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Date Formatting for a Global Audience
Date Formatting for a Global Audience
By James H. Choi
http://column.SabioAcademy.com
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There are many things you need to be aware of when you write to a global audience. What is extremely clear to you could cause confusion in the global reader’s mind. One such case is the date format. You should not write a day as 01/02/03.
A date consists of three pieces of information. Year, month and day. Mathematically speaking there are 6 ways to arrange them, or a 3! (factorial) ways.
But I have used only three of them.
- Americans use Month/Date/Year. 01/02/03 would be January 2, 2003
- South Americans and Europeans use Date/Month/Year. 01/02/03 would be February 1, 2003
- China, Korea, and Japan use Year/Month/Date. 01/02/03 would be February 3, 2001
Other systems might exist, but these three are the ones I have used and they are already enough to cause frustration. These are unnecessary confusions that can be easily avoided.
If you write for a global audience, eliminate the possibility of ambiguities by following these simple rules:
- Spell out the month (e.g. “February,” not “02”)
- Write all four digits of the year (e.g. “2003,” not “03”)
This way, no matter how your writing is arranged, the reader can figure out the date. This full spelling of the date might seem laborious. But this is what it takes to be clear in this world of confusing and conflicting standards. Even when you use software packages such as Excel, always choose formats with four-digit years, spelled-out month names, and the date.
Personally, I find the Chinese interpretation most consistent because it follows the hierarchy of time making it only one that will correctly sort the date/time in a chronological order without any special algorithms.
The Starless Skies Part 1
By James H. Choi
http://column.SabioAcademy.com
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Those parents who were born in the 1960s or 1970s lived in a singularly unique moment in history. We were born in the analogue world, from which we witnessed with our own eyes the change into a completely digital world. This change has far bigger implications than enjoying the convenience of GPS navigator, or streamed HD video on demand. I call what has emerged the “Starless Sky Phenomenon.”
Think back to the real sky when we were young. Well, even then, many cities were already polluted, and we cold not see the sky. Today, we can see them even less. But this is true of not only the sky above us, but also of the world at our fingertips. Take a clock for our first example. When we were young, clocks were made of gears; they were not digital. So if we were curious, we could open the clock and see its machinery move. One favorite lie that I believed until I opened a clock myself was that its minute and hour hands could be switched so the clock would read incorrectly. I tried to do this myself and realized the clock hands could not physically fit; they couldn’t be installed the wrong way. At any rate the point is we could actually peer into the clock and therefore understand its causes and consequences: the wound up spring turns this, and that in turn pushes this, and this in turn pushes another thing. Of course, we had no understanding of how the bi-metal worked to compensate for the temperature difference and such. But nonetheless we were able to look at them, and understand it in its first approximation.
Take the modern watches. Except for the very expensive ones that we should not open at all, these things are electronic. There is a single chip inside of which even the chip-makers cannot see what is happening. If this chip breaks down, even its designer cannot fix it. That person just has to buy a new one. The mechanism is more than completely hidden because it is not there. This is the world into which our children are born and in which they will grow. When I was in college, I was able to change oil and even tune the car. I used the timing gun to tune the firing of the spark plugs. I didn’t do this out of fun; I worked on the car because I didn’t have money to send it to the mechanic. Nonetheless this taught me the principles of how the car works. Today, many of those functions are delegated to built-in computers which — by design — completely out of our view, and understanding.
Or take one final example: a radio. Back when I was in elementary school, I was able to peer into a radio in my bedroom to see the vacuum tubes, capacitors and wires running between them. I didn’t understand how radios worked. For example, I knew nothing about RC filters or frequencies. Yet I could still build my own transistor radio by following the schematics, connecting wires to match the ones I saw. I gained confidence (however unfounded) that I could look into something and figure out how to recreate or control it.
But these days we don’t have vacuum tube radios with clearly visible components. We carry nano iPods that can’t be opened. Even if we could open one, we would not understand what’s inside. Furthermore, we’d have no clue how to make one ourselves even if we had a schematics. This is totally opposite from back in the days when I was in high school, when students built their own amplifiers. These days students don’t have such opportunities. They might not even know what an amplifier is. Instead they just have a personal MP3 player with which they lock themselves in their rooms and shut out the world. They lack the motivation — or even notion they are capable — of building such an electronic device.
What does this all mean for the education of our children? I believe that the current generation is benefiting from the unprecedented wealth of these digital devices and electronics. At the same time, they’re completely shut out of knowing, or even wondering, how things operate. They don’t have to worry about how an operating system works or how to install a device driver. Everything is automatic. Many of my online students don’t even know whether the computers they are using are PCs or Macs. To them, it is a box that works.
I believe that this lack of access to how things function leads to a lack of curiosity. When a student sees only the final, sleek design of a device, there is nothing to trigger their curiosity into how it works. Indeed, today they select devices not on how they function but rather, largely, based on design and looks. The fruits of an engineer’s labor are so completely packaged that they are invisible to students. Therefore students less and less want to become engineers and increasingly want to become consumers.
