It’s directly after I finish my BA and the duration is three months up until mere days before the start of semester 1 next year. So there you have it, three months of five days a week, three hours a day, total immersion, no-English, Chinese study at National Taiwan Norman University. At the prestigious Mandarin Training Center no less.  To put the hours in perspective, each day is about as much Chinese time as an entire week of a Chinese subject at UniMelb, quite apart from living in a Chinese-speaking country. It’s going to be exactly what I need but it’s also going to be a major hassle and a huge amount of work. Hopefully in a good/fun way

The Taiwan government scholarship isn’t heaps of money or anything but it essentially covers the fees and rent, just about. Given I’m pretty much broke, it makes the difference between making the endeavour doable. After this semester is over (not long now!), I’ll start hammering the writing again but this time something new, writing traditional. (繁体字). I’ve been getting pretty good at reading traditional but writing it (by hand)  is just a whole new ball game. I’ll also work on my spoken and listening comprehension somewhat so I’m hitting the ground running.

Coincidentally (I didn’t plan it this way!) I’m actually doing a subject this semester called Taiwan and Beyond: Chinese Settler Culture. Taiwan’s history is deeply fascinating but sadly I wont have the time or the money to go on an island wide tour. Maybe at some point in the future … when I grow tired of this student malarkey and go back to work. This upcoming trip is pretty exciting though, it’s going to join the dots for me. My reading/writing of Chinese is way out in front of my ability to speak so I’m hoping this is going to round out my skills nicely.

This year I was enrolled in Chinese 3A in the first semester 3B in the semester just gone. I had quite enjoyed the previous year of Chinese and, to be fair, I also really enjoyed a subject called Modern Chinese Literature in the first semester. The problem I had was strictly limited to the pure language instruction and a great deal of this stemmed from the baffling choice of a textbook. At lower levels the textbooks used were modern textbooks that also focused on fairly practical uses of language. This year the text book was basically an 80s-era traditional Chinese approach (rote learning) textbook that was firmly focused on the geopolitical situation of China. I happen to know that that the desire to teach history and culture of China played a large part in the choice of the textbook. I know that because late in 2010 I hassled the head of school about what textbook would be using.

My approach to learning Chinese is to make light of things. It’s easier to remember the absurd, than the boring. Modern Chinese Literature in the first semester was very challenging, with vast amounts of vocab to learn. I was hammering the flashcards, reading Chinese heavily and being highly experimental with my written and spoken Chinese. I learned vastly more Chinese than I had ever before. I was making progress. I was friendly with the teacher, but quite critical of the horrific textbook, the chaotic teaching system and the terrible use of our very limited classroom time. I had, I think, a rapport with the teacher. That’s not hard when most of the class is bored shitless by the horrific coursework.

The net result was I learned vast amounts of Chinese. I played fast and loose with assignments, exams and so on because my Chinese was a LOT better than anyone else, I would rather make it a challenge and get it wrong. Tactically, this was disaster because they weren’t interested in anyone learning like that. I was marked wrong many many times for providing a perfectly acceptable answer, but a different one than was in the book. The exam was ridiculously easy, but the same thing again – unless you wrote what was in the textbook, you lost marks.

The net result was something of a shock to say the least. I got a pass. I think it was 64 or something. The lowest mark I had ever got in any subject by a very long way. An absurd mark when you consider my level of Chinese compared to my classmates. I also had put staggering amounts of work in. I learned every word in the text book, the whole year’s worth, not just the first semester. I learned to write everything. I was actually interested in the historical back stories and read further, and tried to (badly) put that in written essays beyond my current level of Chinese. I tried hard, I damn near failed.

On reflection, what was going on was that they didn’t appreciate my approach and I was being punished in a way. I don’t think that’s the whole story, it’s much more a case of the fact that they were teaching the same way as how teaching is done in China. However looking back there were a lot of cues I missed, easier than you might think given how indirect the Chinese can be. Incidentally I got a H1, the highest possible, in Modern Chinese Literature despite the fact that half the class are background speakers of Chinese. I mention that to tell you that this isn’t overconfidence, I was genuinely fucked over.

