Women's Health

Almost half of women surveyed in a national poll said they had failed to seek health care for themselves or their families over the previous year because the cost was too high.

The annual survey of women's attitudes and behaviors regarding health care, released today by the National Women's Health Resource Center (NWHRC), found that women were most likely to put off doctor visits for themselves and least likely to put off doctor visits for their children.

One in four women who said they had skipped needed medical care believed their illnesses lasted longer as a result, and 43% said they worried more about their health.

Rising health costs appeared to have had a major impact on decisions regarding care:

• 28% of women said they put off going to the doctor during an illness for financial reasons.
• 19% said they had skipped recommended medical procedures, such as Pap smears or mammograms, because of cost.
• 18% said they had taken less than the recommended dosage of a prescription drug in order to make it last longer and 18% failed to fill some prescriptions.
• Only 4% said they had put off taking their children to the doctor because of the cost.

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Bilingual Education

Bilingual education programs use both the student's native language and English for instruction. In support of these programs, English Plus advocates cite research that emphasizes the positive influence native language development has on second language proficiency. Lack of first language development has been shown, in some cases, to inhibit the level of second language proficiency and cognitive academic development (Hakuta, 1990).

Krashen (1992) suggests that successful bilingual education programs actually result in faster acquisition of English. Content matter taught in the native language can be transferred to the second language. In the regular classroom, confronted with both concepts and language that are not comprehensible to them, limited English speakers learn neither the content nor the language. Research indicates that language acquisition occurs only when incoming messages can be understood (Krashen, 1992).

Official English proponents believe that bilingual education programs advocate maintenance of native languages and cultures at the expense of English, and that they encourage children not to learn English or become part of American society. They suggest that by teaching students English as quickly as possible, schools "make it clear to immigrant parents and children alike that mastery of English is indispensable for one's becoming a full member of American society" (English Language Amendment, 1984).

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Charles W. Stansfield, Center for Applied Linguistics

In l952, Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote a memo to the Dean of the Language School of the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), calling for the creation of criteria that could be used to identify the foreign language proficiency of U.S. Government Employees. According to the memo, the criteria should be able to differentiate testable levels between "no knowledge" of the foreign language and "total mastery."

A committee, consisting of representatives of government agencies concerned with foreign languages, was established by the Civil Service Commission to develop definitions for each of these testable levels of proficiency and to create an inventory of employees with foreign language proficiency in the various agencies. The result of this effort was a scale, numbered 0-5, with a brief definition of the proficiency associated with each point. These l952 definitions were field tested and substantially revised in l956. That same year, the FSI established a policy of rating the language proficiency of all foreign service officers according to these definitions. Although they have subsequently undergone a number of revisions, the definitions of the different levels of speaking proficiency, which consist of one- or two-paragraph descriptions, have remained essentially the same.

This system of categorizing language proficiency was then adopted by all U.S. Government agencies, from the Peace Corps to the Defense Department (Sollenberger, 1978; Wilds, l975). Today the government scale is known as the Federal Interagency Language Roundtable (FILR) Skill Level Definitions and is available in Higgs (l984) and Duran et al. (l985).

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Broadband Britain- Backwards to the Future

I spent this summer in the UK (August 2005) after having lived in Tokyo for several months. When staying at a friend's house, I was using his broadband connection and went off to the kitchen to make a cup of tea while I rebuilt some databases onsite. I moaned to his flatmate about how slow the internet was in the UK, and she said that he had been saying how fast his connection was now that he had managed to upgrade to a 2Mbps connection, a connection described as 'blistering' by some internet providers, yet a tiny fraction of the speed available in many countries. In my flat in Japan, I have an internet connection fifty times faster, with unlimited download.

It seems to me that rip-off Britain has struck again, and the refusal to create the infrastructure for the information age will have serious repercussions in the future. British companies move information slowly and expensively compared to foreign rivals, and the decision to stick with copper wire for the last few metres to homes and offices will, with hindsight, be looked on as a disastrous and shortsighted error in my opinion. I remember reading a jingoistic article about how our engineers had managed to extract top broadband speeds out of copper wire and, while what they have achieved is certainly fantastic, it simply is not true.

