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Paul Canniff, Web Content Expert
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Election 1997: Debut of the Political Web
Canadian Embassy, Washington, DC
Canadian International Debates Council
In 1995 trade promotion staff at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC could see the potential of the Internet for promoting Canadian business and national interests in the United States.
My web development practice, Canniff and Company had two prime advantages in competing head-on with American firms:
I was a registered developer for a new web log analysis product called Intersé Market Focus. This gave me access to a powerful tool for tracking site usage across North America. Driven by a sophisticated geo-demographic database, Market Focus was crucial in separating Canadian and American traffic patterns.Intersé's technology was eventually acquired by Microsoft and integrated into its Site Server product
A lower-valued Canadian dollar allowed my bid to offer comparable value at lower prices. The embassy received effective on-going support and face-to-face consultations, despite the distance from Washington.
In March 1995 I began work on storyboards and site drafts, proceeding through several iterations. On April 25, 1995 the Canadian embassy in Washington, DC became the first Canadian embassy to have a website.
To prove value for money to Ottawa, the embassy needed to reach a primarily American audience. Relying upon analysis with Intersé Market Focus, I was able to continually refine site content to attract the American target audience. Over a period of several months, the Canadian/American user ratio was reversed from 60/40 to 40/60, thanks to content re-design and site marketing.
"Paul's work in putting up video of our MPs in Question Period and interviewing them online placed us way ahead of other political parties. And it was technology that was still easy for our web visitors to use. That made all the difference."
Russ Carrigan, Former Director of Research, PC Caucus Services
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From Tokyo's Haneda Airport to Gimpo in Seoul, the smaller airport close to the city centre. Although landing on hypermodern Incheon airport is no burden, as your suitcase is usually on the belt before you even have a stamp in your passport (no, that doesn't mean the queues at immigration are terribly long... but the drive to the city is). It is now over a year since we moved from Seoul to Amsterdam, and I enjoy coming back every time.
"This time, I arrive in South Korea as a participant of the Amsterdam trade mission led by Mayor Van der Laan. Together with companies from the region, including Deloitte, Kia, AKD, Schiphol, AON and start-ups DriveUgo and The Student Hotel, in addition to the Amsterdam Chamber of Commerce (KvK) and the VU University, the most important goal is to strengthen ties with a large number of Korean companies that have picked Amsterdam as their European business location. In addition, we would also like to attract Korean businesses, students and talent to Amsterdam.
We visit eight South Korean companies, where we are received will the utmost esteem and jointly discuss new plans for European expansion, exchange gifts and have our picture taken for the archives. Most CEOs express their appreciation for the fact that the Mayor of the Dutch capital personally comes to thank them in Seoul for their investments in Amsterdam.
The third edition of the blog report from Jeroen Plag, head of International Corporate Clients ING, during his business trip through Asia for the website of "Het Financieele Dagblad". After having travelled to Mongolia and Japan, Plag reports from South Korea, where he joins the Amsterdam trade mission led by the city Mayor, Van der Laan. Together with companies from the region, the aim is to strengthen ties with Korean companies that have chosen Amsterdam as their European business location, and to attract more Korean businesses, students and talent to the Dutch capital.
The usefulness of this type of mission is often underestimated in the Netherlands, as the presence of the considerably heavyweight dignitaries, together with the local Dutch ambassador, ensures that the entire management teams of several chaebols (the large industrial conglomerates) are present at the other end of the table. This doesn't happen very often in normal meetings. As we conduct business on an international scale with most Korean companies, particularly in Europe, these visits prove most useful to perpetuate relations at a high level.
From a macro-economic perspective, mainly middle-sized Korean exporters suffer from the cheaper yen (see Abenomics in the previous blog about Japan) and the therefore more expensive won. Of all the Asian currencies, the South Korean won has increased most in value, while almost all other emerging market currencies decreased in value compared to the US dollar.
There are indeed positive reports from larger steel factories that are seeing an improving market in ship construction. In addition, Korean conglomerates remain internationally active in securing gas and oil, as the country has no natural supplies of its own. They way in which the government cooperates together with banks, credit insurers and other private sector players works like a well-oiled machine. Perhaps an export model to also explore in the Netherlands?
In addition to the meetings with companies there was a grand networking dinner (150 guests) with classical and modern Korean musical entertainment. From the 22nd floor of the Plaza Hotel across the newly renovated City Hall – one of the few older buildings to have survived the fury of the Korean war – I looked out over the wide boulevards where pop star PSY performed before 80,000 fans. In the distance, set on the slopes of the Blue House, lays the official residence of the President, and behind those hills is the Pyeongchang Dong district, where we happily lived for 3.5 years.


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\section{Introduction}

CLIR systems retrieve documents written in a language that is different from search query language \cite{book2010Nie}. The  primary objective of CLIR is to translate or project a query into the language of the document repository \cite{sokokov2013boosting}, which we refer to as Retrieval Corpus (RC). To this end, common CLIR approaches translate search queries using a Machine Translation (MT) model and then use a monolingual IR system to retrieve from RC. In this process, a translation model is treated as a black box \citep{Sokolov:2014}, and it is usually trained on a sentence level parallel corpus, which we refer to as Translation Corpus (TC).

We address a pitfall of using existing MT models for query translation \cite{sokokov2013boosting}. An MT model trained on TC does not have any knowledge of RC. In an extreme setting, where there are no common terms between the target side of TC and RC, a well trained and tested translation model would fail because of vocabulary mismatch between the translated query and documents of RC. Assuming a relaxed scenario where some commonality exists between two corpora, a translation model might still perform poorly, favoring terms that are more likely in TC but rare in RC.
Our hypothesis is that a search query translation model would perform better if a translated query term is likely to appear in the both retrieval and translation corpora, a property we call \emph{balanced translation}.

To achieve balanced translations, it is desired to construct an MT model that is aware of RC vocabulary. Different types of MT approaches have been adopted for CLIR task, such as dictionary-based MT, rule-based MT, statistical MT etc. \cite{zhou2012}. However, to the best of our knowledge, a neural search query translation approach has yet to be taken by the community. NMT models with attention based encoder-decoder techniques have achieved state-of-the-art performance for several language pairs \cite{bahdanau2014neural}. We propose a multi-task learning NMT architecture that takes RC vocabulary into account by learning Relevance-based Auxiliary Task (RAT). RAT is inspired from two word embedding learning approaches: Relevance-based Word Embedding (RWE) \cite{Zamani:2017} and Continuous Bag of Words (CBOW) embedding \cite{Mikolov:2013}. We show that learning NMT with RAT enables it to generate balanced translation.

NMT models learn to encode the meaning of a source sentence and decode the meaning to generate words in a target language \cite{LuongPM15}. In the proposed multi-task learning model, RAT shares the decoder embedding and final representation layer with NMT. Our architecture answers the following question: \emph{In the decoding stage, can we restrict an NMT model so that it does not only generate terms that are highly likely in TC?}. We show that training a strong baseline NMT with RAT roughly achieves 16\% improvement over the baseline. Using a qualitative analysis, we further show that RAT works as a regularizer and prohibits NMT to overfit to TC vocabulary.

\section{Balanced Translation Approach}
We train NMT with RAT to achieve better query translations. We improve a recently proposed NMT baseline, Transformer, that achieves state-of-the-art results for sentence pairs in some languages \cite{vaswani}. We discuss Transformer, RAT, and our multi-task learning architecture that achieves balanced translation.

\subsection{NMT and Transformer}
In principle, we could adopt any NMT and combine it with RAT. An NMT system directly models the conditional probability $P(t_i \vert s_i)$ of translating a source sentence, $s_i = s_i^1,\ldots , s_i^n$, to a target sentence $t_i = t_i^1, \ldots , t_i^n$. A basic form of NMT comprises two components: (a) an \emph{encoder} that computes the representations or meaning of $s_i$ and (b) a \emph{decoder} that generates one target word at a time. State-of-the-art NMT models have an attention component that ``searches for a set of positions in a source sentence where the most relevant information is concentrated'' \cite{bahdanau2014neural}.