After the initial wave of shock and anger, this triggered some soul searching. I mean I’m paying a lot to be at university. Not just the thousands it costs in HECS fees I’ll have to pay back (much more than private tuition would cost for the same hours) but also the whole giving up my job thing. Fortunately I had already decided that linguistics was a better fit for me but one does not simply drop a pursuit you love just because of some bad grades. “They can get fucked!”, I thought. It was important that I thought that way, I had to maintain my motivation.

One of my earlier blog posts was talking about motivation and the L2 self. That came out of my studies in second language learning and teaching in the second semester. You see in the break when I had to decide my next subjects, Eg. continuing on to Chinese 3B which I could have have dropped and replaced with something much better and at zero penalty to me. In the end I decided to get analytical about it because some small part of my journey, and this blog I suppose, is to experience the hardship of learning Chinese as a Westerner and try figure out how to do it better, ultimately so I can help others. So I enrolled in Chinese 3B and Second Language Learning and Teaching with the goal to write about and reflect on my experience in this other subject. So that’s what I did.

I also did something else. I stopped trying to learn Chinese. I had a lot of other things going on, I wasn’t doing a hard Chinese subject this semester, so I just put it on the backburner. Instead I just did the minimum. I essentially just read and re-read each chapter of the textbook from hell (which at this point was turning into a communist propaganda organ, you would not believe the stuff in it…) and I practised the exact questions in the textbook. I only turned up to half of the big two-hour lecture too, since I had a clash. I just turned up and did my stuff like the other students. I learned almost no new Chinese, certainly nothing that would help you communicate.

At the end of it I ended up with a H2A, the highest mark in the Chinese 2A through 3B stream I had ever obtained. What an absolute joke. How utterly shameful. It was, perhaps, a lesson worth learning. I think people can intellectually grasp that there’s a difference in teaching between the traditional rote learning methods in China versus the West but even knowing that, I had no idea how one was basically broken when misapplied across culture gaps.

The problem, as I see it, is this. A university will want to have PhD qualified staff teaching their university courses in a language. It is overwhelmingly the case that staff of that sort are native Chinese who did most of their studies, including university, in China. They’ve probably published some research on something in China, which a university cares about more than they care about their ability to teach undergraduates for all sorts of reasons, mostly to do with university rankings. The net result is that most Chinese native PhD calibre university staff are hopeless teachers of Chinese. There are some potent exceptions, and maybe another university is different. However out of all the teachers I had, only one seemed to actually design courses based on sound pedagogy and taught to the same standard and seemed to understand how important it was to use class time efficiently.

To this point I have been talking about the teachers that are going to actually teach you Chinese directly from a textbook on Chinese.  An altogether different thread are the courses based on literature. At my university, and many others, these are taught by Westerners. They’re fluent in Chinese, but they’re not really teaching you Chinese. It’s typical to get an element of language instruction in tutorials from native speakers. The notion of native speakers being the only good people to teach Chinese is very powerful. I think it comes from the idea of pronunciation which is, to my mind a total red herring because it’s an established fact that non-native speakers can understand non-native speakers speaking an L2 more easily than a native speaker and this is extremely valuable. There’s no real prospect of giving people native accents anyway, so the whole concept is flawed but nevertheless it endures.

Also, to a large degree, teaching of a language is not considered to be top shelf work at a university. There are few enough English native speakers that have mastered Chinese as it is. Those such that there are, having obtained their PhD in research in something to do with China and Chinese, are not going to now teach freshmen how to say ni hao ma. Which is to some degree fair enough but I do believe there are some vestiges of… I wont say racism, let’s call it institutional bias. It seems to me it’s much harder to get ahead as a native Chinese academic. Of course that could be due to the quality of work, ability to manage departments and so on… I don’t really know. At any rate, the native Chinese people are terrible teachers and they are the ones that have the job.

Anyway, I’ve finished the stream. I am one of relatively few that could actually go to Chinese 4A (which is sort of ‘next’ but is actually an entry point for native background speakers so it’s a LOT harder, particularly with spoken competence) but one quick check and sure enough, it’s an ancient Chinese style text book. Thank you but no. Instead I have Great Chinese Classics (in introduction to classical Chinese) and Chinese News Analysis. The former will be challenging but right up my alley, the latter will probably be easy. At some point I’m going to have to work out what to do as a replacement for proper Chinese instruction. I might look again to a private tutor.