I was paying nearly ten pounds for my 100Mbps connection (unlimited bandwidth), but my landlords decided that I could have it for free- that is better than many corporate contracts in the UK costing hundreds of pounds a quarter or month, depending on your provider. I can't help feeling that, in years to come, people will look back on the decisions made now to rip customers off instead of building a decent infrastructure for the information age will be one of the most calamitous decisions made in this country, one that will make us a more backward nation, unable to compete with our fast efficient rivals.

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Language-Specific Guidelines

As indicated above, certain changes were made in the Provisional Guidelines between l982 and l986. These changes were due in part to concerns about the applicability of the Provisional Guidelines to languages other than Spanish, French, German, and Italian. The Provisional Guidelines made reference to the learner's accuracy in using common Western grammatical constructions, such as subject-verb and noun-adjective agreement, tenses, and passives.

These constructions either do not exist or do not pose a problem in the learning of many non-Western languages taught in U.S. schools, such as Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic. As a result, specific mention of these constructions was eliminated from the l986 version. At the same time, a series of language-specific guidelines was developed through grants from the U.S. Department of Education. These guidelines include considerable detail regarding learner accuracy in using specific constructions of that language at each level. Initially, committees were formed to work on language-specific guidelines in Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic.

A draft of the guidelines in each language was published or circulated, and comments were invited from other teachers of the language. Subsequently, they were revised and republished (ACTFL, 1987a, 1987b, 1988, 1989, 1990). Today, additional language-specific guidelines are under development or exist as circulating drafts for Hebrew, Korean, Hausa, Indonesian, and a number of other languages. These guidelines have exerted considerable influence on the organization of curriculum as well as on the pedagogical approaches employed by instructors in the classroom (Thompson et al., 1988).

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Definity Article

First off, the idea that this has anything to do with the mass/count distinction is pretty implausible on its face: Both the relevant nouns are countable by the familiar tests.

I do think that morphosyntax (and it's relation to semantics) must play a role, though.

Nominalizations like 'punishment' often have this abstract reading in which they seem to be the *name* of a certain kind of action ('punishment,' 'destruction,' 'failure'), so while you can talk about instances ('3 failures'), you can also refer to the action by name ('failure is not an option'). Here, the absence of the definite article has to do with the name-y quality, which, in turn, is connected to uniqueness presuppositions, etc. You see this behavior very clearly in gerunds ('running is a healthy activity').

'Penalty,' on the other hand, is not one of these kinds of nominalizations. In fact, it's not a nominalization of a verb at all--both 'penalty' and 'penalize' are synchronically related to a base adjective 'penal.'

Maybe this is more of a description than an explanation, but I lean towards attributing the absence of the definite article in 'capital punishment' to the semantics of a class of derivational suffixes.

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US: Wikipedia publishes 2-millionth article in English

SAN FRANCISCO --- WIKIPEDIA published its 2-millionth article in the English language version of the anyone-can-edit encyclopedia, a symbolic milestone for the world's largest user-generated Web publishing site.

Wikipedia, the sixth most visited network of Web sites worldwide behind commercial operators Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Time Warner and eBay, is available in 250 languages. Combined, Wikipedia has published more than eight million articles.

On Sept 10, an article on El Hormiguero, a popular Spanish TV show, was created by Wikipedia contributor Zzxc to become the 2 millionth article in the English Wikipedia. The article is at http: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EltHormiguero/. Since the reference project started in 2001, more than 100,000 registered users have made at least 10 edits each to Wikipedia articles, according to the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit charitable organisation that operates Wikipedia.

The English version of Wikipedia alone has signed up 3.4 million volunteer contributors. The German and French editions of the Wikipedia, the next two largest sites, each have more than half a million articles.

Nine other language sites each have more than 100,000 articles. It has also offers versions in less common languages ranging from South Africa's Xhosa language to the hybrid Esperanto.

Wikipedia articles can be constantly improved upon because they are based on group-editing 'wiki' software.

A study this year by the Hewlett Packard Information Dynamics Laboratory found that the best articles on Wikipedia are those that have been edited most frequently, by the largest number of people.

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