For this study, we use a state-of-the-art NMT model, Transformer \cite{vaswani}, that uses positional encoding and self attention mechanism to achieve three benefits over the existing convolutional or recurrent neural network based models: (a) reduced computational complexity of each layer, (b) parallel computation, and (c) path length between long-range dependencies.

\subsection{Relevance-based Auxiliary Task (RAT)}
We define RAT a variant of word embedding task \cite{Mikolov:2013}. Word embedding approaches learn high dimensional dense representations for words and their objective functions aim to capture contextual information around a word. \citet{Zamani:2017} proposed a model that learns word vectors by predicting words in relevant documents retrieved against a search query. We follow the same idea but use a simpler learning approach that is suitable for our task. They tried to predict words from the relevance model \cite{Lavrenko2003} computed from a query, which does not work for our task because the connection between a query and ranked sentences falls rapidly after the top one (see below).

We consider two data sources for learning NMT and RAT jointly. The first one is a sentence-level parallel corpus, which we refer to as translation corpus, $TC = \{(s_i, t_i); i= 1, 2, \ldots m\}$. The second one is the retrieval corpus, which is a collection of $k$ documents $RC = \{D_1, D_2, \ldots D_k\}$ in the same language as $t_i$. Our word-embedding approach takes each $t_i \in TC$, uses it as a query to retrieve the top document $D_i^{top}$. After that we obtain $t_i'$ by concatenating $t_i$ with $D_i^{top}$ and randomly shuffling the words in the combined sequence. We then augment $TC$ using $t_i^\prime $ and obtain a dataset, $TC' =  \{(s_i, t_i, t_i^\prime); i= 1, 2, \ldots m\}$. We use $t_i'$ to learn a continuous bag of words (CBOW) embedding as proposed by \citet{Mikolov:2013}. This learning component shares two layers with the NMT model. The goal is to expose the retrieval corpus' vocabulary to the NMT model. We discuss layer sharing in the next section.

We select the single top document retrieved against a sentence $t_i$ because a sentence is a weak representation of information need. As a result, documents at lower ranks show heavy shift from the context of the sentence query. We verified this by observing that a relevance model constructed from the top $k$ documents does not perform well in this setting. We thus deviate from the relevance model based approach taken by \citet{Zamani:2017} and learn over the random shuffling of $t_i$ and a single document. Random shuffling has shown reasonable effectiveness for word embedding construction for comparable corpus \cite{vulic2015monolingual}.

\begin{figure}[t]
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=\linewidth ]{overall_schema2.pdf}
    \caption{The architecture of our multi-task NMT. Note that, rectangles indicate data sources and rectangles with rounded corners indicate functions or layers.}
    \label{fig:mtask_nmt}
\end{figure}

\subsection{Multi-task NMT Architecture}
Our balanced translation architecture is presented in Figure~\ref{fig:mtask_nmt}. This architecture is NMT-model agnostic as we only propose to share two layers common to most NMTs: the trainable target embedding layer and the transformation function \cite{LuongPM15} that outputs a probability distribution over the union of the vocabulary of TC and RC. Hence, the size of the vocabulary, $\vert RC \cup TC \vert$, is much larger compared to TC{} and it enables the model to access RC. In order to show task sharing clearly we placed two shared layers between NMT and RAT in Figure \ref{fig:mtask_nmt}. We also show the two different paths taken by two different tasks at training time: the NMT path in shown with red arrows while the RAT path is shown in green arrows.

On NMT path training loss is computed as the sum of term-wise softmax with cross-entropy loss of the predicted translation and the human translation and it summed over a batch of sentence pairs, $\mathcal{L}_{NMT} = \sum_{(s_i, t_i) \in T} \sum_{j=1}^{\vert t_i \vert} -\log P(t_i^j\vert t_i^{<j}, s_i)$. We also use a similar loss function to train word embedding over a set of context ($ctx$) and pivot ($pvt$) pairs formed using $t_i$ as query to retrieve $D_i^{top}$ using Query Likelihood (QL) ranker, $\mathcal{L}_{WE} = \alpha \underset{(ctx, pvt)} {\sum} -\log P(pvt \mid ctx)$. This objective is similar to CBOW word embedding as context is used to predict pivot word
Here, we use a scaling factor $\alpha$, to have a balance between the gradients from the NMT loss and RAT loss. For RAT, the context is drawn from a context window following \citet{Mikolov:2013}.

In the figure, $(s_i,t_i) \in TC$ and $D_i^{top}$ represents the top document retrieved against $t_i$. The shuffler component shuffles $t_i$ and $D_i^{top}$ and creates (context, pivot) pairs. After that those data points are passed through a fully connected linear projection layer and eventually to the transformation function. Intuitively, the word embedding task is similar to NMT as it tries to assign a large probability mass to a target word given a context. However, it enables the transformation function and decoding layer to assign probability mass not only to terms from TC, but also to terms from RC. This implicitly prohibits NMT to overfit and provides a regularization effect. A similar technique was proposed by \citet{nmtwemb} to handle out-of-vocabulary or less frequent words for NMT. For these terms they enabled the transformation (also called the softmax cross-entropy layer) to fairly distribute probability mass among similar words. In contrast, we focus on \emph{relevant} terms rather than similar terms.

\section{Experiments and Results}
\paragraph{Data.} We experiment on two language pairs: \{Italian, Finnish\} $\rightarrow$ English. Topics and relevance judgments are obtained from the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2000-2003 campaigns for bilingual ad-hoc retrieval tracks\footnote{catalog.elra.info/en-us/repository/browse/ELRA-E0008/}. The Italian and French topics are human translations of a set of two hundred English topics. Our retrieval corpus is the Los Angeles Times (LAT94) comprising over 113k news articles.

Topics without any relevant documents on LAT94 are excluded resulting in 151 topics for both Italian and Finnish language. Among the 151 topics in our dataset, we randomly selected 50 queries for validation and 101 queries for test. In the CLEF literature, queries are constructed from either the \textit{title} field or a concatenation of \textit{title} and \textit{description} fields of the topic sets. Following \citet{vulic2015monolingual}, we work on the longer queries.

For TC~we use Europarl v7 sentence-aligned corpus \cite{koehn2005europarl}. TC statistics in Table \ref{tab:parallelcorpus} indicates that we had around two million sentence pairs for each language pairs.
\begin{table}[!h]
    \centering
    {
        \small
    	\tabcolsep=0.19cm
        \begin{tabular}{llrrr} \toprule
            Lang. Pair  & Resource &  \#Inst. & $|V_F|$ & $|V_E|$\\ \midrule
            \multirow{1}{4em}{Ita-Eng}   & Europarl   & 1,894,217 & 146,036 & 77,441\\
                                          \midrule
            \multirow{1}{4em}{Fin-Eng}   & Europarl   & 1,905,683 & 637,902 & 75,851\\
            \bottomrule
        \end{tabular}
    }
    \vspace{-0.3cm}
    \caption{Statistics of resources used for training. $|V_F|$ and $|V_E|$ are the vocabulary size for the source language and the target English language, respectively.  }
    \label{tab:parallelcorpus}

\end{table}

\paragraph{Text Pre-processing.}
For having text consistency across TC~ and RC, we apply the following pre-processing steps. Characters are normalized by mapping diacritic characters to the corresponding unmarked characters and lower-casing. We remove non-alphabetic, non-printable, and punctuation characters from each word. The NLTK library \cite{bird2004nltk} is used for tokenization and stop-word removal. No stemming is performed.

\paragraph{Retrieval.} For ranking documents, after query translation, we use the Galago's implementation\footnote{https://www.lemurproject.org/galago.php} of query likelihood using Dirichlet smoothing \cite{zhai2004study} with default parameters.

