a-school-problem

It spends heavily on universities but neglects K-12.

By
Fabiola Moura
and
Jessica Brice

Mendonça Filho

Mateus Bonomi/AGIF via AP

Brazil’s state universities enjoy a sterling reputation. But students who qualify for admission
come largely from exclusive and expensive private schools. Pupils who attend public
schools usually don’t move very far up from their crumbling and often violent
neighborhoods.

Former President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva and his successor, Dilma Rousseff—who was
impeached last year—attempted to solve the problem by plowing what the federal audit
court estimates at 43.2 billion reais ($14 billion) into a student loan program called Fies from
2009 to 2015. The loans supported students turned away from state universities who could
use the funds to attend a network of for-profit colleges. Those institutions now educate
about 6 million—76 percent of all college students in Brazil.

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The for-profit universities are
dominated by Kroton Educacional
SA, the world’s largest education
company, with about 1 million
undergraduates. Kroton and its
rivals have thrived by expanding
their client base through
distance-learning classes, where
students at centers from the
Amazon jungle to beach towns
gather weekly to attend lectures.

The gains in enrollment, fourfold

over the past 20 years, have
been cheered by ordinary
Brazilians as a major advance for
the middle class in Latin
America’s biggest economy. But
the subsidies raised the
government’s higher education
budget by 30 billion reais over six
years. In the same period, kindergarten-to-high school spending rose just a third of that.
“We’ve got our priorities all backwards,” says José Mendonça Filho, who became
education minister after Rousseff’s impeachment last May. In 2015, Brazil spent 27 percent
more as a share of gross domestic product on basic K-12 education than its peers in the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Yet 30 percent of its workforce
remains functionally illiterate, according to the nonprofit Instituto Paulo Montenegro. The
average Brazilian worker is a quarter as productive as his U.S. counterpart. “From the
moment the average child learns to read and write in Brazil, he starts piling up
deficiencies,” Mendonça Filho says.

At the same time, little is known about the quality of education received by students in for-
profit colleges. There are no numbers on employment rates or the salaries of graduates.
Loan default rates collected by the audit court paint a bleak picture. In December 2015, 49
percent of Fies students who were supposed to be paying back their loans were late; 26
percent were more than 360 days overdue.

Mendonça Filho has some fixes in the works: a system that places high school students in
programs based on academic strength and a planned overhaul of Fies. Kroton, which was
Brazil’s best- or second-best-performing stock three years running through 2014, is down
25 percent from its November 2014 peak on concerns that the government is going to rein
in its support.

Rodrigo Galindo, Kroton’s chief executive officer, says a retrenchment of the loan program
would be a major blow to Brazil’s middle class. While he acknowledges that the academic
performance of students at public universities ranks higher, he says Kroton is offering what
to many is the only avenue for exiting poverty. “Is there a gap? Of course there is,” he says.
“The students who come to us are poorly prepared.”
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About 80 percent of Kroton’s student body is made up of people educated in public
schools, forcing the company to offer freshmen free catch-up courses that go over
everything they should have been taught in high school. Anticipating a change in
government support, Kroton has started offering its own student loan program and now
relies on federal aid for 4 percent of its latest incoming class.

“The money Brazil invests in education isn’t the problem—it’s how we’re spending the
cash,” says Ana Maria Diniz, daughter of billionaire Abilio Diniz and head of the family’s
philanthropic arm. At the grocery chain the family founded, she says it was a major struggle
trying to find qualified people, even for basic jobs such as restocking shelves and counting
out change for customers. “If we could fix the system, Brazil would take off,” she says. “I’m
just guessing, but I bet our GDP could grow by half.”

The bottom line: For-profit universities in Brazil enroll most of the country’s college
students, who are often ill-prepared and need remedial work.

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How Gender And Race Affect Education Today
huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-gender-and-race-affect-education-today_us_587af986e4b077a19d180e6a

Youth Voices in the New Year, Contributor

Essex County New Jersey Middle School Students

01/14/2017 11:39 pm ET Updated Jan 16, 2017

This article was written by Kirah T., an Essex County, NJ Middle School Student.

