All carrots and no stick

North Korea has begun reassembling its main nuclear complex, its only known source of bomb-making plutonium, the South Korean government said Wednesday, but the United States cast doubt on the seriousness of the North’s efforts.

The North announced last week that it had stopped disabling its nuclear facilities at the complex, known as Yongbyon, and threatened to rebuild them because it was angry that it had not yet been removed from the United States’ list of state sponsors of terrorism. The United States maintains that the North has not fulfilled the requirements for being removed from the list.

Building another Yongbyon in Syria, for instance.

Supermarket etiquette

I've always found it odd that, as I approach the supermarket checkout counter, there are magazines with covers blaring issues that it would be entirely inappropriate for me to bring up with the other people in line, or with the checkout clerk. For example, I would be ill-advised to turn to the nearest stranger and, pointing to the cover shown at right, ask, "I wonder what 'little mouth moves' they're referring to?"

And what if a male supermarket manager posed that question (or read almost anything else off the cover) to a female subordinate? A career-ender, if he's lucky.

Seems like an odd double standard; you can put a rude thing in someone's face but only if you hope to make money off it.

Scandalous yet tolerated

Today, selling term papers to students to use as their own is still illegal, but selling speeches to politicians to use as their own remains a legitimate enterprise.

I'm glad someone said it, and said it so well. I've always been puzzled at the news media's breezy attribution of political speeches to the people who read but don't compose them. I'd think the media would at least use this stick to beat the politicians they don't like.

Guns as public goods

My local police department has a handout on safeguarding your house, and owning a gun isn't on the list. In fact it's discouraged. Maybe because, as the Brady campaign argues fairly convincingly, your gun's most likely victim is you. And I'd add to that my doubts that an amateur could get the better of a well-trained criminal, in a shoot-out.

On the other hand,

The 34-year-old mother of two grabbed a shotgun that had been pointed at her face early Wednesday, starting a struggle that ended with one intruder killed with his own weapon and another in the hospital.

I'm grateful to all the people who do keep guns in their homes -- 50% of homes have guns, so they say -- for acting as a deterrent, providing that small but definitely non-negligible and fatal occupational risk all burglars run. I suspect that in the absence of that deterrent, there would be many more burglaries.

Same-old same-old

Hard to see why this is news:

Syria's leader said Thursday he offered a proposal for peace with Israel but also refused to break off ties with Hezbollah and militant Palestinians

We see this "peace plan" recycled over and over: hand over what we failed to take when we attacked you in 1973, and by the way we plan to keep supporting the terrorists who want to destroy you utterly.

The techie gap

Why are there so few (and fewer than once) American-born computer programmers and, in college, computer science majors? In How our Culture Keeps Students out of Science, Peter Wood (starting from a story about Bill Gates lobbying for H1B visas to feed his need for programmers, but then broadening his scope to all science) argues that it's a combination of sloth, misplaced priorities and maleducation. That's the conservative view, of course. Others will say we'd produce more Einsteins (or Richard Stallmans?) if we gave every public school student a laptop and their teachers a "reduced class size".

I don't happen to think this "shortage" (alone) is a social problem worth worrying about, but as long as people are going to talk about it, I'll propose a theory inspired by the economics of international trade: People are sorting themselves into professions in a way that reflects comparative advantage. In international trade, the idea is (oversimplifying greatly) that if an acre of English land can produce 10 tons of wool or 10 tons of milk, and an acre of Portuguese land can produce 5 tons of wool or 8 tons of milk, England will raise mostly sheep and export wool to Portugal while importing milk from Portugal, even though England could, if it really wanted to, produce milk even more efficiently than Portugal can. Turning, then, to the market for skilled labor: bright college-age Americans can become computer programmers but they can also cash in on their American language and social skills to become lawyers, bankers, journalists, politicians, clinical psychologists etc. Meanwhile a bright college-age resident of India or China, looking to emigrate to the USA, enjoys a comparative (even if not absolute) advantage in those fields that don't require native-level English language and American social skills.

The old days, when the engineers looked just like the lawyers and the bankers (except for the pocket protectors and other fashion faux pas), reflected a period of labor market autarky.

Haim B. Rosen, Textbook of Israeli Hebrew

This is an interesting book but it's not so much a beginner's language course as it is a reference grammar of modern Hebrew. Moreover, the grammar is presented in a way that will strike almost everyone who *has* studied Hebrew grammar (in school, or from every other book I've ever seen) as idiosyncratic.

For example, the classification of verbs into seven "binyanim" -- what could be called the cornerstone of most other college-level Hebrew textbooks -- is scarcely to be found at all. In its place you find "strong verbs" and "weak verbs". The strong verbs correspond to the traditional "qal" and "nif'al". The rest of the binyanim are subsumed under the "weak verbs", which Rosen further breaks down into three classes -- class 1 for pi'el and pu'al, class 2 for hitpael, and class 3 for hif'il and huf'al. But you have to read to chapter 41 to learn about that three-part taxonomy. In the mean time, Rosen has introduced most of the verb rules piecemeal. Gone are the familiar tables -- regular verbs, verbs that start with a guttural letter, or end in aleph, or have a yod in the middle, etc. I doubt I could have learned Hebrew verbs the way Rosen presents them, unless I collected all of his scattered rules and wrote my own conjugation tables.

There is another peculiarity which I think is even worse: the Hebrew is spelled without vowels ("points")! When vocabulary is introduced, it's shown in (unpointed) Hebrew alongside a phonetic transliteration in Latin letters. So whenever you see that Hebrew word -- then and there, or later -- you'll see it without vowels. To be sure, there's method, and not just madness, here; most road signs and virtually all restaurant menus, shop windows, newspapers and hand-written notes you see in Israel are like that -- no vowels. On the other hand, students with less than perfect memories will find themselves having to refer back to the transliterations when, instead, they could have been keeping their eyes a little longer on Hebrew letters and, in the process, building some skill at decoding the unfamiliar alphabet. And it gets even worse: there are entire pages with no Hebrew letters on them at all; Rosen will throw in a section on idiomatic expressions, and present them only in Latin letters. At that point, I think even the most diligent student would be hard-pressed to readily recognize those expressions if he were to see them in Hebrew, much less be able to write them out in correctly-spelled Hebrew.

The author, Haim Rosen, was a prominent Israeli academic linguist who popularized the idea of Israeli Hebrew as a distinct new language, whose many deviations from classical norms were to be taken not as mistakes or "substandard usage" but as the legitimate objects of serious study. That serious study was his career, and this book must be how, after much thought and rethinking Hebrew grammar forward and backward, he concluded Hebrew should be taught to beginners.

You might be able to make a go of it if your motivation is rock-solid, and you have patience for a lot of abstractly described grammatical terminology. The natural audience for this book, though, is probably not students at all but rather people who already know Hebrew, and who are interested in seeing what they already know presented in an innovative, often interesting, way.

(amazon.com: "63 people found this helpful")