\paragraph{Training Technique.} Before applying multi-tasking we train the transformer to obtain a reasonable MAP on the Val set. Then we spawn our multi-task transformer from that point, also continuing to train the transformer. We use an early stopping criterion to stop both the models, and evaluate performance on the test set. For NMT training we use Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with Adam Optimizer and learning rate of 0.01. We found that a learning rate of $10^{-5}$ with the same optimizer works well for the word embedding loss minimization. From a training batch (we use dynamic size training batches), more data points are actually created for the word embedding task because of large number of (context, pivot) pairs. We allow the gradients from word embedding loss to pass through the multi-tasking model at first, and then apply NMT loss. Setting a lower learning rate for the word embedding optimizer, and $\alpha  = 0.1 $ allows the NMT gradient updates to be competitive.

\paragraph{Evaluation.}  Given that in CLIR the primary goal is to get a better ranked list of documents against a translated query, we only report Mean Average Precision (MAP).

\subsection{Results and Analysis}
Table \ref{tab:map_comparison} shows the effectiveness of our model (multi-task transformer) over the baseline transformer \cite{vaswani}. Our model achieves significant performance gains in the test sets over the baseline for both Italian and Finnish query translation. The overall low MAP for NMT can possibly be improved with larger TC. Moreover, our model validation approach requires access to RC index, and it slows down overall training process. Hence, we could not train our model for a large number of epochs - it may be another cause of the low performance.
\begin{table}[t]
\resizebox{\linewidth}{!}{%
\begin{tabular}{@{}lccll@{}}
\toprule
                       & \multicolumn{2}{l}{Italian $\rightarrow$ English} & \multicolumn{2}{l}{Finnish $\rightarrow$ English}             \\
Models                 & Val              & Test              & \multicolumn{1}{c}{Val} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{Test} \\ \midrule
Transformer            & 0.192               & 0.179              &                 \textbf{0.127}        &   0.077                        \\
Our model & \textbf{0.230}               & \textbf{0.211}              &            0.126             &  \textbf{0.097}                        \\ \bottomrule
\end{tabular}%
}
	\vspace{-0.3cm}
\caption{Results for ranking with query translation models, in terms of MAP.}
\label{tab:map_comparison}
\end{table}

\begin{figure}[t]
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{balance_values_validation.png}
    \caption{Balance values of a sample of val queries}
    \label{fig:qval}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[t]
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{balance_values_test.png}
    \caption{Balance values of a sample of test queries}
    \label{fig:qtest}
\end{figure}

\paragraph{Balance of Translations.}
We want to show that translation terms generated by our multi-task transformer  are roughly equally likely to be seen in the Europarl corpus (TC) or the CLEF corpus (RC). Given a translation term $t$, we compute the ratio of the probability of seeing $t$ in TC{} and RC, $\frac{P_{TC}(t)}{P_{RC}(t)}$. Here, $P_{TC}(t) = \frac{count_{TC}(t)}{\sum_{t \in {TC}} count_{TC}(t)}$ and $P_{RC}(t)$ is calculated similarly. Given a query $q_i$ and its translation $T_m(q_i)$ provided by model $m$, we calculate the balance of $m$, $B(T_m(q_i)) = \frac{\sum_{t \in T_m(q)} \frac{P_{TC}(t)}{P_{RC}(t)}}{\mid T_m(q) \mid}$. If $B(T_m(q_i))$ is close to 1, the translation terms are as likely in TC{} as in RC. Figure \ref{fig:qval} shows the balance values for transformer and our model for a random sample of 20 queries from the validation set of Italian queries, respectively. Figure \ref{fig:qtest} shows the balance values for transformer and our model for a random sample of 20 queries from the test set of Italian queries, respectively. It is evident that our model achieves better balance compared to baseline transformer, except for a very few cases.

\paragraph{Precision and Recall of Translations.}
Given a query $Q$ , consider $Q^\prime = \{q^\prime_1, q^\prime_1, \ldots , q^\prime_p\}$ as the set of terms from human translation of $Q$ and $Q^M = \{q^M_1, q^M_2, \ldots ,q^M_q\}$ as the set of translation terms generated by model $M$. We define $P_M(Q) = \frac{Q^M \cap Q^\prime}{\vert Q^M \vert}$ and $R_M(Q) = \frac{Q^M \cap Q^\prime}{\vert Q^\prime \vert}$ as precision and recall of $Q$ for model $M$. In Table \ref{tab:translation_quality_comparison}, we report average precision and recall for both transformer and our model across our train and validation query set over two language pairs. Our model generates precise translation, \emph{i.e.} it avoids terms that might be useless or even harmful for retrieval. Generally, from our observation, avoided terms are highly likely terms from TC and they are generated because of translation model overfitting. Our model achieves a regularization effect through an auxiliary task. This confirms results from existing multi-tasking literature \cite{ruder2017overview}.

To explore translation quality, consider pair of sample translations provided by two models. For example, against an Italian query, \emph{medaglia oro super vinse medaglia oro super olimpiadi invernali lillehammer}, translated term set from our model is \{gold, coin, super, free, harmonising, won, winter, olympics\}, while transformer output is \{olympic, gold, one, coin, super, years, won, parliament, also, two, winter\}. Term set from human translation is: \{super, gold, medal, won, lillehammer, olypmic, winter, games\}. Transformer comes up with terms like \emph{parliament}, \emph{also}, \emph{two} and \emph{years} that never appears in human translation. We found that these terms are very likely in Europarl and rare in CLEF. Our model also generates terms such as \emph{harmonising}, \emph{free}, \emph{olympics} that not generated by transformer. However, we found that these terms are equally likely in Europarl and CLEF.

\begin{table}[t]
\resizebox{\linewidth}{!}{%
\begin{tabular}{@{}p{5 em}ccll@{}}
\toprule
                       & \multicolumn{2}{c}{Italian $\rightarrow$ English} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{Finnish $\rightarrow$ English}             \\
Models                 & Val              & Test              & \multicolumn{1}{c}{Val} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{Test} \\ \midrule
Transformer &  (0.44, \textbf{0.45})    &        (0.43, \textbf{0.46})       &      (0.24, 0.23)   & (0.25, \textbf{0.26})                      \\
Our model            &      (\textbf{0.62}, \textbf{0.45})           &      (\textbf{0.57}, 0.41)         &  (\textbf{0.31}, \textbf{0.25})                       &    (\textbf{0.30}, 0.24)                      \\\bottomrule

\end{tabular}%
}
\vspace{-0.3cm}
\caption{Average precision and recall of translated queries, respectively reported in tuples.}
\label{tab:translation_quality_comparison}
\end{table}

\section{Conclusion}
We present a multi-task learning architecture to learn NMT for search query translation. As the motivating task is CLIR, we evaluated the ranking effectiveness of our proposed architecture. We used sentences from the target side of the parallel corpus as queries to retrieve relevant document and use terms from those documents to train a word embedding model along with NMT. One big challenge in this landscape is to sample meaningful queries from sentences as sentences do not directly convey information need. In the future, we hope to learn models that are able to sample search queries or information needs from sentences and use the output of that model to get relevant documents.

\section*{Acknowledgments}
This work was supported in part by the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval and in part by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and IARPA under contract \#FA8650-17-C-9118 under subcontract \#14775 from Raytheon BBN Technologies Corporation. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the sponsor.

