UK Police Deny Misspelling Led To Investigation, Say It Was Other Schoolwork Instead

from the still-a-problem dept

We had just relayed a story via the BBC about an elementary school kid in the UK earning a visit to his home from the authorities after writing in an English assignment that he lived in a "terrorist house", when he reportedly was trying to say he lived in a "terraced house." The crux of this story was that the UK's Anti-Terrorism law, which requires that school teachers act as surveillance agents for the state in an attempt to weed out future-radicalized will-be-terrorists is a policy built for unintended chaos, given that teachers are neither trained nor properly equipped to fulfill this role. The resulting visit to the boy's home by the authorities from a misspelled word was billed as an example of this overreach by government.

But, as some in the comments pointed out, Lancashire police have pushed back on the BBC's story, saying that it wasn't the misspelled words that triggered the visit and ultimately resulted in the authorities determining there was no need for an investigation, but was instead other schoolwork the boy had done that triggered the visit and ultimately resulted in the authorities determining there was no need for an investigation.

In a statement, police and the county council said it was "untrue to suggest that this situation was brought about by a simple spelling mistake. The school and the police have acted responsibly and proportionately in looking into a number of potential concerns using a low-key, local approach," it said. "No concerns were identified and no further action was required by any agency."

For some reason, there are those that think this vindicates both law enforcement and the UK's law because police say the spelling error had nothing to do with any of this. I can't quite figure out the logic of those people, because this is still a story about a teacher using schoolwork to identify a Muslim boy possibly being dangerous that triggered a visit to the boy's home from the authorities. While the BBC has pulled its original post as a result of the pushback, the fundamentals of the story haven't really changed at all. We still have a scared child and an annoyed family stemming from law enforcement action built on the back of a teacher picking through the child's schoolwork. That isn't a sustainable model for combating terrorism, but it is a sustainable model for alienating an entire subsection of a nation's population.

Miqdaad Versi, assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, the UK's largest umbrella group for Islamic associations, said he was aware of dozens of cases similar to that of the schoolboy.

"There are huge concerns that individuals going about their daily life are being seen through the lens of security and are being seen as potential terrorists rather than students," he said. "This is a natural consequence of the extension of the 'Prevent Duty' to schools."

Regardless of the police pushback, which was extremely light on details, that hasn't changed.

Filed Under: children, homework, police, spelling, terrorist, uk

DailyDirt: Making Smarter Animals

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Animals may (or may not) be getting smarter, but there sure is growing evidence that animals have more cognitive abilities than we might have expected. In some cases, we're actually breeding animals for intelligence. (Who wouldn't want to buy a genetically engineered parrot with the conversational capability of a 5 year old kid?) Perhaps we'll end up regretting our animal experiments someday when we're faced with super-intelligent birds or insects, but for now, it's interesting to see just how smart our animal pals can get.

• Breeding smarter fruit flies doesn't sound like a good plan to create a race of super intelligent insects. Still, a decent first step has been accomplished by directing the evolution of fruit flies to exhibit the ability to count to four... [url]
• Some baboons in a French laboratory have been observed to be able to tell the difference between real English words and fake words. This study probably says more about the rules of English spelling rather than evidence of baboons being linguistic geniuses. [url]
• For many mammals, the ratio of brain size to body size is a fairly predictable matter, but there are some outliers with larger than expected brains for a given body size. Curiously, the smaller mammals with larger than expected brains tend to survive extinction better and adapt more easily to environmental changes -- but correlation isn't the same as causation. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: animals, baboons, biology, biotech, brains, fruit flies, intelligence, smart animals, spelling

Zappos Uses Mechanical Turk To Correct Spelling/Grammar Errors In Reviews... And It Increases Sales

from the fascinating dept

Boing Boing points us to a fantastic story about how Zappos uses Mechanical Turk to fix grammar and spelling mistakes in product reviews. You see, research shows that if a product has well-written reviews, that helps sales -- even when the reviews are negative. The more well-written the reviews, the more people trust them. But, of course, on the internet, you get all sorts of grammatical and spelling errors (I should know, I make both all the time). So, to deal with that, Zappos runs its reviews through Mechanical Turk and lets the "crowd" act as its editor. There's no specific data, but apparently Zappos claims that this resulted in "substantial" revenue improvement, for a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars (across 5 million reviews). The corrections never change the actual intent of the content. They just make sure it's in proper English. I wonder what would happen if we did that for all posts and comments here...

Filed Under: grammar, mechanical turk, reviews, spelling
Companies: zappos

Banks Can't Figure Out How To Spell Gadhafi, So They Can't Freeze His Assets

from the well-that's-an-issue dept

The new How to do Everything podcast recently took on the question of just how do you spell the current Libyan leader's name in English? Qadaffi? Khadafi? Gadaffy? It turns out that the "official" answer is Gadhafi, which is used by the AP and NPR -- and part of the reason why is that's how the man himself signed a letter he wrote to a second-grade class back in 1986 in response to their letters to him.

That's great for the press... but it leaves some others in a lurch. Apparently banks and other financial institutions are scrambling to figure out how to freeze assets of Gadhafi and others because they're not sure what names the accounts are really under.

Compounding things, for individuals with Arabic names, sanctions lists provide only a few alternate spellings. The U.S. Treasury Department offers 12 possible spellings for Moammar Gadhafi, though language experts say there are more than 100 for the family name alone.

