brettp
While the paranoid nerd in me might occasionally wonder about all my spending being tracked, watching someone fumble with magic pieces of ~paper~ plastic and metal in a supermarket now looks as quaint to me as someone taking their pig to market to exchange for some eggs and bread.
Humans don't have wheels either. Is Tesla planning to replace wheels in their cars with legs, Flintstones style?
Even though a girl is a person the gender of a girl (das Mädchen) is neuter in German. You need to know that grammatical gender to form a grammatically correct sentence - you do in fact need to say "it" ("er") in your sentence referring to the girl you met yesterday.
A girl is person and a burger isn't, but in German a girl is an "it" and a burger is a "he".
But in German the girl you met yesterday is neuter, and the burger you ate yesterday is masculine, and you need to know that to form a grammatically correct sentence about them.
The reason Mandarin is not an international language and English is, is because learning English as your L2 gives you the ability to speak to people in the United States and England and Australia and New Zealand and India and lot more besides, where learning Mandarin gives you the ability to speak to people in ... China (and even then, historically, only one small part of China).
Both the United States and Australia could very easily have been French speaking, and if they had been, I suggest we'd be having this discussion sur internet en français
Look at the international languages before English - Latin and Greek - both beasts of languages to learn. Vulgar Latin's simplified offspring (French, Italian, Spanish) are largely the result of second language learners casting off the bits of Latin they couldn't or wouldn't learn.
I don't believe that English borrows more profligately than any other language. Historically it was hugely influenced by Norman French but nowadays I'd suggest more languages borrow from English than English does from other languages. The eternal fight between the Académie française and the people who actually speak French over borrowed words vs "native" ones is a good example of this.
English, like many other languages learnt widely as a trade language by non-native speakers, has lost a lot of complexity, notably case system and gender. (Indonesian is perhaps the canonical example of this.) Unfortunately its spelling was standardized just before it underwent a huge change in pronunciation, and its habit of borrowing words from other languages without changing their spelling, has left it with fairly chaotic orthography. A few phonetic features - unusual consonants like th, difficult to learn rules around stressed syllables, nasty consonant clusters (squirrel!) - do make it tricker than it could be for second language learners.
It didn't become the default international language of trade due to any features of the language itself (it did that thanks to the British Empire and in particular its former colony in North America) - but many features of modern English are the result of so many people learning and speaking it.
Because it is so widely spoken by so many people, it does have a large vocabulary and a lot of idioms. But the grammar is generally not too difficult - no grammatical gender, no case aside from a few pronouns, outside of a handful of irregular verbs conjugations are pretty easy ("put an 's' on the third person singular"), and so on.
- English does not have 5 vowels; depending on the variety that you speak and counting diphthongs it has about 20
- "phenology"?
- tonal languages, while challenging to learn for someone who doesn't speak one natively, are not that uncommon, and 4 tones (assuming they're counting correctly) isn't that many. Mandarin has 4. Cantonese has (depending on whom you ask) up to 9. There are American languages with 10-20
- English has 24 consonants by most counts (confusing the Latin alphabet with English phonology again), but there are African languages with famously many, many more than that
- "like Spanish, Navajo is a verb-centric language in which syntax centres on actions" - I'm not sure what that even means. Spanish, like Italian, is a pro-drop language which means you can drop the redundant pronoun if you want because the verb inflection tells you everything you need to know. Navajo is (depending again on who you ask) an agglutinative/fusional/polysynthetic language which, while weird to English speakers, is not that unusual (e.g. Turkish, Finnish)
When you have the world’s most venomous spider which
- has fangs that can go through boots
- hides in holes in the ground
- is aggressive
- is common in the most populous part of the country (east coast around Sydney)
you want strategies that make you more afraid of spiders, not less
> Those trends, in addition to decreasing diagnoses in foreign-born persons, contribute to rising evidence that leprosy has become endemic in the southeastern United States.
and the paper itself says the same thing in the summary:
> In summary, our case adds to the growing body of literature suggesting that central Florida represents an endemic location for leprosy.
How is that misinformation?
But one thing that's missed is the advantage ESL speakers have: they by definition speak at least one other language. English speakers either don't have to or find it too hard to find someone to practise on even if they want to learn.
The fact that English is the lingua franca of science has another advantage even to ESL speakers: they only have to learn English to communicate with just about any other scientist in the world. Imagine having to pick between learning English, French, German, Japanese, Latin, depending on who you wanted your audience to be?
0.6% recurrent event rate does not mean it was 99.4% effective. You need to know what the recurrent event rate would have been if everything else was the same and they hadn't followed the diet. Hint: if the normal recurrent event rate is 0.3% then they are worse off, not better (insert test of statistical significance here).
If the event you are testing for (recurrent CVA) is rare, then a large enough sample and proper statistical significance tests are even more important.
2. No control group
"Didn't follow the diet" is not a control group. They have, post-hoc, selected the subgroup consisting of "people unlikely to follow a lifestyle intervention". That group might also been the most likely to continue smoking, not take their medication, do no exercise, be too unwell to follow a rigorous diet, etc etc.
3. Subgroup analysis
Drawing a circle around a subgroup after your study and making inferences from them is an excellent way to get bogus results. (Classic example: Wimbledon winner prediction system. Email 2000 people at random with each player and ask them to bet $1 on that player. After you know the winner, get the subgroup of people who won, and ask them how accurate they think your winner prediction system is.)
And I think they misspelt his surname.
Incidentally, the R Programming Language manual contains stuff like this:
pdf() Produces a PDF file, which can also be included into PDF files.
Before your next post you might like to read up on search engines, tf/idf, pagerank, and what 'relevancy' actually means.
The only irrelevant thing here is your complaint.