First of all, I’ve now completed two years of my undergraduate degree in linguistics. I’ve completed the normal Chinese language instruction stream, or at least as far as I’m willing to take it at UniMelb. Now it’s literature based subjects which I’m actually good at and is much much better taught, so I’ll be feeling a lot better about Chinese in the coming year.

As I’ve said before, my direction has solidified towards the field of computational linguistics although I find myself in niche area that’s quite hard to pilot. I’m more interested in using computational linguistics as a tool within linguistics proper, rather than as a sort of vocationally-focused computer science dominated field of computational linguistics. Just after semester I attended another academic conference and I came away feeling much better about the prospects of finding a good path ahead.

Another major aspect I haven’t spoken about a lot on this blog is my revived interest in all things to do with ‘making’ or ‘hacking’. I have for some time felt pretty strongly that the consumer electronics boom has a lot to answer for in the atrophy of skills and the generally lesser inclination of your average man to get down to the shed and do something for himself. This comes from something of a perfect storm of events, mostly documented on this blog. Starting from the introduction to Python I had with the first computer subject I took as breadth. It might seem absurd, but I had forgotten how … capable (willing more than ability?) I am at just knocking things up out of the whole technical chain from web browser through to little things soldered onto a board. 2011 was the year of awakening of Mat as a Maker.

So at the very end of 2011, where am I at and what am I doing? It’s another couple of months until uni starts again so I’m firmly in the time-rich portion of the year where I get into projects. Some of my projects:

• The Inf0cube – A sort of kitchen-based explosion of old and new visualisation. Heavy electronics and coding project, probably the most impressive single thing I’ve ever built.
• Higgins – The Android-powered telepresence robot. Chassis works, Android hookup works, now crafting some genuinely innovative ways to use a dirty cheap and powerful smartphone as an all purpose robot brain.
•  Home Brew – I have brewed beer for years, on and off, but only as a ‘kit and kilo’ operator. Eg, you buy cans of stuff and just chuck it in a drum. Since I’m so poor now, I began brewing again just so I could remember the taste of beer. As my obsessive personality dictates, this wasn’t enough and I’ve progressed to ‘all grain’ brewing. I think this is a keeper, it’s easy, fun, lots of geek-out potential and everyone appreciates the results.
• Melbourne Mini Maker Faire and new Melbourne Hackerspace. I’m helping to organise this first maker faire event in Melbourne. It’s on something of a tight schedule. I’m doing things to do with writing about makers, bit of PR and marketing, and offering unwarranted opinions. The event is in January.

So that’s where I’m at. Now I should follow up by drilling into those subjects…

I’ve seen a number of interesting uses of English in Chinese but mostly they are word-based in nature. Coincidental allophones seems to be a powerful motivator but this observation is a different animal altogether. Chinese has little morphology and indeed many words, including 安装 (an zhuang), are verbs and nouns which need context and syntax to disambiguate them. A syntactic example: 我正在安装一台新电脑。（wo zhengzai anzhuang yi tai xin diannao). The 正在 tells us that 安装 is a verb and we’re doing it in the present.

The English morphological rule of using the suffix -ing to indicate the present continuous action of the verb struck this native Chinese speaker as useful enough to use instead of the Chinese structure which would have been 正在安装. In fact a quick Google search turned up millions of such occurrences in the Chinese blogosphere on this and other verbs.

I’m was at a bit of loss as to why this might be but I’ve come to suspect that it’s a coincidence of practicality as well as a coincidence that the English form happens to be an easily said phoneme that is an existing Chinese final phoneme.  In essence 安装ing is actually easier to say than the native Chinese form and flows perfectly naturally. The final piece of the puzzle is the ideal vector to introduce it into the language, namely how others will recognise it when they see it for the first time.

That little -ing is a handy little package of information which is obviously English, given the latin alphabet, provides the pronunciation (the final exists in Chinese pinyin) and they’ll be be aware of it from their English-language tuition in school. I imagine some small part of appearing ‘cool’ by using English in such a way is also a motivator. It certainly seems to occur more often with the younger Chinese speakers.

Chinese has relatively little morphology or none at all depending on how you look at it. The best example is the plural marker 们 (men) although it’s highly limited to animate objects. There’s also the 者 (zhe) agent marker, which similarly doesn’t really exist stand alone (a bound morpheme) but though it sounds quite useful to indicate someone who does a particular thing, like adding -er in English, in practice it’s extremely limited again and most of the time there’s a proper word.