\bibliographystyle{acl_natbib}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


What ground-breaking science research would you like to see attempted in 2017? Jack and Charlie share their views.
For me it's all about space. The Cheops satellite will allow us to see even more exoplanets than ever before. You never know we may find another Earth-like planet or alien life! I'm also excited to see if NASA's Space Launch System can really be the answer for us to blast off to never before reached areas of the Solar System. Lots to look forward to!
I'd like to see medical technology take further leaps forward, especially with microbots that can be used in surgery and also deployed in the blood to help people battle otherwise untreatable diseases. The more prevalent this technology gets, the cheaper it becomes, meaning more people will have access to it.
Who do you agree with? What scientific ventures would you like to see attempted in 2017? Join the converstaion and share your views with us?
Discover more amazing science and technology features in the latest issue of How It Works. It's available from all good retailers, or you can order it online from the ImagineShop. If you have a tablet or smartphone, you can also download the digital version onto your iOS or Android device. To make sure you never miss an issue of How It Works, make sure you subscribe today!


text:
Crewe train driver receives recongition for his support to others
A TRAIN driver whose career was blighted by fatalities has been rewarded for the support he gives to similarly traumatised colleagues.
David Egerton, from Crewe, has worked for Virgin Trains for 25 years and won the V Good Support award at Virgin's national Feel Good awards ceremony.
Between 2001 and 2003, David encountered three fatalities whilst at work and he has used his experiences to help others.
David said: "It's a horrible thing to have to go through. I'm just happy to help with the process of someone being involved in a fatality and then returning to work."
He added: "Drivers are unsure of what to expect, how they will feel and what happens at the coroner's court and so I give them my experience and perspective."
Support and advice is also given by a driver's local manager, but in most cases David visits drivers and offers them his home telephone number.
Virgin Trains chief operating officer Chris Gibb, said: "We're all extremely proud of Dave.
"His actions show great support and courage and demonstrate how staff are willing to go beyond the call of duty, I'm delighted he's won the award."

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Your gateway to the APS
ACT Liberal MLA Steve Doszpot resigns calling for action on freedom of speech and early diagnosis of liver cancer
Glynis Quinlan 25 October 2017 24 October 2017
Steve Doszpot on his birthday last year.
After nine years serving in ACT politics, Steve Doszpot MLA has announced his resignation due to terminal liver cancer in line with the advice of his medical team.
Mr Doszpot, who has been a Liberal member of the Legislative Assembly since 2008, yesterday made a stirring resignation speech to the Assembly about the need for people to be able to voice their opinion without being silenced by political correctness.
He also called for increased awareness of the causes of liver disease and the importance of early intervention.
As a young boy, Mr Doszpot arrived in Australia with his family as refugees from Hungary's Communist regime and he has always appreciated the freedom they found in Australia.
"We are entering troubled times, where the freedoms we so value are slowly being eroded; where political correctness, or downright bullying discourages many in our community from voicing an opinion unless it reflects the populist view of the day," Mr Doszpot said in his speech to the Assembly yesterday.
"My parents escaped from Communism to give their children the right to free speech and the right and freedom to practice a religion.
"I think we owe our children the same right today, the right to be able to stand up and the right to voice their opinion before these values are completely eroded."
In his address, Mr Doszpot also advocated for more understanding, more awareness, more prioritisation and more funding for early diagnosis of liver cancer.
"It is not for myself that I am asking, my cancer is inoperable, but in the course of my journey so far, I have become very much aware how early diagnosis of liver cancer could help save many lives," Mr Doszpot said.
"There needs to be an increased awareness of the causes of liver disease, the role of early interventions, and the role of screening programmes in at-risk individuals."
Among many others who have supported his journey as a politician, Mr Doszpot thanked his wife of 46 years Maureen McCormack and his children Amy and Adam. He also talked of his passion to work the hardest for the most difficult causes.
ACT Opposition Leader Alistair Coe has praised Mr Doszpot for being a community champion who has fought for people who were often unable to fight for themselves.
"Steve has served the community with passion and purpose," Mr Coe said. "Since entering the Assembly as a Canberra Liberals MLA in 2008, Steve has set the standard for fighting on behalf of the community.
"Having pursued many community causes during his time in politics, Steve's theme has always been to fight for people who may not have the ability or resources to help themselves."
Mr Coe said that some of the causes Mr Doszpot has fought for include:
standing up for the Shepherd Centre and Noah's Ark when their future was uncertain
fighting to have a greater presence for nurses in Canberra's special schools
driving legislative reform to empower school principals to have greater autonomy about how they manage their schools
advocating to have more ESL teachers
supporting victims of bullying at CIT.
"He has made hundreds of representations for constituents about footpaths, street lights, grass mowing and so many other essential urban services issues," Mr Coe said.
"In recent times, Steve has championed the need for tougher laws to support victims of dog attacks and he is actively working on legislation to address this pressing need."
Mr Coe said that Mr Doszpot's contribution to public life in the ACT will be missed.
Mr Doszpot's resignation will take effect in six weeks' time. There is speculation that the casual vacancy he leaves could be filled by a former Liberals' candidate, Candice Burch.
Tags act legislative assembly Alistair Coe Canberra news Candice Burch Maureen McCormack resignation Steve Doszpot MLA The Shepherd Centre
Christine Mary - 6 minutes ago
Coe reshuffles shadow ministry after loss of Steve Doszpot
ACT has highest rates of breast cancer but lowest deaths from lung, liver and neck cancers
Glynis Quinlan 21 March 2019


text:
Q: Show that the norm of the derivitive of a $C^1$ function over a vector space is non-negative, homogeneous and satisfies the triangle ineq For $f$ in $C^1[a,b]$, define $p(f)= \parallel f'\parallel _{\infty}$. Show that $p$ is non-negative, homogeneous, and satisfies the triangle inequality. Why is it not a norm?
-I can easily show the supremum of the norm of a function continuous once is positive and homogeneous but im not sure how to show the triangle inequality holds and have no clue why it is not a norm.
Any guidance would be appreciated

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


My buddy 'the' Chad and I have a different way (from the other acoustic tab) of doing the acoustic (VH1 Storytellers) Round Here.
It's easy if have your fingers making C D Em and G, and pick this throughout  the verses, then strum for the chorus.   Just mess with/listen to it and you'll get the idea.
A--------------------------------     when you pick C.
foamy beer--and nobody likes that dude.


Alberto Martinelli is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Political Science and former Dean of the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan. He also taught at Bocconi, Stanford, NYU, Valencia, Cairo Ain Shams University, St.Petersburg, Guangzhou Sun Yat-sen.
Professor Martinelli is also President of the International Social Science Council (UNESCO, Paris), the Fondazione AEM (A2A), Past-President of the International Sociological Association and Vice-President of Science for Peace of the Umberto Veronesi Foundation.
In 45 years of scholarly work Professor Martinelli has been active in teaching, pure and applied research, publishing, international scientific cooperation, and government consulting. His main international research projects: The new International Economic Order, Business Interests Associations, Comparative Charting of Social Change, Sustainability for the 21st Century.
Present research interests focus on global governance, sustainable development, European integration, nationalism, comparative societies and politics, exit strategies form the economic crisis. Main recent publications in English: Transatlantic Divide. Comparing American and European Society, Oxford University Press, 2008; Italian edition, 2011. Global Modernization. Rethinking the Project of Modernity, Sage, 2005, Russian edition, 2006, Chinese edition 2011.
Recent publications in Italian include: La società europea (with A. Cavalli), IL Mulino 2016. Mal di nazione. Contro la deriva populista, Università Bocconi Editore, 2015.
Register now for the next lunch!


The dining room inside a historic Manhattan home boasts a pine trestle table from Belgium a settee and bench from Finch and a deconstructed English Regency wing chair from Lee Stanton Antiques. The walls are painted in Benjamin Moores White Dove and the mantel in Onyx.Cozy Livng Room Ideas The Urban Interior Christmas Find this Pin and more on Holidays by glamlatte. cozy home details curved fireplace Christmas Home Decor Ideas living room decoration winter style cozy room decor white faux fur rugEnglish cottages radiate with charming floral prints unvectoruming furniture and relaxed but dignified design. The following rooms will have you swooning more than Mr. Darcy himself.


text:
Q: lubuntu 14.04.5 kernel compile error I have tried compile kernel with no changes and it returned error:
arch/x86/boot/compressed/head_32.o: In function `efi32_config':
(.data+0x58): undefined reference to `efi_call_phys'
make[3]: *** [arch/x86/boot/compressed/vmlinux] Error 1
make[2]: *** [arch/x86/boot/compressed/vmlinux] Error 2
make[1]: *** [bzImage] Error 2

A: Answer:
Modify linux-source-3.13.0/arch/x86/boot/compressed/head_32.S file content:
    .data
efi32_config:
    .fill 11,8,0
    .long efi_call_phys
    .long 0
    .byte 0