When the first Apple 2 came out, the boot-up screen was the BASIC language interpreter. In other words, you had to know some computer language to use that computer. When the first PC came out, all you saw was an unhelpful C prompt flashing A:>. To make the machine do your bidding, you had to know how to program AUTOEXEC.BAT file. But these days, PCs and Macs work right out of the box. In becoming easier to use, these machines had their technologies become completely inaccessible. Students today don’t have to know anything to use one — so therefore they don’t.
In the eyes of the current generation of students, software is something you use, not create. You download apps for free. And whatever you need is likely to be available, yours for searching. Students lack a desire to write programs because they rarely reach the state of “need.”
So what should parents do in this completely digital world? Unlike our generation, these students don’t have any reference point for what pre-digital means. They were born digital and will stay digital. Our digital age was supposed to make people more connected and productive. The young generation might be connected, but, judging from how my students use computers, digitally productive they are not.
Parents have to reveal the hidden machinery behind technology. We must open the curtain, which is not easy to do, to teach students how to be not just consumers but also producers.
I will discuss specific steps parents can take in subsequent parts of this series. Please share your thoughts in the comment box below.
When I Met Another Penta-lingual in Tokyo
When I Met Another Penta-lingual in Tokyo
By James H. Choi
http://column.SabioAcademy.com
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I speak four languages reasonably but, depending on circumstances, can speak five. The fifth is Spanish, of which I took only one semester in college where I mostly learned how to modify Portuguese into Spanish. About 30 percent of the vocabularies overlap anyway, and about another 30 percent I can manipulate in order to make it sound funny but make sense to Spanish speakers. For instance, Portuguese words that begin with “ch” begin with “ll” in Spanish. So “chover” (to rain) in Portuguese becomes “llover” in Spanish. “Chegar” (to arrive) becomes “llegar”. And so on. So, I blindly apply it to other words that start with “ch” and carefully monitor the listener’s expression to see if it worked.
Thanks to this similarity, I can figure out quite a bit of Spanish on the fly. So when no Spanish speakers are around, I shamelessly declare myself a penta-lingual. How I self-describe my fluency in each language depends solely on who’s around me. If nobody is around to test my fluency in a particular language, I raise my capabilities a couple notches using vague, singularly untestable claims such as “I can carry a nice conversation.”
While in Japan, I saw no threat of running into Spanish speakers bent on exposing my fraud, so I presented myself as a penta-lingual. Of course, I was very humble about my Japanese abilities, but as for my English, Korean, Portuguese AND Spanish, as far as anyone knew, I spoke fluently.
This impressed a colleague on the exchange program with me. One day, he told me he ran into another penta-lingual at his workplace, NHK. Because I am a fake penta-lingual, I immediately smell fraud when others claim to be one. It takes one to know one. My suspicions grew when I learned this other penta-lingual spoke exactly the five languages I did, language for language. What were the chances?
I couldn’t imagine a circumstance in which someone would learn English, Korean, Portuguese, Japanese, and Spanish. First off, I instantly suspected he knew either Portuguese or Spanish and was faking the other. But the other three aren’t interchangeable in any way, thus I was not able to explain those away.
But, who would learn these five languages? What a waste of time! One could do so much taking on other productive pursuits in life! He must been caught by the circumstances like me, and must have been forced to learn a few of those out of necessity, and fake some out of vanity. I had to meet him, and apparently he felt the same way about me. Probably he smelled fraud on me, too. We finally met one night at Asahi beer garden in Ginza.
It turns out we shared far more than I’d ever dreamt.
Born in Korea, he had immigrated to Brazil to study high school — at my high school: Colégio Bandeirantes. He was my upperclassman! We had the same math and Portuguese teachers!! And I found him in Tokyo. This coincidence jarred me for some time, and still baffles me even today.
Afterward, he went to Texas for college and, finally, Japan to work. And yes: His Spanish was fake, just like mine.
Needless to say, his Japanese was far better than mine. Furthermore, he turned out to be the only one who talked straight about my Japanese abilities. I’d blown up my ego about my Japanese because everyone was complementing it during my stay in Japan — until he told me, “James. If you study Japanese another three years, you’d speak it pretty well.” I felt the pain of my deflated head hitting the hard granite floor of Asahi Beer Garden as I heard those words. “Three years” was endlessly echoing in my head. But I was grateful I met someone who understands exactly where I came from, how I was shaped, and would talk straight to me. In fact, I still remember an expression that he corrected for me that night. If I ever have to examine my Japanese level again, I would trust no one — not even the SAT which gave me 780 out of 800 — but him.
My English appeared to be slightly better than his, though, and our Portuguese and Korean were about the same. So suddenly I had a dilemma for the first time: In what language do I speak to him? I could say anything to him in any language, and he would understand. It was the first and the last time (so far) it happened to me. You’d think that’d facilitate our conversation. But, on the contrary, almost every sentence became a challenge.