As far as verbs go, the past perfect 过 (guo) marker and to a lesser extent the muddy but generally past tense 了 (le) marker are the best evidence that the Chinese find affix-morphology an easy to deal with concept. I suspect that the reason that they have not become a more consistent system in Chinese is because of the clash of compound words made from compliments. Something like 出去 (chuqu), out-go.

In fact if we consider the most common ways you would want to modify a verb, tense, then in fact we can say Chinese has a pretty good system of tense modification but it seems to just be missing that last piece. You can say it happened, or it happened past tense perfect but you cannot say it’s happening now, for that you need to do something entirely different and use a syntactical structure.

As an aside here: It is interesting that even the morphologically-rich English does not indicate a verb will be performed in the future by adding a morphological suffix. Instead, just as with Chinese, we use an auxiliary such as ‘will’.

I have only observed evidence of Chinese wanting to say verb-ing something. The clash I mentioned with two-character compliments really raises the question of whether Chinese will adopt something like 出去ing. Whether this sounds like it’s a good idea for a Chinese speaker may shed some light on whether they actually consider 出去 (and the thousands of similar compliments) actual grammatical constructs or if they think of them as individual words, something I’ve pondered for awhile.

I’ve not really spoken about my Chinese language studies for awhile now, mostly because I’d categorise it as a total road crash. Essentially the language schooling at my university is of such incalculably poor quality that it’s managed to trash any enthusiasm I had for studying it in the classroom. Almost. My experience, it seems, is by no means unique.

Rather that get into that particular soap opera, what’s more interesting is that I’m also studying second language learning and teaching and coming to grips with the various theories that underpin how we acquire l L2 (what we call second languages). In fact, with full knowledge that this semester of Chinese – my fourth semester at UniMelb now – would be even more horrific, I enrolled anyway because I knew I’d be studying second language acquisition myself.

The idea being that I could make it a bit less personal and try take away some lessons for the sake of academic interest, personal discovery and maybe, just maybe, the start of of a journey where I might be apart of some attempt to improve matters. Today was a rather interesting day in this regard because in today’s lecture we took at look at the various theoretical frameworks surrounding motivation. This is a pretty powerful factor in the L2 learner’s ultimate success, needless to say, and it’s a pretty interesting area that crosses over into psychology.

I also learned in the lecture of a brand new study on something so close to home it sent shivers up my spine. A study on long-term motivations of a number of students of Chinese at my University. This has been summarised in an article appearing in Australian Review of Applied Linguistics entitled The Changing Face of Motivation: a Study of Second Language Learners’ Motivation Over Time. (pdf)

This article examines motivation using concept introduced by Dörnyei as the ‘L2 Motivational Self System’ which I have only now come into contact with. Campbell and Storch’s article does a finer job of summarising it than I can here (and I highly recommend it, it’s half-way down the second page), but assuming some people with less interest in the subject might read a short summary, I’ll try to paraphrase. Essentially the theory is a view of motivation as three aspects of the ‘L2 self’ as follows:

• L2 Ideal Self: A view the L2 learner has of their ideal second language capabilities.
• Ought-to L2 Self: A view the L2 learner things they should have in order to meet pragmatic expectations such as a career, meeting the expectations of others etc.
• L2 Learning Experience: Perhaps the easiest concept, the situational factors of the learning experience so far.

The key thing here is that this is a view of motivation throughout the process of L2 acquisition and not some snapshot in time. Realistically all language learners go through highs and lows. The things that motivated them to set up learning a language may not be what motivates them to continue, and of course motivation can fade, learners could even give up.

The study concludes that the learners of Chinese were aware of their motivation. I can attest to that personally, sometimes I feel as though I wear my motivation as armour and refuse to be beaten down by my ever plummeting L2 Learning Experience. Even before I read the paper, having just been introduced to the L2 Self idea, it feel like a pretty powerful idea. So where is my L2 Ideal Self? Where is my Ought-to Self? It’s spent a bit of time in thought thinking about this on he way home on the train today and I think it helped.

I realised that my motivation has two positive flows. I have an L2 Ideal Self where I think my ability to speak Chinese is ideally part of who I am. This in itself is quite complicated and has a few facets. A few years in now I think I can frame this as feeling like I’m really in a journey. I don’t feel like a beginner but I’m still embarassed at my lack of ability somewhere. I’m aware I’ve put more effort into this than anything else in my life and there’s no chance I’m throwing it away when it can turn into something I’m intensely proud of, if that makes sense. That’s my L2 Ideal Self.