As below:
#ifdef CONFIG_EFI_STUB
    .data
efi32_config:
    .fill 11,8,0
    .long efi_call_phys
    .long 0
    .byte 0
#endif

you can also find solution on:
https://kernel.opensuse.org/cgit/kernel/commit/?h=stable&id=3db4cafdfd05717dc939780134e53023a3c1f15f


text:
Redefining the American classic: Why it's important to watch Grear Patterson's 'Giants Being Lonely'
Sometimes a film happens on my path by chance and ends up changing the game. 'Giants Being Lonely' written and directed by Grear Patterson and produced by Olmo Schnabel was that film at this year's Venice Film Festival.
E. Nina Rothe, Cultural Activist
I'll admit it. I only watched 'Giants Being Lonely' because of the relentless work by the film's publicist, who extended my way a wonderful chance to interview the cast and crew. And because of one name, a reminder of a cinematic legacy whose work on and off the screen has accompanied me throughout my adult life, I said yes. The scheduling of the film's screenings was tricky. I felt at many turns like canceling the whole thing but the publicist seemed unmovable. Little did I know she was arranging THE interview of my festival.
So the name I noticed at first glance, which made the project immediately appealing was Olmo Schnabel. Is there any filmmaker as great at telling an unconventional story through cinema as his father— Julian Schnabel? I mean, to explain on the big screen in a fascinating and entertaining way the lives of Jean-Dominique Bauby, Reinaldo Arenas, Jean-Michel Basquiat and even Vincent Van Gogh, devoid of clichés takes a special kind of genius.
Once Schnabel's name and legacy had caught my attention, I also noticed Grear Patterson as the film's director and writer. To those who follow the contemporary art world, Patterson is an American artist whose work has been described as both "dystopian" and "utopian". I'd limit myself to saying it's f-ing amazing and totally mesmerizing. So, those two names had me at "hello."
You are now wondering why you have not heard of 'Giants Being Lonely' yet? Because there has been little in the media about it. It's a specially kept secret at the moment, one only a few lucky audience members in Venice have been privy to.
Reason one is that the film suffers from a tagline and synopsis that is incomprehensible to geezer critics and old-at-heart bloggers who come to festivals to watch films like 'Joker' and 'Ad Astra'. Not that there is anything wrong with watching those films, but come on! Does it really need to be done at film festivals, where unique showings of gems like 'Giants Being Lonely' can be found? We are constantly hearing about cinema not being what it used to be. But it's that we're not watching films the way we used to… Adventurously. As a film writer, I try to come to a film festival with a fresh mind, a cool attitude and a yearning to watch new cinema — to discover films. Not to view what everyone else is watching and writing about. I could stay home for that.
I'll admit, even I didn't know what to expect from the film's tagline "Life is a misery and I do not know when death may come. Play Ball!" which comes from a Raymond Pettibon screenprint. But I was wonderfully and pleasantly surprised and discovered within 'Giants Being Lonely' not only my favorite film at the Venice Film Festival but a true masterpiece of comprehension for Gen Z by a group of filmmakers made up of NYC art and cinema royalty.
While the title of the film comes from the closing line of a Carl Sandburg poem, the story of Patterson's film centers around a triangle of characters, seniors in the graduating class of a high school in rural North Carolina. Bobby, played by newcomer Jack Irving, seems to have it all. And yet behind his all-American good looks and star turn as MVP on his baseball team, a deep sadness and loneliness are hidden. Adam, played by Jack's real-life brother Ben Irving, is unrelated to his more successful doppelgänger and yet the genius of the filmmaker here lies in their similar looks, which he mixes up by giving them completely different, almost opposite lives. While deceivingly interchangeable at the start of the story, their inner struggles become more personal as the film progresses and we're supplied with additional information. Of course, once you meet the brothers in person, as I got to do, there is no more confusion.
Patterson explained casting Jack Irving, "the first time I saw Jack, he came out of his house in his boxers in the middle of the snow. And it was beautiful to watch him move, he walked around Mercer Street like the whole place was his backyard. Kind of the same way he moved around the nature in North Carolina." Schnabel jumped in to talk about the casting, "I want to mention something which is kind of funny. He [Jack] was going to be Adam and Ben was going to be Bobby." To which I innocently nodded, "I can see that…"
Schnabel quickly yet kindly rebutted "I can't!" Followed by a collective giggle from the rest of the cast and crew seated at our table. Yes, because I may not have mentioned this yet, I met Schnabel, Patterson, the Irving brothers and leading lady Lily Gavin who plays Caroline, in Venice. Got to interview them while sitting around a table on the beach of the Excelsior Hotel, on a windy yet perfectly lit afternoon. It was the most magical moment I spent in Venice.
Lily Gavin as Caroline, in a still from the film
Caroline provides much more than a romantic interest to both the leading men in the film, she adds a pull for the women in the audience, to relate to her doubts and onset of relationship savvy. Throughout the film, she navigates the waters of being a teenage girl and figuring out how to use her sexuality — something ongoing for most women, even later in life.
But the deepest vein, the true poignancy of 'Giants Being Lonely' is how well it explains the hopelessness of the Millennials and Gen Z, who feel like they've inherited a really messed up world from us, those who inhabited it before them. Their parents may be the official authority figure, but Patterson explained it best when he said, quite off the cuff, "I feel like my whole life I was taking care of my parents."
It's this idea of carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders which has made the current generations so burdened with sadness and fears — and it's explained perfectly in the film. In fact, when I mentioned it to Patterson, he chimed in "what you said is pretty on point actually, because it all comes from my own experience growing up. All my friends and I, we all related, we had a large amount of neglect, a large amount of time alone. All the baby boomers who had kids basically left their kids unattended." But he added, optimistically, "I think probably for better or for worse, it's going to breed a stronger generation hopefully. It came from our experiences, we all can relate, we all have the same universal feeling."
The film's delegation in Venice, with festival director Alberto Barbera
Don't expect to go into 'Giants Being Lonely' with an aging heart — full of the preconceived prejudices the older generations typically have towards Gen Z — and enjoy the film. It will shake you to the core and make you rethink how every single action, all our collective moves have brought us to the world we are leaving behind, for those who are inheriting it from us. Articles like this one try to explain their hopelessness but Schnabel addressed it best:
"It's interesting because we all come from different families, different situations but for some reason there is a shared feeling between all of us and we can all relate to that feeling — of loneliness, the feeling of not knowing what's going to come. When life seems very intimidating, because you're part of a family, you go to school, you're raised and somehow you have to become a person and that idea, that question is something the characters are confronting and that's what the movie is about. And at that moment there is some people who survive, some who figure it out and keeps going and some people who drown in that and it strangles them and they don't make it."
The character of Adam in the film is one such person but I'm not giving anything away by writing that the ending of 'Giants Being Lonely' will leave you breathless. Gavin talked about friends who succumbed to the sadness, "when you're alone and young and you don't know how to get through those emotions, it's a very heavy thing. We've lost friends over the last couple of years from that heaviness of emotional consciousness." Schnabel explained they were one "cousin and a friend of mine, both young people, who had their lives ahead of them and everything, people who loved them. Two boys who were artists and sensitive. The movie has a silence to it but that silence is symbolic of when you're going through those feelings, at that age it's difficult to communicate and you don't want to be vulnerable — because if you're vulnerable you're weak."
For Jack Irving, Bobby proved almost therapeutic to play. He explained his character "I think there is an amazing thing where I don't really have any worldly possessions and I don't have an outlet for my emotions and my feelings. But it's OK, and I take to nature and I take to running around and swimming and kind of like interacting with people." He then turned serious to caution, "people with their phones, the fact there are no phones in the movie. The thing that was most interesting to me, and was in my mind preparing the whole time — there's kids growing up now and every aspect of their life, there will be a picture on their phone to scroll back to, like their three-year old self. That must be so strange. We're kind of lucky to get out just in time."
Ben Irving described his own preparation for the role of Adam, "I had an easy time latching on to those emotions. We [Jack and Ben] both took acting classes in preparation for these roles from this one coach, who really had us delve into our past as brothers. And we would bring up personal topics in relation to Adam and Bobby. I know they weren't siblings in the film, but in many ways in preparing for the roles they were. Even though it's not specifically said that comes out in the film. " When I chimed in to say that the two characters seemed interchangeable to me, Schnabel added "they are the yin and the yang. In some ways they are one boy. At the end of the movie, when they are looking at each other, the story blends."
Schnabel also explained best what the film is meant to do, "at first it will make some people uncomfortable when they're sitting there and don't know quite what's happening but I think that's within the nature of the subject we're talking about and we're trying to address. It's for people to come in there, use their experience and relate to it. And the fact that people can relate to it in different ways that's what we wanted to accomplish and that tells us it's a success."
'Giants Being Lonely' plays next at the Zurich Film Festival at the end of September.
— Published on September 23, 2019
American independent cinema,
Ben Irving,
cinema with a conscience,
Giants Being Lonely,
Grear Patterson,
Human Revolution,
Jack Irving,
Lily Gavin,
Olmo Schnabel,
Venice Film Festival,
I am a blogger and journalist who was born in Florence, Italy and grew up in NYC. Writing for me is a form of cultural activism, a way to connect with others and learn about new worlds.
My loves are cinema with a conscience and easy to wear fashions because they possess the ability to change the world. You vote with your wallet after all...
Community// July 6, 2019
Judy, Judy, Judy: Judy Jean Kwon's 7 Steps to Being Woke
by Quendrith Johnson
Adam Schlachter, Director of AND THE BRAVE SHALL RISE, On 17 Ways to Save America
Wisdom// March 20, 2017
"Cinema with a Conscience": Five Movies that Changed My Life
by E. Nina Rothe


