Tag Archives: understanding

Just because something is easy to measure doesn’t mean it’s important (Seth Godin)

Posted on 06.07.2008 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Citation du jour de Seth Godin, dont je suis en train de devenir fan: "Ce n'est pas parce qu'une chose est facile à mesurer qu'elle est importante." (Contexte: nombre de visiteurs d'un blog/site.)

[en]

After having abandoned Google Reader during the crunch weeks preceeding Going Solo Lausanne, I heard about Feedly, installed it, and started to love it. (I’ll blog about it in more detail in a few weeks, but it’s a Firefox extension which piggybacks upon Google Reader.)

With Feedly, I’ve started reading blogs again — and also blogs that I didn’t read regularly. More and more, I end up reading posts by Seth Godin, and I’m becoming a fan. A few weeks ago, How to Organize the Room but in clear writing something I’d noticed before (atmosphere and interaction are better if people are a bit cramped). Saying thanks in a conference presentation gave me inspiration for how to do things properly next time around. And today, in Who vs. how many, he picks up on Robert Scoble’s post against the rush to audience and provides us with this “quote of the day” gem:

Just because something is easy to measure doesn’t mean it’s important.

Seth Godin

This reminds me of what I was trying to say in Twitter Metrics: Let’s Remain Scientific, Please!, when I got annoyed by numbers thrown about under the assumption that they meant anything. (The post is mainly a video because I couldn’t type at the time, but I’ve been told it was well worth watching.)

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Posted in Social Media and the Web | Tagged blogging, citation, measuring, quote, relevant, seth godin, Social Software, stats, Theories on Life and the World, understanding, worldview | 6 Comments

Diving Into Something New

Posted on 12.09.2007 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Pour se familiariser avec un sujet nouveau, il faut lire, et même si on ne comprend pas tout, continuer à lire. Au bout d'un moment, les choses commencent à tomber en place, et on peut reprendre avec plus de succès les premiers textes que l'on avait compris que partiellement.

[en]

I remember very clearly when I understood this: I was working on my coursework about gnosticism. I didn’t know anything about the subject and had a pile of about 10 books to go through.

I started reading, and felt completely lost: I couldn’t really understand much. But by the time I reached the middle of the pile of books, things started to make sense. I went back to the first books, and they were making sense too.

To learn about something new, one method is to dive in, and just read on even if you don’t understand. At some point, it will sink in, come together, and you’ll start to get it.

Something about Agile popped up this morning when I clicked my Google Reader “Next” bookmarklet this morning. This isn’t the first time I hear about Agile, and I have a rough idea what it is, but I thought that I should probably read up a bit on it. So I’m reading this case study, even though not everything makes sense. At some point, it will. I’m just starting.

Note: don’t misunderstand. I’m not heading for a career change into software development. I just want to understand more.

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Posted in Stuff that doesn't fit | Tagged agile, Education, experience, Geek / Technical, learning, method, Practical, read, reading, Theories, Thinking, understanding | Leave a comment

Most People Are Multilingual

Posted on 11.08.2007 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Une clarification de ce que j'entends par "la plupart des gens sont multilingues". Multilingues au sens large.

[en]

In a comment to my last post, Marie-Aude says I’m being a bit optimistic by stating that “most people are multilingual”. I’d like to clarify what I mean by that.

The “most people are multilingual” thing is not from me. I’ve seen it mentioned in varied settings, though I still need to find systematic studies to back it up (let me know if you have any handy).

It all depends how you define “multilingual”. If you define it in a broad sense (ie, school-level passive understanding of a language counts), then a little thinking shows it’s not that “optimistic”. Here is what would make somebody multilingual:

  • immigration, of course
  • learning a foreign language at school
  • living in a country with different linguistic groups.

Some examples:

  • in India, many people are fluent in their mother tongue, and to some extent in one of the countries official languages: Hindi or English
  • in the US, think about the huge immigrant population; the whole country was built upon immigration, come to think of it; in the bus in San Francisco, I often heard more foreign languages than English
  • again in the US (because the English-speaking world is seen as a big “monolingual” block), think of the increasingly important hispanic/latino population (people who will often have knowledge of both English and Spanish)
  • in most European countries, people learn at least one foreign language in school — even if it’s not used, most people retain at least some passive knowledge of it; I’m not sure about Asia, Africa, Southern America, Australia: does anybody know?

So, I don’t think it’s that optimistic to say most people are multilingual. To say that most people are “perfectly multilingual”, of course, is way off the mark. But most people understand more than one language, at least to some extent.

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Posted in Language Geekiness | Tagged foreign, knowledge, language, languages, Languages / Linguistics, learning, linguistics, multilingual, people, statistics, understanding, world | 13 Comments