So what about the Ought-to Self? Well, it’s much less than it was. I don’t feel I ought-to, and I think the best evidence was when I switched my major to linguistics. I would absolutely feel some ought-to with regards to my Chinese grades were it not for the fact that they’re absolutely nothing to do with my Chinese and everything to do with memorising the diabolical pile of communist propaganda that passes for our text book. That’s interesting, isn’t it? I think my L2 Ideal Self was always there, but my initial feeling is that  it’s had to step up and fill the void of a rapidly diminishing Ought-to Self.

That’s when I started to feel a little uneasy about this idea because under this internal scrutiny it became clear that the combination of a terrible set of L2 Learning Experience and plummeting Ought-to Self cannot be sufficiently balanced out by a growing sense of L2 Ideal Self. There can be only one conclusion, my motivation is in fact lower than it was when I started. I knew it too, I just didn’t want to admit it. Shit.

Just knowing that is pretty valuable. It makes me want to reclaim my motivation armour, tarnished as it is. It might still be more than my class mates but that’s not saying much in the UniMelb Chinese road-crash. I want to be more motivated and I think I can see what I need to do. None of it is going to be easy.

This, in fact, is exactly the conclusion of Campbell and Storch. Firstly they found that L2 Learning Experience was most likely to contribute to demotivation. “These factors are important and certainly need attention” Yes. 

“At the same time, it is clear that if we could employ strategies to bolster learners’ sense of L2 selves, it may help learners to overcome negative experiences, and continue with the enterprise of L2 learning.”

Absolutely although I’m not really sure how we can do that. One of the greatest problems with the current model is that there’s no real contact with a mentor. No guiding hand to help boost motivation, provide study advice or really give you any indication of how you’re travelling other than the entirely-too-late system of grades. There’s much to consider here.

In the Android desktop shot of my Nexus One, you can see some cool Chinese written down the left side in a lovely glowing font. This is in fact the time written in Chinese, designed to be more aesthetic than practical. In order to do this I used three different components.

1. Minimal Text: A fantastic text widget that does some stuff like text-based clocks out of the box, but it’ll also accept locale variables.

2. SL4C and Python for Android: This is the actual script that generates the string of Chinese characters, writing it out as utf-8 to a file on the SD card.

3. Tasker: This fires every five minutes, runs the script and then reads two lines out of the file on SD card and loads them into variables. It then copies the variables to Locale variables.

The Tasker bit is a bit long winded but you can’t seem to write locale variables from SL4A. That said there’s a lot of possibilities to lash stuff up in Python and write things onto your Android screen in beautiful fonts. Note that the CJK font has been replaced with something much nicer than the Android stock font as I discussed in a previous post.

Incidentally the background is a live webcam of my back yard in the Dandenong ranges. The temperature display is from an external weather station and the light gadget toggles my wireless ‘infolights’, another project.

Computational linguistics and natural language processing ought to be field which combines the talents of  two very different academic disciplines, linguistics and computer science. Having somewhat stumbled into this fascinating area by chance (by taking a computing subject as ‘breadth’ while studying towards a linguistics major), I’ve been hooked ever since but in this post I want to talk about the curious cross-discipline  characteristics of linguistics and computer science.

Now having passed the half-way mark in my undergraduate course work, this 40-year-old nuisance student has finally arrived in the depths of linguistics and, this semester, a formal course of study in NLP called Language and Computation. At UniMelb this subject is marked as ‘breadth’ which means that no matter if you’re studying science or arts, you can opt to study the subject as part of your compulsory cross-school breadth units. Linguistics is a very popular major. I don’t have statistics but I can tell you that in the core subjects we’re talking about the larger lecture theatres. There’s probably a couple of hundred linguistics majors in any one core subject.

It would follow, then, that Language and Computation would be an obvious subject choice for linguistics majors right? In fact I’m the only one in the entire class that’s a linguistics major, 90% or so are science majors, engineering, computer science, that sort of thing. If I may make some sweeping generalisations, not edge cases but overwealmingly true by mere observation:

1. Linguistics is female dominated. I’d say at least 70% of the students. Most of the staff.

2. The school of languages (European) and linguistics appears to have a very low competency with technology.

3. Computer science is male dominated. The L&T class has I think one girl in it. *

4. Computational Linguistics is dominated by computer science-type problems of a practical nature rather than technology applied to the study of language itself.