This is a bit of a "nee-ner-nee-ner" situation | Use. The. Clutch.
But I'm going to the Madonna concert in Denver on November 11th.
And I should probably invest in some newer Madonna tunes so that I can be adequately prepared.
sweeeet! were they a gift?!
Prince was by far one of the best shows I've ever been to…went a couple years ago so it was pretty tame…and yet none of us could help but wear all things purple! and I was enthralled with his drummer and sax player. It was unreal!Best show ever though? Gotta be the Beastie Boys Gala last summer…made me fall in love with funk music…and Mike D. haha!
wow……hope you have fun……she's not my cup of tea but i be she puts on an amazing show….i was FORCED to go watch a Prince show years ago and wow he was a really great entertainer….so i can imagine that madonna will be super great…..minus the anti-Christian stuff….


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text:
Problems Related to Bilingual Education
in Tibet
By BADENG NIMA
Dean of faculty of Education,
Sichuan Normal University
Since 1959, modern schools have gradually been set up in all of the Tibetan areas. Now the structure of the education system in Tibet is developed enough for most Tibetan children to study. However, many children do not like to go to school. Many students can not write Tibetan, especially in the eastern areas, and some students can not even speak Tibetan. During the years that Tibet has been influenced by the Chinese economy, the language problem has steadily worsened. Development of an improved Tibetan vocabulary in the areas of culture, education, economics, society, and politics, is a major goal for the future.
This language problem has also been recognised by some Tibetan scholars and education officials. They have voiced their concern and asked the schools to improve the language education. (1) Tibetan people think this is a big problem nowadays. Many famous Tibetan scholars in China are also worried about the erosion of the Tibetan language. Professor Dor Xis (2) claims that Tibetan language education has to be improved in schools immediately, otherwiseTibetan culture will disappear into the history books, and people will slowly forget it. The Tenth Bantch Lhama said on many occasions, that it is very dangerous for the culture to loose its language. Gungthang Rin Po Tshe is also worried about the language problem in schools, and agrees with Bantch Lhama. (3) In general, the unresolved language problem hinders Tibetan development. The basic situation of school education Before the 1950s, in the three areas of Tibet, U-tsang, Kham, and Amdo, there were few modern schools. Only the children of a few big noble families could go to school, most of the students at these schools were the children of Chinese officials and business people from the middle of China. The monasteries were responsible for social and cultural education. The monastery was not only a religious temple, but also a school. In the monasteries the children did not only learn about their religion, but were also taught about livelihood, labour, technology, language, arts, literature, medicine, logic, philosophy and so on. Monastic education was founded by the "Seven Enlightened Ones" at the Bsam-yas Monastery (the first monastery in Tibet, set up in 8th century). During the course of several centuries, the monastic education was eventually built into a complete and graduated educational system with fairly comprehensive disciplinary divisions, teaching contents, forms of instruction, academic sequences, and examination systems. Over thousands of years, monastic education has produced generation upon generation of brilliant scholars and highly prestigious monks in this ancient land of Tibet.
However, some scholars continually dispute this fact. In their opinion, everything preceding socialism is old, and only the things set up after the socialist political structure was put in place can be thought of as modern, and serving the people well. Sichuan University is a famous university in the South of China, where the well-known Tibetologist and historian Professor Ran Guang Rong works. He has continually argued to Chinese scholars, officials, and students that Tibetan monasteries have no educational function, but rather represent a backward religious tradition which has made people appear foolish in public conferences and classes. These claims seem to go against some of his own writings. In his book Chinese Tibetan Buddhist Monasteries (zhongguo zangchuan fojiao siyuan), he takes a less negative view of the monasteries, however he does not mention the function of education. Rong received his position as postgraduate supervisor due to his work on ethnic minorities in China. Unfortunately, his field of research does not give him a deep understanding of the Tibetan culture. Tibetan monastery education is a culturally different educational system and though it does not consent to some scholars' ideas about education, it still has its value if education is viewed in a more holistic perspective including cultural transmission and development.
In Tibet, the geographical and hierarchical structure of school education has emerged since 1959. The period from 1959 up until now has been difficult in many ways. The main educational programs were prepared and implemented between the late 1950s and the beginning of 1960s. Some primary schools were set up at the main traffic cross roads and at the seats of the county governments. During this time, Tibetan language was included in the curriculum in schools in Tibetan areas, and was also used as a language of instruction in some schools along with Chinese. From the mid-1960s to the end of the 70's, the Great Cultural Revolution affected the whole country. In Tibet, Tibetan language was removed from the curriculum. Teachers who had taught Tibetan had to engage in menial work around the schools or get other unskilled jobs in the community.
I remember there was a Tibetan language teacher in our middle school. He was no longer allowed to teach, so his job was to take care of the tools for cleaning and assign work to students and supervise them. Every week when there was a general cleaning of the school, this teacher's responsibility was to distribute the tools, such as brooms and hoes to every class. In addition he sold dinner tickets to the students and teachers.
Sometimes when several of us children went to his small dark room, if he was reading in Tibetan, he would rapidly pull the book under his quilt. After several years he retired, he went back to his small village to live quietly with very sad feeling. Now the people have forgotten him. During the Cultural Revolution Tibetan language became associated with religious superstition (zongjiao mixin). People experienced that reading in Tibetan could get them in trouble. Many schools closed. From the end of the 70's until now the schools have recovered and been adjusted and developed to suit the local needs. In many areas, local governments adjusted the geographical arrangement of the schools and set up some new schools. At present the structure of the primary schools and middle schools are in place. Bilingual education has been reintroduced in most schools.
Now there are three situations with regard to teaching languages within Tibetan primary schools.
1) Some schools teach in a similar way to Chinese schools, without Tibetan language courses. This situation is found in the areas where most students are Chinese and in some cities which have been included in Tibetan regions by allocation.
2) Tibetan courses have been set up in areas where Tibetan children speak Chinese and their own local dialect but not standard Tibetan. All other subjects are taught in Chinese. In primary schools, there are 6 grades. When the children graduate from these schools their Tibetan knowledge should be at 4th or 5th grade.
3) Chinese is a course in school and the other courses are in Tibetan. These children can speak standard Tibetan very well. By the time these students leave primary school, they should have reached 4th grade in Chinese. The other subjects are taught to 6th grade.
In junior middle school as in primary schools, there are three similar situations:
1) The children are taught in Chinese, however the quality of the education is lower than the standard Chinese middle school. These Tibetan students are better prepared to attend the minority nationality colleges in China (minzu xueyuan).
2) There are three grades in junior middle school.
When Tibetan children graduate from junior middle school their Tibetan language skills are the equivalent of the 1st grade at middle school.
3) Chinese is a subject in the curriculum. When the students graduate, the Chinese language skills are at the equivalent of 1st grade at junior middle school.
All the other subjects, taught in Tibetan, should be at 3rd grade junior middle school, however the level is lower than that required by the government for entry to the minority nationality colleges.
Following this scheme the education program in Tibet has improved and become more efficient and the percentage of children going to school has increased.
The level of education the students receive has improved over the last ten years but it has now levelled out and cannot improve further under current conditions. In many areas the percentage of children going to school fluctuates between 40 and 60 percent.
In some areas there is a high percentage of Tibetan people (especially in small villages), but the proportion of children going to school is terrible low. For example in rural areas of Hongyuan County in Amdo, the percentage of children going to school fluctuates between 39.6% and 14.7%. Looking at this situation, it can be argued that the education in Tibet is not suitable for the development of Tibetan society.
Analysis of the language problems within Tibetan school education The language problems in Tibetan education are complex. They relate to culture, religion, economics, manufacturing abilities, and the natural environment.
