Attorney generals trying to shut down usenet?

That reminds me of the information economy" types that forget that they often wear clothes and drive cars and live in houses and such. And just how much of our ordinary lives are made more convenient by the work of clerks, salespersons, laborers, assembly line workers, etc., I have done enough of these things to have permanent respect.

Pleasure and a treasure to be of help.

Thanks, i did not have such a clear example to post to make it plain.

Why do you say that? If he is also very smart then he may have found a way to overcome the difficulty. What you described uncovering one letter at a time is one way of breaking the degeneracy if he sees words as just streams of letters in no particular order.

So to him "raw" and "war" are very hard to distinguish (for example)

I find it hard to believe that reading whole words was the root cause of his problems. Although bad teaching might have played its part.

I find it equally boggling that anyone could get to college or even obtain exam qualifications without being able to read.

Even stranger. How did he pass the exams?

Reseachers into perceptual problems or gifts are interested in people who are highly intelligent and can articulate their problems with reading or writing. Especially interesting are the ones that have overcome them or also show a spectacular ability in some other field.

It could just be really bad teaching. I suppose.

Regards, Martin Brown

Generals.

My apologies for not noticing that.

Yep. I pumped gas, worked in a TV repair shop, and washed dishes in a cafeteria, before graduating up to being a technician ;-)

A goodly portion of my income goes to pay for "services": lawn and tree maintenance, swimming pool maintenance, aquarium maintenance, car wash, car and truck maintenance/service, laundry/shirts, barber, beautician (for wife :-), manicure (for wife :-), restaurants, movies.

Then there's clerks of all kinds, bank tellers, bus drivers, pilots, flight "attendants", cab drivers, train and subway operators, elevator operators, Sky Caps, rental car agents...

And government employees :-(

On and on and on...

I'm sure I missed something ;-)

None of these need a college degree.

Then there's Slowman, hangs out at home and lives off his wife... he didn't need any degrees either ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Generals.

No problem... I just enjoy teasing ;-)

...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

It is a popular one though. And you do at some stage have to learn the written alphabet for your chosen language. This is much harder in Chinese and Japanese where basic literacy requires rote learning to recognise about 2000 distinct characters and their readings.

In the UK they messed about around my time with Initial Teaching Alphabet, ITA in my junior school. I rebelled against it.

Full immersion requires total committment. And you pretty soon learn some vocabulary if you are living and working in a foreign country. Unless that is you live in the expat ghetto (human resources were horrified when we didn't).

You had to pity the real time translators on Japanese TV Bilingual News though - Japanese is one of those languages where you can negate the entire meaning of a sentence with a postfix operator.

In bilingual mode R+L is Japanese and R-L is English - I don't know how the broadcast tells the set this, but it works nicely.

Strangely I was very good at written French grammar at school but could never master the spoken language adequately due to a regional accent.

Many of the more able Dutch students are at least trilingual and fluent.

I had some colourful plastic letters too. I know this because they were also used to title cine films that still survive in a cupboard.

Regards, Martin Brown

Generals.

Generals.

AIUI...

Military lawyers of the Judge Advocate General's Corps (JAG)

There are no generals in the JAG's office, except the general in charge.

...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

The only real way to learn it is to live in France or Quebec for a few years. I once interviewed a sales V.P. When he found out I spoke German he wanted to do the interview in German just for fun. So here he was, an American who spoke German with a thick French accent.

That is because of, you guessed it, immersion. NL/BE is too small a market to voice-over movies so they don't. All you get is subtitles so they almost automagically learn the languages.

I learned English in similar fashion. From ham radio and from, gasp, "All in the Family". So an attorney was an attoinee. Then I had a teacher from Kentucky, followed by one from Lousiana. Later I worked in Scotland ...

I have posted previously about the oriental "bright twit" that gave us "whole word / whole language" ideographic crap to the ruin of phonetics. BTW phonetics is English is difficult because of having multiple linguistic / phonetic roots.

Yet.

Oh, he actually has a PhD; i have verified it. Bill is a classic example of overeducated idiot. And i am sure that if you really think about it, you came across them at MIT as well.

Yep. It's sort of odd, but the brightest guys in my class (went on to PhD) have turned out to be the least productive.

...Jim Thompson

"Those who can, do. Those who can't, grow pointy hair." '-)

--

If you have broadband, your ISP may have a NNTP news server included in your account:

Sporadic E is the Earth's aluminum foil beanie for the 'global warming' sheep.

Late at night, by candle light, Rich Grise penned this immortal opus:

But it takes energy, thus money, to stay ionized.

- YD.

From working with him and seeing how he handles other such problems.

No, he'd never confuse those. Reading aloud he might've misread "speciously" as "specifically." I.e, he was doing exactly what he' d been taught, identifying words by overall appearance: length, shape, and a few key letters.

Like hashing, except they didn't consider collisions.

Works fine for a beginner's limited vocabulary, just not later.

I didn't mean wholly illiterate, just not nearly up to standards.

Did you see the example Jim provided?

(An understatement, actually--the kid's top-notch, an inspiration, an honor and a pleasure to know.)

Not even bad teaching, IMHO, just untested procedures being substituted for tried-and-true. They shouldn't do that.

Cheers, James Arthur

Yeah, and you know what? Unions are also in the best position to set things right.

How? Set, support, and enforce high standards of excellence within their ranks.

Outsiders can't possibly impose success from without; it has to come from within.

If the teachers' unions would set their minds to ensuring better schools, we'd have them.

Cheers, James Arthur

ROFL!

But they don't. Just one example:

FWIW, this is an author who IMHO isn't usually ranting against unions but this episode was so egregious that he probably couldn't hold back either. This case was so disgusting that it has caused me to lose all respect for the teachers union. Sorry for the harsh words but that's how it is.