* My first year comp-sci subjects appeared to perform better than this with much more women, curiously Asian students made up at least 3/4 of the mix. Most of the students appeared to be economics and business though.

I’m not claiming that this is any way empirical but I think the basic trends I describe would be recognisable to people who work in those fields. My sense, and this is rampant speculation, is that the field of NLP sprang out of a necessity to come to grips with language in so far as tricky problems in computer science are language comprehension bound and have very high levels of practicality. Everything from search engines to voice mail systems, sentiment analysis, automated agents and AI.

Conversely at UniMelb there’s a strong theme of studying Aboriginal languages (which are linguistically fascinating) which really is the other end of the scale in not being very practical (a few thousand speakers in remote Australia) but rather seeking to grow the body of human knowledge around the fundamental forms that language may take, how it arises and how we teach and acquire it.

Computer scientists and practitioners of NLP must find formal and rigid ways to analyse language, devise ingenious mechanisms and machines to achieve better results with results gauged in hard percent terms, then ultimately made practical by building into some system with a tangle benefit. Linguists live in a stunningly obscure and diverse world of trying to describe an ever shifting, exception laden, measurement-error prone study of what is essentially an aspect of human nature.

The long and the short of it is that the means, goals and focus of Linguistics resides within the approach of  the school of Arts and Computer Science resides in the school of Science respectively . Female and male dominated areas respectively. I find that fascinating but there are also some concerning imbalances which I think has given rise to vast black spots where the collective natural inclinations of these different schools-of-thought, in a more literal sense, means that many of areas where linguists and computer scientists could really make a difference.

For a start, there should be a lot more linguistics taking computational linguistics courses. They would find programming difficult to start but it is just another language, really, and it in a very short period of time they could gain some extraordinarily powerful skills and tools which they can apply to virtually anything else in linguistics they do. I feel so strongly about this I’m going to see what I can do to improve matters at UniMelb.

I’m not really sure what can be done about the low technical competence within the linguistics department, I don’t really feel it’s my place to make waves. I also haven’t the faintest idea what can be done about the almost depressingly narrow focus of NLP related research I see coming out of the field other than to just hope more linguists make an entrance.

I’m also pretty tired of  the focus on European languages. Alright, obviously I’m biased but honestly you just don’t see anything other than bloody English while some cavernous problems lie totally untackled such as the utterly diabolical state of machine translation for Asian languages.

Again this is because computer science people don’t speak any other language, they have little interest in tackling those problems – and even when they do, they don’t seem to work on them. Is there an image problem?

Most of the NLP work on Asian languages appears to come out of a very narrow set of universities in Asia to the point that they have their own tools and approaches. (I say this on the basis of reading a few papers as I tried to solve word segmentation for Chinese, noting that the citations were almost invariably scholars from the same three or four universities in China and Singapore).

There’s a gulf between languages here that you don’t see in linguistics as a whole. I don’t really have sufficient insight into the field at this point to say more but I already have the sense that a few more linguistics, a few more ladies, would do wonders for driving the field forward.

When I had a bit of a whinge about the font in the new Android Pleco beta (more on that in another post), Pleco’s Mike Love pointed out it was just the Android default font and asked if I thought to change it myself. Well, no, I didn’t. So I looked into it, found out it wasn’t that hard and switched the Chinese font on my phone to the Kaiti font from Windows. Here’s how…
First of all you’re going to need a rooted Android smartphone. No getting around this as far as I know. Once you have that, you just need to download an application called Type Fresh knocked up by Timothy Caraballo. It also wants another application for selecting font files called AndExplorer.

With these installed, next up we run Type Fresh and hit the backup fonts option. This will basically copy the Android fonts to /Fonts on your SD card. From here on all we need to do is select the font we want to change, in this case it’s DroidSansFallback.ttf, and select the new ttf file from our SD card. SIMKAI.TTF comes with Windows and is excellent if a little large. I’ll come back to the choice of font later.