Language is essential for preserving and developing the culture. The Tibetan people have a special need to conserve and develop their own language because of their cultural identity in China. School education in Tibet can not develop in a positive direction before the problem with the language is solved. In this section I will analyse these language problems from the perspectives of how Tibetan people perceive language teaching in school, the problem within the Tibetan language, and the contents of the curriculum within the Tibetan school system.
For a long time, I have travelled extensively in Tibet, from Kham to Amdo, from Amdo to U-tsang, from big cities to small villages, where people live under varying conditions. I have had many conversations with different people; farmers, herdsmen, workers, businessmen, officials, teachers, monks, scholars, undergraduate students and middle-school students, children and adults, females and males. We discussed language teaching in schools, the future of the children, the usefulness of the Tibetan language nowadays, and we also discussed how important the Chinese language is in the modern society. To make a general summary, there are various ideas among different people about how to find the balance between the Chinese language and the Tibetan language for teaching in school. I will summarise these views in what follows.
1) The main language of instruction should be Chinese; the Tibetan language should not be taught or only be taught to a basic level. The reasoning behind this position is that children taught in Chinese will be able to pass exams in Chinese and will be able to go to institutes of higher education, enabling them to get salaried jobs from the government. This view is held by some of the residents of the big cities and some civil servants, some school teachers and employees in state funded organisations. These people get large salaries that are dependent on funding from the national government. Some citizens of big cities, where the living standard is very high compared with herding people and village people, believe that if their children study Chinese they can continue or improve their standard of life by getting government jobs after graduation.
2) Tibetan should be taught as the first language for Tibetan children in school. Chinese should be taught as a second language only. Most of the Tibetan people hold this view, especially the farming / herding people and people working for the government in smaller cities and towns where the Tibetan population is more than 90%. Nevertheless, some of them also worry about their children's future.
3) Some scholars have examined this problem. The scholars who are 60 years or more were educated in the traditional culture as children and have adhered to its principles. Most of these people are authorities in their fields of expertise, such as Tibetan philosophy, medicine, literature, arts, making calendars, and religion. The progression of modern society is faster than these scholars realise. Just as a great wind blows through everywhere, it leaves them feeling uncomfortable; they feel a crisis is approaching and fear they will not survive it.
Civilisation is made up of many strands including education, politics, technology, philosophy, law, morality, and religion; it is a very complex system. These strands can be broadly grouped into material and spiritual aspects of civilisation. Both aspects of civilisation need to progress together or else the system gets out of balance. This imbalance might cause emotional problems as one has to live in modern society with traditional ideas, and must think about how to keep the advantageous content of the culture.
These people do not approve of the current teaching situation of the Tibetan language in schools. They think that Tibetan language and Tibetan cultural education should be strengthened and emphasised . The scholars who are between 40 and 60 years of age, have a basic education in modern subjects such as science, and have mostly been trained since the People's Republic of China was founded. They were mainly educated in the first and second waves for training young Tibetan people in big cities in the middle of China. Most of them were educated at either technical or civil secondary middle schools. A small proportion of them went to college or university.
Currently most of these people are important officials at various levels in the government departments and are contributing to the development of Tibetan society. Following the development of modern society, imported information is overwhelming Tibetan society. These scholars experience that their knowledge system does not sufficiently equip them to cope with the amount and flow of information.
When presented with the many phenomena of modern society -i.e. the relationship between people, how to deal with money, the problem of keeping public order, the problem of the environment and legal and ethical problems- some people are overwhelmed. They find it difficult to come up with satisfactory solutions to problems they might face.
4) The fourth group is the young people. As long as they have knowledge and abilities they can generally get satisfactory employment and earn good money. They have studied Chinese and Tibetan and can use both languages. After they left school, they found Chinese was more important than they thought before. In every department of the government most of the documents, informal letters, notes, certificates and so on are in Chinese. It is difficult for them to live without Chinese and easier to use Chinese words to explain modern concepts because often these concepts can not be expressed in Tibetan. It is difficult to tackle problems of a modern society in the Tibetan language because the Tibetan language lacks modern technical vocabulary. The post office requires letters to be addressed in Chinese, long distance calls via the switchboard operator have to be placed in Chinese, and all telegrams have to be sent in Chinese. Electrical appliances have their instructions in Chinese. Young people who are employed often have problems finding Tibetan concepts that can cover all aspects of their work. For this reason, young scholars pay close attention to their Chinese studies, at the same time they are also very worried about the future of their language. They know the advantages of the Tibetan language and that if it was expanded, it could grasp modern concepts like any other language. Young scholars face the challenge of improving the teaching of the Tibetan language in schools. They also have ideas about why the Tibetan language finds itself in its current situation. This discussion is, however, beyond the scope of this article.
These viewpoints represent different perspectives on education in the current society. I shall now examine the reasons behind this difference in opinion of language education in Tibet. A brief understanding of the basic situation of the Tibetan language and this language's significance for the Tibetan people both in history and in current society is required to gain understanding of this issue.
Tibetan language has been used for a long time. On 25th of January 1994 there was a report in Guangming Ribao (this is the largest newspaper dealing with academics and research in China). The report had examined a language called "Mal language" (Smar Yig), originating more than 5000 years ago. This language was mentioned in ancient Tibetan texts as being used by the "Bon" scholars in their work. The Language Directing Committee of Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR)
went to investigate the language in Mnga-Ris area of TAR and the centre of the ancient Zhang-Zhung Kingdom where the language has its origin. The committee found Mal language written on many ancient petroglyphs. The petroglyphs were made more than one thousand years BC.
They also found single pages and whole sets of hand made presswork in Mal language kept by the local community. The committee made an interesting finding; a book on linguistics which contained a chapter written in typical Mal language.
The current Tibetan written language has developed from the Mal language, and has over a course of centuries developed into a mature language with 30 consonantal letters and 4 vocal letters. In Tibet, many people don't understand Tibetan language, including some Tibetan people and the majority of Chinese people. For the Tibetan people who don't understand their own language the main reason is that for a long time there were few people who had the chance to study their own written language. The few who did study it could not utilise it for specific work such as writing government documents. The Tibetan language is rich with respect to religion and philosophy, but has difficulty with for instance the sphere of science. After 1959, when the structure of the socialist society had been established in Tibet, most of the Tibetan cadres and officials in the government were not skilled in written Tibetan. The Han Chinese officials did not understand Tibetan. In Tibetan language the concepts of politics and sociology are limited, thus it is easier to read and write government documents in Chinese. Some Han Chinese think their culture is the centre of civilisation. Therefore, they think their culture is more civilised than other minorities' peoples, including the language. As this view has prevailed, the officials always read the Chinese copies of documents, although policies dictate that every document should be written in both languages and at every conference of the government all the documents were written in both languages. From 1967 to 1977, the wind of the Great Cultural Revolution was over all of China, at that time in Tibet people were criticised for performing blind religious worshipping if they read in Tibetan, and they would be punished.
Therefore, the written Tibetan language disappeared for about ten years in the schools. As a consequence the social function of Tibetan language was limited, and this had serious consequences for education in Tibet. Based on the preceding historic conditions, other mistaken conceptions about the Tibetan language have been created. These uninformed views make it difficult to strengthen the Tibetan language in the school curriculum.