The following article is a part of a new series, “Listening to Youth Voices in the New Year.”
Each Sunday, articles written by Essex County Middle School students will be published,
each week relating to a new topic. In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., the essays published
this week are those that relate to racial justice.

Race and gender inequality, even though some may not want to believe it, still play a big
role in students’ education, both in the United States and throughout the world. I myself am
a Black/Latino student that believes that racism and sexism are alive in the education
system globally. It’s not as bad in other schools, but I have noticed that more students of
color have received suspensions rather than white students for committing the same act.
Recent reports show that academic and disciplinary racial disparities continue to exist in K-
12 education in the United States, and girls and young women in all parts of the globe are
prevented from starting school at all, or not allowed to complete their education.

The U.S. Department of Education’s 2014 Civil Rights Data Collection provides a
comprehensive report that gives a clearer picture of how race and ethnicity affects the way
students learn and are treated in all levels of education. The report states that “Black,
Latino and Native Americans have a bigger chance of going to schools with a higher
concentration of first year teachers than white students.” The same report states that Black
students were expelled at three times the rate of white students, and observed that Black
girls were suspended at higher rates than all other girls, and most boys. This report makes
it clear that many young people are being marginalized because of their race, which is not
acceptable. Education is essential in everyone’s life, no matter their race. Equality in
educational settings is something that we need to work toward.

As with race, gender plays a large role in education. According to the UNESCO Institute of
Statistics, 31 million girls of primary school age do not attend school and 17 million of these
girls will probably never attend school in their lifetimes. We must continue to advocate for
the right of girls to go to school, because when girls are educated, they are less likely to
live in poverty. It can affect their future and the future of our world. Even further, the U.S. is
not immune to gender inequality in the education system. According to a Washington Post
article, getting into elite colleges is harder for women than for men. Additionally, the same
article discusses how the US Department of Education Data found that 11 percent of men
were accepted to Brown University versus 7 percent of women in 2014. In addition, at
Vassar College the 34 percent acceptance rate for men was almost twice as high as the 19
percent rate for women in 2014.
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This problem is not unsolvable though. Colleges and schools can do something about the
gender and race inequality that exists. As stated in the Washington Post, “Colleges won’t
say it, but this is happening because elite schools field applications from many more
qualified women than men and thus are trying to hold the line against a 60:40 ratio of
women to men. Were Brown to accept women and men at the same rate, its undergraduate
population would be almost 60 percent women instead of 52 percent—three women for
every two men.” Elite colleges are abusing their power by making it harder for women to get
into college than men, instead of giving them the equal opportunity that they deserve.
Schools can also decrease the discrimination and expulsions by having greater
expectations to suspend a student. Schools are exploiting students, and they have to be
liberated, so the inequality in schools can decrease.

Race and gender are significant factors in education. The Washington Post tells us that
soon “gender blind admissions will be the new campus rallying cry.” Gender imbalance in
schools is so senseless and has come to the point where some students are revolting, and
want their admissions being looked at as genderless, just so they’ll have a better chance of
being accepted. Racism in our nation’s public schools is just as bad. This type of racism
affects where students will go for school, and performance in school as well. A recent study
done by Northwestern University shows that “researchers found that the physiological
response to race-based stressors—be it perceived racial prejudice, or the drive to
outperform negative stereotypes—leads the body to pump out more stress hormones in
adolescents from traditionally marginalized groups.” The effects of this discrimination are
appalling. Not everyone has good schooling which is not a problem we can’t fix. I can’t
imagine not having an equal opportunity as the student that sits across from me just
because I’m a student of color and they’re not. Good opportunities should be evenly
distributed between everyone, no matter someone’s race, gender, religion, or anything
else.

The original writing assignment asked students to create their own essay prompt as long as
it connected to our unit theme, “Uses and Abuses of Power,” and was about a topic they
were passionate about. As a result, students submitted essays on racial justice, LGBTQ+
rights, education reform, gender equality, and more. We are excited to share their work in
this series.

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