There are some caveats here. If you are only replacing the DroidSansFallback font (which has the Chinese characters in it) then you are pretty safe. Your smartphone should always boot even if Android doesn’t like the font, which is sadly quite common. However if you change the DroidSans font, and the font doesn’t work, your handset isn’t going to boot. Obviously the right thing to do here is a Nandroid backup for such an eventuality.

Uses of custom ROMs like Cyanogen may find Fresh Face needs you to select ‘apply fonts’ several times before it works. I found it sometimes took up to four attempts. When it works, it’ll also talk about the need to reboot, offer to reboot but nothing happens. So I needed to do it manually.

On the choice of font, some may prefer a slightly thicker font because this action replaces the Chinese in SMS texts and they’re not as easy to read in the default SMS app. I find it fine though. Alternative SMS apps will allow you to bump up the font size also, which would be another solution. The other thing is the Windows SIMKAI font is 11MB. It’s entirely possible that a smaller font will work just as well. I found a couple of fonts that were suitable (typically all discussion around this comes from the old Windows Mobile where it was necessary to do this sort of thing to display Chinese at all) but Android didn’t like them.

Fortunately it just means you get little squares instead of Chinese so providing your phone isn’t set for a Chinese user interface, you can simply launch Fresh Face, change or restore the font and reboot. If you want to see what KaiTi looks like in Hanping and the Android Pleco beta, click through on the images for the full screen grabs.

The Chinese keyboard plug-in for Smartkeyboard Pro IME is almost as good as Google’s Pinyin IME so that’s what I’ve been using and that’s what TouchPal is going up against.

TouchPal’s motion touch, for want of a better phrase, is still deeply wonderful. The idea is that you are able to type capital letters with a quick gesture upwards starting from the letter you selected. If this seems familiar, it’s because Swype does it. TouchPal did it first. Even more usefully, you can flick down to select a symbol. Most useful symbols are on the standard full-qwerty keyboard. Not only that but there’s genuinely useful buttons to go to other pages such as a web tab which enables you to quickly whack on .com or whatever. Since Swype actually seemed to go from amazing to crap in just a few updates, I’ve gone back to the old style peck-and-predict keyboard but TouchPal is at the pinnacle of this sort of thing, particularly with ease of symbol typing.

There’s also a nice ‘edit’ button which enables cursors, copy and pasting (faster than long-press), deleting and so on and a button for voice input, something I don’t use but you always see people moaning about the lack of it on keyboards in the Marketplace comments. There’s a smiley button which is populated with stupid Japanese smileys so is pretty useless I found – it wasn’t apparent to me how to just add some normal smileys but you’d have to think you could?

The prediction is extremely good, not just for English words but word-ahead in English and for full Chinese sentences. All in all, it’s a very functional, very polished, extremely effective bi-lingual keyboard which has usurped Smartkeyboard Pro for me.

That said it’s not without issues. The standard behaviour is to hit space to accept prediction entries. If you want another entry and click on it, it wont put a space after it, you need to do that yourself. This is counter-intuitive after so many keyboards will insert space after you make a prediction choice. There’s some odd stuff going on with updating. I grabbed the current version from the Marketplace and then clicked on the software update inside the app, at which point it grabbed a new version. Why isn’t the one on the Marketplace the newest?

Furthermore the new version looked substantially different keyboard wise than the one I installed from the Market and not particularly better. I also find tapping keys at the bottom of the keyboard sometimes ends up with undesirable results, closing the keyboard, backing out of the app. One can only assume because I’m touching the soft-keys on the Nexus One. I can’t really say, only that it’s a problem I’ve only really had on TouchPal.

You have a choice of where to download add-ons from, the Android market (which as we’ve seen is not the latest version), CooTek direct or something called the Hiapk market. I imagine these choices are necessitated by the need of providing access outside of the Android market. Some add-ons can be downloaded including a Chinese handwriting IME. I gave this a spin and it’s hands down the best one I’ve ever seen, it recognised my hanzi perfectly, has excellent prediction and is all-round pretty fabulous. It’s faster for me to type pinyin being a laowai but I will still find it useful in a dictionary by sketching a word I don’t know. Something I had to use the rather diabolical Android Hanzi Recogniser to do (or rather more likely pull out my iPod and Pleco).