For a long time, some people have not been able to understand the significance of Tibetan language education in schools due to ultra-left trend of politico-thought. This has especially been true for Tibetan people living in Tibet. In Tibet there are few people who want to be officials in government.
Tibetans have thought that it is very important to make the Chinese officials believe that they are standing firmly on the side of the CCP, and therefore they have shown their wholehearted devotion to the party. For this reason they have been afraid to emphasise Tibetan education in schools. They hesitate to advocate strengthening Tibetan language education because the Chinese officials will be suspicious. For a long time both Chinese and Tibetan officials have thought it will cause feelings of local nationalism to advocate Tibetan language education in schools, and it will increase the chances of conflicts. Especially some Tibetan officials think they will be better off if they don't mention Tibetan language education. For this reason some of them are also working against those who advocate Tibetan language education, punishing lower officials who do so. Some people use this strategy in order to get a promotion and financial benefits. However, this is not the case for all higher officials. There are also those officials, Chinese as well as Tibetans who understand the importance of both cultures, and the need for them to co-exist. Thirdly, some people in Tibet do not understand the real function of school education, they don't understand that the aim of school education is to develop the children's ability to function in society, and thereby raise the level of competence of society for all people.
For thousands of years, the aim of Tibetan traditional education has been to train monks and scholars within the fields of traditional medicine, philosophy, astrology, architecture and the arts, to mention some.
Although most of the people who have been educated in this manner have not related to political affairs or been officials, they have been widely respected by Tibetan civilians everywhere. Historically, Tibetan people have respected scholars and their knowledge, but after the foundation of the People's Republic of China this has changed, seemingly because of the collision between "traditional knowledge" and "modern knowledge". Therefore, many people belonging to the old intelligentsia could not serve the society and people directly. And through the Cultural Revolution, the traditional intelligentsia's social position has declined drastically, though they still have an important place in people's hearts. Since 1959, people have been provided jobs by the government, enjoy a salary and material benefits, if they have passed beyond middle school education. People educate themselves to official seats in different departments of government. This "hidden" educational aim is not discussed or mentioned in any government documents. It is more beneficial for students to study in Chinese than in Tibetan. Currently, the prevailing mode of thought is "attend school, attain a secure government job, and thereby money and power." This has had a negative influence on Tibetan society. For example, in 1997, Sichuan Ngab Tibetan, Qiang Autonomous Prefecture (Sichuansheng apa zangzu qiangzu zhizizhou) received over two thousands graduate students who returned from different levels and types of schools, colleges or universities. As the industrial structure was too simple to provide adequate jobs for all, the students were assigned jobs in departments at different levels of government and in state-owned enterprises9.
Undoubtedly, all of the students were given jobs based on their relationship to officials in the government; those with good relations with higher officials might have been awarded a good seat. This imbalance has weakened the socio-economic base of the region. As a result of this, many Tibetan counties could not pay the teachers' salaries.
In Danbar County the budget for teacher's salaries sufficed until July 1997, in Xiahe County the budget for teachers' salaries was sufficient only from January to April 1998. In such a situation, the officials of the education department become beggars, asking for support from higher officials. The higher officials must in turn ask their higher bodies, and the "begging" has to extend up to province government and centre government level in Beijing. In this way money will come to the teachers. This situation is not only found within education but also in every department of the government10. From this it can be understood that Tibetan school education is facing major obstacles that must be overcome in order to develop a functional education system.
Prospects for the future While examining Tibetan school education and the problem of language it is difficult to find simple solutions. Actually, I think this problem is one of culture, so I will place it in a cultural perspective.
Firstly, school education is a means of cultural transmission and improvement. For this reason, education is not only for training government officials or specific cliques set up by a small group of people. Education should be for everyone and for every generation. Tibetan school education should be for everybody who lives in Tibet.
The most important function of language is to bear the content of culture and transmit information. The educational function of language is to develop people's ability to function in society through the language. In a linguistic perspective, the choice of language of instruction should depend on the educational function. In Tibet, the language of instruction should be based on what is easiest for children to study, most convenient for children to use, and what is most useful for their lives. The language of instruction should also help students to master the greatest amount of knowledge in the shortest time. For this reason, I believe Tibetan must be the most suitable language for Tibetan children in schools, therefore, Tibetan should be the first language of instruction.
Secondly, Tibetan children also need to study Chinese thoroughly. In China, there are 56 nationalities (minzu). Chinese is the majority. Chinese is the main language of the country, and the majority use Chinese to exchange information all over the country. Therefore, Tibetan children must study Chinese to understand the country and learn how to be a citizen and live in the modern society.
Meanwhile, there is a big gap between Tibetan traditional culture and modern culture. When we think of the problems surrounding Tibetan language as the mode of instruction, we should make sure that Tibetan children will not only understand their traditional culture but also gain knowledge from the useful aspects of modern culture. In addition, in order to study at higher levels, students need to study foreign languages depending on their needs and subjects.
Besides these points above, the curriculum for children in schools should be re-constructed. Curriculum is the core of any school education, the educational aim, plan, demands and so on are all presented in the curriculum. And many education problems including those of language are focused in the curriculum. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the curriculum in Tibetan school education.
1. Based on the needs of Tibetan society, the contents of the curriculum should be improved. Tibetan school education system came from middle of China with the socialist social structure, so it has special characteristics. These characteristics can be grouped into two. Firstly, the structure of society - of politics, economics, culture and education - is not fit to serve the same parts of the Tibetan society as before. For this reason, education is unable to serve its original function at all. As we can see from the preceding discussion, the students cannot use the knowledge learned in school to earn a living in Tibetan society together with uneducated people.
Secondly, there is a big gap between the new social political structure and the common people's political consciousness. It causes a big gap between the educational curriculum and the needs of the people. In order to adapt the curriculum to children's needs, we must teach children the history of humankind, the history of Tibet and China, and knowledge dealing with social development. Meanwhile, all the courses should be in Tibetan.
2. The content of the curriculum of Tibetan school education should be adjusted properly, some items must be added, others deleted. Currently in Tibet, the curriculum is identical to the rest of China, according to "primary and middle school's curriculum plan" (zhongxiaoxue kecheng jihua). As this curriculum is default for the whole country, the courses are too general for Tibetan schools. This problem prevails for other parts of China as well. The National Educational Department of The People's Republic also pointed to this problem in February, 199811. Some contents of the courses should be left out. Because the contents were chosen from central China, there is no relationship between it and the real experience or knowledge of Tibetan students, and the contents are also not useful for their future. For example, Tibetan students need not study Chinese history in detail, they only need to know the general aspects. For a long time, it has been very difficult for Tibetan students to study such heavy courses with the contents of Chinese history both in Chinese and Tibetan.
3. Part of the solution to the problem of bilingual education in Tibet is to attempt to fill in the gap between Tibetan culture and the modern world culture. Tibetan culture is rich, but we should also admit that our culture cannot equip children with appropriate knowledge to function well in modern society. With respect to the fields of science and technology, it will be especially important to import knowledge of modern society to Tibetan language. If we can use Tibetan to explain all phenomena from basic life to scientific studies, every subject from primary school to postgraduate training can be set up in Tibetan.
However, this is a very difficult and complex challenge, I hope there are many people who are ready to work for this cause.
http://www.khamaid.org/programs/education/Tibetan%20language%20in%20educatio n.htm
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