Rosetta Stone
As I've mentioned before in my blog, I will be doing (or at least have have every intention to do) a Linguistics minor during in my undergraduate studies at NC State. I thoroughly enjoy languages and linguistics, speaking English, Spanish, and French, and having significant intelligibility of Arabic, Latin, Portuguese, Italian, and German, and a cursory knowledge of many other languages and dialects. Anyway, I first became interested in languages when, as a missionary kid in Spain, I met many college students from all over Europe and America doing study abroad at the University of Salamanca. I was fascinated that some of them spoke five (5!) or more (more!) languages; I frankly thought it was awesome, but more than anything, I think being around people like that prepared me mentally to recognize that multilinguilism IS an attainable feat.
But then I took Latin. Y'all know what I mean. Two years of excruciating rote memorization of nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative case endings, past, perfect, future, present and every combination of the above verb tenses, and lorem ipsum, yada yada yada. I still remember much of what I learned, but that's beside the point; learning Latin was not enjoyable. Fortunately, however, and this is where the technology comes in, I began taking French in ninth grade using the multimedia program Rosetta Stone. Compared to Latin, learning French was a picnic complete with cake and some water tubing. The program provided such an effortless, fun, and effective way to learn that I really don't see how I ever learned a even a smattering of Latin. A specific application of technology makes a task that has always been difficult so much simpler. Even fifteen or twenty years ago, the multimedia technology that Rosetta Stone needs didn't exist. I think that as programs like this one become more and more used and more and more improved, being global (i.e. being bi/mulilingual) will become easier and more practical just as other technologies make it more and more necessary and imperative.
Posted at 10:14AM Dec 03, 2008 by advargas in General | Comments[0]
Simple engineering
As average Americans, my family tries to minimize our energy bill. Not only is it good for the environment, but we also like to save as much as we can. Anyway, over the summer, one of the things I did was to thoroughly insulate the the one floor in our house from the crawlspace under the house. Yes, it was a pain, but that's not the point; the point is that last year our energy bill(s) for the month of September, for example, was over two hundred dollars, and this year, we only spent about seventy dollars. We used technology at hand, nothing fancy or state-of-the-art, and we sliced off nearly two thirds of our spending.
I think this relates readily to the book The Shock of the Old. I am sure our house is not the only house in the area, even on our block, that could have used better insulation. If everyone were to simply use the technology (insulation) we do have, an "energy crisis," such as the one we find ourselves in now, would be laughable, and no one (no politician, at least) would ever think to cover the expenses of, for instance, the proposals of President-elect Obama. Ultimately, when presented with a problem such as the enery crisis, we need to recognize that research is not the only answer. From the viewpoint of "human advancement," however, it probably is the most appealing, but from a simple economic viewpoint, effeciently using stuff that we already have in ways that we already know is considerably more than just another option.
Posted at 12:08AM Dec 03, 2008 by advargas in General | Comments[0]