Unlike other so-called script languages such as Chinese or Japanese, Arabic has no transliteration standards. Pronunciation of the same names varies by place, and written Arabic contains few vowels, opening the door to a larger range of acceptable translations. Mohamed can also be transliterated as Mahmut, Mehmud or dozens of other variants.

Banks allow clients to transliterate their names as they see fit when they open new accounts. When a government publishes a new watch list, the banks' software uses so-called fuzzy logic to search for alternative spellings, similar to how Google suggests alternative phrases when it detects a possible typo in a search.

Of course, all that assumes that they're opening accounts under their own names anyway... I would assume that many have hidden accounts under corporation names or front men or simply fictitious individuals, and you would think that those would be more significant... and much harder to track down.

Filed Under: banks, gadhafi, identity, spelling

Yet Another Study Shows Txting Improves Kids' Spelling

from the ok,-are-we-done-yet? dept

While it still seems like the common belief is that "txt spk" and other sorts of abbreviated elements of the English language harm kids' ability to write properly, we've seen study after study after study after study after study after study has found exactly the opposite. They've found that most kids can tell the difference, and do understand what's proper and what's not. On top of that, heavy texters tend to be better spellers, because they're much more used to writing -- even if they tend to abbreviate the language when communicating via technology.

So it almost seems superfluous to mention that yet another one of these studies has come out and it, too, has found that those who regularly use txt spk have very strong literacy skills. But what's annoying is that both the researchers and the BBC act as if this was a "surprise." It's as if no one bothered to check to see if similar research had been done before, and found the many, many, many studies all saying the same exact thing.

Filed Under: kids, spelling, students, studies, texting, txt speak

Yet Another Study Shows Txting Is Good For Kids

from the can-we-put-this-to-rest? dept

We've had a whole series of posts in the past showing various studies explaining that so called "txt spk" isn't harming kids. In fact, the studies have shown that kids these days tend to have a better ability to read and usually recognize when it is, and when it's not appropriate, to use such slang speak in their writing. Yet, every time we post such a study, we get angry comments from people who insist that kids writing in txt spk somehow are destroying the fabric of society. A few folks have sent in the latest report of a study that shows, once again, that txt spk isn't harming reading/writing ability. In fact, it shows the opposite. Those who tend to use txt speak more often have better reading skills than those who don't. I'm sure we'll still get angry responses, but considering how many different studies have shown the same thing, at some point, you're going to need to realize that txt spk isn't killing kids' abilities in reading or writing.

Filed Under: grammar, spelling, txt spk

Linguist Explains That Txting Isn't Ruining Spelling Or The English Language

from the try-again dept

For years, we've been responding to highly questionable reports or unsubstantiated claims that "txt spk" was somehow destroying the English language and seeping into all sorts of written communications from students who just didn't know any better. Much of that myth was apparently built off of a paper that was posted to the internet, that many people then insisted must have been true -- but which later turned out to be a hoax. Yet, the myth prevailed despite plenty of studies that showed children of this generation are better writers because they spend much more time with the English language than earlier generations. And, despite widespread opinion, they usually know which type of writing is proper for which context. In fact, studies showed that there were no ill effects of students learning "txt spk." Yet, because the myth is so strong, even when studies come out disproving the myth, the press often misrepresent the results.

One of England's top linguists has seen enough, however, and has gone through all the research, along with some of his own to come out with a book dispelling the myth that texting hurts a child's language skills. As he notes in a recent interview:

"Almost every basic principle that people hold about texting turns out to be misconceived. Misspelling isn't universal: analysis shows that only 10% of words used in texts are misspelt. Nor are most texts sent by kids: 80% are sent by businesses and adults. Likewise, there is no evidence that texting teaches people to spell badly: rather, research shows that those kids who text frequently are more likely to be the most literate and the best spellers, because you have to know how to manipulate language."

"If you can't spell a word, then you don't really know whether it's cool to misspell it. Kids have a very precise idea of context - none of those I have spoken to would dream of using text abbreviations in their exams - they know they would be marked down for it."

Hopefully, with more studies and academics pointing this out, we can start to put this myth to bed.

Filed Under: grammar, spelling, txt spk

Txt Spk In Schools Not A Big Deal

from the yet-again dept

While some of the headlines on the latest Pew Study about how "txt speak" is slipping into school writing assignments suggest the horror of a generation of kids who write LOL and use smileys in written communications, the actual results aren't that bad at all. What the study found was that, yes, occasionally some students let slip non-formal English, though that's hardly surprising. However, it's not particularly damaging, and it becomes a teaching point, helping students learn the difference between formal and informal English. This is nothing new. Every year we see the same basic study results, despite plenty of people flipping out. Despite long term worries about txt speak destroying the language, there's no evidence to support that.

In 2003, there was a study that showed that all this writing online was actually making kids more comfortable with writing in general. In 2004, a study showed (like this one) that with a little instruction kids easily understood the difference between texting and writing. In 2005, a study actually found that kids were better writers than in the past "using far more complex sentence structures, a wider vocabulary and a more accurate use of capital letters, punctuation and spelling" even if they sometimes let a txtism into their writing. And, in 2006, a study showed that students showed no ill effects from widespread text and IM messaging. In other words, this story is getting plenty of attention, but the details don't support the headline version that kids are unable to understand what's appropriate in their writing.

Also, one other interesting finding came out of this study: despite the fact that kids sometimes seem attached to their computers, two-thirds actually prefer to write assignments by hand. So, perhaps that'll put to rest that other circulating myth that kids aren't able to write by hand any more.

Filed Under: english, grammar, spelling, students, txt spk