My upperclassman had come with his coworker, the boss of my friend at NHK, and my colleague who introduced us was there, too. The four of us spoke late into the night. When all of us were talking, we used Japanese or English, the common language for all of us. But when I talked to my upperclassman privately, I constantly had to select a language. Some languages are better at expressing various thoughts. Expressions in one language, such as “Murphy’s Law” in English, become much longer expression in other languages. Because of this, when I think, my thoughts are constantly shifting among languages. Swear words happen in Portuguese, logical thoughts happen in English, and so on — although I don’t think in my fake Spanish even when I want to fake something.
I’m so used to translating my multilingual thoughts into monolingual conversation that not having to do it was actually harder. Fascinated by this chance to use my “native mode” of speaking for the first time, and eager to make the most of it, I actually began to look for optimal expressions among the five four languages. It probably cost me more energy than talking to a monolingual person with whom I would have no concern for any optimization of intermediary, raw, thought-forming process. But with my upperclassman, I was able to dump my raw data, thus I was trying to shape the raw data itself into a more refined form. I think.
In the end, I ended up mixing all four in an inconsistent manner. He also did likewise, answering me in whatever language I used. We talked and laughed on many topics late into warm and humid summer night in Tokyo until the subway’s last train forced us apart.
One might think two people who share so much in background and communication bandwidth would become close friends. But after this night, we lost touch. Just like me, my upperclassman was aloof, caring little about retaining contact. When two detached people meet, they lose touch easily, as we did. I’ve even forgotten his name. He worked at NHK in 1994 and just had a baby at that time. And he would be known to be penta-lingual. If you know him, please forward this article to him. I’d like to see him again.
My Suspicion About Weather Reports
My Suspicion About Weather Reports
By James H. Choi
http://column.SabioAcademy.com
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Mark Twain famously said, “It is hard to predict — especially about the future.”
Of all people who get paid to predict the future, weather forecasters are the most vulnerable because–compare “Someday the world will end” type of predictions– their predictions are routinely confirmed or falsified.
Perhaps because of it they never seem keep records of what they predict. Who would want to announce to the world how wrong you were, after all.
Modern “Chaos Theory” explains to us why long range weather forecast is impossible–because it depends on too many subtle, unmeasurable factors from all around the glove: called “The Butterfly Effect.”
Even though many weather services predict 10 days in advance, I was told by these Chaos Theorists that we cannot know that far into the future. Thus I doubt the weather will even barely resembles what was forecast when the 10th day arrives. If the forecast was accurate, I believe it was by a random chance, also known as dumb luck.
Forecasts require a lot of ground measurements and super-computer power to create. I don’t believe every station broadcasting weather forecasts owns such resources. (And if they did, what a waste.) So there must be a few central forecasting agencies behind the scenes supplying data for meteorologists in front of the camera. But how many agencies exist? Two? Ten? Which ones are better than the others? Does one agency let most stations parrot its single forecast? I so far haven’t been able to find reliable sources explaining these details. Any prediction or forecast is dubious if they don’t specify their error ranges. A 10-day forecast should have a larger error range than a 12-hour forecast, yet each of these has its own single-number high and low predictions with no error reported, no plus minus something. The meteorologists must know the error range, yet they don’t release it. Why? Perhaps this is because the error can be so large. So large that it is useless, i.e., the high will be between 20°F to 106°F, and the low will be between -10°F to 92°F.
There is another thing that makes me curious. Most countries have their own governmental meteorology departments that derive the weather predictions. They get paid to do so, so regardless of accuracy, the departments must produce these forecasts. I wonder whether these departments simply copy what other countries say their weather will be — many countries’ departments do post international forecasts, after all — or if it is the other way around. Does one country’s meteorology department produce its national forecasts and just reprint international forecasts from the relevant country’s meteorology department?
We all rely on these forecasts, but I don’t think I’m the only one so in the dark about the mechanisms behind them. So I’ve decided to get to the bottom of this. I’ve assigned a research project to students in my SR90 course requiring them find all about this mystery. In addition to finding all weather forecasting agencies, they are to record 10-day forecasts from various web pages and the actual temperatures 10 days later for various cities. We will track the performance of each to see how each one fares.
This project will be the first of SR90 because it requires no equipment; a web page access, and Excel will suffice. Students will record data, analyze them, and graph them, then draw their own conclusions. I’m looking forward to unveiling the Mystery of the Weather Forecast.
Have a Personal Textbook Library On The Cheap
Have a Personal Textbook Library On The Cheap
By James H. Choi
http://column.SabioAcademy.com
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Dear Sabio Students,
By James H. Choi
http://Column.SabioAcademy.com
Your textbooks tend to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. When you need one at home, it’s in your locker — and vice versa. So fix this: Have one at home and one at school.
You have one copy that was lent from your school, so you just need one more copy. Text books are very expensive. Pr-college students don’t realize this because someone else is paying for them, but they’re all more than $100, often $200. You might be tempted to sell your book now knowing its price, but don’t. (First, selling someone else’s property is illegal. Two, you won’t get much because chances are your edition is an old one, for which no one will pay full price.)
This article has been moved to this site: http://en.sabioacademy.com/column2/how-to/library/
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