The tutorial is quite focused on Chinese, the user manual is entirely in Chinese. It seems to have lost some of the complex motion touch features that the IME used to have on WinMo but likely to make it more usable, and I think it kind of works. Given it’s free and it’s actually my favourite Android keyboard, it’s pretty good going really. The focus on Chinese is welcome for me but probably a bit of a mistake in terms of marketability. The keyboard is good enough to go head to head with the best on the Marketplace English keyboards but likely people will be put off by the Asian focus. Oh well.

Anyway, welcome back CooTek. I’s nice to see an old friend return and that they’re still in excellent health.

It wasn’t true then and, since I packed in my career to return to university, I’ve discovered it’s even less true than I thought. Academic journals are really the bulk of the world’s knowledge, there’s thousands of them, stretching back decades. Sometimes the press covers headline grabbing studies and summarises them, more often than not they go straight into some journal you’ve never heard of and are seen by a quantity of eyeballs numbering as little as the thousands or even hundreds. Occasionally when researching something via Google you’ll get a tantalising glimpse from an abstract on something like JSTOR, one of the world’s largest electronic repositories of journals. So it’s not that this knowledge is only in print, far from it. Yet it is nevertheless firmly walled off from the average internet user.

To the lucky few, the doors to these riches are open. Virtually any student at any university in the world generally has access to these stores via a deep and confusing network of affiliated log-ins, tying up your academic authentication with access to the main store. In fact even less students use these resources than they should, because the methods of access are often complicated and arcane.

However by the time students move into graduate research, they will know the journals of their field intimately, they will be familiar with the work of leading lights in their field, and they then become one of the knowledge elite themselves.

Many universities, including my own, have staggeringly complicated meta search engines that act as a front end for the various journal repositories around the world. Unimelb’s is called supersearch and it’s here where on a near daily basic I’m confronted by the massive gap in online material between the ‘open web’ and the ‘academic web’.

When trying to look for anything fairly detailed, your Google search will be dominated by countless results from Wikipedia and from the millions of websites which apparently simply rebadge Wikipedia content. I wonder how many people have needed to resort to “-Wikipedia” on the search bar just to try look further afield?

Yet in mere minutes one can access authoritative journals, several alternative cited sources, studies, abstracts and raw data on just about anything via an academic gateway such as supersearch. Wikipedia by contrast offers up a sort of global abstract of immensely variable quality and often merely cites a journal, as a source, which cannot itself be read by the readers of the Wikipedia article.

There are reasons the system is as it is and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s all about money. It costs money to produce and manage academic journals. Universities are part of a massive network of funding that that provides access to the journals while the journals are sold, at remarkably high prices in many cases, to professionals in the related sector.

Without having access to the financials of the situation, but having some experience in the economics of publishing, it is my feeling that the sums of money involved are not large in the scheme of things.

It strikes me that the single greatest thing that could happen right now for the advancement of human knowledge across our entire planet, and not merely those fortunate enough to be engaged in tertiary education or employed in small sectors of industry, would be to make those journals available on the web.

It seems like a relatively minor undertaking to change the financial structure, to find a way to fund the work of journals, without this walled garden?

What I’m saying isn’t a revelation, Google Scholar is an example of what should exist although as usual you will typically end up at an abstract and can get no further. Wikipedia asked the question recently about why academia was not more involved in Wikipedia editing.

That’s a *really* good question – if you’re just written a damn journal article why would you not at least immediately summarise it in a couple of lines with citation on Wikipedia? Obviously the open encyclopedia is looked down on in some academic circles but in my experience that’s not universal. There is wide recognition of the value of Wikipedia.

Even in academic circles, Wikipedia is often an excellent launchpad for a broad overview of a topic for undergraduate students before getting into the academic material. Academic material, such as text books, is rarely as clear and concise and never as well linked with inter-related subjects.

Journals are a vital link in academia, they always will have a more heavily curated, peer-reviewed and ultimately authoritative content than the rank and file personal web page on the internet. No one is saying random internet users should be able to edit such material, and doubtless having access countless amateurs will bend articles and research to match their agendas.

Yet that doesn’t seem to be any sort of argument at all as to why the greater body of internet citizens shouldn’t have access to it. Whether that’s interested individuals, journalists (who now have no excuse to be ignorant), or keen young minds born into circumstances around the world which still preclude attending libraries and universities.

One one studies history of science and learning, a common theme emerges. Only a few hundred years ago, learning was the exclusive right of the elite. I believe in decades to come we’ll look back at these times and say much the same thing about how output of our universities was locked away from the world.